MORNING CHILD
AND OTHER STORIES
GARDNER DOZOIS
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GARDNER DOZOIS
MORNING CHILD
AND OTHER STORIES
GARDNER DOZOIS is the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and the annual anthology series The Year’s Best Science Fiction, now up to its 19th annual volume, as well as many other anthologies. He has won an unprecedented twelve Hugo Awards as the year’s best editor, and 2 Nebula Awards for his own short fiction. His short fiction has been collected in Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois. He is the author or editor of better than 70 books, including the anthologies Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History, The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition and The Good New Stuff. He has also edited such theme anthologies as Dinosaurs! and Dog Tales! He lives in Philadelphia.
“Intense, well-rendered and colorfully done... a careful sculptor of ideas, a sensitive observer of human responses and a narrator who cares about the way things are said.” 
—Roger Zelazny
“A unique writing talent who speaks with a distinctive voice. He is a writer’s writer, and what’s more, he is a reader’s writer.”
—Ben Bova
“One of the most important collections of the decade. Gardner Dozois is one of the most powerful writers of his generation.”
—Mike Resnick

ALSO BY GARDNER DOZOIS
published by ibooks, inc.:

Strangers

A Publication of ibooks, inc. 
Copyright © 2004 by Gardner Dozois
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Gardner Dozois • “Morning Child” copyright © 1984 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in Omni. • “Ancestral Voices” copyright © 1988 by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick. First appeared in Asimov’s. • “The Hanging Curve” copyright © 2002 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. • “The Peacemaker” copyright © 1983 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. • “A Special Kind of Morning” copyright © 1971 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in New Dimensions 1. • “A Dream at Noonday” copyright © 1970, 1998 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in Orbit 7. • “A Kingdom by the Sea” copyright © 1972, 2000 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in Orbit 10. • “Machines of Loving Grace” copyright © 1972, 2000 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in Orbit 11. • “Chains of the Sea” copyright © 1971, 1999 by Gardner Dozois. First appeared in Chains of the Sea.
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INTRODUCTION
by Gardner Dozois
The stories in this collection were published between 1970 and 2003, and thus represent a considerable chunk, perhaps a majority share, of not only my career but my life. Thirty-three years is a long time, longer than many unfortunate people even get to be alive, and, looking back across those three decades to the skinny, hungry, ambitious young kid in his early twenties who wrote the earliest of these stories, I sometimes wonder if we’re really the same person after all, if we really share anything except a tenuous continuity of memory, a belief that he was me that is based more on faith than evidence. Certainly when some critic asks me what was in my mind when I came up with a certain trope in one of those old stories, or what some bit of symbolism really means, why I chose some word or image instead of another, or sometimes even just what the specific inspiration for a story was, often I just can’t tell him—I’m not that kid anymore, really, just someone who remembers having been him. You’d have to go back in a time-machine and ask the kid himself. He could tell you—he had an elaborately worked-out reason for every image and word-choice. But I no longer can.
Oddly, what I often can remember are the places in which they were written. So I remember clearly the office where I worked as a reporter and features editor for an Army newspaper on a small Army base near Nuremberg, Germany, and how I’d sneak back to the office after duty hours and write on the old manual standup office-model typewriters they had there, which used long continuously scrolling rolls of yellow paper instead of regular sheets of typing paper, which made it uneasily like writing on toilet paper. I wrote “A Dream at Noonday,” the earliest story in the book, in that office, with an ear cocked all the while for some prowling insomniacal officer in the corridor outside, since I wasn’t supposed to be using office equipment after hours for my own private non-duty-related purposes, and it wouldn’t do to get caught—particularly if he paused to actually read the kind of fierce anti-war, anti-Army sentiments I was producing in stories like “A Dream at Noonday.” Oh-oh! But fortunately, no such unlikely night-stalking officer ever came in, all of them being either home snug in their beds or whooping it up at the Officer’s Club with the USO girls we enlisted men weren’t allowed to date. “A Dream at Noonday” was probably the first story where I punched through to a higher level, produced something a quantum jump better than what I’d been producing before, and, unusually for me, before or since, I wrote it all in one sitting, writing at a white-hot pace for hours, the yellow paper scrolling up out of the typewriter and spooling in piles on the desk, and when I’d typed the last word, I slumped against the typewriter, trembling and drenched with sweat, feeling that I’d actually become a writer at last.
I remember the little German farming village in which I started “A Special Kind of Morning,” pacing the deserted streets at four o’ clock in the morning as I plotted it, shaggy new beard and hair (for I was a civilian again by then) and long black raincoat flapping as I strode along almost at a run, no doubt scaring the bejesus out of any villagers I happened to meet... the tiny attic garret which I shared with two other expatriate ex-soldiers and whatever tourist-hippie girlfriends we’d managed to coax up there with us, the smell and hiss and blue-flame crackle of the small propane heater that was all that kept us from freezing solid in the bitter German winter, living for a month on a box of oxtail soup bouillon that a passing hitchhiker who’d crashed there for a night had given us, because we had no money to buy anything else, trying to work in an apartment that was almost literally too small to turn around in, small as a space capsule, full of other people strumming guitars and playing Steppenwolf or The Doors at full volume on a tiny plastic portable record-player (often at the same time), people kissing and making-out on the couch in one corner, while other people waved their hands and carried on even-more-passionate political or metaphysical/religious/cosmological conversations a few feet away, settling all the problems of the universe and unraveling all its mysteries... and I remember the somewhat larger but much more filthy and rundown sixth-floor walkup apartment on East 10th Street in the East Village in New York City in which I finished that story, having advanced from oxtail soup bouillon to living on a box of six frozen veal cutlets that could be purchased for ninety-nine cents a week (you eat a veal cutlet sandwich a day, and on the seventh day, you have a ketchup or mustard sandwich instead), typing throughout the night, silent enough in the apartment to hear the rustling of the tides of cockroaches washing over the dirty dishes in the pitch-black kitchen when you stopped typing for a minute, unless the trash trucks were howling and banging outside, or a police car was screaming by, or someone was getting shot. I wrote “Machines of Loving Grace” in the bathroom of that same apartment, sitting on the toilet and writing in longhand in a three-ring notebook throughout another freezing Manhattan night, describing the room around me, which was also the setting for the opening scene of the story, as accurately as I could, while dawn actually was just beginning to color the sky outside the streaked, dirty window. “A Kingdom by the Sea” was written in that apartment too, and in various all-nite eateries up and down Eighth Street and Fourteenth Street between the East and West Village, where I sat nursing a cup of coffee and scribbling in longhand in coffee shops packed with hippies and Jesus Freaks and transvestites and junkies.
“Chains of the Sea” was largely written in my cramped two-room apartment in an equally run-down but somewhat cleaner brownstone building in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia (which, oddly, is only a few blocks away from where I’m living now, after having skipped around to live in other parts of the city in the thirty intervening years), or in my girlfriend’s larger but even more dilapidated apartment on South St. when I was over there to visit, back when South St. was still a slum where only the poorest of hippies, black folk, and bohemian artists lived, interspersed with a few sad-looking old Jews left over from when the neighborhood had been a de facto Jewish ghetto. Less gentrified then than it is now, the most common sound to be heard in my own neighborhood in Fairmount, when I stopped typing late at night and raised my head from staring at the typewriter keys, was the howling of feral dogs. The only other sound would be the tap-tap-tap of my manual portable typewriter when I started typing again; this neighborhood didn’t even get the crashing garbage trucks, the screaming police cars, or the gunshots. The rooftops outside my window, across the alley, were strung with tripwires to catch “roof rabbit”—the stray cats that ghosted along the roofs in the hours before dawn. Along about two or three in the morning, a small brown mouse would come out of a hole in the baseboard and rummage through the trash in the kitchen; I worked in the bedroom, at a typewriter set up on the dresser, and if I poked my head into the next room, the mouse would vanish, only to reappear instantly the moment I went back to work. Occasionally, my cone-shaped old Italian landlady would come up the stairs and scream up at me to stop typing and shut off the light and go to bed like a decent person. Once she went into my apartment while I was gone and replaced all my 100-watt bulbs with 25-watt bulbs, because she said that the 100-watt bulbs were using up too much electricity and costing her money (I moved a short while later).
I remember finishing “Chains of the Sea” there late one night and tapping the manuscript into a neat pile, and sitting back in the chair, filled with the feeling that I had just reached a significant milestone in my career, that I’d finished a story unlike anything anyone else was doing in the genre, and that it was good, right at the Cutting Edge of the field at that moment, that I had the wheel of the genre in my hands and could steer it where I willed—a feeling of confidence in my own power and abilities that I’d never felt before, and rarely have felt since. Too jazzed to sleep, I went down into the silent winter streets and headed out through a frozen world toward the apartment where my girlfriend (now my wife) lived. There was nobody else around, not even a police car or a taxi, and I began to jog down the broad Benjamin Franklin Parkway (modeled after the Champs Elysees), breath steaming in puffs from my mouth and streaming raggedly away behind me. Everything was frozen, everything was covered in ice. The fountains in Logan Circle were frozen into glittering stalactites. Steam erupted from grates in the sidewalk as I passed, and the stars were clear and cold above. Filled with exultation, I jogged the entire way, two miles through the empty streets of the sleeping city. In that moment, if only for that moment, I knew that I was going to live forever.
Some years later, long since having come to the conclusion that I was wrong about that, I was living in a different Philadelphia neighborhood, in a three-room “railroad” apartment—so called because it’s laid out in a line, like a string of railroad cars—on Quince Street with my wife and young son, and, eventually, almost a dozen cats. I’d almost died, and been hospitalized for a stretch (so much for immortality)—but ironically, after I was released from the hospital, I was filled with a surge of new energy, and in that crowded Quince Street apartment, I wrote “The Peacemaker” and “Morning Child,” and a dozen other stories, both solo and in collaboration with Jack Dann, Michael Swanwick, my wife Susan Casper, and others. When it got too hot inside the apartment to work, which was most of the time except for deep winter (we had one window-mounted air-conditioner, in the bedroom, but you had to lie directly under it, keeping as still as possible, for it to do you any good), I would go outside and drift around the neighborhood, sitting on benches or on the white marble steps of old brownstones to write a few pages in longhand in my three-ring notebook, before moving on to sit somewhere else. Sometimes people would come to the door and yell at me to get off their steps, thinking, with excellent justification, that I was a vagrant—as, in a way, I suppose I was. In Spring, the cherry trees that lined Quince Street (no one ever commented on the incongruity of this) would bloom, covering the sidewalk with a deep drift of petals, like pink snow in May. In winter, whenever there was a real snowstorm, the narrow streets, almost too small to get a car down without scraping the Trinity houses on either side, would prove to be too narrow to plow as well; sometimes the snow-drifts would sit there for months, until they finally melted away to patches of dirty black-and-gray city snow as the season turned. In summer, our cat Spooky, who had assumed the role of Ruler of the Neighborhood after our tomcat died, would sit out in the fenced-in square of concrete we called our “backyard,” lounging around idly with all her cat buddies, seven or eight of them, male and female, from blocks around, just sprawling there in whatever shade they could find, looking like they would call for mint juleps or iced tea—or a plate of iced mice?—if they could figure out a way to get the humans to understand them. Occasionally, if she had kittens then, Spooky would go up to passing strangers on the sidewalk and yap at them until they agreed to go into the apartment and admire her babies.
A few years after that, we’d moved eight or nine blocks away, to a small but more expensive and classier-looking apartment on Spruce Street, a few streets below Independence Hall, on the cheap edge of Society Hill, just before the area where the really rich people lived. We were down to two cats by then (we gained one more later, but managed to hold the line at three), our son had just moved away to go to college in New York, freeing up a room to use as an actual office, I was working as the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and I even had a home computer, although I’d still hang on to using a typewriter (now an electric typewriter, at least) for a number of years to come. More importantly, we had central air conditioning now, which meant that I didn’t have to lose three or four months of work every summer when it became too hot inside to do anything other than crouch stunned under the window unit. Perhaps this is why, in spite my hugely increased workload as Asimov’s editor, I still managed to write a fair number of stories (for me), in our Spruce Street place, including “Ancestral Voices,” written with Michael Swanwick, and a number of other stories not included in this collection.
For the last couple of years, we’ve been living in a small house (the first one I’ve ever owned, and probably the last) in the Fairmount district, which is tucked away at the top of a low hill just behind the Art Museum. It used to be a hardcore Blue Collar working-class neighborhood called Brewerytown, mostly composed of Ukrainians (there’s still a big Ukrainian cultural center here, as well as a VA lodge) and Irishmen and a sprinkling of Polish people and other nationalities, but now the breweries are all closed and turned into townhouses and condos, and a tide of young professionals, rent-refugees from the very area of Center City where we used to live, and where property values have been skyrocketing, is washing in, taking over houses one by one as the old folks die and their kids decide they’d rather stay out in the suburbs than return to their childhood homes. So it’s a neighborhood in transition. The curb is crowded with SUVs, but you can still hear church bells ringing and carillons chiming every morning from the half-dozen churches within as many blocks, and wizened old clerks in tiny hole-in-the-wall grocery stores where the shelves are lined with cans of beef stew and peas and other basic stuff stare in bewilderment at yuppies asking for bottled water and brie. Here I wrote “,” and, most recently, “Fairy Tale,” sometimes upstairs in the office at the very keyboard I’m sitting at now, sometimes sitting on an old office chair in the basement and writing in longhand while one of the cats (we were down to one, but just got two more) peers at me puzzledly from the stairs and meows, as if to say, “What the hell are you doing down here? Why aren’t you upstairs watching TV? Or, to do something useful, giving me something to eat?”
So, perhaps it’s an odd way to review your career, by the places where you’ve lived. Probably not very satisfactory to the critics. The most disgruntled among them will just have to get that time-machine and go back and ask that bright-eyed young twenty-year-old kid about his work. Doubtless he will be able to answer questions about it much more satisfactorily than I can.
If you see him, say hi for me.

MORNING CHILD
T
he old house had been hit by something sometime during the war and mashed nearly flat. The front was caved in as though crushed by a giant fist: wood pulped and splintered, beams protruding at odd angles like broken fingers, the second floor collapsed onto the remnants of the first. The rubble of a chimney covered everything with a red mortar blanket. On the right, a gaping hole cross-sectioned the ruins, laying bare all the strata of fused stone and plaster and charred wood—everything curling back on itself like the lips of a gangrenous wound. Weeds had swarmed up the low hillside from the road and swept over the house, wrapping the ruins in wildflowers and grapevines, softening the edges of destruction with green.
Williams brought John here almost every day. They had lived here once, in this house, many years ago, and although John’s memory of that time was dim, the place seemed to have pleasant associations for him, in spite of its ruined condition. John was at his happiest here and would play contentedly with sticks and pebbles on the shattered stone steps, or go whooping through the tangled weeds that had turned the lawn into a jungle, or play-stalk in ominous circles around Williams while Williams worked at filling his bags with blueberries, daylilies, Indian potatoes, dandelions, and other edible plants and roots.
Even Williams took a bittersweet pleasure in visiting the ruins, although coming here stirred memories that he would rather have left undisturbed. There was a pleasant melancholy to the spot and something oddly soothing about the mixture of mossy old stone and tender new green, a reminder of the inevitability of cycles—life-in-death, death-in-life.
John erupted out of the tall weeds and ran laughing to where Williams stood with the foraging bags. “I been fighting dinosaurs!” John said. “Great big ones!” Williams smiled crookedly and said, “That’s good.” He reached down and rumpled John’s hair. They stood there for a second, John panting like a dog from all the running he’d been doing, his eyes bright, Williams letting his touch linger on the small, tousled head. At this time of the morning, John seemed always in motion, motion so continuous that it gave nearly the illusion of rest, like a stream of water that looks solid until something makes it momentarily sputter and stop.
This early in the day, John rarely stopped. When he did, as now, he seemed to freeze solid, his face startled and intent, as though he were listening to sounds that no one else could hear. At such times Williams would study him with painful intensity, trying to see himself in him, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, and wondering which hurt more, and why.
Sighing, Williams took his hand away. The sun was getting high, and they’d better be heading hack to camp if they wanted to be there at the right time for the heavier chores. Slowly, Williams bent over and picked up the foraging bags, grunting a little at their weight as he settled them across his shoulder—they had done very well for themselves this morning.
“Come on now, John,” Williams said, “time to go,” and started off, limping a bit more than usual under the extra weight. John, trotting alongside, his short legs pumping, seemed to notice. “Can I help you carry the bags?” John said eagerly. “Can I? I’m big enough!” Williams smiled at him and shook his head. “Not yet, John,” he said. “A little bit later, maybe.”
They passed out of the cool shadow of the ruined house and began to hike back to camp along the deserted highway.
The sun was baking down now from out of a cloudless sky, and heat-bugs began to chirrup somewhere, producing a harsh and metallic stridulation that sounded amazingly like a buzz saw. There were no other sounds besides the soughing of wind through tall grass and wild wheat, the tossing and whispering of trees, and the shrill piping of John’s voice. Weeds had thrust up through the macadam—tiny, green fingers that had cracked and buckled the road’s surface, chopped it up into lopsided blocks. Another few years and there would be no road here, only a faint track in the undergrowth—and then not even that. Time would erase everything, burying it beneath new trees, gradually building new hills, laying down a fresh landscape to cover the old. Already grass and vetch had nibbled away the corners of the sharper curves, and the wind had drifted topsoil onto the road. There were saplings now in some places, growing green and shivering in the middle of the highway, negating the faded signs that pointed to distances and towns.
John ran ahead, found a rock to throw, ran back, circling around Williams as though on an invisible tether. They walked in the middle of the road, John pretending that the faded white line was a tightrope, waving his arms for balance, shouting warnings to himself about the abyss creatures who would gobble him up if he should misstep and fall.
Williams maintained a steady pace, not hurrying: the epitome of the ramrod-straight old man, his snow-white hair gleaming in the sunlight, a bush knife at his belt, an old Winchester .30-30 slung across his back—although he no longer believed that they’d need it. They weren’t the only people left in the world, he knew—however much it felt like it sometimes—but this region had been emptied of its population years ago, and since he and John had returned this way on their long journey up from the south, they had seen no one else at all. No one would find them here.
There were traces of buildings along the way now, all that was left of a small country town: the burnt-out spine of a roof ridge meshed with weeds; gaping stone foundations like battlements for dwarfs; a ruined water faucet clogged with spiderwebs; a shattered gas pump inhabited by birds and rodents. They turned off onto a gravel secondary road, past the burnt-out shell of another filling station and a dilapidated roadside stand full of windblown trash. Overhead, a rusty traffic light swayed on a sagging wire. Someone had tied a big orange-and-black hex sign to one side of the light, and on the other side, the side facing away from town and out into the hostile world, was the evil eye, painted against a white background in vivid, shocking red. Things had gotten very strange during the Last Days.
Williams was having trouble now keeping up with John’s ever-lengthening stride, and he decided that it was time to let him carry the bags. John hefted the bags easily, flashing his strong white teeth at Williams in a grin, and set off up the last long slope to camp, his long legs carrying him up the hill at a pace Williams couldn’t hope to match. Williams swore good-naturedly, and John laughed and stopped to wait for him at the top of the rise.
Their camp was set well back from the road, on top of a bluff, just above a small river. There had been a restaurant here once, and a corner of the building still stood, two walls and part of the roof, needing only the tarpaulin stretched across the open end to make it into a reasonably snug shelter. They’d have to find something better by winter, of course, but this was good enough for July, reasonably well hidden and close to a supply of water.
Rolling, wooded hills were around them to the north and east. To the south, across the river, the hills dwindled away into flatland, and the world opened up into a vista that stretched to the horizon.
They grabbed a quick lunch and then set to work, chopping wood, hauling in the nets that Williams had set across the river to catch fish, carrying water, for cooking, up the steep slope to camp. Williams let John do most of the heavy work. John sang and whistled happily while he worked, and once, on his way back from carrying some firewood to the shelter, he laughed, grabbed Williams under the arms, boosted him into the air, and danced him around in a little circle before setting him back down on his feet again.
“Feeling your oats, eh?” Williams said with mock severity, looking up into the sweaty face that smiled down at him.
“Somebody has to do the work around here,” John said cheerfully, and they both laughed. “I can’t wait to get back to my outfit,” John said eagerly. “I feel much better now. I feel terrific. Are we going to stay out here much longer?” His eyes pleaded with Williams. “We can go back soon, can’t we?”
“Yeah,” Williams lied, “we can go back real soon.”
But already John was tiring. By dusk, his footsteps were beginning to drag, and his breathing was becoming heavy and labored. He paused in the middle of what he was doing, put down the wood-chopping ax, and stood silently for a moment, staring blankly at nothing.
His face was suddenly intent and withdrawn, and his eyes were dull. He swayed unsteadily and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. Williams got him to sit down on a stump near the improvised fireplace. He sat there silently, staring at the ground in abstraction, while Williams bustled around, lighting a fire, cleaning and filleting the fish, cutting up dandelion roots and chicory crowns, boiling water. The sun was down now, and fireflies began to float above the river, winking like fairy lanterns through the velvet darkness.
Williams did his best to interest John in supper, hoping that he’d eat something while he still had some of his teeth, but John would eat little. After a few moments he put his tin plate down and sat staring dully to the south, out over the darkened lands beyond the river, just barely visible in the dim light of a crescent moon. His face was preoccupied and glum, and beginning to get jowly. His hairline had retreated in a wide arc from his forehead, creating a large bald spot. He worked his mouth indecisively several times and at last said, “Have I been...ill?”
“Yes, John,” Williams said gently. “You’ve been ill.”
“I can’t...I can’t remember,” John complained. His voice was cracked and husky, querulous. “Everything’s so confused. I can’t keep things straight—”
Somewhere on the invisible horizon, perhaps a hundred miles away, a pillar of fire leapt up from the edge of the world.
As they watched, startled, it climbed higher and higher, towering miles into the air, until it was a slender column of brilliant flame that divided the sullen black sky in two from ground to stratosphere. The pillar of fire blazed steadily on the horizon for a minute or two, and then it began to coruscate, burning green and blue and silver and orange, the colors flaring and flickering fitfully as they merged into one another. Slowly, with a kind of stately and awful symmetry, the pillar broadened out to become a flattened diamond shape of blue-white fire. The diamond began to rotate slowly on its axis, and, as it rotated, it grew eye-searingly bright. Gargantuan unseen shapes floated around the blazing diamond, like moths beating around a candle flame, throwing huge tangled shadows across the world.
Something with a huge, melancholy voice hooted, and hooted again, a forlorn and terrible sound that beat back and forth between the hills until it rumbled slowly away into silence.
The blazing diamond winked out. Hot white stars danced where it had been. The stars faded to sullenly glowing orange dots that flickered away down the spectrum and were gone.
It was dark again.
The night had been shocked silent. For a while, that silence was complete, and then slowly, tentatively, one by one, the crickets and tree frogs began to make their night sounds again.
“The war—” John whispered. His voice was reedy and thin and weary now, and there was pain in it. “It still goes on?”
“The war got...strange,” Williams said quietly. “The longer it lasted, the stranger it got. New allies, new weapons—” He stared off into the darkness in the direction where the fire had danced: there was still an uneasy shimmer to the night air on the horizon, not quite a glow. “You were hurt by such a weapon, I guess. Something like that, maybe.” He nodded toward the horizon, and his face hardened. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what that was. I don’t understand much that happens in the world anymore.... Maybe it wasn’t even a weapon that hurt you. Maybe they were experimenting on you biologically before you got away. Who knows why? Maybe it was done deliberately—as a punishment. Or a reward. Who knows how they think? Maybe it was a side effect of some device designed to do something else entirely. Maybe it was an accident; maybe you just got too close to something like that when it was doing whatever it is it does.” Williams was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “Whatever happened, you got to me afterward somehow, and I took care of you. We’ve been hiding out ever since, moving from place to place.”
They had both been nearly blind while their eyes readjusted to the night, but now, squinting in the dim glow of the low-burning cooking fire, Williams could see John again. John was now totally bald, his cheeks had caved in, and his dulled and yellowing eyes were sunken deeply into his ravaged face. He struggled to get to his feet, then sank back down onto the stump again. “I can’t—” he whispered. Weak tears began to run down his cheeks. He started to shiver.
Sighing, Williams got up and threw a double handful of pine needles into boiling water to make white-pine-needle tea. He helped John limp over to his pallet, supporting most of his weight, almost carrying him—it was easy; John had become shrunken and frail and amazingly light, as if he were now made out of cloth and cotton and dry sticks instead of flesh and bone. He got John to lie down, tucked a blanket around him in spite of the heat of the evening, and concentrated on getting some of the tea into him.
He drank two full cups before his fingers became too weak to hold the cup, before even the effort of holding up his head became too great for him. John’s eyes had become blank and shiny and unseeing, and his face was like a skull, earth-brown and blotched, with the skin drawn tightly over the bones.
His hands plucked aimlessly at the blanket; they looked mummified now, the skin as translucent as parchment, the blue veins showing through beneath.
As the evening wore on, John began to fret and whine incoherently, turning his face blindly back and forth, muttering random fragments of words and sentences, sometimes raising his voice in a strangled, gurgling shout that had no words at all in it, only bewilderment and outrage and pain. Williams sat patiently beside him, stroking his shriveled hands, wiping sweat from his hot forehead.
“Sleep now,” Williams said soothingly. John moaned, and whined in the back of his throat. “Sleep. Tomorrow we’ll go to the house again. You’ll like that, won’t you? But sleep now, sleep—”
At last John quieted, his eyes slowly closed, and his breathing grew deeper and more regular.
Williams sat patiently by his side, keeping a calming hand on his shoulder. Already John’s hair was beginning to grow back, and the lines were smoothing out of his face as he melted toward childhood.
When Williams was sure that John was asleep, he tucked the blanket closer around him and said, “Sleep well, Father,” and then slowly, passionately, soundlessly, he started to weep.

A SPECIAL KIND OF
MORNING
THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE IS THE HUMAN RACE.
—Graffito in New York Subway Seventy-ninth Street Station
D
id y’ever hear the one about the old man and the sea? Halt a minute, lordling; stop and listen. It’s a fine story, full of balance and point and social pith; short and direct. It’s not mine. Mine are long and rambling and parenthetical and they corrode the moral fiber right out of a man. Come to think, I won’t tell you that one after all. A man of my age has a right to prefer his own material, and let the critics be damned. I’ve a prejudice now for webs of my own weaving.
Sit down, sit down: but against pavement, yes; it’s been done before. Everything has, near about. Now that’s not an expression of your black pessimism, or your futility, or what have you. Pessimism’s just the commonsense knowledge that there’s more ways for something to go wrong than for it to go right, from our point of view anyway—which is not necessarily that of the management, or of the mechanism, if you prefer your cosmos depersonalized. As for futility, everybody dies the true death eventually; even though executives may dodge it for a few hundred years, the hole gets them all in the end, and I imagine that’s futility enough for a start. The philosophical man accepts both as constants and then doesn’t let them bother him any. Sit down, damn it; don’t pretend you’ve important business to be about. Young devil, you are in the enviable position of having absolutely nothing to do because it’s going to take you a while to recover from what you’ve just done.
There. That’s better. Comfortable? You don’t look it; you look like you’ve just sat in a puddle of piss and’re wondering what the socially appropriate reaction is. Hypocrisy’s an art, boy; you’ll improve with age. Now you’re bemused, lordling, that you let an old soak chivy you around, and now he’s making fun of you. Well, the expression on your face is worth a chuckle; if you could see it you’d laugh yourself. You will see it years from now too, on some other young man’s face—that’s the only kind of mirror that ever shows it clear. And you’ll be an old soak by that time, and you’ll laugh and insult the young buck’s dignity, but you’ll be laughing more at the reflection of the man you used to be than at that particular stud himself. And you’ll probably have to tell the buck just what I’ve told you to cool him down, and there’s a laugh in that too; listen for the echo of a million and one laughs behind you. I hear a million now.
How do I get away with such insolence? What’ve I got to lose, for one thing. That gives you a certain perspective. And I’m socially instructive in spite of myself—I’m valuable as an object lesson. For that matter, why is an arrogant young aristo like you sitting there and putting up with my guff? Don’t even bother to answer; I knew the minute you came whistling down the street, full of steam and strut. Nobody gets up this early in the morning anymore, unless they’re old as I am and begrudge sleep’s dryrun of death—or unless they’ve never been to bed in the first place. The world’s your friend this morning, a toy for you to play with and examine and stuff in your mouth to taste, and you’re letting your benevolence slop over onto the old degenerate you’ve met on the street. You’re even happy enough to listen, though you’re being quizzical about it, and you’re sitting over there feeling benignly superior. And I’m sitting over here feeling benignly superior. A nice arrangement, and everyone content. Well, then, mornings make you feel that way. Especially if you’re fresh from a night at the Towers, the musk of Lady Ni still warm on your flesh.
A blush—my buck, you are new-hatched. How did I know? Boy, you’d be surprised what I know; I’m occasionally startled myself, and I’ve been working longer to get it catalogued. Besides, hindsight is a comfortable substitute for omnipotence. And I’m not blind yet. You have the unmistakable look of a cub who’s just found out he can do something else with it besides piss. An incredible revelation, as I recall. The blazing significance of it will wear a little with the years, though not all that much, I suppose; until you get down to the brink of the Ultimate Cold, when you stop worrying about the identity of warmth, or demanding that it pay toll in pleasure. Any hand of clay, long’s the blood still runs the tiny degree that’s just enough for difference. Warmth’s the only definition between you and graveyard dirt. But morning’s not for graveyards, though it works the other way. Did y’know they also used to use that to make babies? ‘S’fact, though few know it now. It’s a versatile beast. Oh come—buck, cub, young cocksman—stop being so damn surprised. People ate, slept, and fornicated before you were born, some of them anyway, and a few will probably even find the courage to keep on at it after you die. You don’t have to keep it secret; the thing’s been circulated in this region once or twice before. You weren’t the first to learn how to make the beast do its trick, though I know you don’t believe that. I don’t believe it concerning myself, and I’ve had a long time to learn.
You make me think, sitting there innocent as an egg and twice as vulnerable; yes, you are definitely about to make me think, and I believe I’ll have to think of some things I always regret having thought about, just to keep me from growing maudlin. Damn it, boy, you do make me think. Life’s strange—wet-eared as you are, you’ve probably had that thought a dozen times already, probably had it this morning as you tumbled out of your fragrant bed to meet the rim of the sun; well, I’ve four times your age, and a ream more experience, and I still can’t think of anything better to sum up the world: life’s strange. ‘S been said, yes. But think, boy, how strange: the two of us talking, you coming, me going; me knowing where you’ve got to go, you suspecting where I’ve been, and the same destination for both. O strange, very strange! Damn it, you’re a deader already if you can’t see the strangeness of that, if you can’t sniff the poetry; it reeks of it, as of blood. And I’ve smelt blood, buck. It has a very distinct odor; you know it when you smell it. You’re bound for blood; for blood and passion and high deeds and all the rest of the business, and maybe for a little understanding if you’re lucky and have eyes to see. Me, I’m bound for nothing, literally. I’ve come to rest here in Kos, and while the Red Lady spins her web of colors across the sky I sit and weave my own webs of words and dreams and other spider stuff—
What? Yes, I do talk too much; old men like to babble, and philosophy’s a cushion for old bones. But it’s my profession now, isn’t it, and I’ve promised you a story. What happened to my leg? That’s a bloody story, but I said you’re bound for blood; I know the mark. I’ll tell it to you then: perhaps it’ll help you to understand when you reach the narrow place, perhaps it’ll even help you to think, although that’s a horrible weight to wish on any man. It’s customary to notarize my card before I start, keep you from running off at the end without paying. Thank you, young sir. Beware of some of these beggars, buck; they have a credit tally at Central greater than either of us will ever run up. They turn a tidy profit out of poverty. I’m an honest pauper, more’s the pity, exist mostly on the subsidy, if you call that existing—Yes, I know. The leg.
We’ll have to go back to the Realignment for that, more than half a century ago, and half a sector away, at World. This was before World was a member of the Commonwealth. In fact, that’s what the Realignment was about, the old Combine overthrown by the Quaestors, who then opted for amalgamation and forced World into the Commonwealth. That’s where and when the story starts.
Start it with waiting.
A lot of things start like that, waiting. And when the thing you’re waiting for is probable death, and you’re lying there loving life and suddenly noticing how pretty everything is and listening to the flint hooves of darkness click closer, feeling the iron-shod boots strike relentless sparks from the surface of your mind, knowing that death is about to fall out of the sky and that there’s no way to twist out from under—then, waiting can take time. Minutes become hours, hours become unthinkable horrors. Add enough horrors together, total the scaly snouts, and you’ve got a day and a half I once spent laying up in a mountain valley in the Blackfriars on World, almost the last day I ever spent anywhere.
This was just a few hours after D’kotta. Everything was a mess, nobody really knew what was happening, everybody’s communication lines cut. I was just a buck myself then, working with the Quaestors in the field, a hunted criminal. Nobody knew what the Combine would do next, we didn’t know what we’d do next, groups surging wildly from one place to another at random, panic and riots all over the planet, even in the Controlled Environments.
And D’kotta-on-the-Blackfriars was a seventy-mile swath of smoking insanity, capped by boiling umbrellas of smoke that eddied ashes from the ground to the stratosphere and back. At night it pulsed with molten scum, ugly as a lanced blister, lighting up the cloud cover across the entire horizon, visible for hundreds of miles. It was this ugly glow that finally panicked even the zombies in the Environments, probably the first strong emotion in their lives.
It’d been hard to sum up the effects of the battle. We thought that we had the edge, that the Combine was close to breaking, but nobody knew for sure. If they weren’t as close to folding as we thought, then we were probably finished. The Quaestors had exhausted most of their hoarded resources at D’kotta, and we certainly couldn’t hit the Combine any harder. If they could shrug off the blow, then they could wear us down.
Personally, I didn’t see how anything could shrug that off. I’d watched it all and it’d shaken me considerably. There’s an old-time expression, “put the fear of God into him.” That’s what D’kotta had done for me. There wasn’t any God anymore, but I’d seen fire vomit from the heavens and the earth ripped wide for rape, and it’d been an impressive enough surrogate. Few people ever realized how close the Combine and the Quaestors had come to destroying World between them, there at D’kotta.
We’d crouched that night—the team and I—on the high stone ramparts of the tallest of the Blackfriars, hopefully far away from anything that could fall on us. There were twenty miles of low, gnarly foothills between us and the rolling savannahland where the city of D’kotta had been minutes before, but the ground under our bellies heaved and quivered like a sick animal, and the rock was hot to the touch: feverish.
We could’ve gotten farther away, should have gotten farther away, but we had to watch. That’d been decided without anyone saying a word, without any question about it. It was impossible not to watch. It never even occurred to any of us to take another safer course of action. When reality is being turned inside out like a dirty sock, you watch, or you are less than human. So we watched it all from beginning to end: two hours that became a single second lasting for eons. Like a still photograph of time twisted into a scream—the scream reverberating on forever and yet taking no duration at all to experience.
We didn’t talk. We couldn’t talk—the molecules of the air itself shrieked too loudly, and the deep roar of explosions was a continual drumroll—but we wouldn’t have talked even if we’d been able. You don’t speak in the presence of an angry God. Sometimes we’d look briefly at each other. Our faces were all nearly identical: ashen, waxy, eyes of glass, blank, and lost as pale driftwood stranded on a beach by the tide. We’d been driven through the gamut of expressions into extremis—rictus: faces so contorted and strained they ached—and beyond to the quietus of shock: muscles too slack and flaccid to respond anymore. We’d only look at each other for a second, hardly focusing, almost not aware of what we were seeing, and then our eyes would be dragged back as if by magnetism to the Fire.
At the beginning we’d clutched each other, but as the battle progressed we slowly drew apart, huddling into individual agony; the thing so big that human warmth meant nothing, so frightening that the instinct to gather together for protection was reversed, and the presence of others only intensified the realization of how ultimately naked you were. Earlier we’d set up a scattershield to filter the worst of the hard radiation—the gamma and intense infrared and ultraviolet—blunt some of the heat and shock and noise. We thought we had a fair chance of surviving, then, but we couldn’t have run anyway. We were fixed by the beauty of horror/horror of beauty, surely as if by a spike driven through our backbones into the rock.
And away over the foothills, God danced in anger, and his feet struck the ground to ash.
What was it like?
Kos still has oceans and storms. Did y’ever watch the sea lashed by high winds? The storm boils the water into froth, whips it white, until it becomes an ocean of ragged lace to the horizon, whirlpools of milk, not a fleck of blue left alive. The land looked like this at D’kotta. The hills moved. The Quaestors had a discontinuity projector there, and under its lash the ground stirred like sluggish batter under a baker’s spoon; stirred, shuddered, groaned, cracked, broke: acres heaved themselves into new mountains, other acres collapsed into canyons.
Imagine a giant asleep just under the surface of the earth, overgrown by fields, dreaming dreams of rock and crystal. Imagine him moving restlessly, the long rhythm of his dreams touched by nightmare, tossing, moaning, tremors signaling unease in waves up and down his miles-long frame. Imagine him catapulted into waking terror, lurching suddenly to his knees with the bawling roar of ten million burning calves: a steaming claw of rock and black earth raking for the sky. Now, in a wink, imagine the adjacent land hurtling downward, sinking like a rock in a pond, opening a womb a thousand feet wide, swallowing everything and grinding it to powder. Then, almost too quick to see, imagine the mountain and the crater switching, the mountain collapsing all at once and washing the feet of the older Blackfriars with a tidal wave of earth, then tumbling down to make a pit; at the same time the sinking earth at the bottom of the other crater reversing itself and erupting upward into a quaking fist of rubble. Then they switch again, and keep switching. Like watching the same film clip continuously run forward and backward. Now multiply that by a million and spread it out so that all you can see to the horizon is a stew of humping rock. D’y’visualize it? Not a tenth of it.
Dervishes of fire stalked the chaos, melting into each other, whirlpooling. Occasionally a tactical nuclear explosion would punch a hole in the night, a brief intense flare that would be swallowed like a candle in a murky snowstorm. Once a tacnuke detonation coincided with the upthrusting of a rubble mountain, with an effect like that of a firecracker exploding inside a swinging sack of grain.
The city itself was gone; we could no longer see a trace of anything man-made, only the stone maelstrom. The river Delva had also vanished, flash-boiled to steam; for a while we could see the gorge of its dry bed stitching across the plain, but then the ground heaved up and obliterated it.
It was unbelievable that anything could be left alive down there. Very little was. Only the remainder of the heavy weapons sections on both sides continued to survive, invisible to us in the confusion. Still protected by powerful phasewalls and scattershields, they pounded blindly at each other—the Combine somewhat ineffectively with biodeths and tacnukes, the Quaestors responding by stepping up the discontinuity projector. There was only one, in the command module—the Quaestor technicians were praying it wouldn’t be wiped out by a random strike—and it was a terraforming device and not actually a “weapon” at all, but the Combine had been completely unprepared for it, and were suffering horribly as a result.
Everything began to flicker, random swatches of savannahland shimmering and blurring, phasing in and out of focus in a jerky, mismatched manner: that filmstrip run through a spastic projector. At first we thought it must be heat eddies caused by the fires, but then the flickering increased drastically in frequency and tempo, speeding up until it was impossible to keep anything in focus even for a second, turning the wide veldt into a mad kaleidoscope of writhing, interchanging shapes and color-patterns from one horizon to the other. It was impossible to watch it for long. It hurt the eyes and filled us with an oily, inexplicable panic that we were never able to verbalize. We looked away, filled with the musty surgings of vague fear.
We didn’t know then that we were watching the first practical application of a process that’d long been suppressed by both the Combine and the Commonwealth, a process based on the starship dimensional “drive” (which isn’t a “drive” at all, but the word’s passed into the common press) that enabled a high-cycling discontinuity projector to throw time out of phase within a limited area, so that a spot here here would be a couple of minutes ahead or behind a spot a few inches away, in continuity sequence. That explanation would give a psychophysicist fits, since “time” is really nothing at all like the way we “experience” it, so the process “really” doesn’t do what I’ve said it does—doing something really abstruse instead—but that’s close enough to what it does on a practical level, ‘cause even if the time distortion is an “illusionary effect”—like the sun seeming to rise and set—they still used it to kill people. So it threw time out of phase, and kept doing it, switching the dislocation at random: so that in any given square foot of land there might be four or five discrepancies in time sequence that kept interchanging. Like, here might be one minute “ahead” of the base “now,” and then a second later (language breaks down hopelessly under this stuff; you need the math) here would be two minutes behind the now, then five minutes behind, then three ahead, and so on. And all the adjacent zones in that square foot are going through the same switching process at the same time (goddamn this language!). The Combine’s machinery tore itself to pieces. So did the people: some died of suffocation because of a five-minute discrepancy between an inhaled breath and oxygen received by the lungs, some drowned in their own blood.
It took about ten minutes, at least as far as we were concerned as unaffected observers. I had a psychophysicist tell me once that “it” had both continued to “happen” forever and had never “happened” at all, and that neither statement canceled out the validity of the other, that each statement in fact was both “applicable” and “nonapplicable” to the same situation consecutively—and I did not understand. It took ten minutes.
At the end of that time, the world got very still.
We looked up. The land had stopped churning. A tiny star appeared amongst the rubble in the middle distance, small as a pinhead but incredibly bright and clear. It seemed to suck the night into it like a vortex, as if it were a pinprick through the worldstuff into a more intense reality, as if it were gathering a great breath for a shout.
We buried our heads in our arms as one, instinctively.
There was a very bright light, a light that we could feel through the tops of our heads, a light that left dazzling after-images even through closed and shrouded lids. The mountain leaped under us, bounced us into the air again and again, battered us into near unconsciousness. We never even heard the roar.
After a while, things got quiet again, except for a continuous low rumbling. When we looked up, there were thick, sluggish tongues of molten magma oozing up in vast flows across the veldt, punctuated here and there by spectacular shower-fountains of vomited sparks.
Our scattershield had taken the brunt of the blast, borne it just long enough to save our lives, and then overloaded and burnt itself to scrap; one of the first times that’s ever happened.
Nobody said anything. We didn’t look at each other. We just lay there.
The chrono said an hour went by, but nobody was aware of it.
Finally, a couple of us got up, in silence, and started to stumble aimlessly back and forth. One by one, the rest crawled to their feet. Still in silence, still trying not to look at each other, we automatically cleaned ourselves up. You hear someone say “it made me shit my pants,” and you think it’s an expression; not under the right stimuli. Automatically, we treated our bruises and lacerations, automatically we tidied the camp up, buried the ruined scatterfield generator. Automatically, we sat down again and stared numbly at the light show on the savannah.
Each of us knew the war was over—we knew it with the gut rather than the head. It was an emotional reaction, but very calm, very resigned, very passive. It was a thing too big for questioning; it became a self-evident fact. After D’kotta, there could be nothing else. Period. The war was over.
We were almost right. But not quite.
In another hour or so, a man from field HQ came up over the mountain shoulder in a stolen vacform and landed in camp. The man switched off the vac, jumped down, took two steps toward the parapet overlooking hell, stopped. We saw his stomach muscles jump, tighten. He took a stumbling half-step back, then stopped again. His hand went up to shield his throat, dropped, hesitated, went back up. We said nothing. The HQ directing the D’kotta campaign had been sensibly located behind the Blackfriars: they had been shielded by the mountain chain and had seen nothing but glare against the cloud cover. This was his first look at the city; at where the city had been. I watched the muscles play in his back, saw his shoulders hunch as if under an unraised fist. A good many of the Quaestor men involved in planning the D’kotta operation committed suicide immediately after the Realignment; a good many didn’t. I don’t know what category this one belonged in.
The liaison man finally turned his head, dragged himself away. His movements were jerky, and his face was an odd color, but he was under control. He pulled Heynith, our team leader, aside. They talked for a half hour. The liaison man showed Heynith a map, scribbled on a pad for Heynith to see, gave Heynith some papers. Heynith nodded occasionally. The liaison man said goodbye, half-ran to his vacform. The vac lifted with an erratic surge, steadied, then disappeared in a long arc over the gnarled backs of the Blackfriars. Heynith stood in the dirtswirl kicked up by the backwash and watched impassively.
It got quiet again, but it was a little more apprehensive.
Heynith came over, studied us for a while, then told us to get ready to move out. We stared at him. He repeated it in a quiet, firm voice; unendurably patient. Hush for a second, then somebody groaned, somebody else cursed, and the spell of D’kotta was partially broken, for the moment. We awoke enough to ready our gear; there was even a little talking, though not much.
Heynith appeared at our head and led us out in a loose travel formation, diagonally across the face of the slope, then up toward the shoulder. We reached the notch we’d found earlier and started down the other side.
Everyone wanted to look back at D’kotta. No one did. 
Somehow, it was still night.
We never talked much on the march, of course, but tonight the silence was spooky: you could hear boots crunch on stone, the slight rasp of breath, the muted jangle of knives occasionally bumping against thighs. You could hear our fear; you could smell it, could see it.
We could touch it, we could taste it.
I was a member of something so old that they even had to dig up the name for it when they were rooting through the rubble of ancient history, looking for concepts to use against the Combine: a “commando team.” Don’t ask me what it means, but that’s what it’s called. Come to think, I know what it means in terms of flesh: it means ugly. Long ugly days and nights that come back in your sleep even uglier, so that you don’t want to think about it at all because it squeezes your eyeballs like a vise. Cold and dark and wet, with sudden death looming up out of nothing at any time and jarring you with mortality like a rubber glove full of ice water slapped across your face. Living jittery high all the time, so that everything gets so real that it looks fake. You live in an anticipation that’s pain, like straddling a fence with a knifeblade for a top rung, waiting for something to come along in the dark and push you off. You get so you like it. The pain’s so consistent that you forget it’s there, you forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you live on the adrenaline.
We liked it. We were dedicated. We hated. It gave us something to do with our hate, something tangible we could see. And nobody’d done it but us for hundreds of years; there was an exultation to that. The Scholars and Antiquarians who’d started the Quaestor movement—left fullsentient and relatively unwatched so they could better piece together the muddle of prehistory from generations of inherited archives—they’d been smart. They knew their only hope of baffling the Combine was to hit them with radical concepts and tactics, things they didn’t have instructions for handling, things out of the Combine’s experience. So they scooped concepts out of prehistory, as far back as the archives go, even finding written records somewhere and having to figure out how to use them.
Out of one of these things, they got the idea of “guerrilla” war. No, I don’t know what that means either, but what it means is playing the game by your own rules instead of the enemy’s. Oh, you let the enemy keep playing by his rules, see, but you play by your own. Gives you a wider range of moves. You do things. I mean, ridiculous things, but so ancient they don’t have any defense against them because they never thought they’d have to defend against that. Most of the time they never even knew that existed.
Like, we used to run around with these projectile weapons the Quaestors had copied from old plans and mass-produced in the autfacs on the sly by stealing computer time. The things worked by a chemical reaction inside the mechanism that would spit these tiny missiles out at a high velocity. The missile would hit you so hard it would actually lodge itself in your body, puncture internal organs, kill you. I know it sounds like an absurd concept, but there were advantages.
Don’t forget how tightly controlled a society the Combine’s was; even worse than the Commonwealth in its own way. We couldn’t just steal energy weapons or biodeths and use them, because all those things operated on broadcast power from the Combine, and as soon as one was reported missing, the Combine would just cut the relay for that particular code. We couldn’t make them ourselves, because unless you used the Combine’s broadcast power you’d need a ton of generator equipment with each weapon to provide enough energy to operate it, and we didn’t have the technology to miniaturize that much machinery. (Later some genius figured out a way to make, say, a functioning biodeth with everything but the energy source and then cut into and tap Combine broadcast power without showing up on the coding board, but that was toward the end anyway, and most of them were stockpiled for the shock troops at D’kotta.) At least the “guns” worked. And there were even unexpected advantages. We found that tanglefields, scattershields, phasewalls, personal warders, all the usual defenses, were unable to stop the “bullets” (the little missiles fired by the “guns”)—they were just too sophisticated to stop anything as crude as a lump of metal moving at relatively sluggish ballistic speeds. Same with “bombs” and “grenades”—devices designed to have a chemical reaction violent enough to kill in an enclosed place. And the list went on and on. The Combine thought we couldn’t move around, because all vehicles were coded and worked on broadcast power. Did you ever hear of “bicycles”? They’re devices for translating mechanical energy into motion, they ride on wheels that you actually make revolve with physical labor. And the bicycles didn’t have enough metal or mass to trigger sentryfields or show up on sweep probes, so we could go undetected to places they thought nobody could reach. Communicate? We used mirrors to flash messages, used puffs of smoke as code, had people actually carry messages from one place to another.
More important, we personalized war. That was the most radical thing, that was the thing that turned us from kids running around and having fun breaking things into men with bitter faces, that was the thing that took the heart out of the Combine more than anything else. That’s why people still talk about the Realignment with horror today, even after all these years, especially in the Commonwealth.
We killed people. We did it, ourselves. We walked up and stabbed them. I mentioned a knife before, boy, and I knew you didn’t know what it was; you bluff well for a kid—that’s the way to a reputation for wisdom: look sage and always keep your mouth shut about your ignorance. Well, a knife is a tapering piece of metal with a handle, sharpened on the sides and very sharp at the tapered end, sharp enough so that when you strike someone with it the metal goes right into their flesh, cuts them, rips them open, kills them, and there is blood on your hands which feels wet and sticky and is hard to wash off because it dries and sticks to the little hairs on the backs of your wrists. We learned how to hit people hard enough to kill them, snap the bones inside the skin like dry sticks inside oiled cloth. We did. We strangled them with lengths of wire. You’re shocked. So was the Combine. They had grown used to killing at a great distance, the push of a button, the flick of a switch, using vast, clean, impersonal forces to do their annihilation. We killed people. We killed people—not statistics and abstractions. We heard their screams, we saw their faces, we smelled their blood, and their vomit and shit and urine when their systems let go after death. You have to be crazy to do things like that. We were crazy. We were a good team.
There were twelve of us in the group, although we mostly worked in sections of four. I was in the team leader’s section, and it had been my family for more than two years:
Heynith, stocky, balding, leather-faced; a hard, fair man; brilliant organizer.
Ren, impassive, withdrawn, taciturn, frighteningly competent, of a strange humor.
Goth, young, tireless, bullheaded, given to sudden enthusiasms and depressions; he’d only been with us for about four months, a replacement for Mason, who had been killed while trying to escape from a raid on Cape Itica.
And me.
We were all warped men, emotional cripples one way or the other.
We were all crazy.
The Combine could never understand that kind of craziness, in spite of the millions of people they’d killed or shriveled impersonally over the years. They were afraid of that craziness, they were baffled by it, never could plan to counter it or take it into account. They couldn’t really believe it.
That’s how we’d taken the Blackfriars Transmitter, hours before D’kotta. It had been impregnable—wrapped in layer after layer of defense fields against missile attack, attack by chemical or biological agents, transmitted energy, almost anything. We’d walked in. They’d never imagined anyone would do that, that it was even possible to attack that way, so there was no defense against it. The guardsystems were designed to meet more esoteric threats. And even after ten years of slowly escalating guerrilla action, they still didn’t really believe anyone would use his body to wage war. So we walked in. And killed everybody there. The staff was a sentient techclone of ten and an executive foreman. No nulls or zombies. The ten identical technicians milled in panic, the foreman stared at us in disbelief, and what I think was distaste that we’d gone so far outside the bounds of procedure. We killed them like you kill insects, not really thinking about it much, except for that part of you that always thinks about it, that records it and replays it while you sleep. Then we blew up the transmitter with chemical explosives. Then, as the flames leaped up and ate holes in the night, we’d gotten on our bicycles and rode like hell toward the Blackfriars, the mountains hunching and looming ahead, as jagged as black snaggle-teeth against the industrial glare of the sky. A tanglefield had snatched at us for a second, but then we were gone.
That’s all that I personally had to do with the “historic” Battle of D’kotta. It was enough. We’d paved the way for the whole encounter. Without the transmitter’s energy, the Combine’s weapons and transportation systems—including liftshafts, slidewalks, irisdoors, and windows, heating, lighting, waste disposal—were inoperable; D’kotta was immobilized. Without the station’s broadcast matter, thousands of buildings, industrial complexes, roadways, and homes had collapsed into chaos, literally collapsed. More important, without broadcast nourishment, D’kotta’s four major Cerebrums—handling an incredible complexity of military/industrial/administrative tasks—were knocked out of operation, along with a number of smaller Cerebrums: the synapses need constant nourishment to function, and so do the sophont ganglion units, along with the constant flow of the psychocybernetic current to keep them from going mad from sensory deprivation, and even the nulls would soon grow intractable as hunger stung them almost to self-awareness, finally to die after a few days. Any number of the lowest-ranking sentient clones—all those without stomachs or digestive systems, mostly in the military and industrial castes—would find themselves in the same position as the nulls; without broadcast nourishment, they would die within days. And without catarcs in operation to duplicate the function of atrophied intestines, the buildup of body wastes would poison them anyway, even if they could somehow get nourishment. The independent food dispensers for the smaller percentage of fullsentients and higher clones simply could not increase their output enough to feed that many people, even if converted to intravenous systems. To say nothing of the zombies in the Environments scattered throughout the city.
There were backup fail-safe systems, of course, but they hadn’t been used in centuries, the majority of them had fallen into disrepair and didn’t work, and other Quaestor teams made sure the rest of them wouldn’t work either.
Before a shot had been fired, D’kotta was already a major disaster.
The Combine had reacted as we’d hoped, as they’d been additionally prompted to react by intelligence reports of Quaestor massings in strength around D’kotta that it’d taken weeks to leak to the Combine from unimpeachable sources. The Combine was pouring forces into D’kotta within hours, nearly the full strength of the traditional military caste and a large percentage of the militia they’d cobbled together out of industrial clones when the Quaestors had begun to get seriously troublesome, plus a major portion of their heavy armament. They had hoped to surprise the Quaestors, catch them between the city and the inaccessible portion of the Blackfriars, quarter the area with so much strength it’d be impossible to dodge them, run the Quaestors down, annihilate them, break the back of the movement.
It had worked the other way around.
For years, the Quaestors had stung and run, always retreating when the Combine advanced, never meeting them in conventional battle, never hitting them with anything really heavy. Then, when the Combine had risked practically all of its military resources on one gigantic effort calculated to be effective against the usual Quaestor behavior, we had suddenly switched tactics. The Quaestors had waited to meet the Combine’s advance and had hit the Combine forces with everything they’d been able to save, steal, hoard, and buy clandestinely from sympathizers in the Commonwealth in over fifteen years of conspiracy and campaign aimed at this moment.
Within an hour of the first tacnuke exchange, the city had ceased to exist, everything leveled except two of the Cerebrums and the Escridel Creche. Then the Quaestors activated their terraforming devices—which I believe they bought from a firm here on Kos, as a matter of fact. This was completely insane—terraforming systems used indiscriminately can destroy entire planets—but it was the insanity of desperation, and they did it anyway. Within a half hour, the remaining Combine heavy armaments battalions and the two Cerebrums ceased to exist. A few minutes later, the supposedly invulnerable Escridel Creche ceased to exist, the first time in history a creche had ever been destroyed. Then, as the cycling energies got out of hand and filterfeedback built to a climax, everything on the veldt ceased to exist.
The carnage had been inconceivable.
Take the vast population of D’kotta as a base, the second largest city on World, one of the biggest even in this sector of the Commonwealth. The subfleets had been in, bringing the betja harvest and other goods up the Delva; river traffic was always heaviest at that time of year. The mines and factories had been in full swing, and the giant sprawl of the Westernese Shipyards and Engine Works. Add the swarming inhabitants of the six major Controlled Environments that circled the city. Add the city-within-a-city of Admin South, in charge of that hemisphere. Add the twenty generations of D’kotta Combine fullsentients whose discorporate ego-patterns had been preserved in the mountain of “indestructible” micromolecular circuitry called the Escridel Creche. (Those executives had died the irreversible true death, without hope of resurrection this time, even as disembodied intellects housed within artificial mind-environments: the records of their brain’s unique pattern of electrical/chemical/psychocybernetic rhythms and balances had been destroyed, and you can’t rebuild consciousness from a fused puddle of slag. This hit the Combine where they lived, literally, and had more impact than anything else.) Add the entire strength of both opposing forces; all of our men—who suspected what would happen—had been suicide volunteers. Add all of the elements together.
The total goes up into the multiples of billions.
The number was too big to grasp. Our minds fumbled at it while we marched, and gave up. It was too big.
I stared at Ren’s back as we walked, a nearly invisible mannequin silhouette, and tried to multiply that out to the necessary figure. I staggered blindly along, lost and inundated beneath thousands of individual arms, legs, faces; a row of faces blurring off into infinity, all screaming—and the imagining nowhere near the actuality.
Billions.
How many restless ghosts out of that many deaders? Who do they haunt?
Billions.
Dawn caught us about two hours out. It came with no warning, as usual. We were groping through World’s ink-dark, moonless night, watched only by the million icy eyes of evening, shreds of witchfire crystal, incredibly cold and distant. I’d watched them night after night for years, scrawling their indecipherable hieroglyphics across the sky, indifferent to man’s incomprehension. I stopped for a second on a rise, pushing back the infrared lenses, staring at the sky. What program was printed there, suns for ciphers, worlds for decimal points? An absurd question—I was nearly as foolish as you once, buck—but it was the first fully verbalized thought I’d had since I’d realized the nakedness of flesh, back there on the parapet as my life tore itself apart. I asked it again, half-expecting an answer, watching my breath turn to plumes and tatters, steaming in the silver chill of the stars.
The sun came up like a meteor. It scuttled up from the horizon with that unsettling, deceptive speed that even natives of World never quite get used to. New light washed around us, blue and raw at first, deepening the shadows and honing their edges. The sun continued to hitch itself up the sky, swallowing stars, a watery pink flush wiping the horizon clear of night. The light deepened, mellowed into gold. We floated through silver mist that swirled up around the mountain’s knobby knees. I found myself crying silently as I walked the high ridge between mist and sky, absorbing the morning with a new hunger, grappling with a thought that was still too big for my mind and kept slipping elusively away, just out of reach. There was a low hum as our warmsuits adjusted to the growing warmth, polarizing from black to white, bleeding heat back into the air. Down the flanks of the Blackfriars and away across the valley below—visible now as the mists pirouetted past us to the summits—the night plants were dying, shriveling visibly in mile-long swaths of decay. In seconds the Blackfriars were gaunt and barren, turned to hills of ash and bone. The sun was now a bloated yellow disk surrounded by haloes of red and deepening scarlet, shading into the frosty blue of rarefied air. Stripped of softening vegetation, the mountains looked rough and abrasive as pumice, gouged by lunar shadows. The first of the day plants began to appear at our feet, the green spiderwebbing, poking up through cracks in the dry earth.
We came across a new stream, tumbling from melting ice, sluicing a dusty gorge.
An hour later we found the valley.
Heynith led us down onto the marshy plain that rolled away from mountains to horizon. We circled wide, cautiously approaching the valley from the lowlands. Heynith held up his hand, pointed to me, Ren, Goth. The others fanned out across the mouth of the valley, hid, settled down to wait. We went in alone. The speargrass had grown rapidly; it was chest-high. We crawled in, timing our movements to coincide with the long soughing of the morning breeze, so that any rippling of the grass would be taken for natural movement. It took us about a half hour of dusty, sweaty work. When I judged that I’d wormed my way in close enough, I stopped, slowly parted the speargrass enough to peer out without raising my head.
It was a large vacvan, a five-hundred-footer, equipped with waldoes for self-loading.
It was parked near the hill flank on the side of the wide valley.
There were three men with it.
I ducked back into the grass, paused to make sure my “gun” was ready for operation, then crawled laboriously nearer to the van.
It was very near when I looked up again, about twenty-five feet away in the center of a cleared space. I could make out the hologram pictograph that pulsed identification on the side: the symbol for Urheim, World’s largest city and Combine Seat of Board, half a world away in the Northern Hemisphere. They’d come a long way; still thought of as long, though ships whispered between the stars—it was still long for feet and eyes. And another longer way: from fetuses in glass wombs to men stamping and jiggling with cold inside the fold of a mountain’s thigh, watching the spreading morning. That made me feel funny to think about. I wondered if they suspected that it’d be the last morning they’d ever see. That made me feel funnier. The thought tickled my mind again, danced away. I checked my gun a second time, needlessly.
I waited, feeling troubled, pushing it down. Two of them were standing together several feet in front of the van, sharing a mild narcotic atomizer, sucking deeply, shuffling with restlessness and cold, staring out across the speargrass to where the plain opened up. They had the stiff, rumpled, puff-eyed look of people who had just spent an uncomfortable night in a cramped place. They were dressed as fullsentients uncloned, junior officers of the military caste, probably hereditary positions inherited from their families, as is the case with most of the uncloned cadet executives. Except for the cadre at Urheim and other major cities, they must have been some of the few surviving clansmen; hundreds of thousands of military cadets and officers had died at D’kotta (along with uncounted clones and semisentients of all ranks), and the caste had never been extremely large in the first place. The by-laws had demanded that the Combine maintain a security force, but it had become mostly traditional, with minimum function, at least among the uncloned higher ranks, almost the last stronghold of old-fashioned nepotism. That was one of the things that had favored the Quaestor uprising, and had forced the Combine to take the unpopular step of impressing large numbers of industrial clones into a militia. The most junior of these two cadets was very young, even younger than me. The third man remained inside the van’s cab. I could see his face blurrily through the windfield, kept on against the cold though the van was no longer in motion.
I waited. I knew the others were maneuvering into position around me. I also knew what Heynith was waiting for.
The third man jumped down from the high cab. He was older, wore an officer’s hologram: a full executive. He said something to the cadets, moved a few feet toward the back of the van, started to take a piss. The column of golden liquid steamed in the cold air.
Heynith whistled.
I rolled to my knees, parted the speargrass at the edge of the cleared space, swung my gun up. The two cadets started, face muscles tensing into uncertain fear. The older cadet took an involuntary step forward, still clutching the atomizer. Ren and Goth chopped him down, firing a stream of “bullets” into him. The guns made a very loud metallic rattling sound that jarred the teeth, and fire flashed from the ejector ends. Birds screamed upward all along the mountain flank. The impact of the bullets knocked the cadet off his feet, rolled him so that he came to rest belly-down. The atomizer flew through the air, hit, bounced. The younger cadet leaped toward the cab, right into my line of fire. I pulled the trigger; bullets exploded out of the gun. The cadet was kicked backwards, arms swinging wide, slammed against the side of the cab, jerked upright as I continued to fire, spun along the van wall and rammed heavily into the ground. He tottered on one shoulder for a second, then flopped over onto his back. At the sound of the first shot, the executive had whirled—penis still dangling from pantaloons, surplus piss spraying wildly—and dodged for the back of the van, so that Heynith’s volley missed and screamed from the van wall, leaving a long scar. The executive dodged again, crouched, came up with a biodeth in one hand, and swung right into a single bullet from Ren just as he began to fire. The impact twirled him in a staggering circle, his finger still pressing the trigger; the carrier beam splashed harmlessly from the van wall, traversed as the executive spun, cut a long swath through the speargrass, the plants shriveling and blackening as the beam swept over them. Heynith opened up again before the beam could reach his clump of grass, sending the executive—somehow still on his feet—lurching past the end of the van. The biodeth dropped, went out. Heynith kept firing, the executive dancing bonelessly backwards on his heels, held up by the stream of bullets. Heynith released the trigger. The executive collapsed: a heap of arms and legs at impossible angles.
When we came up to the van, the young cadet was still dying. His body shivered and arched, his heels drummed against the earth, his fingers plucked at nothing, and then he was still. There was a lot of blood.
The others moved up from the valley mouth. Heynith sent them circling around the rim, where the valley walls dipped down on three sides.
We dragged the bodies away and concealed them in some large rocks.
I was feeling numb again, like I had after D’kotta.
I continued to feel numb as we spent the rest of that morning in frantic preparation. My mind was somehow detached as my body sweated and dug and hauled. There was a lot for it to do. We had four heavy industrial lasers, rock-cutters; they were clumsy, bulky, inefficient things to use as weapons, but they’d have to do. This mission had not been planned so much as thrown together, only two hours before the liaison man had contacted us on the parapet. Anything that could possibly work at all would have to be made to work somehow; no time to do it right, just do it. We’d been the closest team in contact with the field HQ who’d received the report, so we’d been snatched; the lasers were the only things on hand that could even approach potential as a heavy weapon, so we’d use the lasers.
Now that we’d taken the van without someone alerting the Combine by radio from the cab, Heynith flashed a signal mirror back toward the shoulder of the mountain we’d quitted a few hours before. The liaison man swooped down ten minutes later, carrying one of the lasers strapped awkwardly to his platvac. He made three more trips, depositing the massive cylinders as carefully as eggs, then gunned his platvac and screamed back toward the Blackfriars in a maniac arc just this side of suicidal. His face was still gray, tight-pressed lips a bloodless white against ash, and he hadn’t said a word during the whole unloading procedure. I think he was probably one of the Quaestors who followed the Way of Atonement. I never saw him again. I’ve sometimes wished I’d had the courage to follow his example, but I rationalize by telling myself that I have atoned with my life rather than my death, and who knows, it might even be somewhat true. It’s nice to think so anyway.
It took us a couple of hours to get the lasers into position. We spotted them in four places around the valley walls, dug slanting pits into the slopes to conceal them and tilt the barrels up at the right angle. We finally got them all zeroed on a spot about a hundred feet above the center of the valley floor, the muzzle arrangement giving each a few degrees of leeway on either side. That’s where she’d have to come down anyway if she was a standard orbot, the valley being just wide enough to contain the boat and the vacvan, with a safety margin between them. Of course, if they brought her down on the plain outside the valley mouth, things were going to get very hairy; in that case we might be able to lever one or two of the lasers around to bear, or, failing that, we could try to take the orbot on foot once it’d landed, with about one chance in eight of making it. But we thought that they’d land her in the valley; that’s where the vacvan had been parked, and they’d want the shelter of the high mountain walls to conceal the orbot from any Quaestor eyes that might be around. If so, that gave us a much better chance. About one out of three.
When the lasers had been positioned, we scattered, four men to an emplacement, hiding in the camouflaged trenches alongside the big barrels. Heynith led Goth and me toward the laser we’d placed about fifty feet up the mountain flank, directly behind and above the vacvan. Ren stayed behind. He stood next to the van—shoulders characteristically slouched, thumbs hooked in his belt, face carefully void of expression—and watched us out of sight. Then he looked out over the valley mouth, hitched up his gun, spat in the direction of Urheim and climbed up into the van cab.
The valley was empty again. From our position the vacvan looked like a shiny toy, sun dogs winking across its surface as it baked in the afternoon heat. An abandoned toy, lost in high weeds, waiting in loneliness to be reclaimed by owners who would never come.
Time passed.
The birds we’d frightened away began to settle back onto the hillsides.
I shifted position uneasily, trying half-heartedly to get comfortable. Heynith glared me into immobility. We were crouched in a trench about eight feet long and five feet deep, covered by a camouflage tarpaulin propped open on the valley side by pegs, a couple of inches of vegetation and topsoil on top of the tarpaulin. Heynith was in the middle, straddling the operator’s saddle of the laser. Goth was on his left, I was on his right. Heynith was going to man the laser when the time came; it only took one person. There was nothing for Goth and me to do, would be nothing to do even during the ambush, except take over the firing in the unlikely event that Heynith was killed without the shot wiping out all of us, or stand by to lever the laser around in case that became necessary. Neither was very likely to happen. No, it was Heynith’s show, and we were superfluous and unoccupied.
That was bad.
We had a lot of time to think.
That was worse.
I was feeling increasingly numb, like a wall of clear glass had been slipped between me and the world and was slowly thickening, layer by layer. With the thickening came an incredible isolation (isolation though I was cramped and suffocating, though I was jammed up against Heynith’s bunched thigh—I couldn’t touch him, he was miles away) and with the isolation came a sick, smothering panic. It was the inverse of claustrophobia. My flesh had turned to clear plastic, my bones to glass, and I was naked, ultimately naked, and there was nothing I could wrap me in. Surrounded by an army, I would still be alone; shrouded in iron thirty feet underground, I would still be naked. One portion of my mind wondered dispassionately if I was slipping into shock; the rest of it fought to keep down the scream that gathered along tightening muscles. The isolation increased. I was unaware of my surroundings, except for the heat and the pressure of enclosure.
I was seeing the molten spider of D’kotta, lying on its back and showing its obscene blotched belly, kicking legs of flame against the sky, each leg raising a poison blister where it touched the clouds.
I was seeing the boy, face runneled by blood, beating heels against the ground.
I was beginning to doubt big, simple ideas.
Nothing moved in the valley except wind through grass, spirits circling in the form of birds.
Spider legs.
Crab dance.
The blocky shadow of the vacvan crept across the valley.
Suddenly, with the intensity of vision, I was picturing Ren sitting in the van cab, shoulders resting against the door, legs stretched out along the seat, feet propped up on the instrument board, one ankle crossed over the other, gun resting across his lap, eyes watching the valley mouth through the windfield. He would be smoking a cigarette, and he would take it from his lips occasionally, flick the ashes onto the shiny dials with a fingernail, smile his strange smile, and carefully burn holes in the plush fabric of the upholstery. The fabric (real fabric; not plastic) would smolder, send out a wisp of bad-smelling smoke, and there would be another charred black hole in the seat. Ren would smile again, put the cigarette back in his mouth, lean back, and puff slowly. Ren was waiting to answer the radio signal from the orbot, to assure its pilot and crew that all was well, to talk them down to death. If they suspected anything was wrong, he would be the first to die. Even if everything went perfectly, he stood a high chance of dying anyway; he was the most exposed. It was almost certainly a suicide job. Ren said that he didn’t give a shit; maybe he actually didn’t. Or at least had convinced himself that he didn’t. He was an odd man. Older than any of us, even Heynith, he had worked most of his life as a cadet executive in Admin at Urheim, devoted his existence to his job, subjugated all of his energies to it. He had been passed over three times for promotion to executive status, years of redoubled effort and mounting anxiety between each rejection. With the third failure he had been quietly retired to live on the credit subsidy he had earned with forty years of service. The next morning, precisely at the start of his accustomed work period, he stole a biodeth from a security guard in the Admin Complex, walked into his flowsector, killed everyone there, and disappeared from Urheim. After a year on the run, he had managed to contact the Quaestors. After another year of training, he was serving with a commando team in spite of his age. That had been five years ago; I had known him for two. During all that time, he had said little. He did his job very well with a minimum of waste motion, never made mistakes, never complained, never showed emotion. But occasionally he would smile and burn a hole in something. Or someone.
The sun dived at the horizon, seeming to crash into the plain in an explosion of flame. Night swallowed us in one gulp. Black as a beast’s belly.
It jerked me momentarily back into reality. I had a bad moment when I thought I’d gone blind, but then reason returned and I slipped the infrared lenses down over my eyes, activated them. The world came back in shades of red. Heynith was working cramped legs against the body of the laser. He spoke briefly, and we gulped some stimulus pills to keep us awake; they were bitter, and hard to swallow dry as usual, but they kicked up a familiar acid churning in my stomach, and my blood began to flow faster. I glanced at Heynith. He’d been quiet, even for Heynith. I wondered what he was thinking. He looked at me, perhaps reading the thought, and ordered us out of the trench.
Goth and I crawled slowly out, feeling stiff and brittle, slapped our thighs and arms, stamped to restore circulation. Stars were sprinkling across the sky, salt spilled on black porcelain. I still couldn’t read them, I found. The day plants had vanished, the day animals had retreated into catalepsy. The night plants were erupting from the ground, fed by the debris of the day plants. They grew rapidly, doubling, then tripling in height as we watched. They were predominantly thick, ropy shrubs with wide, spearhead leaves of dull purple and black, about four feet high. Goth and I dug a number of them up, root systems intact, and placed them on top of the tarpaulin to replace the day plants that had shriveled with the first touch of bitter evening frost. We had to handle them with padded gloves; the leaf surfaces greedily absorbed the slightest amount of heat and burned like dry ice.
Then we were back in the trench, and it was worse than ever. Motion had helped for a while, but I could feel the numbing panic creeping back, and the momentary relief made it even harder to bear. I tried to start a conversation, but it died in monosyllabic grunts, and silence sopped up the echoes. Heynith was methodically checking the laser controls for the nth time. He was tense; I could see it bunch his shoulder muscles, bulge his calves into rock as they pushed against the footplates of the saddle. Goth looked worse than I did; he was somewhat younger, and usually energetic and cheerful. Not tonight.
We should have talked, spread the pain around; I think all of us realized it. But we couldn’t; we were made awkward by our own special intimacy. At one time or another, every one of us had reached a point where he had to talk or die, even Heynith, even Ren. So we all had talked and all had listened, each of us switching roles sooner or later. We had poured our fears and dreams and secret memories upon each other, until now we knew each other too well. It made us afraid. Each of us was afraid that he had exposed too much, let down too many barriers. We were afraid of vulnerability, of the knife that jabs for the softest fold of the belly. We were all scarred men already, and twice-shy. And the resentment grew that others had seen us that helpless, that vulnerable. So the walls went back up, intensified. And so when we needed to talk again, we could not. We were already too close to risk further intimacy.
Visions returned, ebbing and flowing, overlaying the darkness.
The magma churning, belching a hot breath that stinks of rotten eggs.
The cadet, his face inhuman in the death rictus, blood running down in a wash from his smashed forehead, plastering one eye closed, bubbling at his nostril, frothing around his lips, the lips tautening as his head jerks forward and then backwards, slamming the ground, the lips then growing slack, the body slumping, the mouth sagging open, the rush of blood and phlegm past the tombstone teeth, down the chin and neck, soaking into the fabric of the tunic. The feet drumming at the ground a final time, digging up clots of earth.
I groped for understanding. I had killed people before, and it had not bothered me except in sleep. I had done it mechanically, routine backed by hate, hate cushioned by routine. I wondered if the night would ever end. I remembered the morning I’d watched from the mountain. I didn’t think the night would end. A big idea tickled my mind again.
The city swallowed by stone.
The cadet falling, swinging his arms wide.
Why always the cadet and the city in conjunction? Had one sensitized me to the other, and if so, which? I hesitated.
Could both of them be equally important?
One of the other section leaders whistled.
We all started, somehow grew even more tense. The whistle came again, warbling, sound floating on silence like oil on water. Someone was coming. After a while we heard a rustling and snapping of underbrush approaching downslope from the mountain. Whoever it was, he was making no effort to move quietly. In fact he seemed to be blundering along, bulling through the tangles, making a tremendous thrashing noise. Goth and I turned in the direction of the sound, brought our guns up to bear, primed them. That was instinct. I wondered who could be coming down the mountain toward us. That was reason. Heynith twisted to cover the opposite direction, away from the noise, resting his gun on the saddle rim. That was caution. The thrasher passed our position about six feet away, screened by the shrubs. There was an open space ten feet farther down, at the head of a talus bluff that slanted to the valley. We watched it. The shrubs at the end of the clearing shook, were torn aside. A figure stumbled out into starlight.
It was a null.
Goth sucked in a long breath, let it hiss out between his teeth. Heynith remained impassive, but I could imagine his eyes narrowing behind the thick lenses. My mind was totally blank for about three heartbeats, then, surprised: a null! and I brought the gun barrel up, then, uncomprehending: a null? and I lowered the muzzle. Blank for a second, then: how? and trickling in again: how? Thoughts snarled into confusion, the gun muzzle wavered hesitantly.
The null staggered across the clearing, weaving in slow figure-eights. It almost fell down the talus bluff, one foot suspended uncertainly over the drop, then lurched away, goaded by tropism. The null shambled backward a few paces, stopped, swayed, then slowly sank to its knees.
It kneeled: head bowed, arms limp along the ground, palms up.
Heynith put his gun back in his lap, shook his head. He told us he’d be damned if he could figure out where it came from, but we’d have to get rid of it. It could spoil the ambush if it was spotted. Automatically, I raised my gun, trained it. Heynith stopped me. No noise, he said, not now. He told Goth to go out and kill it silently.
Goth refused. Heynith stared at him speechlessly, then began to flush. Goth and Heynith had had trouble before. Goth was a good man, brave as a bull, but he was stubborn, tended to follow his own lead too much, had too many streaks of sentimentality and touchiness, thought too much to be a really efficient cog.
They had disagreed from the beginning, something that wouldn’t have been tolerated this long if the Quaestors hadn’t been desperate for men. Goth was a devil in a fight when aroused, one of the best, and that had excused him a lot of obstinacy. But he had a curious squeamishness, he hadn’t developed the layers of numbing scar-tissue necessary for guerrilla work, and that was almost inevitably fatal. I’d wondered before, dispassionately, how long he would last.
Goth was a hereditary fullsentient, one of the few connected with the Quaestors. He’d been a cadet executive in Admin, gained access to old archives that had slowly soured him on the Combine, been hit at the psychologically right moment by increasing Quaestor agitprop, and had defected; after a two-year proving period, he’d been allowed to participate actively. Goth was one of the only field people who was working out of idealism rather than hate, and that made us distrust him. Heynith also nurtured a traditional dislike for hereditary fullsentients. Heynith had been part of an industrial sixclone for over twenty years before joining the Quaestors. His Six had been wiped out in a production accident, caused by standard Combine negligence. Heynith had been the only survivor. The Combine had expressed mild sympathy, and told him that they planned to cut another clone from him to replace the destroyed Six; he of course would be placed in charge of the new Six, by reason of his seniority. They smiled at him, not seeing any reason why he wouldn’t want to work another twenty years with biological replicas of his dead brothers and sisters, the men, additionally, reminders of what he’d been as a youth, unravaged by years of pain. Heynith had thanked them politely, walked out, and kept walking, crossing the Gray Waste on foot to join the Quaestors.
I could see all this working in Heynith’s face as he raged at Goth. Goth could feel the hate too, but he stood firm. The null was incapable of doing anybody any harm; he wasn’t going to kill it. There’d been enough slaughter. Goth’s face was bloodless, and I could see D’kotta reflected in his eyes, but I felt no sympathy for him, in spite of my own recent agonies. He was disobeying orders. I thought about Mason, the man Goth had replaced, the man who had died in my arms at Itica, and I hated Goth for being alive instead of Mason. I had loved Mason. He’d been an Antiquarian in the Urheim archives, and he’d worked for the Quaestors almost from the beginning, years of vital service before his activities were discovered by the Combine. He’d escaped the raid, but his family hadn’t. He’d been offered an admin job in Quaestor HQ, but had turned it down and insisted on fieldwork in spite of warnings that it was suicidal for a man of his age. Mason had been a tall, gentle, scholarly man who pretended to be gruff and hard-nosed, and cried alone at night when he thought nobody could see. I’d often thought that he could have escaped from Itica if he’d tried harder, but he’d been worn down, sick and guilt-ridden and tired, and his heart hadn’t really been in it; that thought had returned to puzzle me often afterward. Mason had been the only person I’d ever cared about, the one who’d been more responsible than anybody for bringing me out of the shadows and into humanity, and I could have shot Goth at that moment because I thought he was betraying Mason’s memory.
Heynith finally ran out of steam, spat at Goth, started to call him something, then stopped and merely glared at him, lips white. I’d caught Heynith’s quick glance at me, a nearly invisible head-turn, just before he’d fallen silent. He’d almost forgotten and called Goth a zombie, a widespread expletive on World that had carefully not been used by the team since I’d joined. So Heynith had never really forgotten, though he’d treated me with scrupulous fairness. My fury turned to a cold anger, widened out from Goth to become a sick distaste for the entire world.
Heynith told Goth he would take care of him later, take care of him good, and ordered me to go kill the null, take him upslope and out of sight first, then conceal the body.
Mechanically, I pulled myself out of the trench, started downslope toward the clearing. Anger fueled me for the first few feet, and I slashed the shrubs aside with padded gloves, but it ebbed quickly, leaving me hollow and numb. I’d known how the rest of the team must actually think of me, but somehow I’d never allowed myself to admit it. Now I’d had my face jammed in it, and, coming on top of all the other anguish I’d gone through the last two days, it was too much.
I pushed into the clearing.
My footsteps triggered some response in the null. It surged drunkenly to its feet, arms swinging limply, and turned to face me.
The null was slightly taller than me, built very slender, and couldn’t have weighed too much more than a hundred pounds. It was bald, completely hairless. The fingers were shriveled, limp flesh dangling from the club of the hand; they had never been used. The toes had been developed to enable technicians to walk nulls from one section of the Cerebrum to another, but the feet had never had a chance to toughen or grow callused: they were a mass of blood and lacerations. The nose was a rough blob of pink meat around the nostrils, the ears similarly atrophied. The eyes were enormous, huge milky corneas and small pupils, like those of a nocturnal bird; adapted to the gloom of the Cerebrum, and allowed to function to forestall sensory deprivation; they aren’t cut into the psychocybernetic current like the synapses or the ganglions. There were small messy wounds on the temples, wrists, and spine-base where electrodes had been torn loose. It had been shrouded in a pajamalike suit of nonconductive material, but that had been torn almost completely away, only a few hanging tatters remaining. There were no sex organs. The flesh under the rib cage was curiously collapsed; no stomach or digestive tract. The body was covered with bruises, cuts, gashes, extensive swatches sun-baked to second-degree burns, other sections seriously frostbitten or marred by bad coldburns from the night shrubs.
My awe grew, deepened into archetypical dread.
It was from D’kotta, there could be no doubt about it. Somehow it had survived the destruction of its Cerebrum, somehow it had walked through the boiling hell to the foothills, somehow it had staggered up to and over the mountain shoulder. I doubted if there’d been any predilection in its actions; probably it had just walked blindly away from the ruined Cerebrum in a straight line and kept walking. Its actions with the talus bluff demonstrated that; maybe earlier some dim instinct had helped it fumble its way around obstacles in its path, but now it was exhausted, baffled, stymied. It was miraculous that it had made it this far. And the agony it must have suffered on its way was inconceivable. I shivered, spooked. The short hairs bristled on the back of my neck.
The null lurched toward me.
I whimpered and sprang backwards, nearly falling, swinging up the gun.
The null stopped, its head lolling, describing a slow semicircle. Its eyes were tracking curiously, and I doubted if it could focus on me at all. To it, I must have been a blur of darker gray.
I tried to steady my ragged breathing. It couldn’t hurt me; it was harmless, nearly dead anyway. Slowly, I lowered the gun, pried my fingers from the stock, slung the gun over my shoulder.
I edged cautiously toward it. The null swayed, but remained motionless. Below, I could see the vacvan at the bottom of the bluff, a patch of dull gunmetal sheen. I stretched my hand out slowly. The null didn’t move. This close, I could see its gaunt ribs rising and falling with the effort of its ragged breathing. It was trembling, an occasional convulsive spasm shuddering along its frame. I was surprised that it didn’t stink; nulls were rumored to have a strong personal odor, at least according to the talk in field camps—bullshit, like so much of my knowledge at that time. I watched it for a minute, fascinated, but my training told me I couldn’t stand out here for long; we were too exposed. I took another step, reached out for it, hesitated. I didn’t want to touch it. Swallowing my distaste, I selected a spot on its upper arm free of burns or wounds, grabbed it firmly with one hand.
The null jerked at the touch, but made no attempt to strike out or get away. I waited warily for a second, ready to turn my grip into a wrestling hold if it should try to attack. It remained still, but its flesh crawled under my fingers, and I shivered myself in reflex. Satisfied that the null would give me no trouble, I turned and began to force it upslope, pushing it ahead of me.
It followed my shove without resistance, until we hit the first of the night shrubs, then it staggered and made a mewing, inarticulate sound. The plants were burning it, sucking warmth out of its flesh, raising fresh welts, ugly where bits of skin had adhered to the shrubs. I shrugged, pushed it forward. It mewed and lurched again. I stopped. The null’s eyes tracked in my direction, and it whimpered to itself in pain. I swore at myself for wasting time, but moved ahead to break a path for the null, dragging it along behind me. The branches slapped harmlessly at my warmsuit as I bent them aside; occasionally one would slip past and lash the null, making it flinch and whimper, but it was spared the brunt of it. I wondered vaguely at my motives for doing it. Why bother to spare someone (something, I corrected nervously) pain when you’re going to have to kill him (it) in a minute? What difference could it make? I shelved that and concentrated on the movements of my body; the null wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t easy to drag it uphill either, especially as it’d stumble and go down every few yards and I’d have to pull it back to its feet again. I was soon sweating, but I didn’t care, as the action helped to occupy my mind, and I didn’t want to have to face the numbness I could feel taking over again.
We moved upslope until we were about thirty feet above the trench occupied by Heynith and Goth. This looked like a good place. The shrubs were almost chest-high here, tall enough to hide the null’s body from an aerial search. I stopped. The null bumped blindly into me, leaned against me, its breath coming in rasps next to my ear. I shivered in horror at the contact. Gooseflesh blossomed on my arms and legs, swept across my body. Some connection sent a memory whispering at my mind, but I ignored it under the threat of rising panic. I twisted my shoulder under the null’s weight, threw it off. The null slid back downslope a few feet, almost fell, recovered.
I watched it, panting. The memory returned, gnawing incessantly. This time it got through:
Mason scrambling through the sea-washed rocks of Cape Itica toward the waiting ramsub, while the fire sky-whipping behind picked us out against the shadows; Mason, too slow in vaulting over a stone ridge, balancing too long on the razor-edge in perfect silhouette against the night; Mason jerked upright as a fusor fired from the high cliff puddled his spine, melted his flesh like wax; Mason tumbling down into my arms, almost driving me to my knees; Mason, already dead, heavy in my arms, heavy in my arms; Mason torn away from me as a wave broke over us and deluged me in spume; Mason sinking from sight as Heynith screamed for me to come on and I fought my way through the chest-high surf to the ramsub-
That’s what supporting the null had reminded me of: Mason, heavy in my arms.
Confusion and fear and nausea.
How could the null make me think of Mason?
Sick self-anger that my mind could compare Mason, gentle as the dream-father I’d never had, to something as disgusting as the null.
Anger novaed, trying to scrub out shame and guilt.
I couldn’t take it. I let it spill out onto the null.
Growling, I sprang forward, shook it furiously until its head rattled and wobbled on its limp neck, grabbed it by the shoulders, and hammered it to its knees.
I yanked my knife out. The blade flamed suddenly in starlight.
I wrapped my hand around its throat to tilt its head back.
Its flesh was warm. A pulse throbbed under my palm. All at once, my anger was gone, leaving only nausea. I suddenly realized how cold the night was. Wind bit to the bone.
It was looking at me.
I suppose I’d been lucky. Orphans aren’t as common as they once were—not in a society where reproduction has been relegated to the laboratory—but they still occur with fair regularity. I had been the son of an uncloned junior executive who’d run up an enormous credit debit, gone bankrupt, and been forced into insolvency. The Combine had cut a clone from him so that their man-hours would make up the bank discrepancy, burned out the higher levels of his brain, and put him in one of the nonsentient penal Controlled Environments. His wife was also cloned, but avoided brainscrub and went back to work in a lower capacity in Admin. I, as a baby, then became a ward of the State, and was sent to one of the institutional Environments. Imagine an endless series of low noises, repeating over and over again forever, no high or low spots, everything level: MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Like that. That’s the only way to describe the years in the Environments. We were fed, we were kept warm, we worked on conveyor belts piecing together miniaturized equipment, we were put to sleep electronically, we woke with our fingers already busy in the monotonous, rhythmical motions that we couldn’t remember learning, motions we had repeated a million times a day since infancy. Once a day we were fed a bar of food-concentrates and vitamins. Occasionally, at carefully calculated intervals, we would be exercised to keep up muscle tone. After reaching puberty, we were occasionally masturbated by electric stimulation, the seed saved for sperm banks. The administrators of the Environment were not cruel; we almost never saw them. Punishment was by machine shocks; never severe, very rarely needed. The executives had no need to be cruel. All they needed was MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. We had been taught at some early stage, probably by shock and stimulation, to put the proper part in the proper slot as the blocks of equipment passed in front of us. We had never been taught to talk, although an extremely limited language of several mood-sounds had independently developed among us; the executives never spoke on the rare intervals when they came to check the machinery that regulated us. We had never been told who we were, where we were; we had never been told anything. We didn’t care about any of these things, the concepts had never formed in our minds, we were only semiconscious at best anyway. There was nothing but MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. The executives weren’t concerned with our spiritual development; there was no graduation from the Environment, there was no place else for us to go in a rigidly stratified society. The Combine had discharged its obligation by keeping us alive, in a place where we could even be minimally useful. Though our jobs were sinecures and could have been more efficiently performed by computer, they gave the expense of our survival a socially justifiable excuse, they put us comfortably in a pigeonhole. We were there for life. We would grow up from infancy, grow old, and die, bathed in MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. The first real, separate, and distinct memory of my life is when the Quaestors raided the Environment, when the wall of the assembly chamber suddenly glowed red, buckled, collapsed inward, when Mason pushed out of the smoke and the debris cloud, gun at the ready, and walked slowly toward me. That’s hindsight. At the time, it was only a sudden invasion of incomprehensible sounds and lights and shapes and colors, too much to possibly comprehend, incredibly alien. It was the first discordant note ever struck in our lives: MMMMMMMMMMMM!!!! shattering our world in an instant, plunging us into another dimension of existence. The Quaestors kidnapped all of us, loaded us onto vacvans, took us into the hills, tried to undo some of the harm. That’d been six years ago. Even with the facilities available at the Quaestor underground complex—hypnotrainers and analysis computers to plunge me back to childhood and patiently lead me out again step by step for ten thousand years of subjective time, while my body slumbered in stasis—even with all of that, I’d been lucky to emerge somewhat sane. The majority had died, or been driven into catalepsy. I’d been lucky even to be a Ward of the State, the way things had turned out. Lucky to be a zombie. I could have been a low-ranked clone, without a digestive system, tied forever to the Combine by unbreakable strings. Or I could have been one of the thousands of tank-grown creatures whose brains are used as organic-computer storage banks in the Cerebrum gestalts, completely unsentient: I could have been
a null.
Enormous eyes staring at me, unblinking.
Warmth under my fingers.
I wondered if I was going to throw up.
Wind moaned steadily through the valley with a sound like MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
Heynith hissed for me to hurry up, sound riding the wind, barely audible. I shifted my grip on the knife. I was telling myself: it’s never been really sentient anyway. Its brain has only been used as a computer unit for a biological gestalt, there’s no individual intelligence in there. It wouldn’t make any difference. I was telling myself: it’s dying anyway from a dozen causes. It’s in pain. It would be kinder to kill it.
I brought up the knife, placing it against the null’s throat. I pressed the point in slowly, until it was pricking flesh.
The null’s eyes tracked, focused on the knifeblade.
My stomach turned over. I looked away, out across the valley. I felt my carefully created world trembling and blurring around me, I felt again on the point of being catapulted into another level of comprehension, previously unexpected. I was afraid.
The vacvan’s headlights flashed on and off, twice.
I found myself on the ground, hidden by the ropy shrubs. I had dragged the null down with me, without thinking about it, pinned him flat to the ground, arm over back. That had been the signal that Ren had received a call from the orbot, had given it the proper radio code reply to bring it down. I could imagine him grinning in the darkened cab as he worked the instruments.
I raised myself on an elbow, jerked the knife up, suspending it while I looked for the junction of spine and neck that would be the best place to strike. If I was going to kill him (it), I would have to kill him (it!) now. In quick succession, like a series of slides, like a computer equation running, I got: D’kotta—the cadet—Mason—the null. It and him tumbled in selection. Came up him. I lowered the knife. I couldn’t do it. He was human. Everybody was.
For better or worse, I was changed. I was no longer the same person.
I looked up. Somewhere up there, hanging at the edge of the atmosphere, was the tinsel collection of forces in opposition called a starship, delicately invulnerable as an iron butterfly. It would be phasing in and out of “reality” to hold its position above World, maintaining only the most tenuous of contacts with this continuum. It had launched an orbot, headed for a rendezvous with the vacvan in this valley. The orbot was filled with the gene cultures that could be used to create hundreds of thousands of nonsentient clones who could be imprinted with behavior patterns and turned into computer-directed soldiers; crude but effective. The orbot was filled with millions of tiny metal blocks, kept under enormous compression: when released from tension, molecular memory would reshape them into a wide range of weapons needing only a power source to be functional. The orbot was carrying, in effect, a vast army and its combat equipment, in a form that could be transported in a five-hundred-foot vacvan and slipped into Urheim, where there were machines that could put it into use. It was the Combine’s last chance, the second wind they needed in order to survive. It had been financed and arranged by various industrial firms in the Commonwealth who had vested interests in the Combine’s survival on World. The orbot’s cargo had been assembled and sent off before D’kotta, when it had been calculated that the reinforcements would be significant in ensuring a Combine victory; now it was indispensable. D’kotta had made the Combine afraid that an attack on Urheim might be next, that the orbot might be intercepted by the Quaestors if the city was under siege when it tried to land. So the Combine had decided to land the orbot elsewhere and sneak the cargo in. The Blackfriars had been selected as a rendezvous, since it was unlikely the Quaestors would be on the alert for Combine activity in that area so soon after D’kotta, and even if stopped, the van might be taken for fleeing survivors and ignored. The starship had been contacted by esper en route, and the change in plan made.
Four men had died to learn of the original plan. Two more had died in order to learn of the new landing site and get the information to the Quaestors in time.
The orbot came down.
I watched it as in a dream, coming to my knees, head above the shrubs. The null stirred under my hand, pushed against the ground, sat up.
The orbot was a speck, a dot, a ball, a toy. It was gliding silently in on grays, directly overhead.
I could imagine Heynith readying the laser, Goth looking up and chewing his lip the way he always did in stress. I knew that my place should be with them, but I couldn’t move. Fear and tension were still there, but they were under glass. I was already emotionally drained. I could sum up nothing else, even to face death.
The orbot had swelled into a huge, spherical mountain. It continued to settle toward the spot where we’d calculated it must land. Now it hung just over the valley center, nearly brushing the mountain walls on either side. The orbot filled the sky, and I leaned away from it instinctively. It dropped lower-
Heynith was the first to fire.
An intense beam of light erupted from the ground down-slope, stabbed into the side of the orbot. Another followed from the opposite side of the valley, then the remaining two at once.
The orbot hung, transfixed by four steady, unbearably bright columns.
For a while, it seemed as if nothing was happening. I could imagine the consternation aboard the orbot as the pilot tried to reverse grays in time.
The boat’s hull had become cherry red in four widening spots. Slowly, the spots turned white.
I could hear the null getting up beside me, near enough to touch. I had risen automatically, shading my eyes against glare.
The orbot exploded.
The reactor didn’t go, of course; they’re built so that can’t happen. It was just the conventional auxiliary engines, used for steering and for powering internal systems. But that was enough.
Imagine a building humping itself into a giant stone fist, and bringing that fist down on you, squash. Pain so intense that it snuffs your consciousness before you can feel it.
Warned by instinct, I had time to do two things. I thought, distinctly: so night will never end. And I stepped in front of the null to shield him. Then I was kicked into oblivion.
I awoke briefly to agony, the world a solid, blank red. Very, very far away, I could hear someone screaming. It was me.
I awoke again. The pain had lessened. I could see. It was day, and the night plants had died. The sun was dazzling on bare rock. The null was standing over me, seeming to stretch up for miles into the sky. I screamed in preternatural terror. The world vanished.
The next time I opened my eyes, the sky was heavily overcast and it was raining, one of those torrential southern downpours. A Quaestor medic was doing something to my legs, and there was a platvac nearby. The null was lying on his back a few feet away, a bullet in his chest. His head was tilted up toward the scuttling gray clouds. His eyes mirrored the rain.
That’s what happened to my leg. So much nerve tissue destroyed that they couldn’t grow me a new one, and I had to put up with this stiff prosthetic. But I got used to it. I considered it my tuition fee.
I’d learned two things: that everybody is human, and that the universe doesn’t care one way or the other; only people do. The universe just doesn’t give a damn. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that a relief? It isn’t out to get you, and it isn’t going to help you either. You’re on your own. We all are, and we all have to answer to ourselves. We make our own heavens and hells; we can’t pass the buck any further. How much easier when we could blame our guilt or goodness on God.
Oh, I could read supernatural significance into it all—that I was spared because I’d spared the null, that some benevolent force was rewarding me—but what about Goth? Killed, and if he hadn’t balked in the first place, the null wouldn’t have stayed alive long enough for me to be entangled. What about the other team members, all dead—wasn’t there a man among them as good as me and as much worth saving? No, there’s a more direct reason why I survived. Prompted by the knowledge of his humanity, I had shielded him from the explosion. Three other men survived that explosion, but they died from exposure in the hours before the med team got there, baked to death by the sun. I didn’t die because the null stood over me during the hours when the sun was rising and frying the rocks, and his shadow shielded me from the sun. I’m not saying that he consciously figured that out, deliberately shielded me (though who knows), but I had given him the only warmth he’d known in a long nightmare of pain, and so he remained by me when there was nothing stopping him from running away—and it came to the same result. You don’t need intelligence or words to respond to empathy, it can be communicated through the touch of fingers—you know that if you’ve ever had a pet, ever been in love. So that’s why I was spared, warmth for warmth, the same reason anything good ever happens in this life. When the med team arrived, they shot the null down because they thought it was trying to harm me. So much for supernatural rewards for the Just.
So, empathy’s the thing that binds life together, it’s the flame we share against fear. Warmth’s the only answer to the old cold questions.
So I went through life, boy; made mistakes, did a lot of things, got kicked around a lot more, loved a little, and ended up on Kos, waiting for evening.
But night’s a relative thing. It always ends. It does; because even if you’re not around to watch it, the sun always comes up, and someone’ll be there to see.
It’s a fine, beautiful morning.
It’s always a beautiful morning somewhere, even on the day you die.
You’re young—that doesn’t comfort you yet.
But you’ll learn.

The Hanging Curve
I
T WAS A COOL OCTOBER night in Philadelphia, with a wet wind coming off the river that occasionally shifted to bring in the yeasty spoiled-beer smell of the nearby refineries. Independence Stadium, the relatively new South Philly stadium that had been built to replace the old Veteran’s Stadium, which still stood deserted a block or so away, was filled to capacity, and then some, with people standing in the aisles. It was the last game of a hard-fought and bitterly contested World Series between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, 3-2 in favor of the Phillies, the Yankees at bat with two out in the top of the ninth inning, and a man on third base. Eduardo Rivera was at bat for the Yankees against pitcher Karl Holzman, the Yankees’ best slugger against the Phillies’ best stopper, and Holzman had run a full count on Rivera, 3-2. Everything depended on the next pitch.
Holzman went into his slow, deliberate windup. Everybody in the stadium was leaning forward, everybody was holding their breath. Though there were almost ten thousand people in the stands, nobody was making a sound. Even the TV announcers were tense and silent. Hey, there it is! The pitch—
Some pundits later said that what was about to happen happened because the game was so tight, because so much was riding on the next pitch—that it was the psychic energy of the thousands of fans in the stands, the millions more in the viewing audience at home, every eye and every mind focused on that particular moment. That what happened was caused by the tension and the ever-tightening suspense felt by millions of people hanging on the outcome of that particular pitch....
And yet, in the more than a century and a half that people had been playing professional baseball, there had been many games as important as this one, many contests as closely fought, many situations as tense or tenser, with as much or more passion invested in the outcome—and yet what happened that night had never happened before, in any other game.
Holzman pitched. The ball left his hand, streaked toward the plate....
And then it froze.
The ball just stopped, inches from the plate, and hung there, motionless, in midair.
After a second of stunned surprise, Rivera stepped forward and took a mighty hack at the motionless ball. He broke his bat on it, sending splinters flying high. But the ball itself didn’t move.
The catcher sat back on his butt with a thump, then, after a second, began to scoot backward, away from the plate. He was either praying or cursing in Spanish, perhaps both. Hurriedly, he crossed himself.
The home-base umpire, Kellenburger, had been struck dumb with astonishment for a moment, but now he raised his hands to call time. He took his mask off and came a few steps closer to lean forward and peer at the ball, where it hung impossibly in midair.
The umpire was the first to actually touch the ball. Gingerly, he poked it with his finger, an act either very brave or very foolish, considering the circumstances. “It felt like a baseball,” he later said, letting himself in for a great deal of comic ridicule by late-night talk show hosts, but it really wasn’t that dumb a remark, again considering the circumstances. It certainly wasn’t acting like a baseball.
He tried to scoop the ball out of the air. It wouldn’t budge. When he took his hand away, there it still was, the ball, hanging motionless a few feet above home plate.
The fans in the stadium had been shocked into stunned silence for a few heartbeats. But now a buzzing whisper of reaction began to swell, soon growing into a waterfall roar. No one understood what had happened. But something had happened to stop the game at the most critical possible moment, and nobody liked it. Fistfights were already beginning to break out in the outfield bleachers.
Rivera had stepped forward to help Kellenburger tug at the ball, trying to muscle it down. They couldn’t move it. Holzman, as puzzled as everyone else, walked in to see what in the world was going on. Managers flew out of the dugouts, ready to protest something, although they weren’t quite sure what. The rest of the umpires trotted in to take a look. Soon home plate was surrounded by almost everybody who was down on the ballfield, both dugouts emptying, all shouting, arguing, making suggestions, jostling to get a close look at the ball, which hung serenely in midair.
Within minutes, fights were breaking out on the field as well. The stadium cops were already having trouble trying to quell disturbances in the seats, where a full-fledged riot was brewing. They couldn’t handle it. The fans began tearing up the seats, trampling each other in panicked or angry surges, pouring out on to the field to join in fistfights with the players. The city cops had to be called in, then more cops, then the riot squad, who set about forcibly closing the stadium, chasing the outraged fans out with tear gas and rubber bullets. Dozens of people were injured, some moderately seriously, but, by some other miracle, none were killed. Dozens of people were arrested, including some of the players and the manager of the Yankees. The stadium was seriously trashed. By the time the umpires got around to officially calling the game, it had become clear a long time before that World Series or no World Series, no game was going to be played in Independence Stadium that night, or, considering the damage that had been done to the bleachers, probably for many nights to come.
Finally, the last ambulance left, and the remaining players and grounds crew and assorted team personnel were herded out, still complaining and arguing. After a hurried conference between the police and the owners, the gates were locked behind them.
The ball still hung there, not moving. In the empty stadium, gleaming white under the lights, it somehow looked even more uncanny than it had with people swarming around it. Two cops were left behind to keep an eye on it, but the sight spooked them, and they stayed as far away from it as they could without leaving the infield, checking it every few minutes as the long night crept slowly past. But the ball didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Most of the riot had been covered live across the nation, of course, television cameras continuing to roll as fans and players beat each other bloody, while the sportscasters provided hysterical commentary (and barricaded the doors of the press room). Reporters from local stations had been there within twenty minutes, but nobody knew quite how to handle the event that had sparked the riot in the first place; most ignored it, while others treated it as a Silly Season item. The reporters were back the next morning, though, some of them, anyway, as the owners and the grounds crew, more cops, the Commissioner of Baseball, and some Concerned City Hall Bigwigs went back into the stadium. In spite of the bright, grainy, mundane light of morning, which is supposed to chase all fancies away and dissolve all troubling phantasms, the ball was still frozen there in midair, motionless, exactly the same way it had been the night before. It looked even spookier though, more bewilderingly inexplicable, under the ordinary light of day than it had looked under the garish artificial lighting the night before. This was no trick of the eyes, no confusion of light and shadow. Although it couldn’t be, the goddamn thing was there.
The grounds crew did everything that they could think of to get the ball to move, including tying a rope around it and having a dozen hefty men yank and heave and strain at it, their feet scrambling for purchase, as if they were playing tug-of-war with Mighty Joe Young and losing, but they could no more move the ball than Kellenburger had been able to the night before.
It was becoming clear that it might be a long time before another game could be played in Independence Stadium.
After two days of heated debate in the highest baseball circles, Yankee Stadium was borrowed to restage the potential final out of the series. Thousands of fans in the stadium (who had paid heretofore unheard-of prices for tickets) and millions of television viewers watched breathlessly as Holzman went into his windup and delivered the ball to the plate at a respectable ninety-five miles-per-hour. But nothing happened except that Rivera took a big swing at the ball and missed. No miracle. The ball thumped solidly into the catcher’s mitt (who’d had to be threatened with heavy sanctions to get him to play, and who had a crucifix, a St. Christopher’s medal, and an evil-eye-warding set of horns hung around his neck). Kellenburger, the home-plate umpire, pumped his fist and roared “You’re out!” in a decisive, no-nonsense tone. And that was that. The Philadelphia Phillies had won the World Series.
The fans tore up the seats. Parts of New York City burned. The riots were still going on the following afternoon, as were riots in Philadelphia and (for no particular reason anyone could see; perhaps they were sympathy riots) in Cincinnati.
After another emergency session, the Commissioner announced that entire last game would be replayed, in the interests of fairness. This time, the Yankees won, 7-5.
After more rioting, the Commissioner evoked special executive powers that no one was quite sure he had, and declared that the Series was a draw. This satisfied nobody, but eventually fans stopped burning down bits of various cities, and the situation quieted.
The bizarre result went into the record books, and baseball tried to put the whole thing behind it.
In the larger world outside the insular universe of baseball, things weren’t quite that simple.
Dozens of newspapers across the country had independently—and perhaps inevitably—come up with the headline HANGING CURVE BALL!!!, screamed across the front page in the largest type they could muster. A novelty song of the same name was in stores within four days of the Event, and available for download on some internet sites in two. Nobody knows for sure how long it took for the first Miracle Ball joke to appear, but they were certainly circulating widely by as early as the following morning, when the strange non-ending of the World Series was the hot topic of discussion in most of the workplaces and homes in America (and, indeed, around the world), even those homes where baseball had rarely—if ever—been discussed before.
Media hysteria about the Miracle Ball continued to build throughout the circus of replaying the World Series; outside of sports circles, where the talk tended to center around the dolorous affect all this was having on baseball, the focus was on the Miracle itself, and what it might—or might not—signify. Hundreds of conspiracy-oriented internet sites, of various degrees of lunacy, appeared almost overnight. Apocalyptic religious cults sprang up almost as fast as wacko internet sites. The Miracle was widely taken as a Sign that the Last Days were at hand, as nearly anything out of the ordinary had been, from an earthquake to Jesus’s face on a taco, for the last thousand years. Within days, some people in California had sold their houses and all their worldly possessions and had begun walking barefoot toward Philadelphia.
After the Gates-of-Armageddon-are-gaping-wide theory, the second most popular theory, and the one with the most internet sites devoted to it, was that Aliens had done it—although as nobody ever came up with an even remotely convincing reason why aliens would want to do this, that theory tended to run out of gas early, and never was as popular as the Apocalypse Now/Sign from the Lord theory. The respectable press tended to ridicule both of these theories (as well as the Sinister Government Conspiracy theory, a dark horse, but popular in places like Montana and Utah)—still, it was hard for even the most determined skeptic to deny that something was going on that no one could even begin to explain, something that defied the laws of physics as we thought we knew them, and more than one scientist, press-ganged into appearing on late-night talk shows or other Talking Head venues, burbled that if we could learn to understand the strange cosmic forces, whatever they were, that were making the Ball act as it was acting, whole new sciences would open up, and Mankind’s technological expertise could be advanced a thousand years.
Up until this point, the government had been ignoring the whole thing, obviously not taking it seriously, but now, perhaps jolted into action by watching scientists on The Tonight Show enthuse about the wondrous new technologies that might be there for the taking, they made up for lost time (and gave a boost to the Sinister Government Conspiracy theory) by swooping down and seizing Independence Stadium, excluding all civilians from the property.
The city and the owners protested, then threatened to sue, but the feds smacked them with Eminent Domain and stood pat (eventually they would be placated by the offer to build a new stadium elsewhere in the city, at government expense; since you certainly couldn’t play a game in Independence Stadium anyway, with that thing hanging in the air, the owners were not really all that hard to convince). Hordes of scientists and spooks from various alphabet-soup agencies swarmed over the playing field. A ring of soldiers surrounded the stadium day and night, military helicopters hovered constantly overhead to keep other helicopters with prying television cameras away, and when it occurred to somebody that this wouldn’t be enough to frustrate spy satellites or high-flying spy planes, a huge tent enclosure was raised over the entire infield, hiding the Ball from sight.
Months went by, then years. No news about the Miracle Baseball was coming out of Independence Stadium, although by now a tent city had been raised in the surrounding parking lots to house the influx of government-employed scientists, who were kept in strict isolation. Occasionally, a fuss would be made in the media or a motion would be raised in Congress in protest of such stringent secrecy, but the government was keeping the lid down tight, in spite of wildfire rumors that scientists were conferring with UFO Aliens in there, or had opened a dimensional gateway to another universe.
The cultists, who had been refused admittance to Independence Stadium to venerate the Ball, when they’d arrived with blistered and bleeding feet from California several months after the Event, erected a tent city of their own across the street from the government’s tent city, and could be seen keeping vigil day and night in all weathers, as if they expected God to pop his head out of the stadium to say hello at any moment, and didn’t want to miss it. (They eventually filed suit against the government for interfering with their freedom to worship by refusing them access to the Ball, and the suit dragged through the courts for years, with no conclusive results.)
The lack of information coming out of Independence Stadium did nothing to discourage media speculation, of course. In fact, it was like pouring gasoline on a fire, and for several years it was difficult to turn on a television set at any time of the day or night without finding somebody saying something about the Miracle Ball, even if it was only on the PBS channels. Most of the players and officials who were down on the field When It Happened became minor media celebrities, and did the rounds of all the talk shows. Rivera, the batter who’d been at the plate that night, refused to talk about it, seeming bitter and angry about the whole thing—the joke was that Rivera was pissed because God had been scared to pitch to him—but Holzman, the pitcher, showed an unexpected philosophical bent—pitchers were all head-cases anyway, baseball fans told each other—and was a fixture on the talk show circuit for years, long after he’d retired from the game. “I’m not sure it proves the existence of God,” he said one night. “You’d think that God would have better things to do. But it sure shows that there are forces at work in the universe we don’t understand.” Later, on another talk show, discussing the theory that heavenly intervention had kept his team from winning the Series, Holzman famously said, “I don’t know, maybe God is a Yankees fan—but if He hates the Phillies all that much, wouldn’t it have been a lot easier just to let Rivera get a hit?”
In the second year after the Event, a book called Schrodinger’s Baseball, written by a young Harvard physicist, postulated the theory that those watching the game in the stadium that night had been so evenly split between Yankees fans wanting Rivera to get a hit and Phillies fans wanting him to strike out, the balance so exquisitely perfect between the two opposing pools of observers, that the quantum wave function had been unable to “decide” which way to collapse, and so had just frozen permanently into an indeterminate state, not resolving itself into either outcome. This was immediately derided as errant nonsense by other scientists, but the book became an international bestseller of epic proportions, staying at the top of the lists for twenty months, and, although it had no plot at all, was later optioned for a (never made) Big Budget movie for a hefty seven-figure advance.
Eventually, more than four years later, after an election where public dislike of the Secret of Independence Stadium had played a decisive role, a new administration took charge and belatedly declared an Open Door policy, welcoming in civilian scientists, even those from other nations, and, of course, the media.
As soon became clear, they had little to lose. Nothing had changed in almost half a decade. The Ball still hung there in midair. Nothing could move it. Nothing could affect it. The government scientists had tried taking core samples, but no drill bit would bite. They’d tried dragging it away with tractor-hauled nets and with immense magnetic fields, and neither the brute-force nor the high-tech approach had worked. They’d measured it and the surrounding space and the space above and below it with every instrument anybody could think of, and discovered nothing. They’d hit it with high-intensity laser beams, they’d tried crisping it with plasma and with flame-throwers, they’d shot hugely powerful bolts of electricity into it. Nothing had worked.
They’d learned nothing from the Ball, in spite of years of intensive, round-the-clock observation with every possible instrumentation, in spite of dozens of scientists working themselves into nervous exhaustion, mental breakdowns, and emotional collapse. No alien secrets. No heretofore unexpected forces of nature (none that they’d learned to identify and control, anyway). The Ball was just there. Who knew why? Or how?
More years of intensive investigation by scientists from around the world followed, but eventually, as years stretched into decades, even the scientists began to lose interest. Most ordinary people had lost interest long before, when the Miracle Ball resolutely refused to do anything else remarkable, or even moderately non-boring.
Baseball the sport did its best to pretend the whole thing had never happened. Game attendance had soared for a while, as people waited for the same thing to happen again, then, when it didn’t, declined disastrously, falling to record lows. Several major-league franchises went out of business (although, oddly, sandlot and minor-league games were as popular as ever), and those who were lucky enough to survive did their best to see that the Ball was rarely mentioned in the sports pages.
Other seasons went into the record books, none tainted by the miraculous.
Forty more years went by.
Frederick Kellenburger had not been a young man even when he officiated at home plate during the Event. Now he was fabulously old, many decades into his retirement, and had chosen to spend the remaining few years of his life living in a crumbling old brownstone building in what remained of a South Philadelphia neighborhood, a couple of blocks from Independence Stadium. In the last few years, almost against his will, since he had spent decades resolutely trying to put the whole business behind him, he had become fascinated with the Event, with the Ball—in a mellow, non-obsessive kind of way, since he was of a calm, phlegmatic, even contemplative, temperament. He didn’t expect to solve any mysteries, where so many others had failed. Still, he had nothing better to do with the residue of his life, and as almost everybody else who had been involved with the Event was dead by now, or else tucked away in nursing homes, it seemed appropriate somehow that someone who had been there from the start should keep an eye on the Ball.
He spent the long, sleepless nights of extreme old age on his newly acquired (only twenty years old) hobby of studying the letters and journals of the Knights of St. John of twelfth-century Rhodes, a hobby that appealed to him in part just because it was so out of character for a retired baseball umpire, and an area in which, to everyone’s surprise—including his own—he had become an internationally recognized authority. Days, he would pick up a lightweight cloth folding chair, and hobble the few blocks to Independence Stadium, moving very, very slowly, like an ancient tortoise hitching itself along a beach in the Galapagos Islands. Hurry wasn’t needed, even if he’d been capable of it. This neighborhood had been nearly deserted for years. There was no traffic, rarely anybody around. The slowly rising Atlantic lapped against the base of the immense Jersey Dike a few blocks to the east, and most of the buildings here were abandoned, boarded-up, falling down. Weeds grew through cracks in the middle of the street. For decades now, the city had been gradually, painfully, ponderously shifting itself to higher ground to the west, as had all the other cities of the slowly foundering East Coast, and few people were left in this neighborhood except squatters, refugees from Camden and Atlantic City who could afford nothing better, and a few stubborn South Philly Italians almost as old as he was, who’d been born here and were refusing to leave. No one paid any attention to an old man inching his way down the street. No one bothered him. It was oddly peaceful.
Independence Stadium itself was half-ruined, falling down, nearly abandoned. The tent cities were long gone. There was a towheaded, lazily smiling young boy with an old and probably non-functional assault rifle who was supposed to keep people out of the Stadium, but Kellenburger bribed him with a few small coins every few days, and he always winked and looked the other way. There were supposed to be cameras continuously running, focused on the Ball, part of an ongoing study funded by the University of Denver, recording everything just in case something ever happened, but the equipment had broken down long since, and nobody had seemed to notice, or care. The young guard never entered the Stadium, so, once inside, Kellenburger had the place pretty much to himself.
Inside, Kellenburger would set up his folding chair behind the faded outline of home plate, right where he used to stand to call the games, sit down in the dappled sunlight (the tent enclosing the infield had long since fallen down, leaving only a few metal girders and a few scraps of fabric that flapped lazily in the wind), and watch the Ball, which still hung motionless in the air, just as it had for almost fifty years now. He didn’t expect to see anything, other than what had always been there to be seen. It was quiet inside the abandoned stadium, though, and peaceful. Bees buzzed by his ears, and birds flew in and out of the stadium, squabbling under the eaves, making their nests in amongst the broken seats, occasionally launching into liquid song. The air was thick with the rich smells of morning-glory and honeysuckle, which twined up around the ruined bleachers. Wildflowers had sprung up everywhere, and occasionally the tall grass in the outfield would rustle as some small unseen creature scurried through it. Kellenburger watched the Ball, his mind comfortably blank. Sometimes—more often than not, truth be told—he dozed and nodded in the honeyed sunlight.
As chance would have it, he happened to be awake and watching when the Ball moved at last.
Without warning, the Ball suddenly shot forward across the plate, just as if Holzman had thrown it only a second before, rather than nearly half a century in the past. With no catcher there to intercept it, it shot past home plate, hit the back wall, bounced high in the air, fell back to Earth, bounced again, rolled away, and disappeared into the tall weeds near what had once been the dugout.
After a moment of silent surprise, Kellenburger rose stiffly to his feet. Ponderously, he shuffled forward, bent over as much as he could, tilted his head creakingly this way and that, remembering the direction of the ball as it shot over the faded ghost of home plate, analyzing, judging angles. At last, slowly, he smiled.
“Strike!” he said, with satisfaction. “I knew it would be. You’re out.”
Then, without a backward look, without even a glance at where the famous Ball lay swallowed in the weeds, he picked up his folding chair, hoisted it to his shoulder, went out of the ruins of Independence Stadium, and, moving very slowly, shuffled home along the cracked and deserted street through the warm, bright, velvet air of spring.

A KINGDOM
BY THE SEA
E
very day, Mason would stand with his hammer and kill cows. The place was big—a long, high-ceilinged room, one end open to daylight, the other end stretching back into the depths of the plant. It had white, featureless walls—painted concrete—that were swabbed down twice a day, once before lunch and once after work. The floor could be swabbed too—it was stone, and there was a faucet you could use to flood the floor with water. Then you used a stiff-bristled broom to swish the water around and get up the stains. That was known as Gling a floor in the Army. Mason had been in the Army. He called it Gling. So did the three or four other veterans who worked that shift, and they always got a laugh out of explaining to the college boys the plant hired as temporary help why the work they’d signed up to do was called that. The college boys never knew what Gling was until they’d been shown, and they never understood the joke either, or why it was called that. They were usually pretty dumb.
There was a drain in the floor to let all the water out after the place had been Gled. In spite of everything, though, the room would never scrub up quite clean; there’d always be some amount of blood left staining the walls and floor at the end of the day. About the best you could hope to do was grind it into the stone so it became unrecognizable. After a little of this, the white began to get dingy, dulling finally to a dirty, dishwater gray. Then they’d paint the room white again and start all over.
The cycle took a little longer than a year, and they were about halfway through it this time. The men who worked the shift didn’t really give a shit whether the walls were white or not, but it was a company regulation. The regs insisted that the place be kept as clean as possible for health reasons, and also because that was supposed to make it a psychologically more attractive environment to function in. The workmen wouldn’t have given a shit about their psychological environment either, even if they’d known what one was. It was inevitable that the place would get a little messy during a working day.
It was a slaughterhouse, although the company literature always referred to it as a meat-packing plant.
The man who did the actual killing was Mason: the focal point of the company, of all the meat lockers and trucks and canning sections and secretaries and stockholders; their lowest common denominator. It all started with him.
He would stand with his hammer at the open end of the room, right at the very beginning of the plant, and wait for the cows to come in from the train yard. He had a ten-pound sledgehammer, long and heavy, with serrated rubber around the handle to give him a better grip. He used it to hit the cows over the head. They would herd the cows in one at a time, into the chute, straight up to Mason, and Mason would swing his hammer down and hit the cow between the eyes with tremendous force, driving the hammer completely through the bone and into the brain, killing the cow instantly in its tracks. There would be a gush of warm, sticky blood, and a spatter of purplish brain matter; the cow would go to its front knees, as if it were curtsying, then its hindquarters would collapse and drag the whole body over onto one side with a thunderous crash—all in an eyeblink. One moment the cow would be being prodded in terror into the chute that led to Mason, its flanks lathered, its muzzle flecked with foam, and then—almost too fast to watch, the lightning would strike, and it would be a twitching ruin on the stone floor, blood oozing sluggishly from the smashed head.
After the first cow of the day, Mason would be covered with globs and spatters of blood, and his arms would be drenched red past the elbows. It didn’t bother him—it was a condition of his job, and he hardly noticed it. He took two showers a day, changed clothes before and after lunch; the company laundered his white working uniforms and smocks at no expense. He worked quickly and efficiently, and never needed more than one blow to kill. Once Mason had killed the cow, it was hoisted on a hook, had its throat cut, and was left for a few minutes to bleed dry. Then another man came up with a long, heavy knife and quartered it. Then the carcass was further sliced into various portions, each portion was impaled on a hook and carried away by a clanking overhead conveyor belt toward the meat lockers and packing processes that were the concerns of the rest of the plant.
The cows always seemed to know what was about to happen to them—they would begin to moan nervously and roll their eyes in apprehension as soon as they were herded from the stock car on the siding. After the first cow was slaughtered, their apprehension would change to terror. The smell of the blood would drive them mad. They would plunge and bellow and snort and buck; they would jerk mindlessly back and forth, trying to escape. Their eyes would roll up to show the whites, and they would spray foam, and their sides would begin to lather. At this point, Mason would work faster, trying to kill them all before any had a chance to sweat off fat. After a while, they would begin to scream. Then they would have to be prodded harshly toward Mason’s hammer. At the end, after they had exhausted themselves, the last few cows would grow silent, shivering and moaning softly until Mason had a chance to get around to them, and then they would die easily with little thrashing or convulsing. Often, just for something to do, Mason and the other workmen would sarcastically talk to the cows, make jokes about them, call them by pet names, tell them—after the fashion of a TV variety-skit doctor—that everything was going to be all right and that it would only hurt for a minute, tell them what dumb fucking bastards they were—“That’s right, sweetheart. Come here, you big dumb bastard. Papa’s got a surprise for you”—tell them that they’d known goddamn well what they were letting themselves in for when they’d enlisted. Sometimes they would bet on how hard Mason could hit a cow with his big hammer, how high into the air the brain matter would fly after the blow. Once Mason had won a buck from Kaplan by hitting a cow so hard that he had driven it to its knees. They were no more callous than ordinary men, but it was a basically dull, basically unpleasant job, and like all men with dull, unpleasant jobs, they needed something to spice it up, and to keep it far enough away. To Mason, it was just a job, no better or worse than any other. It was boring, but he’d never had a job that wasn’t boring. And at least it paid well. He approached it with the same methodical uninterest he had brought to every other job he ever had. It was his job, it was what he did.
Every day, Mason would stand with his hammer and kill cows.
It is raining: a sooty, city rain that makes you dirty rather than wet. Mason is standing in the rain at the bus stop, waiting for the bus to come, as he does every day, as he has done every day for the past six years. He has his collar up against the wind, hands in pockets, no hat: his hair is damp, plastered to his forehead. He stands somewhat slouched, head slumped forward just the tiniest bit—he is tired, the muscles in his shoulders are knotted with strain, the back of his neck burns. He is puzzled by the excessive fatigue of his body; uneasy, he shifts his weight from foot to foot—standing here after a day spent on his feet is murder, it gets him in the thighs, the calves. He has forgotten his raincoat again. He is a big man, built thick through the chest and shoulders, huge arms, wide, thick-muscled wrists, heavy-featured, resigned face. He is showing the first traces of a future potbelly. His feet are beginning to splay. His personnel dossier (restricted) states that he is an unaggressive underachiever, energizing at low potential, anally oriented (plodding, painstaking, competent), highly compatible with his fellow workers, shirks decision-making but can be trusted with minor responsibility, functions best as part of a team, unlikely to cause trouble: a good worker. He often refers to himself as a slob, though he usually tempers it with laughter (as in: “Christ, don’t ask a poor slob like me about stuff like that,” or, “Shit, I’m only a dumb working slob”). He is beginning to slide into the downhill side of the middle thirties. He was born here, in an immigrant neighborhood, the only Protestant child in a sea of foreign Catholics—he had to walk two miles to Sunday school. He grew up in the gray factory city—sloughed through high school, the Army, drifted from job to job, town to town, dishwashing, waiting tables, working hardhat (jukeboxes, back-rooms, sawdust, sun, water from a tin pail), work four months, six, a year, take to the road, drift: back to his hometown again after eight years of this, to his old (pre-Army) job, full circle. This time when the restlessness comes, after a year, he gets all the way to the bus terminal (sitting in the station at three o’clock in the morning, colder than hell, the only other person in the huge, empty hall a drunk asleep on one of the benches) before he realizes that he has no place to go and nothing to do if he gets there. He does not leave. He stays: two years, three, four, six now, longer than he has ever stayed anywhere before. Six years, slipping up on him and past before he can realize it, suddenly gone (company picnics, Christmas, Christ—taxes again already?), time blurring into an oily gray knot, leaving only discarded calendars for fossils. He will never hit the road again, he is here to stay. His future has become his past without ever touching the present. He does not understand what has happened to him, but he is beginning to be afraid.
He gets on the bus for home.
In the cramped, sweaty interior of the bus, he admits for the first time that he may be getting old.
Mason’s apartment was on the fringe of the heavily builtup district, in a row of dilapidated six-story brownstones. Not actually the slums, not like where the colored people lived (Mason doggedly said colored people, even when the boys at the plant talked of niggers), not like where the kids, the beatniks lived, but a low-rent district, yes. Laboring people, low salaries. The white poor had been hiding here since 1920, peering from behind thick faded drapes and cracked Venetian blinds. Some of them had never come out. The immigrants had disappeared into this neighborhood from the boats, were still here, were still immigrants after thirty years, but older and diminished, like a faded photograph. All the ones who had not pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to become crooked politicians or gangsters or dishonest lawyers—all forgotten: a gritty human residue. The mailboxes alternated names like Goldstein and Kowalczyk and Ricciardi. It was a dark, hushed neighborhood, with few big stores, no movies, no real restaurants. A couple of bowling alleys. The closest civilization approached was a big concrete housing project for disabled war veterans a block or two away to the east, and a streamlined-chromeplated-neonflashing shopping center about half a mile to the west, on the edge of a major artery. City lights glowed to the north, high rises marched across the horizon south: H. G. Wells Martians, acres of windows flashing importantly.
Mason got off the bus. There was a puddle at the curb and he stepped in it. He felt water soak into his socks. The bus snapped its doors contemptuously shut behind him. It rumbled away, farting exhaust smoke into his face. Mason splashed toward his apartment, wrapped in rain mist, moisture beading on his lips and forehead. His shoes squelched. The wet air carried heavy cooking odors, spicy and foreign. Someone was banging garbage cans together somewhere. Cars hooted mournfully at him as they rushed by.
Mason ignored this, fumbling automatically for his keys as he came up to the outside door. He was trying to think up an excuse to stay home tonight. This was Tuesday, his bowling night; Kaplan would be calling in a while, and he’d have to tell him something. He just didn’t feel like bowling; they could shuffle the league around, put Johnson in instead. He clashed the key against the lock. Go in, damn it. This would be the first bowling night he’d missed in six years, even last fall when he’d had the flu—Christ, how Emma had bitched about that, think he’d risen from his deathbed or something. She always used to worry about him too much. Still, after six years. Well, fuck it, he didn’t feel like it, was all; it wasn’t going to hurt anything, it was only a practice session anyway. He could afford to miss a week. And what the fuck was wrong with the lock? Mason sneered in the dark. How many years is it going to take to learn to use the right key for the front door, asshole? He found the proper key (the one with the deep groove) with his thumb and clicked the door open.
Course, he’d have to tell Kaplan something. Kaplan’d want to know why he couldn’t come, try to argue him into it. (Up the stairwell, around and around.) Give him some line of shit. At least he didn’t have to make up excuses for Emma anymore—she would’ve wanted to know why he wasn’t going, if he felt good, if he was sick, and she’d be trying to feel his forehead for fever. A relief to have her off his back. She’d been gone almost a month. Now all he had to worry about was what to tell fucking Kaplan. (Old wood creaked under his shoes. It was stuffy. Muffled voices leaked from under doorways as he passed, pencil beams of light escaped from cracks. Dust motes danced in the fugitive light.)
Fuck Kaplan anyway, he didn’t have to justify his actions to Kaplan. Just tell him he didn’t want to, and the hell with him. The hell with all of them.
Into the apartment: one large room, partially divided by a low counter into kitchen and living room—sink, refrigerator, stove and small table in the kitchen; easy chair, coffee table and portable television in the living room; a small bedroom off the living room and a bath. Shit, he’d have to tell Kaplan something after all, wouldn’t he? Don’t want the guys to start talking. And it is weird to miss a bowling night. Mason took off his wet clothes, threw them onto the easy chair for Emma to hang up and dry. Then he remembered that Emma was gone. Finally left him—he couldn’t blame her much, he supposed. He was a bum, it was true. He supposed. Mason shrugged uneasily. Fredricks promoted over him, suppose he didn’t have much of a future—he didn’t worry about it, but women were different, they fretted about stuff like that, it was important to them. And he wouldn’t marry her. Too much of a drifter. But family stuff, that was important to a woman. Christ, he couldn’t really blame her, the dumb cunt—she just couldn’t understand. He folded his clothes himself, clumsily, getting the seam wrong in the pants. You miss people for the little things. Not that he really cared whether his pants were folded right or not. And, God knows, she probably missed him more than he did her; he was more independent—sure, he didn’t really need anybody but him. Dumb cunt.
Maybe he’d tell Kaplan that he had a woman up here, that he was getting laid tonight. Kaplan was dumb enough to believe it. He paused, hanger in hand, surprised at his sudden vehemence. Kaplan was no dumber than anybody else. And why couldn’t he be getting laid up here? Was that so hard to believe, so surprising? Shit, was he supposed to curl up and fucking die because his girl’d left, even a longtime (three years) girl? Was that what Kaplan and the rest of those bastards were thinking? Well, then, call Kaplan and tell him you’re sorry you can’t make it, and then describe what a nice juicy piece of ass you’re getting, make the fucker eat his liver with envy because he’s stuck in that damn dingy bowling alley with those damn dingy people while you’re out getting laid. Maybe it’ll even get back to Emma. Kaplan will believe it. He’s dumb enough.
Mason took a frozen pizza out of the refrigerator and put it into the oven for his supper. He rarely ate meat, didn’t care for it. None of his family had. His father had worked in a meat-packing plant too—the same one, in fact. He had been one of the men who cut up the cow’s carcass with knives and cleavers. “Down to the plant,” he would say, pushing himself up from the table and away from his third cup of breakfast coffee, while Mason was standing near the open door of the gas oven for warmth and being wrapped in his furry hat for school, “I’ve got to go down to the plant.”
Mason always referred to the place as a meat-packing plant. (Henderson had called it a slaughterhouse, but Henderson had quit.)
The package said fifteen minutes at 450, preheated. Maybe he shouldn’t tell Kaplan that he was getting laid, after all. Then everybody’d be asking him questions tomorrow, wanting to know who the girl was, how she was in the sack, where he’d picked her up, and he’d have to spend the rest of the day making up imaginary details of the affair. And suppose they found out somehow that he hadn’t had a woman up here after all? Then they’d think he was crazy, making up something like that. Lying. Maybe he should just tell Kaplan that he was coming down with the flu. Or a bad cold. He was tired tonight. Maybe he actually was getting the flu. From overwork, or standing around in the rain too long, or something. Maybe that was why he was so fucking tired—Christ, exhausted—why he didn’t feel like going bowling. Sure, that was it. And he didn’t have to be ashamed of being sick: he had a fine work record, only a couple of days missed in six years. Everybody gets sick sometime, that’s the way it is. They’d understand.
Fuck them if they didn’t.
Mason burned the pizza slightly. By the time he pulled it out with a washcloth, singeing himself in the process, it had begun to turn black around the edges, the crust and cheese charring. But not too bad. Salvageable. He cut it into slices with a roller. As usual, he forgot to eat it quickly enough, and the last pieces had cooled off when he got around to them—tasting now like cardboard with unheated spaghetti sauce on it. He ate them anyway. He had some beer with the pizza, and some coffee later. After eating, he still felt vaguely unsatisfied, so he got a package of Fig Newtons from the cupboard and ate them too. Then he sat at the table and smoked a cigarette. No noise—nothing moved. Stasis.
The phone rang: Kaplan.
Mason jumped, then took a long, unsteady drag on his cigarette. He was trembling. He stared at his hand, amazed. Nerves. Christ. He was working too hard, worrying too much. Fuck Kaplan and all the rest of them. Don’t tell them anything. You don’t have to. Let them stew. The phone screamed again and again: three times, four times, six. Don’t answer it, Mason told himself, whipping up bravura indignation to cover the sudden inexplicable panic, the fear, the horror. You don’t have to account to them. Ring (scream), ring (scream), ring (scream). The flesh crawled on his stomach, short hair bristled along his back, his arms. Stop, dammit, stop, stop. “Shut up!” he shouted, raggedly, half rising from the chair.
The phone stopped ringing.
The silence was incredibly evil.
Mason lit another cigarette, dropping the first match, lighting another, finally getting it going. He concentrated on smoking, the taste of the smoke and the feel of it in his lungs, puffing with staccato intensity (IthinkIcanIthinkIcanIthinkIcanIthinkIcan). Something was very wrong, but he suppressed that thought, pushed it deeper. A tangible blackness: avoid it. He was just tired, that’s all. He’d had a really crummy, really rough day, and he was tired, and it was making him jumpy. Work seemed to get harder and harder as the weeks went by. Maybe he was getting old, losing his endurance. He supposed it had to happen sooner or later. But shit, he was only thirty-eight. He wouldn’t have believed it, or even considered it, before today.
“You’re getting old,” Mason said, aloud. The words echoed in the bare room.
He laughed uneasily, nervously, pretending scorn. The laughter seemed to be sucked into the walls. Silence blotted up the sound of his breathing.
He listened to the silence for a while, then called himself a stupid asshole for thinking about all this asshole crap, and decided that he’d better go to bed. He levered himself to his feet. Ordinarily he would watch television for a couple of hours before turning in, but tonight he was fucked up—too exhausted and afraid. Afraid? What did he have to be scared of? It was all asshole crap. Mason stacked the dirty dishes in the sink and went into the bedroom, carefully switching off all the other lights behind him. Darkness followed him to the bedroom door.
Mason undressed, put his clothes away, sat on the bed. There was a dingy transient hotel on this side of the building, and its red neon sign blinked directly into Mason’s bedroom window, impossible to block out with any thickness of curtain. Tonight he was too tired to be bothered by it. It had been a bad day. He would not think about it, any of it. He only wanted to sleep. Tomorrow would be different, tomorrow would be better. It would have to be. He switched off the light and lay back on top of the sheet. Neon shadows beat around the room, flooding it rhythmically with dull red.
Fretfully, he began to fall asleep in the hot room, in the dark.
Almost to sleep, he heard a woman weeping in his mind.
The weeping scratched at the inside of his head, sliding randomly in and out of his brain. Not really the sound of weeping, not actually an audible sound at all, but rather a feeling, an essence of weeping, of unalterable sadness. Without waking, he groped for the elusive feelings, swimming down deeper and deeper into his mind—like diving below a storm-lashed ocean at night, swimming down to where it is always calm and no light goes, down where the deep currents run. He was only partially conscious, on the borderline of dream where anything seems rational and miracles are commonplace. It seemed only reasonable, only fair, that, in his desolation, he should find a woman in his head. He did not question this, he did not find it peculiar. He moved toward her, propelled and guided only by the urge to be with her, an ivory feather drifting and twisting through vast empty darkness, floating on the wind, carried by the currents that wind through the regions under the earth, the tides that march in Night. He found her, wrapped in the underbelly of himself like a pearl: a tiny exquisite irritant. Encased in amber, he could not see, but he knew somehow that she was lovely, as perfect and delicate as the bud of a flower opening to the sun, as a baby’s hand. He comforted her as he had comforted Emma on nights when she’d wake up crying: reaching through darkness toward sadness, wrapping it in warmth, leaching the fear away with presence, spreading the pain around between them to thin it down. She seemed startled to find that she was not alone at the heart of nothing, but she accepted him gratefully, and blended him into herself, blended them together, one stream into another, a mingling of secret waters in the dark places in the middle of the world, in Night, where shadows live. She was the thing itself, and not its wrapping, as Emma had been. She was ultimate grace—moving like silk around him, moving like warm rain within him. He merged with her forever.
And found himself staring at the ceiling.
Gritty light poured in through the window. The hotel sign had been turned off. It was morning.
He grinned at the ceiling, a harsh grin with no mirth in it: skin pulling back and back from the teeth, stretching to death’s-head tautness.
It had been a dream.
He grinned his corpse grin at the morning.
Hello morning. Hello you goddamned son of a bitch.
He got up. He ached. He was lightheaded with fatigue: his head buzzed, his eyelids were lead. It felt like he had not slept at all.
He went to work.
It is still raining. Dawn is hidden behind bloated spider clouds. Here, in the factory town, miles of steel mills, coke refineries, leather-tanning plants, chemical scum running in the gutters, it will rain most of the year: airborne dirt forming the nucleus for moisture, an irritant to induce condensation—producing a listless rain that fizzles down endlessly, a deity pissing. The bus creeps through the mists and drizzle like a slug, parking lights haloed by dampness. Raindrops inch down the windowpane, shimmering and flattening when the window buzzes, leaving long wet tracks behind them. Inside, the glass has been fogged by breath and body heat, making it hard to see anything clearly. The world outside has merged into an infinity of lumpy gray shapes, dinosaur shadows, here and there lights winking and diffusing wetly—it is a moving collage done in charcoal and watery neon. The men riding the bus do not notice it—already they seem tired. It is seven A.M. They sit and stare dully at the tips of their shoes, or the back of the seat in front of them. A few read newspapers. One or two talk. Some sleep. A younger man laughs—he stops almost immediately. If the windows were clear, the rain collage of light and shadow would be replaced by row after row of drab, crumbling buildings, gas stations decked with tiny plastic flags, used car lots with floodlights, hamburger stands, empty schoolyards with dead trees poking up through the pavement, cyclone-fenced recreation areas that children never use. No one ever bothers to look at that either. They know what it looks like.
Usually Mason prefers the aisle seat, but this morning, prompted by some obscure instinct, he sits by the window. He is trying to understand his compulsion to watch the blurred landscape, trying to verbalize what it makes him think of, how it makes him feel. He cannot. Sad—that’s the closest he can come. Why should it make him sad? Sad, and there is something else, something he gropes for but it keeps slipping away. An echo of reawakening fear, in reaction to his groping. It felt like, it was kind of like—Uneasily, he presses his palm to the window, attempts to rub away some of the moisture obscuring the glass. (This makes him feel funny too. Why? He flounders, grasping at nothing—it is gone.) A patch of relatively clear glass appears as he rubs, a swath of sharper focus surrounded by the oozing myopia of the collage. Mason stares out at the world, through his patch of glass. Again he tries to grasp something—again he fails. It all looks wrong somehow. It makes him vaguely, murkily angry. Buildings crawl by outside. He shivers, touched by a septic breath of entropy. Maybe it’s—If it was like—He cannot. Why is it wrong? What’s wrong with it? That’s the way it’s always looked, hasn’t it? Nothing’s changed. What could you change it to? What the fuck is it supposed to be like? No words.
Raindrops pile up on the window again and wash away the world.
At work, the dream continued to bother Mason throughout the day. He found that he couldn’t put it out of his mind for long—somehow his thoughts always came back to it, circling constantly like the flies that buzzed around the pools of blood on the concrete floor.
Mason became annoyed, and slightly uneasy. It wasn’t healthy to be so wrapped up in a fucking dream. It was sick, and you had to be sick in the head to fool around with it. It was sick—it made him angry to think about the slime and sickness of it, and faintly nauseous. He didn’t have that slime in his head. No, the dream had bothered him because Emma was gone. It was rough on a guy to be alone again after living with somebody for so long. He should go out and actually pick up some broad instead of just thinking about it—should’ve had one last night so he wouldn’t’ve had to worry about what to tell Kaplan. Sweep the cobwebs out of his brain. Sitting around that damn house night after night, never doing anything—no wonder he felt funny, had crazy dreams.
At lunch—sitting at the concrete, formica-topped table, next to the finger-smudged plastic faces of the coffee machine, the soft drink machine, the sandwich machine, the ice cream machine (OUT OF ORDER) and the candy bar machine—he toyed with the idea of telling Russo about the dream, playing it lightly, maybe getting a few laughs out of it. He found the idea amazingly unpleasant. He was reluctant to tell anybody anything about the dream. To his amazement, he found himself getting angry at the thought. Russo was a son of a bitch anyway. They were all son of a bitches. He snapped at Russo when the Italian tried to draw him into a discussion he and Kaplan were having about cars. Russo looked hurt.
Mason mumbled something about a hangover in apology and gulped half of his steaming coffee without feeling it. His tuna salad sandwich tasted like sawdust, went down like lead. A desolate, inexplicable sense of loss had been growing in him throughout the morning as he became more preoccupied with the dream. He couldn’t have been this affected by a dream, that was crazy—there had to be more to it than that, it had to be more than just a dream, and he wasn’t crazy. So it couldn’t have been a dream completely, somehow. He missed the girl in the dream. How could he miss someone who didn’t exist? That was crazy. But he did miss her. So maybe the girl wasn’t completely a dream somehow, or he wouldn’t miss her like that, would he? That was crazy too. He turned his face away and played distractedly with crumbs on the formica tabletop. No more of this: it was slimy, and it made his head hurt to think about it. He wouldn’t think about it anymore.
That afternoon he took to listening while he worked. He caught himself at it several times. He was listening intently, for nothing. No, not for nothing. He was listening for her.
On the bus, going home, Mason is restless, as if he were being carried into some strange danger, some foreign battlefield. His eyes gleam slightly in the dark. The glare of oncoming car headlights sweeps over him in oscillating waves. Straps swing back and forth like scythes. All around him, the other passengers sit silently, not moving, careful not to touch or jostle the man next to them. Each in his own space: semivisible lumps of flesh and shadow. Their heads bob slightly with the motion of the bus, like dashboard ornaments.
When Mason got home, he had frozen pizza for supper again, though he’d been intending to have an omelet. He also ate some more Fig Newtons. It was as though he were half-consciously trying to reproduce the previous night, superstitiously repeating all the details of the evening in hopes of producing the same result. So he ate pizza, shaking his head at his own stupidity and swearing bitterly under his breath. He ate it nevertheless. And as he ate, he listened for the scratching—hating himself for listening, but listening—only partially believing that such a thing as the scratching even existed, or ever had, but listening. Half of him was afraid that it would not come; half was afraid that it would. But nothing happened.
When the scratching at his mind did come again it was hours later, while he was watching an old movie on The Late Show, when he had almost managed to forget. He stiffened, feeling a surge of terror (and feeling something else that he was unable to verbalize), even the half of his mind that had wanted it to come screaming in horror of the unknown now that the impossible had actually happened. He fought down terror, breathing harshly. This couldn’t be happening. Maybe he was crazy.
A flicker of abysmal fear. Sweat started on his forehead, armpits, crotch.
Again, the scratching: bright feelings sliding tentatively into his head, failing to catch and slipping out, coming back again—like focusing a split-image lens. He sat back in the easy chair; old springs groaned, the cracked leather felt hot and sticky against his T-shirted back. He squeezed the empty beer can, crumpling it. Automatically he put the empty into the six-pack at the foot of the chair. He picked up another can and sat with it unopened in his lap. The sliding in his head made him dizzy and faintly nauseous—he squirmed uneasily, trying to find a position that would lessen the vertigo. The cushion made a wet sucking noise as he pulled free of it: the dent made by his back in the leather began to work itself back to level, creaking and groaning, only to re-form when he let his weight down again. Jarred by motion, the ashtray he’d been balancing on his knee slipped and crashed face-down to the rug in an explosion of ashes.
Mason leaned forward to pick it up, stopped, his attention suddenly caught and fixed by the television again. He blinked at the grainy, flickering black-and-white images; again he felt something that he didn’t know how to say, so strongly that the sliding in his head was momentarily ignored.
It was one of those movies they’d made in the late twenties or early thirties, where everything was perfect. The hero was handsome, suave, impeccably dressed; he had courage, he had style, he could fit in anywhere, he could solve any problem—he never faltered, he never stepped on his own dick. He was Quality. The heroine matched him: she was sophisticated, refined, self-possessed—a slender, aristocratic sculpture in ice and moonlight. She was unspeakably lovely. They were both class people, posh people: the ones who ran things, the ones who mattered. They had been born into the right families on the right side of town, gone to the right schools, known the right people—got the right jobs. Unquestioned superiority showed in the way they moved, walked, planted their feet, turned their heads. It was all cool, planned and poised, like a dancer. They knew that they were the best people, knew it without having to think about it or even knowing that they knew it. It was a thing assumed at birth. It was a thing you couldn’t fake, couldn’t put on: something would trip you up every time, and the other ones on top would look through you and see what you really were and draw a circle that excluded you (never actually saying anything, which would make it worse), and you would be left standing there with your dick hanging out, flushed, embarrassed, sweating—too coarse, doughy, unfinished—twisting your hat nervously between knobby, clumsy hands. But that would never happen to the man and woman on television.
Mason found himself trembling with rage, blind with it, shaking as if he were going to tear himself to pieces, falling apart and not knowing why, amazed and awed by his own fury, his guts knotting, his big horny hands clenching and unclenching at the injustice, the monstrousness, the slime, the millions of lives pissed away, turning his anger over and over, churning it like a murky liquid, pounding it into froth.
They never paid any dues. They never sweated, or defecated. Their bodies never smelled bad, never got dirty. They never had crud under their fingernails, blisters on their palms, blood staining their arms to the elbows. The man never had five o’clock shadow, the woman never wore her hair in rollers like Emma, or had sour breath, or told her lover to take out the garbage. They never farted. Or belched. They did not have sex—they made love, and it was all transcendental pleasure: no indignity of thrashing bodies, clumsily intertwining limbs, fumbling and straining, incoherent words and coarse animal sounds; and afterward he would be breathing easily, her hair would be in place, there would be no body fluids, the sheets would not be rumpled or stained. And the world they moved through all their lives reflected their own perfection: it was beautiful, tidy, ordered. Mansions. Vast lawns. Neatly painted, tree-lined streets. And style brought luck too. The gods smiled on them, a benign fate rolled dice that always came up sevens, sevens, sevens. They skated through life without having to move their feet, smiling, untouched, gorgeous, like a parade float: towed by others. They broke the bank of every game in town. Everything went their way. Coincidence became a contortionist to finish in their favor.
Because they had class. Because they were on top.
Mason sat up, gasping. He had left the ashtray on the floor. Numbly, he set the beer can down beside it. His hand was trembling. He felt like he had been kicked in the stomach. They had quality. He had nothing. He could see everything now: everything he’d been running from all his life. He was shit. No way to deny it. He lived in a shithouse, he worked in a shithouse. His whole world was a vast shithouse: dirty black liquid bubbling prehistorically; rich feisty odors of decay. He was surrounded by shit, he wallowed in it. He was shit. Already, he realized, it made no difference that he had ever lived. You’re nothing, he told himself, you’re shit. You ain’t never been anything but shit. You ain’t never going to be anything but shit. Your whole life’s been nothing but shit.
No.
He shook his head blindly.
No.
There was only one thing in his life that was out of the ordinary, and he snatched at it with the desperation of a drowning man.
The sliding, the scratching in his head that was even now becoming more insistent, that became almost overwhelming as he shifted his attention back to it. That was strange, wasn’t it? That was unusual. And it had come to him, hadn’t it? There were millions and millions of other people in the world, but it had picked him—it had come to him. And it was real, it wasn’t a dream. He wasn’t crazy, and if it was just a dream he’d have to be. So it was real, and the girl was real. He had somebody else inside his head. And if that was real, then that was something that had never happened to anybody else in the world before—something he’d never even heard about before other than some dumb sci-fi movies on TV. It was something that even they had never done, something that made him different from every man in the world, from every man who had ever lived. It was his own personal miracle.
Trembling, he leaned back in the chair. Leather creaked. This was his miracle, he told himself, it was good, it wouldn’t harm him. The bright feelings themselves were good: somehow they reminded him of childhood, of quiet gardens, of dust motes spinning in sunlight, of the sea. He struggled for calm. Blood pounded at his throat, throbbed in his wrists. He felt (the memory flooding, incredibly vivid---ebbing) the way he had the first time Sally Rogers had let him spread her meaty, fragrant thighs behind the hill during noon class in the seventh grade: light-headed, scared, shaking with tension, madly impatient. He swallowed, hesitating, gathering courage. The television babbled unnoticed in the background. He closed his eyes and let go.
Colors swallowed him in a rush.
She waited for him there, a there that became here as his knowledge of his physical environment faded, as his body ceased to exist, the soothing blackness broken only by random afterimages and pastel colors scurrying in abstract, friendly patterns.
She was here—simultaneously here and very far away. Like him, she both filled all of here and took up no space at all—both statements were equally absurd. Her presence was nothing but that: no pictures, no images, nothing to see, hear, touch, or smell. That had all been left in the world of duration. Yet somehow she radiated an ultimate and catholic femininity, an archetypal essence, a quicksilver mixture of demanding fire and an ancient racial purpose as unshakable and patient as ice—and he knew it was the (girl? woman? angel?) of his previous “dream,” and no other.
There were no words here, but they were no longer needed. He understood her by empathy, by the clear perception of emotion that lies behind all language. There was fear in her mind—a rasp like hot iron—and a feeling of hurtling endlessly and forlornly through vast, empty desolation, surrounded by cold and by echoing, roaring darkness. She seemed closer tonight, though still unimaginably far away. He felt that she was still moving slowly toward him, even as they met and mingled here, that her body was careening toward him down the path blazed by her mind.
She was zeroing in on him: this was the theory his mind immediately formed, instantly and gratefully accepted. He had thought of her from the beginning as an angel—now he conceived of her as a lost angel wandering alone through Night for ages, suddenly touched by his presence, drawn like an iron filing to a magnet, pulled from exile into the realms of light and life.
He soothed her. He would wait for her, he would be a beacon—he would not leave her alone in the dark, he would love her and pull her to the light. She quieted, and they moved together, through each other, became one.
He sank deeper into Night.
He floated in himself: a Möbius band.
In the morning, he woke in the chair. A test pattern hummed on the television. The inside of his pants was sticky with semen.
Habit drives him to work. Automatically he gets up, takes a shower, puts on fresh clothes. He eats no breakfast; he isn’t hungry—he wonders, idly, if he will ever be hungry again. He lets his feet take him to the bus stop, and waits without fretting about whether or not he’d remembered to lock the door. He waits without thinking about anything. The sun is out; birds are humming in the concrete eaves of the housing project. Mason hums too, quite unconsciously. He boards the bus for work, lets the driver punch his trip ticket, and docilely allows the incoming crowd to push and jostle him to an uncomfortable seat in the back, over the wheel. There, sitting with his knees doubled up in the tiny seat and peering around with an unusual curiosity, the other passengers give him the first bad feeling of the day. They sit in orderly rows, not talking, not moving, not even looking out the window. They look like department store dummies, on their way to a new display. They are not there at all.
Mason decided to call her Lilith—provisionally at least, until the day, soon now, when he could learn her real name from her own lips. The name drifted up from his subconscious, from the residue of long, forgotten years of Sunday school—not so much because of the associations of primeval love carried by the name (although those rang on a deeper level), but because as a restless child suffering through afternoons of watered-down theology he’d always imagined Lilith to be rather pretty and sympathetic, the kind who might wink conspiratorially at him behind the back of the pious, pompous instructor: a girl with a hint of illicit humor and style, unlike the dumpy, clay-faced ladies in the Bible illustrations. So she became Lilith. He wondered if he would be able to explain the name to her when they met, make her laugh with it.
He fussed with these and other details throughout the day, turning it over in his mind—he wasn’t crazy, the dream was real, Lilith was real, she was his—the same thoughts cycling constantly. He was happy in his preoccupation, self-sufficient, only partly aware of the external reality through which he moved. He contributed only monosyllabic grunts to the usual locker-room conversations about sports and politics and pussy, he answered questions with careless shrugs or nods, he completely ignored the daily gauntlet of hellos, goodbyes, how’re they hangings and other ritual sounds. During lunch he ate very little and let Russo finish his sandwich without any of the traditional exclamations of amazement about the wop’s insatiable appetite—which made Russo so uneasy that he was unable to finish it after all. Kaplan came in and told Russo and Mason in hushed, delighted tones that old Hamilton had finally caught the clap from that hooker he’d been running around with down at Saluzzio’s. Russo exploded into the expected laughter, said no shit? in a shrill voice, pounded the table, grinned in jovial disgust at the thought of that old bastard Hamilton with VD. Mason grunted.
Kaplan and Russo exchanged a look over his head—their eyes were filled with the beginnings of a reasonless, instinctive fear: the kind of unease that pistons in a car’s engine might feel when one of the cylinders begins to misfire. Mason ignored them; they did not exist; they never had. He sat at the stone table and chain-smoked with detached ferocity, smoking barely half of each cigarette before using it to light another and dumping the butt into his untouched coffee to sizzle and drown. The Dixie cup was filled with floating, jostling cigarette butts, growing fat and mud-colored as they sucked up coffee: a nicotine logjam. Kaplan and Russo mumbled excuses and moved away to find another table; today Mason made them feel uneasy and insignificant.
Mason did not notice that they had gone. He sat and smoked until the whistle blew, and then got up and walked calmly in to work. He worked mechanically, raising the hammer and bringing it down, his hands knowing their job and doing it without any need of volition, the big muscles in his arms and shoulders straining, his legs braced wide apart, sweat gleaming—an automaton, a clockwork golem. His face was puckered and preoccupied, as if he were constipated. He did not see the blood; his brain danced with thoughts of Lilith.
Twice that day he thought he felt her brush at his mind, the faintest of gossamer touches, but there were too many distractions—he couldn’t concentrate enough. As he washed up after work, he felt the touch again: a hesitant, delicate, exploratory touch, as if someone were groping through his mind with feather fingers.
Mason trembled, and his eyes glazed. He stood, head tilted, unaware of the stream of hot water against his back and hips, the wet stone underfoot, the beaded metal walls; the soap drying on his arms and chest, the smell of heat and wet flesh, the sharp hiss of the shower jets and the gargle of water down the drain; the slap of thongs and rasp of towels, the jumbled crisscross of wet footprints left by men moving from the showers to the lockers, the stuffiness of steam and sweat disturbed by an eddy of colder air as someone opened the outer door; the rows of metal lockers beyond the showers with Playboy gatefolds and Tijuana pornography and family snapshots pinned to the doors, the discolored wooden benches and the boxes of foot powder, the green and white walls of the dressing room covered with company bulletins and joke-shop signs...Everything that went into the making of that moment, of his reality, of his life. It all faded, became a ghost, the shadow of a shadow, disappeared completely, did not exist. There was only here, and Lilith here. And their touch, infinitely closer than joined fingers. Then the world dragged him away.
He opened his eyes. Reality came back: in a babble, in a rush, mildly nauseating. He ignored it, dazed and incandescent with the promise of the night ahead. The world steadied. He stepped back into the shower stream to wash the soap from his body. He had an enormous erection. Clumsily, he tried to hide it with a towel.
Mason takes a taxi home from work. The first time.
That night he is transformed, ripped out of himself, turned inside out. It is pleasure so intense that, like pain, it cannot be remembered clearly afterward—only recollected as a severe shock: sensation translated into a burst of fierce white light. It is pleasure completely beyond his conception—his most extreme fantasy not only fulfilled but intensified. And yet for all the intensity of feeling, it is a gentle thing, a knowing, a complete sharing of emotion, a transcendental empathy. And afterward there is only peace: a silence deeper than death, but not alone. I love you, he tells her, really believing it for the first time with anyone, realizing that words have no meaning, but knowing that she will understand, I love you.
When he woke up in the morning, he knew that this would be the day.
Today she would come. The certainty pulsed through him, he breathed it like air, it beat in his blood. The knowledge of it oozed in through every pore, only to meet the same knowledge seeping out. It was something felt on a cellular level, a biological assurance. Today they would be together.
He looked at the ceiling. It was pocked with water stains; a deep crack zigzagged across flaking plaster. It was beautiful. He watched it for a half hour without moving, without being aware of the passage of time; without being aware that what he was watching was a “ceiling.” Then, sluggishly, something came together in his head, and he recognized it. Today he didn’t begrudge it, as he had Wednesday morning. It was a transient condition. It was of no more intrinsic importance than the wall of a butterfly’s cocoon after metamorphosis.
Mason rolled to his feet. Fatigue and age had vanished. He was filled with bristly, crackling vitality, every organ, every cell seeming to work at maximum efficiency: so healthy that “healthy” became an inadequate word. This was a newer, higher state.
Mason accepted it calmly, without question. His movements were leisurely and deliberate, almost slow motion, as if he were swimming through syrup. He knew where he was going, that they would find each other today—that was predestined. He was in no hurry. The same inevitability colored his thoughts. There was no need to do much thinking now, it was all arranged. His mind was nearly blank, only deep currents running. Her nearness dazzled him. Walking, he dreamed of her, of time past, of time to come.
He drifted to the window, lazily admiring the prism sprays sunlight made around the edges of the glass. The streets outside were empty, hushed as a cathedral. Not even birds to break the holy silence. Papers dervished down the center of the road. The sun was just floating clear of the brick horizon: a bloated red ball, still hazed with nearness to the earth.
He stared at the sun.
Mason became aware of his surroundings again while he was dressing. Dimly, he realized that he was buckling his belt, slipping his feet into shoes, tying knots in the shoelaces. His attention was caught by a crisscross pattern of light and shadow on the kitchen wall.
He was standing in front of the slaughterhouse. Mason blinked at the building’s filigreed iron gates. Somewhere in there, he must have caught the bus and ridden it to work. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t care.
Walking down a corridor. A machine booms far away. 
He was in an elevator. People. Going down.
Time clock.
A door. The dressing room, deep in the plant. Mason hesitated. Should he go to work today? With Lilith so close? It didn’t matter—when she came, Lilith would find him no matter where he was. It was easier meanwhile not to fight his body’s trained responses; much easier to just go along with them, let them carry him where they would, do what they wanted him to do.
Buttoning his work uniform. He didn’t remember opening the door, or the locker. He told himself that he’d have to watch that.
A montage of surprised faces, bobbing like balloons, very far away. Mason brushed by without looking at them. Their lips moved as he passed, but he could not hear their words.
Don’t look back. They can turn you to salt, all the hollow men.
The hammer was solid and heavy in his hand. Its familiar weight helped to clear his head, to anchor him to the world. Mason moved forward more quickly. A surviving fragment of his former personality was eager to get to work, to demonstrate his regained strength and vigor for the other men. He felt the emotion through an ocean of glass, like ghost pain in an amputated limb. He tolerated it, humored it; after today, it wouldn’t matter.
Mason walked to the far end of the long white room. Lilith seemed very close now—her nearness made his head buzz intolerably. He stumbled ahead, walking jerkily, as if he were forcing his way against waves of pressure. She would arrive any second. He could not imagine how she would come, or from where. He could not imagine what would happen to him, to them. He tried to visualize her arrival, but his mind, having only Disney, sci-fi, and religion to work with, could only picture an ethereally beautiful woman made of stained glass descending from the sky in a column of golden light while organ music roared: the light shining all around her and from her, spraying into unknown colors as it passed through her clear body. He wasn’t sure if she would have wings.
Raw daylight through the open end of the room. The nervous lowing of cattle. Smell of dung and sweat, undertang of old, lingering blood. The other men, looking curiously at him. They had masks for faces, viper eyes. Viper eyes followed him through the room. Hooves scuffed gravel outside.
Heavy-lidded, trembling, he took his place.
They herded in the first cow of the day, straight up to Mason. He lifted the hammer.
The cow approached calmly. Tranquilly she walked before the prods, her head high. She stared intently at Mason. Her eyes were wide and deep—serene, beautiful, and trusting.
Lilith, he named her, and then the hammer crashed home between her eyes.

A DREAM AT
NOONDAY
I
remember the sky, and the sun burning in the sky like a golden penny flicked into a deep blue pool, and the scuttling white clouds that changed into magic ships and whales and turreted castles as they drifted up across that bottomless ocean and swam the equally bottomless sea of my mind’s eye. I remember the winds that skimmed the clouds, smoothing and rippling them into serene grandeur or boiling them into froth. I remember the same wind dipping low to caress the grass, making it sway and tremble, or whipping through the branches of the trees and making them sing with a wild, keening organ note. I remember the silence that was like a bronzen shout echoing among the hills.
—It is raining. The sky is slate-gray and grittily churning. It looks like a soggy dishrag being squeezed dry, and the moisture is dirty rain that falls in pounding sheets, pressing down the tall grass. The rain pocks the ground, and the loosely packed soil is slowly turning into mud and the rain spatters the mud, making it shimmer—
And I remember the trains. I remember lying in bed as a child, swathed in warm blankets, sniffing suspiciously and eagerly at the embryonic darkness of my room, and listening to the big trains wail and murmur in the freight yard beyond. I remember lying awake night after night, frightened and darkly fascinated, keeping very still so that the darkness wouldn’t see me, and listening to the hollow booms and metallic moans as the trains coupled and linked below my window. I remember that I thought the trains were alive, big dark beasts who came to dance and to hunt each other through the dappled moonlight of the world outside my room, and when I would listen to the whispering clatter of their passing and feel the room quiver ever so slightly in shy response, I would get a crawly feeling in my chest and a prickling along the back of my neck, and I would wish that I could watch them dance, although I knew that I never would. And I remember that it was different when I watched the trains during the daytime, for then even though I clung tight to my mother’s hand and stared wide-eyed at their steam-belching and spark-spitting they were just big iron beasts putting on a show for me; they weren’t magic then, they were hiding the magic inside them and pretending to be iron beasts and waiting for the darkness. I remember that I knew even then that trains are only magic in the night and only dance when no one can see them. And I remember that I couldn’t go to sleep at night until I was soothed by the muttering lullaby of steel and the soft, rhythmical hiss-clatter of a train booming over a switch. And I remember that some nights the bellowing of a fast freight or the cruel, whistling shriek of a train’s whistle would make me tremble and feel cold suddenly, even under my safe blanket-mountain, and I would find myself thinking about rain-soaked ground and blood and black cloth and half-understood references to my grandfather going away, and the darkness would suddenly seem to curl in upon itself and become diamond-hard and press down upon my straining eyes, and I would whimper and the fading whistle would snatch the sound from my mouth and trail it away into the night. And I remember that at times like that I would pretend that I had tiptoed to the window to watch the trains dance, which I never really dared to do because I knew I would die if I did, and then I would close my eyes and pretend that I was a train, and in my mind’s eye I would be hanging disembodied in the darkness a few inches above the shining tracks, and then the track would begin to slip along under me, slowly at first then fast and smooth like flowing syrup, and then the darkness would be flashing by and then I would be moving out and away, surrounded by the wailing roar and evil steel chuckling of a fast freight slashing through the night, hearing my whistle scream with the majestic cruelty of a stooping eagle and feeling the switches boom and clatter hollowly under me, and I would fall asleep still moving out and away, away and out.
—The rain is stopping slowly, trailing away across the field, brushing the ground like long, dangling gray fingers. The tall grass creeps erect again, bobbing drunkenly, shedding its burden of water as a dog shakes himself dry after a swim. There are vicious little crosswinds in the wake of the storm, and they make the grass whip even more violently than the departing caress of the rain. The sky is splitting open above, black rain clouds pivoting sharply on a central point, allowing a sudden wide wedge of blue to appear. The overcast churns and tumbles and clots like wet heavy earth turned by a spade. The sky is now a crazy mosaic of mingled blue and gray. The wind picks up, chews at the edge of the tumbling wrack, spinning it to the fineness of cotton candy and then lashing it away. A broad shaft of sunlight falls from the dark undersides of the clouds, thrusting at the ground and drenching it in a golden cathedral glow, filled with shimmering green highlights. The effect is like that of light through a stained-glass window, and objects bathed in the light seem to glow very faintly from within, seem to be suddenly translated into dappled molten bronze. There is a gnarled, shaggy tree in the center of the pool of sunlight, and it is filled with wet, disgruntled birds, and the birds are hesitantly, cautiously, beginning to sing again—
And I remember wandering around in the woods as a boy and looking for nothing and finding everything and that clump of woods was magic and those rocks were a rustlers’ fort and there were dinosaurs crashing through the brush just out of sight and everybody knew that there were dragons swimming in the sea just below the waves and an old glittery piece of Coke bottle was a magic jewel that could let you fly or make you invisible and everybody knew that you whistled twice and crossed your fingers when you walked by that deserted old house or something shuddery and scaly would get you and you argued about bang you’re dead no I’m not and you had a keen gun that could endlessly dispatch all the icky monsters who hung out near the swing set in your backyard without ever running out of ammunition. And I remember that as a kid I was nuts about finding a magic cave and I used to think that there was a cave under every rock, and I would get a long stick to use as a lever and I would sweat and strain until I had managed to turn the rock over, and then when I didn’t find any tunnel under the rock I would think that the tunnel was there but it was just filled in with dirt, and I would get a shovel and I would dig three or four feet down looking for the tunnel and the magic cave and then I would give up and go home for a dinner of beans and franks and brown bread. And I remember that once I did find a little cave hidden under a big rock and I couldn’t believe it and I was scared and shocked and angry and I didn’t want it to be there but it was and so I stuck my head inside it to look around because something wouldn’t let me leave until I did and it was dark in there and hot and very still and the darkness seemed to be blinking at me and I thought I heard something rustling and moving and I got scared and I started to cry and I ran away and then I got a big stick and came back, still crying, and pushed and heaved at that rock until it thudded back over the cave and hid it forever. And I remember that the next day I went out again to hunt for a magic cave.
—The rain has stopped. A bird flaps wetly away from the tree and then settles back down onto an outside branch. The branch dips and sways with the bird’s weight, its leaves heavy with rain. The tree steams in the sun, and a million raindrops become tiny jewels, microscopic prisms, gleaming and winking, loving and transfiguring the light even as it destroys them and they dissolve into invisible vapor puffs to be swirled into the air and absorbed by the waiting clouds above. The air is wet and clean and fresh; it seems to squeak as the tall grass saws through it and the wind runs its fingernails lightly along its surface. The day is squally and gusty after the storm, high shining overcast split by jagged ribbons of blue that look like aerial fjords. The bird preens and fluffs its feathers disgustedly, chattering and scolding at the rain, but keeping a tiny bright eye carefully cocked in case the storm should take offense at the liquid stream of insults and come roaring back. Between the tufts of grass the ground has turned to black mud, soggy as a sponge, puddled by tiny pools of steaming rainwater. There is an arm and a hand lying in the mud, close enough to make out the texture of the tattered fabric clothing the arm, so close that the upper arm fades up and past the viewpoint and into a huge featureless blur in the extreme corner of the field of vision. The arm is bent back at an unnatural angle and the stiff fingers are hooked into talons that seem to claw toward the gray sky—
And I remember a day in the sixth grade when we were struggling in the cloakroom with our coats and snow-encrusted overshoes and I couldn’t get mine off because one of the snaps had frozen shut and Denny was talking about how his father was a jet pilot and he sure hoped the war wasn’t over before he grew up because he wanted to kill some Gooks like his daddy was doing and then later in the boy’s room everybody was arguing about who had the biggest one and showing them and Denny could piss farther than anybody else. I remember that noon at recess we were playing kick the can and the can rolled down the side of the hill and we all went down after it and somebody said hey look and we found a place inside a bunch of bushes where the grass was all flattened down and broken and there were pages of a magazine scattered all over and Denny picked one up and spread it out and it was a picture of a girl with only a pair of pants on and everybody got real quiet and I could hear the girls chanting in the schoolyard as they jumped rope and kids yelling and everybody was scared and her eyes seemed to be looking back right out of the picture and somebody finally licked his lips and said what’re those things stickin’ out of her, ah, and he didn’t know the word and one of the bigger kids said tits and he said yeah what’re those things stickin’ outta her tits and I couldn’t say anything because I was so surprised to find out that girls had those little brown things like we did except that hers were pointy and hard and made me tremble and Denny said hell I knew about that I’ve had hundreds of girls but he was licking nervously at his lips as he said it and he was breathing funny too. And I remember that afternoon I was sitting at my desk near the window and the sun was hot and I was being bathed in the rolling drone of our math class and I wasn’t understanding any of it and listening to less. I remember that I knew I had to go to the bathroom but I didn’t want to raise my hand because our math teacher was a girl with brown hair and eyeglasses and I was staring at the place where I knew her pointy brown things must be under her blouse and I was thinking about touching them to see what they felt like and that made me feel funny somehow and I thought that if I raised my hand she would be able to see into my head and she’d know and she’d tell everybody what I was thinking and then she’d get mad and punish me for thinking bad things and so I didn’t say anything but I had to go real bad and if I looked real close I thought that I could see two extra little bulges in her blouse where her pointy things were pushing against the cloth and I started thinking about what it would feel like if she pushed them up against me and that made me feel even more funny and sort of hollow and sick inside and I couldn’t wait any longer and I raised my hand and left the room but it was too late and I wet myself when I was still on the way to the boys’ room and I didn’t know what to do so I went back to the classroom with my pants all wet and smelly and the math teacher looked at me and said what did you do and I was scared and Denny yelled he pissed in his pants he pissed in his pants and I said I did not the water bubbler squirted me but Danny yelled he pissed in his pants he pissed in his pants and the math teacher got very mad and everybody was laughing and suddenly the kids in my class didn’t have any faces but only laughing mouths and I wanted to curl up into a ball where nobody could get me and once I had seen my mother digging with a garden spade and turning over the wet dark earth and there was half of a worm mixed in with the dirt and it writhed and squirmed until the next shovelful covered it up.
—Most of the rain has boiled away, leaving only a few of the larger puddles that have gathered in the shallow depressions between grass clumps. The mud is slowly solidifying under the hot sun, hardening into ruts, miniature ridges and mountains and valleys. An ant appears at the edge of the field of vision, emerging warily from the roots of the tall grass, pushing its way free of the tangled jungle. The tall blades of grass tower over it, forming a tightly interwoven web and filtering the hot yellow sunlight into a dusky green half-light. The ant pauses at the edge of the muddy open space, reluctant to exchange the cool tunnel of the grass for the dangers of level ground. Slowly, the ant picks its way across the sticky mud, skirting a pebble half again as big as it is. The pebble is streaked with veins of darker rock and has a tiny flake of quartz embedded in it near the top. The elements have rounded it into a smooth oval, except for a dent on the far side that exposed its porous core. The ant finishes its cautious circumnavigation of the pebble and scurries slowly toward the arm, which lies across its path. With infinite patience, the ant begins to climb up the arm, slipping on the slick, mud-spattered fabric. The ant works its way down the arm to the wrist and stops, sampling the air. The ant stands among the bristly black hairs on the wrist, antennae vibrating. The big blue vein in the wrist can be seen under its tiny feet. The ant continues to walk up the wrist, pushing its way through the bristly hair, climbing onto the hand and walking purposefully through the hollow of the thumb. Slowly, it disappears around the knuckle of the first finger—
And I remember a day when I was in the first year of high school and my voice was changing and I was starting to grow hair in unusual places and I was sitting in English class and I wasn’t paying too much attention even though I’m usually pretty good in English because I was in love with the girl who sat in front of me. I remember that she had long legs and soft brown hair and a laugh like a bell and the sun was coming in the window behind her and the sunlight made the downy hair on the back of her neck glow very faintly and I wanted to touch it with my fingertips and I wanted to undo the knot that held her hair to the top of her head and I wanted her hair to cascade down over my face soft against my skin and cover me and with the sunlight I could see the strap of her bra underneath her thin dress and I wanted to slide my fingers underneath it and unhook it and stroke her velvety skin. I remember that I could feel my body stirring and my mouth was dry and painful and the zipper of her dress was open a tiny bit at the top and I could see the tanned texture of her skin and see that she had a brown mole on her shoulder and my hand trembled with the urge to touch it and something about Shakespeare and when she turned her head to whisper to Denny across the row her eyes were deep and beautiful and I wanted to kiss them softly brush them lightly as a bird’s wing and Hamlet was something or other and I caught a glimpse of her tongue darting wetly from between her lips and pressing against her white teeth and that was almost too much to bear and I wanted to kiss her lips very softly and then I wanted to crush them flat and then I wanted to bite them and sting them until she cried and I could comfort and soothe her and that frightened me because I didn’t understand it and my thighs were tight and prickly and the blood pounded at the base of my throat and Elsinore something and the bell rang shrilly and I couldn’t get up because all I could see was the fabric of her dress stretched taut over her hips as she stood up and I stared at her hips and her belly and her thighs as she walked away and wondered what her thing would look like and I was scared. I remember that I finally got up enough nerve to ask her for a date during recess and she looked at me incredulously for a second and then laughed, just laughed contemptuously for a second and walked away without saying a word. I remember her laughter. And I remember wandering around town late that night heading aimlessly into nowhere trying to escape from the pressure and the emptiness and passing a car parked on a dark street corner just as the moon swung out from behind a cloud and there was light that danced and I could hear the freight trains booming far away and she was in the back seat with Denny and they were locked together and her skirt was hiked up and I could see the white flash of flesh all the way up her leg and he had his hand under her blouse on her breast and I could see his knuckles moving under the fabric and the freight train roared and clattered as it hit the switch and he was kissing her and biting her and she was kissing him back with her lips pressed tight against her teeth and her hair floating all around them like a cloud and the train was whispering away from town and then he was on top of her pressing her down and I felt like I was going to be sick and I started to vomit but stopped because I was afraid of the noise and she was moaning and making small low whimpering noises I’d never heard anyone make before and I had to run before the darkness crushed me and I didn’t want to do that when I got home because I’d feel ashamed and disgusted afterward but I knew that I was going to have to because my stomach was heaving and my skin was on fire and I thought that my heart was going to explode. And I remember that I eventually got a date for the dance with Judy from my history class who was a nice girl although plain but all night long as I danced with her I could only see my first love moaning and writhing under Denny just as the worm had writhed under the thrust of the garden spade into the wet dark earth long ago and as I ran toward home that night I heard the train vanish into the night trailing a cruelly arrogant whistle behind it until it faded to a memory and there was nothing left.
—The ant reappears on the underside of the index finger, pauses, antennae flickering inquisitively, and then begins to walk back down the palm, following the deep groove known as the life line until it reaches the wrist. For a moment, it appears as if the ant will vanish into the space between the wrist and the frayed, bloodstained cuff of the shirt, but it changes its mind and slides back down the wrist to the ground on the far side. The ant struggles for a moment in the sticky mud, and then crawls determinedly off across the crusted ground. At the extreme edge of the field of vision, just before the blur that is the upper arm, there is the jagged, pebbly edge of a shellhole. Half over the lip of the shellhole, grossly out of proportion at this distance, is half of a large earthworm, partially buried by the freshly turned earth thrown up by an explosion. The ant pokes suspiciously at the worm—
And I remember the waiting room at the train station and the weight of my suitcase in my hand and the way the big iron voice rolled unintelligibly around the high ceiling as the stationmaster announced the incoming trains and cigar and cigarette smoke was thick in the air and the massive airconditioning fan was laboring in vain to clear some of the choking fog away and the place reeked of urine and age and an old dog twitched and moaned in his ancient sleep as he curled close against an equally ancient radiator that hissed and panted and belched white jets of steam and I stood by the door and looked up and watched a blanket of heavy new snow settle down over the sleeping town with the ponderous invulnerability of a pregnant woman. I remember looking down into the train tunnel and out along the track to where the shining steel disappeared into darkness and I suddenly thought that it looked like a magic cave and then I wondered if I had thought that was supposed to be funny and I wanted to laugh only I wanted to cry too and so I could do neither and instead I tightened my arm around Judy’s waist and pulled her closer against me and kissed the silken hollow of her throat and I could feel the sharp bone in her hip jabbing against mine and I didn’t care because that was pain that was pleasure and I felt the gentle resilience of her breast suddenly against my rib cage and felt her arm tighten protectively around me and her fingernails bite sharply into my arm and I knew that she was trying not to cry and that if I said anything at all it would make her cry and there would be that sloppy scene we’d been trying to avoid and so I said nothing but only held her and kissed her lightly on the eyes and I knew that people were looking at us and snickering and I didn’t give a damn and I knew that she wanted me and wanted me to stay and we both knew that I couldn’t and all around us about ten other young men were going through similar tableaux with their girlfriends or folks and everybody was stern and pale and worried and trying to look unconcerned and casual and so many women were trying not to cry that the humidity in the station was trembling at the saturation point. I remember Denny standing near the door with a foot propped on his suitcase and he was flashing his too-white teeth and his too-wide smile and he reeked of cheap cologne as he told his small knot of admirers in an overly loud voice that he didn’t give a damn if he went or not because he’d knocked up a broad and her old man was trying to put the screws on him and this was a good way to get outta town anyway and the government would protect him from the old man and he’d come back in a year or so on top of the world and the heat would be off and he could start collectin female scalps again and besides his father had been in and been a hero and he could do anything better than that old bastard and besides he hated those goddamned Gooks and he was gonna get him a Commie see if he didn’t. I remember that the train came quietly in then and that it still looked like a big iron beast although now it was a silent beast with no smoke or sparks but with magic still hidden inside it although I knew now that it might be a dark magic and then we had to climb inside and I was kissing Judy good-bye and telling her I loved her and she was kissing me and telling me that she would wait for me and I don’t know if we were telling the truth or even if we knew ourselves what the truth was and then Judy was crying openly and I was swallowed by the iron beast and we were roaring away from the town and snickering across the web of tracks and booming over the switches and I saw my old house flash by and I could see my old window and I almost imagined that I could see myself as a kid with my nose pressed against the window looking out and watching my older self roar by and neither of us suspecting that the other was there and neither ever working up enough nerve to watch the trains dance. And I remember that all during that long train ride I could hear Denny’s raucous voice somewhere in the distance talking about how he couldn’t wait to get to Gookland and he’d heard that Gook snatch was even better than nigger snatch and free too and he was gonna get him a Commie he couldn’t wait to get him a goddamned Commie and as the train slashed across the wide fertile farmlands of the Midwest the last thing I knew before sleep that night was the wet smell of freshly turned earth.
—The ant noses the worm disdainfully and then passes out of the field of vision. The only movement now is the ripple of the tall grass and the flash of birds in the shaggy tree. The sky is clouding up again, thunderheads rumbling up over the horizon and rolling across the sky. Two large forms appear near the shaggy tree at the other extreme of the field of vision. The singing of the birds stops as if turned off by a switch. The two forms move about vaguely near the shaggy tree, rustling the grass. The angle of the field of vision gives a foreshortening effect, and it is difficult to make out just what the figures are. There is a sharp command, the human voice sounding strangely thin under the sighing of the wind. The two figures move away from the shaggy tree, pushing through the grass. They are medics; haggard, dirty soldiers with big red crosses painted on their helmets and armbands and several days’ growth on their chins. They look tired, harried, scared and determined, and they are moving rapidly, half-crouching, searching for something on the ground and darting frequent wary glances back over their shoulders. As they approach they seem to grow larger and larger, elongating toward the sky as their movement shifts the perspective. They stop a few feet away and reach down, lifting up a body that has been hidden by the tall grass. It is Denny, the back of his head blown away, his eyes bulging horribly open. The medics lower Denny’s body back into the sheltering grass and bend over it, fumbling with something. They finally straighten, glance hurriedly about and move forward. The two grimy figures swell until they fill practically the entire field of vision, only random patches of the sky and the ground underfoot visible around their bulk. The medics come to a stop about a foot away. The scarred, battered, mud-caked combat boot of the medic now dominates the scene, looking big as a mountain. From the combat boot, the medic’s leg seems to stretch incredibly toward the sky, like a fatigue-swathed beanstalk, with just a suggestion of a head and a helmet floating somewhere at the top. The other medic cannot be seen at all now, having stepped over and out of the field of vision. His shallow breathing and occasional muttered obscenities can be heard. The first medic bends over, his huge hand seeming to leap down from the sky, and touches the arm, lifting the wrist and feeling for a pulse. The medic holds the wrist for a while and then sighs and lets it go. The wrist plops limply back into the cold sucking mud, splattering it. The medic’s hand swells in the direction of the upper arm, and then fades momentarily out of the field of vision, although his wrist remains blurrily visible and his arm seems to stretch back like a highway into the middle distance. The medic tugs, and his hand comes back clutching a tarnished dog tag. Both of the medic’s hands disappear forward out of the field of vision. Hands prying the jaw open, jamming the dog tag into the teeth, the metal cold and slimy against the tongue and gums, pressing the jaws firmly closed again, the dog tag feeling huge and immovable inside the mouth. The world is the medic’s face now, looming like a scarred cliff inches away, his bloodshot twitching eyes as huge as moons, his mouth, hanging slackly open with exhaustion, as cavernous and bottomless as a magic cave to a little boy. The medic has halitosis, his breath filled with the richly corrupt smell of freshly turned earth. The medic stretches out two fingers which completely occupy the field of vision, blocking out even the sky. The medic’s fingertips are the only things in the world now. They are stained and dirty and one has a white scar across the whorls. The medic’s fingertips touch the eyelids and gently press down. And now there is nothing but darkness—
And I remember the way dawn would crack the eastern sky, the rosy blush slowly spreading and staining the black of night, chasing away the darkness, driving away the stars. And I remember the way a woman looks at you when she loves you, and the sound that a kitten makes when it is happy, and the way that snowflakes blur and melt against a warm windowpane in winter. I remember. I remember.

ANCESTRAL
VOICES
Gardner Dozois
& Michael Swanwick
L
ike all intelligent creatures, it adapted. Behind it was fire! fear! pain! horror! and it fled from them through madness and roaring chaos, fled for a long nightmarish time through an unfamiliar world, through a phantasmagorical confusion of alien shapes and lights and stinks and noises, fled until its strength was gone and it could flee no more.
After that was the black churning darkness of oblivion.
When it came to itself again, awareness returning bit by incremental bit, it was in a dank and narrow alley between the back of a decaying flophouse hotel and the side of a liquor store, lying still in the deep black shadow behind a mound of overstuffed green garbage bags.
Warily, it surveyed its surroundings, taking in the tall brick walls that rose on either side, the muddy, slime-coated pavement upon which it rested, the dull red light—from an ancient, buzzing neon sign on the corner—that ebbed and flooded rhythmically through the darkness, the thin sliver of alien sky far overhead...and again it was taken by disorientation and fear. It reached instinctively for knowledge, for connection with the flood of data that would tell it location, status, mission, and instead it touched fire! fear! pain! horror! and recoiled from the searing agony of the memory.
Cautiously, it tried again to remember, like an electric linesman testing a live wire by gingerly brushing it with his thumb, and again it was driven back by the sizzling intensity of what lurked in the recesses of its own mind. Again and again it tried to remember, until its mind was ablaze with pain, and shudders ran like waves across the long flat carpet of its body. But nothing would come.
Its past was gone. It had no past—it had been born in that endless moment of pain and red screaming chaos, and before that it could not go. Instinctively it knew that it didn’t belong here, that the world around it was alien, frighteningly wrong, but it couldn’t remember how the world should be, what or where home was, what it was doing here in this place whose wrongness beat in upon its senses from every side.
Trembling, it lay flat in the cold mud of the alley. Each new sound from the unknown world beyond, each metallic roar or shriek or clatter, sent a new pulse of terror through it.
And then something blocked part of the light from the alley-mouth.
A monstrous figure loomed there, huge and dark and terrible.
There was the sound of a can being kicked underfoot, sent clattering away against the wall.
The figure moved slowly closer, down the alleyway, swaying, staggering from side to side, pushing a wave of rich alien stink before it.
“Oblah-dee,” the figure muttered. “Oblahfucking-dee, oblahfucking-blah—” It crashed against the wall, pushed away again. “Life goes fucking onnnn, blah—” The figure coughed, coughed again spasmodically, hawked and spat. “Sonsabitches,” it mumbled. “Think they can tell me...”
Weaving. Coming closer.
It saw the wino with the colorless, directionless perception characteristic of its race, but, more importantly, it felt him, felt the rush and interplay of electrical impulses along the intricate pathways of the wino’s nervous system, felt the cold living fire that pulsed about the cerebrum, felt the sensuous shifting and interweaving of alpha and beta rhythms....
Suddenly, it was hungry.
The hunger rose in a bitter, biting flood, driving away fear, overwhelming everything. For a moment it didn’t know what to do, and then instinct took over, a deep cellular knowledge that sent it rippling silently forward, deeper into the shadow cast by the wall of garbage bags, its mantle stiffening and rising.
It melded itself flat against the cold surface of the bags.
It waited....
The wino had stubbed his toe and was cursing in a low, racking undertone. Then he stumbled forward again. “Wham-bam, thank you ma’am,” he muttered. “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” He lurched against the garbage bags, almost toppling them, then ripped one open with both hands and began rummaging clumsily, spilling tin cans and bottles and soggy old paper bags to the ground. “You don’t know how lucky they aarrrree, boys...back in the—back in the—shit!” An empty pint crashed to the ground, breaking with a flat, pinpoint spray of glass. He chuckled. “Dead soldier. Don’t make no nevermind. What I should of told her, what I shoulda told her....” He fished an old sneaker out of the trash, examined it, wriggling his fingers through the large hole in the sole. “Oh yeah.” He threw the sneaker aside, leaned forward into the shadow.
The wino’s face filled its field of vision, huge, terrifying, slathered in bristly black whiskers, eyes as big and bloodshot red as harvest moons, the stink of corruption breathing from the slackened lips....
“Molly stays at home and does her fucking face.” He dug his arms more deeply into the trash. “Oblah—”
It struck.
The derelict jerked convulsively, as if he had walked into a high-tension line, jerked again, and toppled to the ground, bringing the trash can clattering down with him.
It stretched its body into a rope to follow him down, maintaining contact, feeding, feeding voraciously....
On the ground, the wino twitched and quivered, already dead, his eyes rolled horribly up into his head, the whites gleaming in the starlight. It too quivered as it fed, its long flat body pulsing and swelling like a fire hose with a high-pressure head of water working through it.
Then—stillness. The wino’s body had shrunken, collapsed in upon itself, sucked dry of all nourishment. Only the blood and bone and flesh was left behind. It spread its own body out, relaxing, allowing itself to form into a flat, almost-oval, molecule-thin carpet about five feet across.
But with the blunting of its hunger, fear returned.
Something huge and rank drifted past the alley-mouth, bellowing in a tremendous voice, making a terrible iron crash and clatter—
It started, contracting its body into a narrow ribbon again. The disturbance was only a garbage truck—but it didn’t know that, and through its mind flashed again the torrent of fire! fear! pain! horror!
Without thinking, it rippled to the back of the alley and flowed straight up a wall. When it regained its composure, it found itself on a high place, empty space everywhere around it, open to the frighteningly alien sky.
Something swooped at it from that sky, shining a dazzling light. Something dark and enormous that seemed to skim by just a few feet overhead. The airport was just beyond, and to the residents of that particular flophouse hotel, it often seemed as if the big jets in the landing pattern were brushing their wheels on the roof as they went over.
Again it fled in unknowing panic, pouring itself like a tide of mist across rooftops, up walls, down rusting and dilapidated fire escapes. Instinctively seeking shelter from this nightmare place, it squeezed between the slats of a broken and boarded-up window, and found itself in darkness.
In darkness, it calmed again, its panic fading.
There were heavy, bulky objects around it in the gloom, its spatial sense told it, and gratefully it poured itself under them, working its way as far in as it could. Feeling safer for the sheltering mass above it, it let its mind drift into the neutral looping that served its kind for sleep....
Early the next morning, a neutral alarm jolted it back into active mode, and it watched from under a cluster of heavy Victorian furniture—dressers, hunt cabinets, wardrobes, highboys, roll-top mahogany desks: the sheltering masses of the night before—as a man came into the room, a bald-pated man with a frizzy halo of white hair around his ears and a hammer tucked by the claw-end into the breast pocket of his coveralls. It had found refuge in an antique warehouse, a rundown and half-abandoned brick building that had, sometime in the nineteenth century, been a harness-maker’s factory. Now the downstairs floor was used as a workshop, while the upper two floors were devoted to the storage of antiques awaiting either renovation or delivery, room after room of dusty furniture, some of which had not been moved or touched in years.
Whistling, the man kicked at a wardrobe, tapped the joints a few times with the hammer, then tipped the wardrobe over so he could work the nails loose from the wood.
It had shrunk away at the close approach of the man’s feet. Now it stirred and oozed forward again, sliding under a sideboard, a pharmacist’s cabinet, a claw-footed bath basin, pausing finally under an overstuffed damask armchair to observe the workman.
Still whistling, the workman pulled a square of sandpaper from his hip pocket and began to rasp away at the wardrobe.
The fire-of-life was there, the crackling electric interplay of the nervous system....
Hunger stirred in it again, and it felt its mantle stiffen and rise.
Slowly it slid forward....
The workman tucked the sandpaper away in his pocket, picked up the hammer again, and tapped ruminatively at the wardrobe. The wan gray morning light gleamed from his bald head and glinted from his thick eyeglasses as he moved. He was a superstitious man, given to hunches and omens and premonitions, but now, in a supreme bit of irony, with death gliding silently up behind him, he was oblivious to its presence.
Death was a lightless black ribbon that reared up behind him, a hooded flat cobra-shaped shadow that loomed over him, paused, and with the slightest involuntary tremble prepared to strike, to reach out to claim him....
Inches from the workman, so close his internal interplay of forces was a tantalizing tickle, it stopped. It stopped, made hesitant by a flicker of the same sort of shadowy, half understood instinct or almost-memory that the night before had taught it how to kill. The pattern of the fire-of-life was complex and intensely bright—this was certainly a sophont, and somehow it knew that killing sophonts could be dangerous if other sophonts learned of the killing, if you alerted them to your presence by the killing, especially if you were incautious enough to kill near your own nest or refuge. It was just now beginning to realize how much of its surroundings were artificial, crafted; the other night it had seen the buildings and rooftops and alleyways as natural formations, alien mountains and canyons and outcroppings of rock, and only now, replaying the thread of that memory, could it begin to guess how much of all it had seen so far had been made.
Created! This spoke of a world of almost unbelievable complexity, a world whose ways would have to be unraveled with patience and caution, and it dare not endanger the best refuge it had found so far just for a quick and easy kill.
It reversed direction, flowing backward as easily as it had flowed forward, disappearing under a chiffonier.
The workman continued tapping at the wardrobe, as unaware of his reprieve as he had been of his endangerment. As he put the hammer away and fished a screwdriver out of his belt, he began to whistle “Amazing Grace.” Already deep inside the warehouse, the hammering and whistling fading behind, it sped through the dim and cobwebbed spaces beneath dustcovered harpsichords and mildewing Victorian sofas and wormholed grandfather clocks, seeking out the sealed-off and deserted sections of the building where men never went, seeking safer prey.
It adapted.
There were pigeons by the dozen in the deserted attic of the warehouse, and in the long-unused belvedere, boarded-up sloppily enough to be open to the sky on three sides, there were pigeons by the hundreds. There were cats on the surrounding maze of rooftops, and rats in the alleyways and sewers it learned to hunt by night. There was a little park a few blocks from the warehouse, and there among the trees and bushes it learned to take squirrels and field mice and nesting birds of all sorts. People would bring big dogs to the park and unleash them and let them run, and it took several of those, finding them very satisfactory. It needed a good deal of nourishment, fairly frequently, and finding that nourishment kept it busy.
It stayed hidden by daylight as much as it could, although it soon realized that the native sophonts were unlikely to spot it even then—it blended well with the stained and soot-covered and moss-overgrown walls of the city, and it traveled the roofways where people seldom looked. Electrical appliances and motor vehicles made it uneasy, and it stayed away from them; it had learned early that they were not alive, but their electrical fields touched off strange longings and sudden goosed scurryings of almost-memories that disturbed the placid mental status quo it had established for itself, the easy looping of its mind in ways that did not force it to confront the fire! fear! pain! horror! that always lurked somewhere just below its surface thoughts. It also had a strange effect occasionally on the electric appliances, though it didn’t pay any attention to that.
It adapted, the weeks went by, and fall began to solidify into winter.
Prey became harder to find as the days grew colder. It often went hungry. It had made serious inroads on the local dog and cat population—although there were always a few strays drifting in to partially compensate—and many of the pigeons were nesting elsewhere now, having shifted their range for blocks and even miles to avoid the relentless horror that poured like smoke across the gables and ledges and roof-eaves. Even the rats had noticeably thinned out.
One dull gray afternoon, it took three children who were playing in the park, and that evening the park and the streets around the park were thick with men with flashlights, too many men to make further hunting possible.
There was also the night that the Northern Lights danced faintly in the sky, and it danced with them, whirling and darting madly on the deserted, icy rooftops under the cold stars, feeling the enormous magnetic fields stir and scramble its emotions even at that great distance.
In that still and freezing night, fey and hungry and half-mad, it left its usual resting place in the ruined belvedere and went down through the building to the warehouse floor, penetrating deep into the tangles of stacked-up furniture, craving the solidity of mass between it and the dancing maddening fires that flared and dimmed on the horizon.
It found a drawer left ajar in a massive dresser that stood upright inside a thick wooden box, and slithered inside. It waited there in the darkness, jittering and buzzing with sick energy, unable to loop its mind into oblivion, nearly insane, occasionally striking furiously and futilely at the smooth wood inside the drawer.
Half an hour later, the white-haired workman entered the warehouse. He had had a hot roast beef sandwich and a couple of knocks of whiskey at the bar on the corner, and now he had one last task to finish up before he called it quits and went home. Taking off his overcoat, he reached over and snapped on his portable radio, but could get nothing out of it but a see-sawing squeal of static. He shrugged and switched it off—the damn thing had been going haywire off and on for a couple of months now, and the phones and the old black-and-white TV in the office had been on the fritz too, now and again. Sunspots, maybe, or some damn microwave relay tower nearby. Fry us in our goddamn jeans yet, he thought sourly, only dimly aware of the subconscious pun. He gathered up his tools and walked toward the massive packing crate.
A step or two from it, he stopped, and felt a chill shiver up his spine. “Somebody’s walking on my grave,” he said aloud, the words coming out flat and strange in this familiar place that all at once seemed too big and dark and echoingly empty. Gooseflesh had blossomed on his arms, and he ran his hands down over them to smooth it. There was a big Federal dresser in the crate, already surrounded by wood on three sides. The dresser’s bottom drawer was standing ajar, and abruptly, without knowing why, he reached out with the toe of his work shoe and kicked it solidly shut.
Another chill shuddered along his spine, raising the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. It was funny that he’d never noticed how dark and cavernous it was here at night, or how black and spooky the surrounding shadows were.
Shivering, he manhandled the last end of the packing crate into position and began to nail, noticing that he was taking unusual, almost obsessive, care to make sure that the crate was closely and firmly sealed—again without knowing why—as though for some esoteric reason it needed to be airtight. A line from an old church song was running repeatedly through his head: Amazing grace...something something...that saved a wretch like me....
When the job was done—and he took twice as long about it as he should have taken—but before he turned out the lights and went gratefully home, the workman took out a Magic Marker and on the side of the crate in large, somewhat shaky letters wrote:
Mrs. Alma Kingsley
Maple Hill Farm
Eden Falls, Vermont
“Gamma, there’s a truck with men outside!”
Alma Kingsley put her Manhattan down on the kitchen counter—carefully, for her arthritis was acting up again—and said to her granddaughter, “Dear child, please do endeavor to refrain from calling me ‘Gamma’ in the future. It makes you sound most deplorably winsome.”
Jennifer beamed and laughed, as she did at all of her grandmother’s more gravely sententious pronouncements. She didn’t know what they meant, but they all sounded funny to her.
Meanwhile, however, the driver of the truck was leaning on his horn, and his assistant was at the tailgate, wrestling an enormous crate onto the lift. “Come, child,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “Get your coat. You may find this interesting.” She swept into the yard, little Jenny trailing after her like a hyperkinetic pull-toy.
Outside, the day was cold, with a promise of snow in the air—a promise seconded by a sky as uniformly gray and featureless as an old blanket. Beyond the rocky, frozen fields, a fringe of trees marked the ravine separating Maple Hill Farm from the Laferrier place—though their farmhouse was not visible from here. They were isolated, alone among the Green Mountains, and that was the way Alma Kingsley preferred it. She couldn’t abide people tromping through here with their problems and their petty jealousies and ambitions. She’d put the world behind her more than a decade ago, when she gave up the editorship of New England magazine, and she liked it that way.
As they crossed the yard, a flight of three military jets screamed by, only a couple of hundred feet away, flying very low to the ground, black and sleek and predatory as mechanical sharks. The immense noise of their passing seemed to shake the bones of the world, and everybody looked up, Jennifer waving excitedly, the two workmen staring at them expressionlessly for a moment and then looking away. The jets roared away across the fields, still hugging the ground, afterburners blazing, hopped up over a distant ridge, and were gone. They left a shocked, ringing silence in their wake.
Alma Kingsley compressed her lips and kept walking. She didn’t like military planes flying across her land, but there was little point in complaining at a time like this, when she’d only be ignored. They were practicing for war—practicing flying low to the ground to avoid radar, maybe, or perhaps doing mock strafing runs on her barn or the delivery truck. They’d get to try their hand at the real thing soon enough, the way things were going.
Jennifer was babbling happily to her about the planes, but she ignored her. The workmen nodded politely to her, not quite tugging the forelocks they didn’t have anyway, and she nodded stiffly back. No one spoke. She gestured for them to unload the big crate, and tugged an inquisitive Jennifer safely out of the way while the lift lowered it ponderously to the ground, and the men grunted it onto a hand-truck.
Iago came bounding up from wherever it is that dogs go, barking furiously at the men, who ignored him. The huge black mongrel ran in frantic circles, from Mrs. Kingsley to the truck and back again, until she had to take him by the collar, swat him on the rump to get his attention, and—pointing firmly downward—order him to “Sit!” He obeyed unhappily, watching the unloading with a worried, disapproving expression.
She supervised the delivery, directing the workmen to take the crate—carefully!—into the old barn, which had once held a few cows and maybe a horse but now had been snugged up and served for storage space. They set the crate down and produced hammers and pry bars, and, with a shriek and squeal of protesting nails, the front came off, revealing her newest acquisition, a perfectly lovely piece that she had spotted on her last trip down south and which (not coincidentally) was the spitting image of a dresser her Aunt Dorothy had owned when she was a child, and which she had always, through all the intervening decades, lusted after. It was a triumph of will, her owning this piece, and the fulfillment of a girlhood oath, and she savored it as such.
“Now I’m going to want you to come back Tuesday, after the guests are gone, to place it in the house,” she admonished the driver. Then, to her granddaughter, “No, dear, we do not root about on the dirty floor like small, ill-mannered swine.” And again to the driver, “Tuesday, you understand, because I will not have you underfoot with company here. I’ll need to decide which furniture to shift, as well.”
The driver nodded slowly and, after a pause, said “Yep.” There was a quiet censuriousness to his monosyllabic reply, as if it were an admonition to keep her words and reasons to herself. His assistant, chewing on something—either gum or “chaw,” probably the latter—jaws agape and about as attractive-looking as a cow at its cud, was wielding his pry bar with abandon, splintering the crate’s planks, threatening the absolutely priceless—and irreparable should it be damaged—patina of the wood. Until finally she could not bear to simply watch any longer.
“Hand me that pry,” she snapped, and took it away from the gawking youth. There was a correct way to uncrate furniture; you sought out the joints and deftly, even daintily, applied leverage there, so that the whole thing popped open like a walnut shell under properly applied nutcrackers. Brute force was totally unnecessary. And so she would have shown him, only her arthritis chose that instant to seize up, and her hands became about as useless as clubs, and wouldn’t close all the way around the pry. She made a feeble pass or two at the wood, but it was hopeless—the tool slid in her hand, refusing to obey her. She couldn’t even hold the damnable thing.
She looked up then, and in a timeless instant of glaring horror saw that the driver and his slack-jawed assistant were both staring at her with pity in their eyes. Jennifer, thankfully, was too young to comprehend, and stood looking on with innocent curiosity.
For a moment, she trembled with humiliation, and then, furiously, she flung the pry bar to the floor. Tears flooding her eyes, she gasped, “Oh, you do it!” and fled.
Behind her, the men quietly, red-facedly, settled the dresser into a dry corner. When it was in place, the driver rubbed it down with his pocket bandana to remove any greasy fingerprints, and swiftly pulled each drawer out a half-inch and back in again, to make sure that none had seized up in transit. He was a conscientious man, and always gave his work this extra bit of care and attention. But he wasn’t anxious to linger, and it was entirely understandable that, in his haste, he didn’t fully re-close one drawer.
It was dying.
Hunger had driven it to the sharp edge of starvation. It was already seriously sick, or it would have abandoned the dresser immediately upon regaining the mental equilibrium that served it for consciousness. No matter how comfortably enclosed, how nurturing and psychologically sheltering a niche it was, the drawer had proven unsafe. But the long exposure to first one, then another truck’s electrical systems had weakened and disoriented it, and filled it with anguished glimpses of something that was once, or perhaps ought to be, but was now no more. It trembled shiveringly where it was, until the hunger rose up like a wall and forced it out.
Moving as swiftly—as noiselessly—as shifting shadows, it scavenged the barn, a whirlwind of silent wrath, in search of the fire-of-life all living creatures carried within. Up in the rafters it took a clutch of bats, engulfing them before they could stir from their upside-down perches, and felt better for it, unsatisfied, but no longer so ravenous. Again and again, it scoured the barn, knowing that there should be more prey, and bewildered by its absence.
Frequently it passed by yellow cardboard boxes with grain spilling out from them and of course could not recognize them as bait stations filled with rat poison. But it quickly came to realize that the nourishment it must have would of necessity have to be found outside.
Cautiously, it edged out into the farmyard, slipping easily under the barn door.
And—fire! fear! pain! horror!—found its spatial sense overwhelmed by land that stretched far and away, featureless and with no place to hide, no sheltering masses or deep crannies into which to duck, nothing but rolling, exposed emptiness for hundreds of times its own length. Off to one side was the farmhouse, surrounded by evergreen shrubbery and a few ancient oaks, but it hardly spared that a glimpse in its panicked retreat back into the barn.
Terrified, cold, and hungry, it returned to the half-open drawer to huddle shivering like a wounded animal, its mind looping furiously over and over again and still not easing out the jagged static terror. It waited, because it had to, waited for something to change, for food to come to it, or else for the hunger and need to grow so great that it would be forced out into the openness and emptiness where it currently dared not go.
Mrs. Kingsley was tucking Jennifer into bed when the child’s father came up the drive. She carefully bundled the little girl in, first between a pair of flannel sheets, then under a thin electric blanket, and finally—to top it all off—pulling a double-wedding band quilt over all. The quilt was one her mother had made, in point of fact, and Alma Kingsley hoped to live long enough to pass it on to her granddaughter, when the child came of marrying age.
“It’s snowing outside,” Jennifer said as her grandmother smoothed down the quilt. And then, in that flat, absolutely sincere way children have of presenting their fantasies, she said, “And I saw a Monster from my window.”
It was then, in a kind of ironic counterpoint, that the El Dorado purred up the long drive. Jennifer sat up immediately. “Is that Daddy, Gamma?”
Mrs. Kingsley smoothed the child down on the pillow, then turned to look out the window. A few small, bitter flakes of snow were falling from the black sky. They fell fast, a precursor of more to come. The El Dorado pulled off the drive, which was unnecessary, and onto the house’s front yard, which was worse. It was winter and the grass was dead, but, still, that kind of treatment hurt a lawn.
“Yes, it’s your father,” she said. The car’s front door opened and the man himself spilled drunkenly out. “No, don’t get up. I am certain that your father would rather find you tucked angelically into bed than running about caterwauling like a wild heathen Indian. Parents are peculiar in that respect.”
Jenny giggled appreciatively, if somewhat sleepily. Outside, the El Dorado’s other front door swung open.
Alma Kingsley slipped out of the room, snapping off the light. “I’ll leave the door open a crack,” she said. “Now you just lie there with your eyes closed, so when your father comes in to kiss you goodnight, you can open them and surprise him. Won’t that be fun?”
The child nodded slowly, then twisted a bit to dig her cheek into the pillows.
“Sweet dreams,” Mrs. Kingsley murmured.
She went downstairs to confront the father.
Iago came padding out from the kitchen as she threw a jacket over her thin shoulders against the terrible cold outside. He stood by her side, anxious with doggish worries of his own, as she flung the front door open. Desmond stood on the stoop, one arm flung around his roadhouse floozy’s neck, grappling vaguely for her breasts, and the other digging through his pockets—with equal incompetence—in search of the door key. He gaped up stupidly at her.
“How dare you?” she whispered, so as not to wake the child. “Your own daughter is in this house!” The snow was falling more thickly now, slanting down fast and tightly together, filling the air. The air was so full of snowflakes you could choke on them. If you listened carefully, you could hear them hit, it was so quiet. A whispery, slithery sound.
Desmond released the woman. He looked directly into Alma Kingsley’s eyes, possibly the first time he had done so since arriving at Maple Hill Farm. “You sanctimonious old bag,” he said quietly, also unwilling to disturb the child. “Stephanie died over a year ago. And you know something? A year is a long time to go without. You’d know that yourself, if you could remember that far back....”
The floozy—her hair was that hideous aniline red that positively shrieked its artificiality—hung back, embarrassed. Or maybe not; she gaped up at them from the car, as vacant-faced as a cow. Mrs. Kingsley didn’t spare her a second glance.
“I will not tolerate having the morals of a child corrupted within my house!” She moved to slam the door shut in his face.
The father caught the door with one hand, and effortlessly held it open. He was a short, heavy man, with a dirty little fringe of beard. About as far from the Kingsley type as you could get, but a strong creature nevertheless. For an instant, she thought he was going to actually strike her, could almost feel the pain, the old bones cracking under porcelain skin.... But he didn’t. He just grinned, a mean, drunken grin. “I don’t like bringing Jenny up here twice a year,” he said. “I only did it for Stephanie’s sake, when she was alive, and now for Jenny. She likes being on your farm. But I’ll tell you this—either you let us in or this is the fucking last time you’ll ever see the child again.”
She stood motionless in the doorway, losing heat to the out-of-doors while Desmond leered up at her. The snow was gathering already, a light powder-sugar frosting on the bare and frozen ground. The wind was already sweeping it to and fro. The air was cold on her face and it seemed to her that so long as she didn’t move, she could hold back the future, keep from ever having to move, keep from slipping into a situation where she had lost control, where she was defeated before she even began.
At her heel, the dog whined plaintively. “Hush, Iago,” she said automatically. She moved aside.
In the morning, she set out four plates for breakfast—the good Spode china, too, as pointed a bit of formality as it was possible to give a guest. She considered turning on the big plug-in radio on the kitchen counter, all the company she had most mornings as she cooked a solitary breakfast for herself, but there was a delicious quiet and serenity out here this morning, the snow now falling heavily but without sound close outside the window, like a slow fall of feathers, muting the daylight and filling it with shifting highlights, so that it was like being all alone in a bubble on the bottom of the sea. She hated to shatter that peacefulness with noise before it needed to be shattered; Desmond would be down and rattling the china with his booming, cheaply genial voice soon enough.
Besides, there wouldn’t be much worth listening to on the radio anyway. Sometimes she could pull in WGBH from Boston in the mornings and listen to chamber music or string quartets, but for months now there’d been too much static from all the sunspot activity to tune it in clearly, and all she’d been able to get for the last few days were somberly hysterical talk-radio stations yattering on about the current international crisis, lines being drawn in the sand, frantic diplomatic efforts, troops massing at borders, military alerts, security advisories, leaves being canceled, aircraft carriers on the move, and so on—and she was sick to the teeth of that. All the familiar stuff, saber-rattling, jingoism, the vitriolic outpourings of suddenly acceptable racism toward people we were supposed to like only a few months before. Primate Aggressive Displays, chimps hooting at each other and beating their breasts until they had worked themselves up into enough of a lather to attack. It seemed like she’d been hearing this stuff all her long life, one conflict after another, one enemy after another, and she was sick of it. Let them have their war and leave her alone, here in her own kitchen. She didn’t have to listen to them talk about it!
“Hi, Gamma!” It was Jennifer, down first, chirpy-happy as usual, practically bouncing with enthusiasm. Remember when you had that much energy? Mrs. Kingsley thought wryly. Remember when you had a fourth of it? She let Jennifer help by setting out the silverware and napkins, while she fried up eggs and sausages and piles of French toast, all in an iron skillet with lots of Crisco.
The second one up was her son-in-law’s roadhouse pick-up. She slumped down on a chair, eyes bleary under smeared makeup. Her hair was done in that kind of razor-cut where you can never tell if it’s brushed or not. “Morning,” she mumbled. She picked up a fork and stared at it, turning it over and over in her hand, as if she’d never seen Grand Baroque silver before in her life, and were searching for a clue to its purpose.
Sliding breakfast in front of her, Mrs. Kingsley was struck by the horrible realization that this young chippie was somebody’s daughter, and probably came down to the breakfast table in exactly the same sullen way every morning, with grumbled greeting and averted eyes. Maybe she hadn’t even noticed yet that she hadn’t made it home the night before.
“It snowed two feet last night,” the child announced. “Gamma says maybe it’ll snow all day today, right Gamma?” Then, when Gamma didn’t reply, “My name’s Jennifer, what’s yours?”
The woman stared at Jennifer, as if the girl had been suddenly and without warning plopped down out of the sky before her. “Candy,” she said at last.
The child’s father chose that moment to make his appearance. He lifted Jennifer out of her chair, hugged her, and held her up in the air while she squealed. Then he peered out the window. “Still coming down, eh?” He whistled. “Look at that drift over by the barn! Jesus!”
Desmond was wearing jeans and a green football jersey with white sleeves and a double-zero numeral on the back. Bits of lint were stuck in his beard; it would never have occurred to him to brush it before breakfast. He took a sip from the coffee cup that had been awaiting him for the past ten minutes, ever since she’d heard himself clumping about overhead, and made a face. “Could you warm this thing up for me?”
Wordlessly, she took the cup from him, put it into the microwave, and switched the device on.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Candy looked up suddenly. “How deep did you say it was out there?” She went to the window and pushed the curtain aside. “Oh, no!” she groaned. “How am I going to get home through all that?”
“The plows will be by when the snow stops,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “But this isn’t a primary route, and while it’s falling they’re going to keep most of their machines out on the Interstate.”
“My mom is going to have a cow! Where’s the telephone?”
“In the hallway,” Desmond said, and she hurried off without even pausing to ask permission.
A motion in the corner of her eye caught Alma Kingsley’s attention then, and she suddenly remembered the coffee in the microwave. Brown liquid was bulging ominously over the cup’s lip. Hurriedly she cut off the device, and it subsided. The cup was nice and warm; half the flavor was boiled out, but no need to mention that. She set it down in front of Desmond.
The young woman returned, throwing herself down into the chair with a kind of heavy despair. “I can’t get through. There’s this static and a kind of whooping noise, and nothing goes through.”
“More than likely something wrong at the switching facilities,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “The phone service here’s never been much to brag about.”
Candy worried a pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter out of her disco bag and accusingly said, “Well, my mother is going to have a cow.”
Mrs. Kingsley personally thought that the girl’s mother’s outrage was a day late and a dollar short, but she kept her opinion to herself. Aloud, she said, “No, my dear, I am afraid that I do not allow smoking at the breakfast table.”
“Hah?” Candy looked down stupidly, lit the cigarette, and then hastily removed it from her mouth. “Oh—yeah, sure.” She made as if to stub out the cigarette on her plate. Mrs. Kingsley hastily reached into the cupboards for an ashtray.
“Here.” She thrust it at the young woman. It was ironic, the tyranny that smokers exercised over their betters. She herself had never picked up the disgusting habit, and yet had of necessity, over the years, acquired any number of ashtrays to accommodate friends and guests. “You can smoke in the hallway,” she said. “Though it would be nice if you were to go outside when—”
But an angry glance from Desmond told her that she had gone too far. “Well, that would be unreasonable, of course.”
“Damn straight it would,” Desmond muttered. He was at the kitchen radio now, fiddling with it. It emitted an earsplitting, see-sawing howl of static, like a dying banshee. Wincing, he turned the knob from one end of the dial to the other, finding no stations, then grimaced and turned the radio off. He started to say “Shit!”, cast a quick look at his daughter, thought better of it, and settled for an exasperated “Damn!” He came back to the table. “I’d hoped to catch the news.”
“War, and portents of war,” Mrs. Kingsley said sourly.
Desmond grinned offensively at her. “Hey, sounds good to me!” he said. “That means I don’t have to worry about being out of work, right?” He knew that she disapproved of his work for military contractors—“war work” she’d called it bitterly once, in a monumental argument a few months after Stephanie’s death, correcting his euphemistic “defense work”—and he loved to bait her about it.
“There’s a television in the living room,” she said stiffly. “We get CNN even out here in the boondocks. Just keep the volume down. I don’t care to hear it.”
He shook his head. “You’d think you’d want to know what’s going on. There’s a crisis underway! Don’t you care what happens?”
Mrs. Kingsley hesitated, and glanced toward Jennifer, but she and the roadhouse floozy were busy playing dolls together with the salt and pepper shakers; obviously Jennifer had found a companion on her own level of emotional development. “I don’t care what happens anymore,” she said, keeping her voice pitched low. “Let them have their war. Let them all kill each other. Unless they drop an H-bomb on Montpelier, I don’t intend to take any notice of it.”
Desmond made a disgusted face. “You’ve got your head in the sand! You think the real world is going to go away just because you don’t like it? You have to deal with things as they are. Do something about them! If there weren’t so many people who think like you, maybe Stephanie would still be alive.”
They glared at each other, locking gazes. He’d stepped over the line, though, and he knew it, for, after a moment, he had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. Her gaze, though, was unflinching and unforgiving.
At that moment, opportunely, there was a scratching at the door, and she had to go let the dog back in.
“O base Iago! O inhuman dog!” she declaimed as the mutt bounded in. Candy stared at her uncomprehendingly. The little chit had probably never even heard of Shakespeare.
Iago was jumping up on her, panting and enthusiastically trying to wag his entire body. She looked deliberately at Desmond. “Let slip the dogs of War, eh?” she said, and smiled sweetly. She knew he’d heard of Shakespeare.
It was weakening. Perhaps it held enough reserves for another day or so, if it husbanded its resources. But that way lay oblivion and slow death; to survive it needed to strike out, to forage away from the comforting shelter of the barn, out into the flat, horribly open countryside.
It was hesitating by the door when the sound of trudging footsteps approached, heading straight for it.
Jerking back as if struck, it rose up, mantle stiffening, ready to attack. Then caution took over, and it retreated swiftly to the shadows, hunkering down into the darkest corner, every sense on edge, waiting, observing.
The door rattled, then flew open. Two sophonts stepped into the barn, accompanied by a wild skirl of snowflakes. They slammed the door shut noisily, and stamped their boots clear of snow.
It listened carefully to words it could not comprehend. “I don’t think your mother-in-law likes me.”
“Don’t take it personally. The old bat doesn’t like anyone.”
Stealthily, slowly, it moved. Keeping to the shadows and edges, it made its way to a wide support beam beyond the direct perception of the sophonts. Swiftly, it flowed up the beam’s far side, up to the loft, and then to the rafters, just below the ridgepole. Given the choice, it was always best to strike from above.
It moved cautiously, always conscious of the gentle tickle of the fire-of-life below.
The shorter of the two produced fire. Smoke snarled through the cold air. It could not smell, of course, but it sensed the smoke as a flicker of ionized charges.
“Whew—I really needed that!” the shorter one said. She sucked in the ions again, letting them damp down within her lungs. “Here, have a toke.”
The taller one made a disgusted noise. “Is that what we came out here for? To get stoned?”
Silently it moved among the rafters, flowing from brace to joist, and across the collar beams, until it was in position, directly above its prey. It rested invisibly over them, and prepared to strike.
The shorter one laughed. “What did you expect? I hope you didn’t think I was going to screw you out in this weather!”
But they were both sophonts and sophonts were dangerous. It would have to take both of them to be safe, and it wasn’t at all certain it could do that. Its reserves of strength were perilously low.
“I thought you had something you wanted to tell me. Let’s go back inside, okay? It’s too cold to stand out here smoking that shit.”
“Damnit, I’m going to need this to get me through the afternoon. Did you see the way she was eyeing me at lunch?”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got a daughter back there in the house and I’d like to preserve a few of her illusions about her old man for a while longer, okay? So if you’ll excuse me, I don’t see any reason why I should hang around out here in the cold.”
And then, incredibly, there was only one! The other sophont slammed out through the door, and his footsteps faded away rapidly in the falling snow.
It gathered itself together to strike. The distance was not great, and it was starting from an ideal position. With effort, it suppressed a tremble of excitement in its stiffening mantle.
The woman below huddled disconsolately in her parka. She sucked in a lungful of ions, and held them.
It struck.
“Gamma, where’s Candy?”
The parlor was very quiet without the television or radio on—Alma Kingsley had tried them both (with Desmond coming right behind her and trying them again, as if she didn’t know how to turn a television set on properly), and they wouldn’t work right; sunspots or something—they had been very bad all this year, with the Northern Lights stronger and more frequent than she’d ever known them to be in all the years since she’d retired from the magazine—had scrambled all incoming signals. The phone still wasn’t working either, and Desmond had gotten quite agitated—uselessly—about not being able to get in touch with the office. The rest of the morning had, to say the least, been tense. Desmond had finally retreated into his work, getting lost in that annoying way that he had, going so deep into it that nobody, not even Jennifer, not even Stephanie when she’d been alive, could reach him.
She put down her copy of Paris Match, and said, “I don’t know, child. Somewhere in the house, I should imagine. Why don’t you ask your father?”
“She’s not in the house,” the child insisted. “I wanted her to play Barbie-doll with me, and I looked everywhere.”
Desmond looked up from a briefcase full of flow charts and printouts and other tools of his arcane trade. “Hmmm?” he said. And when the problem was explained to him, “She ought to be back from the barn by now.” With a sigh, he switched off his calculator, set down his ballpoint pen, and stood. “Now where did I leave my coat?”
Iago bounded up eagerly when Desmond opened the door, and insisted on following him out into the snow. The door slammed, and Iago’s excited barking faded as they headed toward the old barn.
Five minutes later, Desmond returned, carrying Candy’s body.
Mrs. Kingsley saw him coming from the kitchen window and—with a smothered exclamation of horror—hurried to throw open the door for him. Together they hurried into the parlor and laid Candy down on a couch.
It was possible now to assess the damage that had been done the woman. Her features were unnaturally sunken, the cheeks collapsed in on themselves, drawing the lips back from the teeth, and her stomach was literally concave, looking as if someone had punched it in with his fist. An ugly purple flush was still spreading over her face as hundreds of ruptured capillaries lost blood.
“She was just lying there!” Desmond said helplessly. “Like she’d had a heart attack or something. Is the phone still out? We need a doctor. Maybe I can...I could hike out to the road and flag down a car.”
Alma Kingsley put a finger under the girl’s nostrils. She touched her wrists, forehead, chest. She pressed down a fingernail, looked at the color.
“Desmond,” she said, “it’s too late.”
She straightened, and her son-in-law did likewise, both involuntarily drawing away from the body, as if by so doing they could distance themselves from death. When she glanced away, Mrs. Kingsley saw that Jennifer was standing in the middle of the parlor rug, eyes wide and calm, staring at the corpse.
“Daddy,” she said, “is Candy dead?”
Her father got a sick expression on his face, as if he’d been called upon to explain sex and reproduction to the child right now, with no blushing and no preparation. But he answered, voice flat and superficially composed, “Yes.”
“Like on TV?”
Alma Kingsley regained control then, and gathered the two up. With a push here, a nudge there, she shooed father and daughter out of the parlor and into the kitchen. At her command, Iago followed. Then she closed the door.
To survive, it had to get into the farmhouse. It knew that now, with a kind of animal cunning that came before reason and intellect. There were sophonts within, and it was practically suicidal to attack a sophont within its own lair. But they were few in number, and they were isolated from their own kind. And while they were danger, they were also nourishment.
It hesitated at the doorway of the shed, baffled by the snow that had already drifted above the middle hinges. Then it flowed up the wall, climbing to the crack at the top of the doorway, and eased through. Halfway out it halted, stunned by how the world had been transformed. The falling snow formed complex, shifting patterns that disappeared the instant it got a fix on them. It was as if the world had been shredded and divided into component atoms, then instantly rearranged, again and again, a thousand times a second. All anew, it was struck by the sheer alienness of this world, where nothing was certain, where everything shifted and moved and changed. It wavered, flowed outward, flinched back again. Individual flakes of snow touched its surface, did not melt, slid off without sticking.
Had anyone been watching from the house, they would have seen it then, carelessly, dangerously exposed. But occupied as they were with their own troubles, no one was looking.
It advanced out onto the snow then, all in a rush, sudden and brave. Midway between barn and house, it halted. Nothing happened. It found it could partially filter out the flakes falling, though they disoriented and bewildered it still. Purposefully it set out for the farmhouse, a solid mass of potential shelter, unchanging, shot through with electrical fires and harboring at its heart the precious rumor of fire-of-life.
But the task it had set for itself was not an easy one; the house had been winterized with typical Yankee thoroughness. Caulk had been applied around every window and door frame, and a long, even bead had been drawn at the juncture where clapboarding met foundation. Cracks in the masonry had been plastered over, and every window was double-paned and covered over with storm windows, every door had weatherstripping.
It circled the house without finding entrance. The building was tight, invulnerable to it. There might be entrances up above—experience said it was likely to find chimney pots and furnace exhausts, gable vents, even the occasional hatchway—but it dared not climb the house side, up into the swirling, shifting snow, where matter and sky intermingled. It could not have been sure of maintaining its orientation, of knowing where the house left off and the air began. It was madness to even consider it.
Time and again it lashed silently around the house, skimming the surface of the snow, leaving behind it the very thinnest layer of ice, a trail that disappeared almost instantaneously under the new falling snow. It was perilously exposed, and this added to its confusion and desperation, to its determination to try anything, no matter how rash or foolhardy, that might help it to survive.
Even after Desmond had finally bowed to the inevitable and taken Candy’s corpse out to the El Dorado, where it could await the snowplows and the doctor and the coroner in the preserving cold, there was an eerie pall cast over the house. Jennifer had been put to bed early, and the adults had retired to the kitchen, to try to talk.
But there was nothing to say. There was no way Candy could have died, and speculation would not explain the inexplicable—only the autopsy could do that. And she was a stranger, so there could be no reminiscences about her, none that Alma Kingsley would care to have Desmond share, anyway. So, in the end, they simply fell silent. Mrs. Kingsley began going through her cookbooks, and Desmond fell to punching listlessly on the keys of his calculator.
“What is wrong with that dog?” Alma Kingsley grumbled in exasperation. Iago was pacing the kitchen floor, infinitely restless, his claws going click-click-click on the linoleum. Now he was at the door again, pushing at the crack between door and sill with his nose, digging at it hopelessly with his claws, scratching and whining.
“Sounds like he wants to be let out,” Desmond said without looking up.
“Well, maybe I should,” she said at last. Throwing a wrap over herself, she took hold of Iago’s collar, and led him to the door. Her intent was to shove his nose outside and give him a whiff of the cold, and then draw him back in again. That ought to have settled his restlessness. But when the door opened, he strained forward, barking furiously, even anxiously, and she saw something outlined on the snow in the rectangle of light cast by the open door. She squinted and said, “Desmond, come here. Take a look at this.”
The dog’s feet scrabbled wildly on the floor, but her grip was firm. “Look at what?” Desmond said. He ambled up, calculator in hand, and peered over her shoulder. “That’s just a patch of shadow.”
“There never was a patch of shadow shaped like that there before,” Mrs. Kingsley said dubiously. A momentary twinge of arthritis hit her then, and her hold on Iago’s collar loosened.
All hell broke loose.
It lay watching, not knowing that it did not blend in against the snow, assuming that the sophonts’ awareness would be as dazzled by the downfalling flakes as was its own.
It had flattened against the snow’s surface the instant that the door opened with a great outrushing of warmth. The shifts of ionization and static charges in the air made the doorway a shimmering beacon, bright and inviting, and only the faint, almost undetectable flickers of fire-of-life within that wash of liquid warmth kept it from leaping forward at that very instant. Wary, it crouched, waiting.
Then the dog came flying through the air to attack it.
The beast was large and fierce, plowing through and scattering snow, howling and barking as it came. Terrified, the creature fled, but—cunning, desperate—it fled straight for the door, risking everything on a frontal attack, a savage, killing assault on whatever might lie in its path.
In the doorway, the black beast ravening and almost upon it, its perception cleared, and it found that only two enemies stood between it and shelter. The first fell aside, shrinking back against the wall as it charged forward, and it could ignore her, making for the second who was just beyond her, and who was bigger, with more fire-of-life in him.
Berserk, it sprang at the man, who stumbled back, involuntarily flinging up a hand to fend it off. There was an object in that hand, a glittering complex of resistance paths that held a shimmering, shifting structure of energies, a vastly simplified and purified version of what lay within living beings.
A concept came searing up from the shuttered and forbidden parts of its mind, breaking through the pain: WEAPON! WEAPON! WEAPON! and it turned in midair, reshaping its structure and seizing hold of a wall so that it slammed aside and away from the thing. The beast leaped up after it, and for an instant almost had it, and then it fled down the hall and away.
In terror and wild confusion it was driven through several rooms and up a stairway. It took the first opening off of the hall it could find, and discovered itself in a cul-de-sac, the air all abuzz with jittery white energy, and dominated by a large, painful glow in its center.
The beast halted, hackles rising. It was cornered, and the beast knew it.
“What was that?” Desmond gasped.
Alma Kingsley shook her head. Her breath was still short, her face felt pallid with shock, and she discovered that she was clutching at her heart. Disdainful of her own weakness, she forced the hand down. Then, looking up at where Iago’s frantic baying had come to an abrupt stop, she felt seized with terror and cried, “Jennifer!”
Desmond easily outdistanced her, but she arrived in the guest bedroom practically on his heels. To her unutterable relief, the child was unharmed, sitting up sleepily in her bed and looking at the frantic Iago with dull, unfocused interest. Her father swept her up in a hug, and backed away, into the hallway. Oddly enough, Alma Kingsley felt a pang of jealousy.
Iago had cornered the creature.
Whatever it was—and in the gloom it was all but invisible—it crouched in the shadows to the far side of the four-poster, alert and quivering, frightened and dangerous. It reared up and slowly dipped down as Iago darted forward, then back, then forward again, growling and making little feinting attacks. The combination of quick and mazy movements made the fight look like a confrontation between cobra and mongoose.
The creature was trapped in the aisle between bed and wall. To its rear was a closet, its door open on a thick-packed rank of summer dresses in their plastic dry-cleaning bags. Jennifer’s jumper hung by itself on a hook on the back of the door.
Mrs. Kingsley was just reaching—belatedly, she realized—for the light switch when Iago attacked. Snapping and foaming, he charged. The two went tumbling, one over the other. Shaking his head fiercely, Iago backed out of the narrow way, dragging the creature out between his jaws, struggling.
Iago snarled savagely as he tore at the creature, and then there was an ozone crackle in the air and he yelped, a high, heartbreaking cry. His stiffening body crashed over sideways, onto the floor, and did not move.
The creature disentangled itself instantly, feinted at Desmond, then turned again and—going carefully around rather than over the bed—rushed into the closet.
There was an access panel in the back of the closet. It had been installed early in the century, when the upstairs water closet was retrofitted, and opened into the wall and a few dusty pipes. The panel was ajar slightly, leaning loosely rather than snugly. Perhaps the child had been playing with it, looking for a secret passageway, or perhaps it had been left partly open for years or even decades without anyone ever bothering to get around to straightening it.
The creature squeezed through the crack, quick and impossibly fluid, and disappeared into the wall.
Slowly, awkwardly, Mrs. Kingsley squatted down, knees almost touching the floor. She laid a hand on her dog’s head. He was dead. “Oh, Iago,” she said. “My little bête noire.”
She began to cry.
The house was a maze of electric circuits and appliances. They dizzied and blinded it, dazzling and baffling its senses. The sophonts were somewhere within this maze, and it did not even know how many they were. It only knew that they had not followed it, and thus presumably could not. But the sophonts’ lair was a dangerous environment, naturally hostile to it, and it fled.
It fled deep, sinking downward by instinct, tracing a tortuous way between walls and floors, sometimes following water pipes, and always avoiding electrical wires. Carefully, fearfully, it threaded its way along a twisty path that led downward, ever downward.
Finally it emerged into warm, cavernous darkness, and knew that it had found refuge.
Iago was dead, but Jennifer was alive; there was comfort in that. The faithful old family retainer had given up his life in defense of home and child, and that was somehow fitting. It was the way things ought to be. His corpse was outside the kitchen door now, packed in snow because the frozen earth made burial impossible, but Alma Kingsley vowed that her great-grandchildren would know his name.
The snow had finally stopped, and the night was clear, and bitterly cold, the stars burning in it like chips of ice. The great glowing, shimmering, billowing curtains of the Northern Lights were out, shifting restlessly back and forth on the horizon, brighter than she had ever seen them, so bright that it almost seemed that she could burn her hand on them, if she held it out to the sky.
It had been quite a storm. It must have dumped at least four feet of snow on the region all told, snowing through the night and through the day and through most of the night again, and the driveway beyond the lee of the house was buried under huge drifts; you couldn’t even see the highway at its end. So much for her first thought, which was to bundle them all into Desmond’s car and make a run for it, abandoning the house to the creature until they could come back later with help. To get the hell out of here!
But with all that snow, nobody was going anywhere, life-or-death emergency or not, until the snowplow came by in the morning. It was physically impossible. And if they locked themselves in the car as a refuge—her second thought—they’d freeze to death before daybreak. And besides, who was to say that it couldn’t get into the car after them, the way it seemed to be able to squeeze itself through the smallest of cracks?
“Did you notice that it was afraid of my pocket calculator?” Desmond asked. He was pacing the length of the kitchen, back and forth, from the pantry door to the wooden cot they had set up for Jennifer by the refrigerator. “And it wouldn’t touch the electric blanket either.”
“Why is that?” Mrs. Kingsley asked without interest. Her granddaughter was sleeping like an angel, and her heart pounded with fear for the child. She had to fight down the impulse to run a rough old hand over hair so fine it could break your heart.
“I don’t know, but did you see the way it squeezed into the wall? Like it was boneless, or something more than boneless. I’ll bet it doesn’t mass much of anything at all!”
He was getting excited now. Alma Kingsley simply tuned out his voice and let him rant on. Stephanie had always said that problem-solving was his forte, what he was most at home with. Given a logic problem—a crossword puzzle or a program that had crashed—and some shred of clue, his intuition would worry it to death or solution. To Alma Kingsley’s way of thinking, this was a good argument that problem-solving logic was not one of the civilized skills.
It was only when he moved her brand new toaster-oven to the kitchen table and began disassembling it that she was finally moved to object. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
“I’m going to wrap a resistance coil,” he said, absorbed in his chore and talking so fast his words ran together. “Look, this thing is obviously sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, right? Now, assuming its shape is maintained through bound charges, then it would move by shifting electrical potential within itself. That would explain how it moves so fluidly. So—”
“Desmond,” she said, her patience wearing thin, “just what are you trying to do?”
He looked up from his work, puzzled. “I’m building a signal-interrupter. Didn’t I make myself clear?” Without waiting for a response, he bent back down over the table, uncoiling wires from the heating elements.
She closed her eyes, calmed herself. “Just what will this signal-interrupter do when it’s built?”
“Well, basically—” He broke something out of the toaster-oven, glanced at it, threw it aside. “Basically, it ought to render this creature totally immobile anywhere within—oh, let’s say a fifteen-twenty foot radius. More, probably, but that much at least.”
For the first time in her life, Alma Kingsley wondered if God might not have had reasons for creating Desmond. “You can do this?” she asked anxiously. “Tonight?”
He favored her with a vulgar, lopsided grin. “Old hoss,” he said, “give me half an hour, and we have got it dicked!”
With no warning, all the lights went out at once, plunging them into complete darkness.
“Oh shit,” Desmond said.
Calmly, because she’d been through blackouts before, Mrs. Kingsley felt and twisted the knobs on the gas range. One by one the burners came on, filling the room with an eerie, flickering light.
By sheer bad luck, the furnace was off at the instant the power went. It was a gas furnace, but it operated off of a solid state programmable electric thermostat, and wouldn’t go back on again until the thermostat told it to. But it wasn’t really crucial; she lit the oven, leaving the door open for heat.
After some clumsy, fearful rummaging through the dark pantry, she unearthed a hurricane lamp. Its chimney had gulls painted on the side, and the transparent reservoir was filled with blue scented oil. Still, when she set it on the kitchen table, the light it shed was warm and friendly, and she could turn off the range.
Desmond, meanwhile, had found the utility flashlight in its recharger bracket by the basement door. He stood in the middle of the pantry, flicked it on and off, and then said, “What does this house have—fuses or circuit breakers?”
Alma Kingsley stared at the man in disbelief. His face was dark with shadow, his eyes lost in blackness. He was a silhouette creature, almost all outline and no substance, one hand on the doorknob of the cellar door. “Desmond, this isn’t the city. A power line is down. Going into the cellar and flicking a switch is not going to restore the electricity.”
She didn’t have to be able to see the face to know the smug, superior smile that crossed it now; she could hear it in his voice. “Let’s not get all worked up, now. Maybe a line is down. But the more likely reason is that a power transient has kicked out the main circuit breaker. There’s no reason for us to spend a night in the cold and dark when just a moment’s effort can restore the power.” He opened the door.
She peered past him, down into the cellar—it was a perfect, lightless black. Vague colors swam before her, visual hallucinations brought up by the absolute lack of light. The blackness crawled with menace. The only sound anywhere was the hissing of the gas oven.
Involuntarily, she clutched his arm. “For God’s sake, Desmond, you don’t know what’s down there!”
Desmond turned the flashlight on her face. She stood blinking as he studied her. “Don’t be such a wuss,” he said. “Whatever that thing is, we know that it’s somewhere above us, not below.”
He shook free of her grip and moved to the top of the cellar steps, hesitated for a moment, looking down. “Desmond,” she said, so frightened that she found herself actually pleading, “this is unwise. You’re acting like a character in a monster movie! Everybody in the theater would be yelling ‘Don’t go down there!’ by this point. Stay up here with us. We need you here.” It galled her to speak the words, words she’d never imagined she’d hear herself say—but it was true.
Desmond turned his head to look back at her, and grimaced. “Look,” he said, a defensive note creeping into his voice, “this thing kills people, and it’s on the loose. The only defense we have against it uses electricity. Either I go down there and reset the breakers, or we sit up here in the dark and wait to die.” After a second of silence, he grinned at her, the arrogance, the boundless self-confidence and self-assurance she’d always found so odious in the man already returning to his face after a fleeting moment of uncertainty. “Beside, I’ll be quick...and I’ll be careful!”
He was wrong, horribly wrong, but she didn’t have the arguments to confute him with, only a horrid assurance that he was making a stupid move. Desmond shone the flash down the stairs.
A thin line of worn wooden treads led downward into darkness, a trace of light glimmering on the walls to either side. When Desmond raised the flash slightly, a pale circle formed on the whitewashed rock wall just beyond the landing. “Damn,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose the circuit box is on the near wall?”
“No, it’s on the wall opposite, at the front of the house.”
Abruptly, Desmond turned and walked back into the kitchen. For a giddy moment, Mrs. Kingsley thought he had come to his senses. But he only paused by his daughter and gently placed something on the cot beside her sleeping head. The calculator. He switched it on, then turned back toward the cellar.
“For the love of Christ, Desmond!”
But, ignoring her completely, he stepped down onto the top stair. It groaned under his weight. Slowly he descended, clutching the loose railing with his free hand. The light danced and bobbed on the basement wall, growing brighter as he approached, then darting to the side and disappearing as he turned away. Briefly, there was the faintest shimmer of reflected light, and then nothing.
The air from below was warm, like an animal’s breath on her face. Staring down into the liquid blackness, Mrs. Kingsley felt her every nerve on end. She strained to hear, to track her son-in-law’s progress below by sound alone. But the dirt floor muffled his footsteps, and damped down the noise he made.
“Desmond?” she said softly. He did not answer. Her own breath sounded loud to her; she could make out nothing above it. It was uncanny how silent the cellar was. It was as if the darkness were a gigantic beast that moved on soft paws to swallow up the least sound.
Then Desmond stumbled into a pile of cardboard boxes filled with old paint and coffee cans that she had put away years ago against some possible future need. A jar fell to the floor. He kicked it angrily, and it skittered and skipped away to shatter against the wall. “Fuck.”
Mrs. Kingsley leaned down into the stairway. The darkness was so deep, so absolute, it seemed to want to suck her down into it. It welled up dizzyingly about her, and she had to put out a hand to steady herself against the jamb.
Silence again. Then—
“Found it!” Desmond shouted. He sounded relieved; one presumed the darkness had finally gotten to him. There were faint noises as he poked about. “Jeez, this is an old system. Look at the rust on it! I’ll bet you ten to one I—”
He gasped.
The flashlight clattered noisily to the ground. For an instant there was silence, complete and profound. Then a kind of throbbing electrical hum rose to fill the darkness. Over the throbbing came other sounds, choking and thrashing sounds, as if Desmond were having a seizure. The noise went on and on.
And then it stopped.
The silence seemed to echo, like the air just after a great bell has been stilled. Fearfully, Alma Kingsley called down, “Desmond? Desmond, are you all right?” She waited, and heard nothing. “Desmond?”
A faint slithering noise whispered up from below. It wasn’t quite like anything she had ever heard before, and yet it definitely came from a living creature. It was coming from the far side of the cellar, and it was headed right for the stairway.
Frantically, she slammed the door shut, and backed away, into the warmth and light of the kitchen. For an instant’s frozen horror, she was convinced it would follow her. But it did not.
“Gamma?”
Jennifer was sitting up in bed, sleepily rubbing one eye. It was clear that the door slamming had wakened her. “Gamma,” she said. “Where’s Daddy?”
It had fled as far as it could, as deep as it was possible to go in this labyrinthine structure, and had thought itself safe. It badly needed to think things through, as a dozen conflicting emotions chased themselves through its neural fabric, and at that point wanted only solitude, darkness, stillness, the security of enclosure. But then, terrifyingly, one of the sophonts had come after it, tracking it down, coming relentlessly closer and closer and closer, a buzzing electrical device that emitted a spray of photons—a weapon?—in one hand. It had backed away in terror, retreating as the man came on toward it step by step, finally stopping only when it backed up against a solid wall and there was no place left to go without turning and exposing its back to a potentially fatal attack.
Still the man came implacably on, ever closer, ponderous steps shaking the floor like thunder, looming huge and heavy and menacing, only a few bodylengths away now. At last, still moving forward, the sophont turned the stream of photons from its device/weapon directly on it....
Trapped, terrified, knowing that it might only have seconds of life left in which to act, it struck. The sophont jerked and thrashed and flailed, the electrical device flying from its hand to shatter against the floor and go out.
It had tried its best to avoid this confrontation, had not wanted to kill again so soon, had wanted to think about the whole situation, but it had been given no choice.
None of those considerations kept it from feeding as fully as it could, of course, now that it had killed. The sophont was big and vigorous, in the prime of its cycle of existence, and was full of the fire-of-life.
When it had finished with him, it fell refreshed and somewhat calmer...although, almost immediately, a new unease began to grow within it. This was a bad situation, trapped inside a structure like this with a band of sophonts, all alerted to its presence. It was a dangerous situation, one in which it could easily be trapped or attacked—and there was something else about the situation that dimly troubled it, something other than the danger, something that generated another kind of unease. It shouldn’t be hunting sophonts, it knew that somehow, not unless it had no other choice. It should find other, easier, less dangerous prey, like the rats and squirrels and birds it’d found in the park. To find nonsophont prey instead would be far less dangerous, and it would also be, it would also be...something. Something it no longer had the concept for, but which it vaguely knew was desirable.
Yes, it should leave here, get out of this situation altogether.
So it hunted through the structure until it found access to a metal pipe that it followed up through the walls and out onto the roof, out into the chill outer air.... But there were the Northern Lights, blazing above it, filling the sky, curtains of dancing, shimmering radiation, seemingly only a few feet above its head, dazzling it, making it squirm and caper and thrash, coil and uncoil and coil, scribing odd cabalistic patterns in the snow...until, on the verge of total madness, it retreated back into the pipe, plunging deep into the reassuringly solid structure of the house, where at least the sheer mass of all the stone and wood and iron afforded it some protection against the shifting, chaotic, maddening lights in the sky.
It had to stay here. It had no choice.
The grandmother clock in the upstairs hallway chimed midnight, a soft, homey noise. The house was still, and the kitchen was warm. The thing in the basement—whatever it was—still had not come out. Mrs. Kingsley dared to hope that it would not, that it was holed up in the cellar for good, and would not willingly emerge. Her granddaughter was asleep again, and she was alone with her fear and her guilt.
“He’s gone to town to get a snowplow,” she had lied. It was moral cowardice, pure and simple, and she knew that she would never be able to completely forgive herself for it. But by the same token, there was no way she could possibly have told the child the truth. Not now. Not in the state she was in. “He’ll be back in the morning, after breakfast.”
“Oh.” Jennifer’s head had sunk back to the pillow then. She turned to the side, closed her eyes, and was asleep. A faint green glow from the calculator’s display tinged her face.
Alma Kingsley stood motionless. Now that she listened, she could hear the house talking to itself. It creaked and groaned, making wooden noises like doors opening and shutting in a distant, fairy-tale wood. Ghosts walked the halls with slow, ominous tread.
She was afraid. Her heart was beating rapidly, and her limbs felt weak and drained. Her house—her own house!—loomed dark and menacing on all sides, and she was afraid of it.
She needed a weapon. The gizmo Desmond had been working on was nowhere near done, a tangle of wires and trash. Even with the power on, she would have no idea how to finish it herself. Desmond had said the monster was afraid of electricity, but with the power out, all the electronic equipment she owned, the television, the radios, the microwave, the food processor, were dead, and so the idea of surrounding them with a barricade of such things, all turned on, wasn’t going to work. The electric blanket was useless as a defense now too. There weren’t any firearms in the house, and she doubted a kitchen knife would be much use against the creature. Struck by sudden quick inspiration, she stepped into the mudroom to the side of the kitchen door and opened the narrow door of the utility closet. There was a heavy woodchopper’s ax there, set on brackets on the wall, behind a jumble of brooms, old vacuum cleaners, saws, rakes, and other junk, where it had rested untouched for years, since her hands had gotten too bad to let her chop her own wood for the winter.
She fumbled the ax down from its brackets, lugged it into the kitchen—marveling ruefully at how heavy it now seemed, how much arm-strength she’d lost in only five or six years—and set it down near Jennifer’s cot, handle up, leaning against the wall.
It wasn’t enough. The ax might make for a secondary, last-ditch line of defense if the thing got into the kitchen, but she was too weak and stiff and arthritic to wield it with any real vigor or competence anymore, and the idea of taking slow, clumsy strokes at a creature that moved as fast as this one did, in a half-darkened room that was dancing with shadows anyway, made her mouth dry with terror. That wasn’t good enough. She had to figure out some way to keep it out of the kitchen in the first place.
How to do that? How to keep it out of here, keep it away from Jennifer? Think, damn it, think!
The only thing she knew it feared was Desmond’s pocket calculator.
That was a start, then. She darted into the darkened parlor and snagged a long, white taper from the candelabra on the mantelpiece. With a shiver, she retreated back to the kitchen. She wrapped several paper napkins around its base to protect her hand against the drippings. Desmond would have more calculators among his effects—he was simply that kind of person. There might even be one among Jennifer’s things. And for that matter, there was her own, tucked away in the upstairs china cabinet, which she used periodically for taxes and bills.
The candle shed very little light; it seemed to blind her more than illumine the way. She hesitated in the doorway and the shadows flickered and waved about her like living things. She did not want to go into the dark.
Holding herself straight, she stepped forward, fighting against panic.
Desmond had brought along two more calculators, and Jennifer one, a child’s calculator in the shape of an owl, the readout part of its big round eyes. Among the child’s things, too, she had found a pocket computer game—Meteor Defense, or some such nonsense—and estimating it similar enough to be of use, that brought the total up to six. Five, if you didn’t count it.
It had been a harrowing expedition. She had started at every creak of the joists or scream of stairway tread underfoot. She had felt the Dark Angel upon her twice, as the shadow in an empty doorway had shifted toward her, and when the darkness behind a cabinet gathered itself up to leap. As she returned downstairs and into the parlor, her pace quickened. The kitchen beckoned.
It so heartened her to reach safe haven that she began to hum a snatch of Mozart. She was alive! She blew out the candle and dumped the calculators onto the kitchen table. For the moment, she didn’t even notice the thing crouching in the hallway.
A sudden sense of foreboding, a prickling, crawling sensation, made her spin about. Something moved just outside the kitchen door. Black crawled within black, shadow in shadow.
It yearned forward slightly, then retreated, bobbing up and down in indecision, torn between flight and attack. Mrs. Kingsley couldn’t even see it clearly, but she felt it studying the sleeping child.
More from panic than courage, then, she ran at the thing wildly. She slashed her arm as if the calculator in it were an ax, and she could use it to chop the thing into bloody bits, its black ichor steaming onto the floor, eating through the carpet.
It hesitated fractionally, then flowed into darkness and was gone.
Mrs. Kingsley sobbed in the doorway, weak and despairing. It was a victory, but a minor one. The thing was still loose, and with every encounter it was losing fear. She set calculators by the doors to the pantry, hallway, and parlor. The fourth she put by the window, and the little computer game was laid at the foot of Jennifer’s cot as a second line of defense. They all glowed gently.
The oil lamp was running low. Mrs. Kingsley blew it out, to conserve what little fuel remained, and twisted on two of the range burners. She felt oddly secure, surrounded by the arcane little devices, with their crisp little lights. She felt safe, protected. It was probably unwarranted, mere blind faith in technology, but...
The calculator by the parlor door began blinking. The numbers had disappeared and there was a single dot tracking its way across the readout. She remembered Desmond bragging about the thing, when he first showed it to her, explaining that if it weren’t used for some number of minutes—five? twenty? ten?—the numbers disappeared from the readout, though the memory still held them, and it went into an energy-conserving mode. And then, if more time went by and nobody used it, it simply turned itself off.
Hastily, she punched some figures at random, and hit a function button. The numbers came back on, with that funny little symbol that meant that an error had been made. She ignored it.
It wasn’t long before she realized that the calculators were not going to do. Three of them kept blinking off, and one of the others was failing, its batteries low. She couldn’t keep punching the things through the night—sleep would take her long before the snowplow came.
Think! she told herself fiercely. She had to kill the thing, to electrocute it somehow...She remembered a story Stephanie used to tell, about the summer camp she’d stayed at as a child, a place with an old-fashioned crank phone system.
The girls used to hook up a phone with one wire connected to a metal bed frame, then the other to a wad of aluminum foil. When the victim sat down on the bed frame, one girl would toss her the ball of foil and yell “Catch!” while her accomplice gave the phone a vicious crank.
She didn’t have a crank phone, of course, but she sensed she was on the right track. She’d found a trap that wouldn’t require much mechanical skill to set up. All she needed was a power source. Something like...
Something like an automobile battery.
She dressed hurriedly, making plans all the while.
First, she got the jumper cables out of the El Dorado’s trunk, leaving it up and open behind her as she hurried them through the snow to the kitchen. Jennifer was still asleep, and this time Mrs. Kingsley didn’t try to keep from stroking her hair. The simple act seemed to fill her with resolve. The creature would not get the child. This she swore.
Again she stepped out into the storm. The car’s front door balked at first, frozen with the cold. She yanked harder and it popped open.
Candy stared up at her accusingly. The dead girl’s face was grotesquely shrunken in upon itself, and the tightening skin had pulled the eyes wide open. Mrs. Kingsley gasped involuntarily. She had forgotten the macabre thing was there, stretched out across the front seat.
But there was no time for squeamishness. She leaned over the corpse, and fumbled under the steering wheel for the hood release. With a bing, the hood unlatched and she went around to the front—slamming the door shut behind her—to raise it up and confront the battery.
She was fiddling with the cables—they were cold, of course, and frozen to the terminals, and corroded over as well—when her hands seized up with arthritis again. Vainly she tried to force her mittened hands to close about a cable. Pain shot up her arms, but still her hands did not respond. Frustrated, she slammed them against the cables again and again.
The lines wouldn’t budge.
Tears built at the corners of her eyes, but sternly she suppressed them, blinking them down, thinking harsh thoughts at herself. There had to be a way—the trunk! She’d left it open, hadn’t she? She hurried around back and it was true, the trunk still gaped wide. She rummaged about with her useless arms, pushing things to one side or another as if they were long sticks she was using to poke with, and at last she found what she was looking for. A tire iron.
It took longer to scoop up the iron than she’d have liked, an awkward, nightmarishly clumsy time, but finally she had it, and scuttled back to the battery. Holding the iron as a Punchinello might hold its bashing-stick, she tried again and again, leaning, putting her weight just so, until finally the one cable popped loose and went banging against the engine.
Time was all. Mrs. Kingsley tried hard not to think of Jennifer lying alone in the house, at the center of her protective pentagram of failing calculators, tried hard to put blind, unreasoning faith in the flimsy little Oriental-built machines.
It took a hellishly long time to get the iron in position for the second cable, and then it kept slipping out of the way. But at last she pried that one free of its terminal too, and with a feeling of triumph, she let the iron fall. She reached for the battery.
It would not budge.
She couldn’t get her hands around the damnable thing, couldn’t get a hold on it, probably didn’t even have the strength to lift it.
She did cry then, the tears running down her cheeks and the thin trail of moisture freezing on her skin with a faint crackling sensation. But even then she did not give up. Her mind kept working, as she started with a positive hatred at the battery. There was nothing in the workings of the car touching it, she noted, and nothing beneath it. There was a space of an inch or so around it on three sides, and it was set on a kind of little metal ledge.
If not for that ledge, the battery would fall to the ground.
She set out to break the little shelf, battering and prying at it with the tire iron. Time and again the iron slipped from her hands and fell. She had to get to her knees in the snow, and reach around under the car to make it fall flat, and then draw it out from under and seduce it into her arms again—she lost a lot of time that way.
By now her knees and her arms, up to her shoulders, were numbed and bruised. The cold seemed to soak through to her bones, and she knew she was running a bad risk of frostbite.
But at last she managed to poke and pry and stab enough that, with a sudden ripping noise, the battery was gone. It had fallen to the ground.
She still couldn’t lift it up from the snow—not for more than a few seconds at a time, anyway. But she could get the thing back to the house by pushing it, if she was willing to crawl.
Slowly, with distaste, she got down to the ground. Sometimes a woman had to crawl.
It was more with disbelief than with joy that she finally shoved the battery onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Leaving it on its side, she slowly stood and sank gratefully into a chair. Her knees were afire. The creature could have come and taken her then, and she’d have felt only gratitude. It would be so very pleasant to simply lean back and fall asleep....
Something creaked. Panicked, she struggled upright, twisting around to see that Jennifer was still all right. Her father’s calculator had slipped to the floor as the child shifted in her sleep. Of the guardian calculators at the doors, only one was still blinking.
Hurriedly she punched new life into the calculators, bringing the green alphanumerics swimming up to their surfaces. There could be no sleep for her. She still had work to do, a trap to set.
But desire would not unclench her hands. She thrust them into her armpits, desperately trying to warm the joints into movement. It didn’t work. She was stopped before she could begin.
Finally she knelt by her granddaughter’s cot and nudged her ever so gently. “Rise and shine, sweetheart,” she murmured. “Grandmother needs you to be her hands.”
Jennifer was sleepy and balky. It took a great deal of coaxing just to get her to untangle the jumper cables. Then, when they were stretched out to their ten-foot lengths, side by side like orange vinyl snakes, it was time to assemble the trap.
Fortunately the cables were old, and the clips were not as taut as they might be. Even at that, Jennifer had to use both hands and all her strength to open the grippers enough to clamp them onto a battery terminal. The first two times she tried, they slipped right back off. Mrs. Kingsley merely tightened her lips and said, “Again.”
“Why?”
A noise came from the parlor, a faint, whispery slithering sound. Mrs. Kingsley threw back her head, listening, but it was gone. “Just do it. I’m your grandmother.” She put all the authority she had in her voice, and, for a wonder, the child obeyed.
As soon as the connection was firm, and wouldn’t come loose at a tug on the cable, she threw a tea towel over the terminal, to protect her grandchild against accidental shock. “That’s good,” she said. “Now the other one.”
“This is dumb!” Jennifer cried rebelliously. “I don’t have to if I don’t want to!”
“By God, I’ll give you don’t-have-to!” Mrs. Kingsley angrily lifted a hand shoulder-high to slap the child. Then, at the look in her eyes, she stopped, and bit back her anger. She crouched down, joints hurting horribly, and hugged Jennifer to her. “I know it seems hard, child. But sometimes we have to do things we would rather not. It’s simply the way the world wags.”
Jennifer obstinately shook her head.
“It won’t take long, I promise. Suppose that as soon as we get through with this, we make hot chocolate? Would you like that?” She held the child at arm’s length, studied her solemnly. “Yes, I’d supposed you would.”
The second cable went on smoothly, and Jennifer enjoyed making the ball of aluminum foil. Alma Kingsley had to stop her from using up all that was on the roll.
“Now pretend that the cable is an alligator, and make it bite the shiny ball.” It took Jennifer three tries, and then she got it right. The final step was to hook the other cable to something large and metallic, something that the creature would have to touch or pass over to get at her. This was less satisfactory than the rest. The nearest bed frame was on the second floor. She could no more have dragged it down into the kitchen than she could have hauled the battery up the stairs to it. In the end, the best she could find was a screen window that had been stored in the pantry against spring.
The screen was wire mesh, not the modern plastic stuff, but after Jennifer had clipped the cable to it, it looked woefully small and inadequate. There was no way of placing it that guaranteed the creature would pass over it, or of being sure it would be touching when she threw the second cable. But it would have to do. Because it was the best she could come up with.
“Gamma, we can make hot chocolate now, right?” 
She allowed herself a smile. “No, my young apprentice. You will make the cocoa. Your grandmother will supervise. Have you ever made cocoa all by yourself before?”
Jennifer shook her head, eyes wide and solemn.
“Well! This will be a special occasion, then. The first thing to do is to—”
The cocoa was a smashing success. By the time it was made, Jennifer was nodding and yawning again. She only managed to drink half her mug’s contents before her head slumped over onto her shoulder. Mrs. Kingsley led her back to the cot, and pulled the blankets up over her.
The trap was not good enough. It needed...something more. Mrs. Kingsley thought the problem through as she put the cocoa-stained saucepan in the sink and ran a little water in it for it to soak. The drain was closed and water built up in the sink.
Inspiration struck her then.
She turned the tap all the way over, and stood back to watch the sink fill up and brim over. Water crept out onto the formica countertop, and slopped over onto the floor in a thin, ragged sheet. It splattered and spread, a widening puddle on the linoleum. Soon everything on the floor—including the screen window—was damp.
Success! She stepped through the spreading water and gathered up the calculators. Climbing up on a chair, she sat down on the kitchen table itself, resting her feet on the chair’s cane seat. She didn’t know much about electricity, but she knew that this would insulate her from the shock. In the same way, the cot’s wooden legs would protect Jennifer.
The water was spreading into the pantry and the hallway, seeping through the floorboards, being sopped up by the Oriental carpets in the parlor. The damage it was doing to her house was incalculable. But she kept the water flowing. As long as the one cable was solidly grounded in the water, the entire kitchen was a deathtrap for the creature.
One by one, she turned off the calculators, stacking them beside her. She rested the ball of foil in her lap, ready to throw. Let the monster come! She was prepared for it.
She only wished she had thought to brew some tea for the wait.
Time passed with excruciating slowness. She kept squinting at her watch, thinking that an hour had gone by, to find that it had only been a minute or two instead.
Where was it? she thought, straining to hear, although she knew that it could move almost without sound. What was it up to? What was it doing?
What was it doing here, for that matter? Here in this house, here on this planet? For it was obvious to her by now that the creature was not of this Earth. What did it want? Why had it come? Was it just a blindly ravening, mindless creature, a simple predator, or did it have some kind of plan, some sort of purpose?
Conquest, probably. Invasion. That was the most likely guess. Perhaps it was a scout for some sort of interstellar invasion force. A spy, a saboteur, a guerrilla fighter, a stealthy terrorist. A soldier.
The thought made her feel very tired. Even out among the stars, it seemed, they had soldiers, and wars, and armies, and waged campaigns of conquest. The fighting never stopped, the killing never stopped, no matter where in the universe you went. There was no escaping it.
She blinked back sudden tears, and steeled herself to increased alertness. This time she was drawing her own line in the sand. It was not going to get Jennifer. This time she was going to fight the blank black grinding forces of the universe to a standstill. She was going to kill the loathsome thing, right here and now.
Come on, you abomination. Come for me!
Come on....
The weapons were gone! The sophonts had disarmed themselves, rendered themselves unprotected, unguarded...helpless. And yet, such an action was contrary to everything it somehow knew—without quite knowing how it knew—about the nature of sophonts. It felt the contradiction as an almost physical assault.
It was baffled and terrified. The imperatives of survival demanded that it attack and kill the two remaining sophonts. Yet they were alerted and prepared, waiting for it in a space that had but one approach, and whatever they had done with their weapons, it was not fooled into thinking they were not dangerous. They were waiting for it.
It quivered in darkness, mantle involuntarily expanding and contacting with conflicting urges, making little retreating and advancing movements, paralyzed with indecision and fear. It was in an impossible position. It felt the wrongness, though it had no way of understanding it. It should not be here, it knew, should not be playing this dangerous game in such alien surroundings. This was not how it was meant to be....
Finally, though, it came to the only decision it could: it must attack.
If it was to act, it would have to act fast. The sophonts would not remain passive forever. In what pitiable remnants of its mapping functions remained accessible, it created a model of the house, a one-to-one visualization of its every wall and surface, from the patterned tin ceiling of the master bedroom to the uneven dirt floor of the basement. There were lacunae within its knowledge of the house, but they did not matter; it knew those portions that it would employ. Within this small maze, it set a marker to represent itself.
It plotted its attack by moving the signifier. Silently, craftily, it would flow up one wall to the juncture of wall and ceiling. Attacking from above was instinctive behavior to its own kind, and it knew from experience that the sophonts here rarely looked up; taken together, these facts just might give it an edge.
Quickly, then, it would traverse wall and ceiling to the kitchen doorway. The room was charged with tensions. The air sparkled with dying by-products of the gas oven, dazzling its senses, so that it perceived the two surviving sophonts with their complex nervous systems as areas of greater brightness within a general glare. It would be entering the room half blind.
The mental marker looped over the archway, sped midway across the ceiling to a spot directly over the smaller brightness. It came to a dead stop, and then dropped.
Time and again, it ran the marker through its mazy path of attack, never varying, until the instructions were scored into its consciousness. It was huddled in upon itself, fringe crackling and humming faintly with the effort. Had its enemy known, she could have walked up to it now and destroyed it without its being able to put up the least resistance. All its energies directed inward, it was temporarily helpless. But that was necessary if it was to imprint its attack, making it a single complex involuntary motion, a spasm of reflex violence that would either succeed all in an instant, or fail before it could regain full consciousness.
One last time, it held the cursor-self over the lesser sophont. Without pausing, it dropped. Fluidly, it stunned, possibly even killed, its first opponent, then leaped straight at the second, to wrap its hood about it, and discharge the powers that freed the fire-of-life. It was a desperate move, and if any least thing went wrong, it would be a fatal one.
When the cursor had run through the final repetition, it was as taut with energy as an overwound spring. It positioned itself carefully. It would take only the slightest triggering thought to free that resolve into a blurred burst of killing fury, an explosion of purpose.
Now!
She must have been dozing. Or perhaps a general stunned weariness had dulled her perceptions, so that she stared blankly unseeing as it entered. Because the first that Alma Kingsley saw of the creature was when it flickered down before her, and on top of Jennifer.
It came too fast. It was upon Jennifer before she could react. There was a sudden moving darkness, like black cloth flapping in the breeze, and then a scorching smell, and the child screamed! Then the thing was flying through the air at her, the sides of its mantle spread like manta ray wings, as if it needed that little extra bit of lift to reach her.
She would have died then, had her reflexes not betrayed her. For in the panicked instant when the creature fell through the air before her, all thought stopped, all plans of action and attack abruptly fled and she’d scrambled to her feet, chair falling away, as she twisted to flee from the thing.
Then the creature was soaring through the air at the space where she had been, and it slammed into her upraised hand, the one that held the jumper cable with its foolish ball of aluminum foil, as though it were a scepter. The thing’s surface had the oddest feel, coarsely textured as if it were made of woven metal and at the same time oddly slick, as if it held some faint charge repulsing her hand. The mantle spread wide, then folded in, seeking to wrap her head in its folds. In blind fear, because she had a dread of suffocation that dated back to her childhood, she flung the creature away.
The thing flew across the kitchen, hit the wall, and fell to the floor. For an instant, it crumpled to practically nothing. Then unseen forces stiffened it and it rose up, swaying slowly and woozily back and forth, looking for all the world like a punch-drunk fighter. For a long moment, they stared at each other. 
The thing was resting on the high end of the kitchen, and though the floor was damp there, it was not so deeply puddled as further in, and Mrs. Kingsley didn’t know enough about electrical conductivity to know if it was damp enough. “Come on,” she grated, holding up the ball of foil as if it were a crucifix she were employing to ward off a vampire. “Just a little bit closer, and I have you!”
She thought of righting the chair and climbing up on it, to protect herself. But she was still wearing her rubber boots, having foreseen the danger and put them on for this very purpose, and surely they ought to be enough. “That’s right,” she crooned. “Slide forward, into the water.”
The creature swayed slightly, back and forth, forth and back, clearly focusing on her. It seemed dazed, unsure. It moved a bit to one side, then to the other, avoiding the edge of the puddle proper.
It knew! The vile thing knew to avoid the water! She felt a wave of dread. It was not going to be tricked.
To one side, Jennifer made a soft noise, a gentle, final sigh, and Mrs. Kingsley turned to see the child’s head fall to one side. The face was burned and blistered, and the eyes closed. She could see no sign of breathing.
The creature chose that instant to attack. It was upon her before she could throw the cable. Alma Kingsley screamed, and it seemed to some far, remote part of her that there was less terror than rage in her scream, and then she was grappling with the thing. It had leaped through the air, and though she held the cable against its skin, no part of it made contact with the water. The circuit wasn’t complete.
Those soft, tough surfaces wrapped about her arms, tried to envelope her head. It covered one eye, and she could not pry it off. Her skin tingled, and she heard the faintest imaginable mechanical-sounding hum, as of a generator starting up just over the horizon.
Very deliberately then, Alma Kingsley decided that if she was not going to survive this encounter, then neither would her enemy. It was the only chance Jennifer had. And at the very worst, at the very least, if her granddaughter was already dead, she could take this hells-pawned demon with her, and if vengeance was a sour drink, it was at least a potent one.
Grappling the creature with both hands, she threw herself forward, tumbling them both into the wet, charged floor.
Fire! fear! pain! horror! And then a blinding, ripping, sundering bolt of light, beyond pain and horror, more powerful than anything it had ever known, that ripped the very fabric of the universe apart. That wiped its mind clean like a sponge across a blackboard. And then put it back together again, in an instant.
It screamed. Alma Kingsley, lying stunned and spasmed on the linoleum floor, heard it, not with her ears, but deep in her brain, a wash of noise that filled the universe. The creature screamed not as an animal would, not as a being of flesh and blood, backbone and viscera would, but like a machine in agony. Like the scream of stripping gears of some immense but deadlocked engine tearing itself apart with its own energy of motion because it was unable to go forward as it was designed to do, because the load it was pushing against or trying to lift was too great for it to move. Like the high-pitched squeal of distortion, chasing itself up the frequencies, of an electric amplifier just before it burns itself out with a bang and a flash and the stink of burning insulation. Like the boiler of some old-fashioned steam locomotive shrieking out news of its impending death, seconds before the boiler explodes and fills the icy night with twisted scraps of flying black iron. Like that same locomotive plunging off a high trestle into a deep ravine. Like the dopplering scream of an artillery shell or a missile as it falls out of the sky to kill some mother’s child. Like the apotheosis of every ugly mechanical sound that had ever been heard since people came down from the trees and learned how to make tools.
It screamed and there was more to that scream than mere pain: there was anguish there too, maybe even—but she was surely making this up—regret. It was a cry from Hell, like that a damned soul might make as it fell down into the Pit, a cry from a soul that knew that it deserved to be damned, and to fall endlessly forever through darkness.
The car battery shorted out. A scorched smell rose from its remains, and a short black puff of smoke curled like a question mark in the air, slowly dissipating. Freed from her grip, the creature flopped, twisted, and streaked for the kitchen window. There was a flare of energy, and the ugly stench of burning wood, paint, and glass. A pane flowed and melted, and, with a dwindling wail, the creature was gone, out into the night.
Cold air blew in through the hole.
Alma Kingsley was still alive, although at first she didn’t realize it. She lay there for a long time, listening to someone crying, making baffled little sobbing sounds, hunnn, hunnn, hunnn, like a beaten and exhausted animal, and then the cold wind in her face revived her enough that she realized that it was she herself who was making the noise, and that that meant that somehow, impossibly, she was still alive. Sense began to seep back into her head, and the world swam blurrily into focus. She moved, instinctively trying to sit up, and a fierce lance of pain cleared her head a little bit more. She had no conscious memory of the electric shock but it must have been bad, because when she tried to remember, her mind shrank away from the very thought in fear and revulsion.
Snow was blowing in through the window from the wind-drifted dune beyond, fine particles that danced a stately gavotte in the middle of the air. She sat there for a moment longer, sitting in a puddle of water on the floor, cold wet linoleum underneath her, cold air in her face, blinking in bewilderment, staring at the fine particles of snow dancing in the air, staring at the ragged hole melted through the window, wondering what on Earth could have happened...and then memory began to return, and with it, fear and horror, rebooting suddenly, kicking in with a sudden shock that flooded her system with adrenaline, as painful and nauseating as a punch in the stomach.
Jennifer. Oh God, Jennifer!
Somehow, she managed to pull herself to her feet, although the world tilted slowly around her when she did so, first one way and then the other, with ponderous slow-motion grace, as if she were riding a ship in a heavy sea. She staggered toward her granddaughter, falling next to her rather than kneeling, pawing at her with hands that felt like frozen slabs of meat rather than living flesh.
Jennifer was lying still, very still. There was a deep burn across one side of her face, curling up a corner of her mouth, touching the edge of one eye, blistered and cauterized, and all around it the child’s flesh was a horrible dead-grey color, as if all the energy and life had been sucked out of her.
She fumbled at Jennifer’s throat, trying to find a pulse, unable to tell whether she couldn’t find one for the obvious reason or because of her numbed, tingling hands; she could hardly tell whether she was even touching the child without looking to see where her hands were. She leaned close to smell her lips, feeling for even the gentlest whisper of breath from those tiny nostrils, thinking she felt it, unable to be sure.
Without even knowing she’d gotten up or crossed the room, she was at the telephone, fumbling at it, finally getting her hands to pick up the receiver, forgetting entirely that the device was dead—and then, just as she was remembering with a sick surge of dismay that it was dead, she realized it wasn’t. The dial tone was clear, perfectly normal, as though nothing had ever happened, as though it were a perfectly ordinary day and this a perfectly ordinary call. Somehow she forced her blundering fingers to dial 911. She reached the police with her first attempt and, a flicker of common sense telling her not to babble of monsters, not now, not yet, managed to at least convey that an ambulance was needed out here, that it was a life-or-death emergency, with every second counting...although she knew, without them needing to mention it—although they did—that with all the best will in the world it would take some time for an emergency vehicle to force its way through the snow-choked roads to her place.
She stumbled back to the cot, knelt down by her silent, unmoving grandchild. Bits and pieces of first-aid wisdom, learned decades ago at summer camp or half-remembered from television programs she hadn’t really been paying much attention to, babbled desperately in her head, and so she tugged the blanket out from under Jennifer’s frail, broken little body, wrapping her up in it to keep her warm and keep her from slipping into shock, balled the pillows up and stuffed them under her feet to elevate her legs...all the while trying to ignore a cold dry voice in the back of her head, remorselessly logical, that knew perfectly well that all this was useless, and kept whispering, Too late, too late. When she could no longer feel any hint of breath, and could no longer feel even the ghost of a pulse—sensation was returning to her hands with a feeling like a thousand hot needles being plunged into them, although she hardly noticed the pain—she began clumsily performing CPR on the child, performing it as well as she could remember how to perform it, anyway, whispering between breaths, “Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, don’t die,” like a mantra, trying not to also think Too late, too late, too late, like a counter-beat.
At last, she could fool herself no longer, and slowed to a stop. The child looked like a waxwork dummy of herself, all heat and life—the soul, if you believed in those—gone. Her flesh was already growing cold. Too late.
Alma Kingsley went away from her body for awhile then. When she came back to it again, returning as though from across a great gulf of space, she heard her voice speaking aloud again, mumbling broken fragments of sentences in a sodden monotone, randomly assembled words that jarred and ground against each other like stones in a sack.
A vast surge of bitterness shot through her. Useless old woman. Never good for anything in your whole damn life. Couldn’t keep your husband alive, couldn’t save your daughter. Couldn’t even protect your own grandchild. You’d think if you’d be able to do anything, one miserable thing that made a difference in this foul and pestilent existence, that made it worthwhile that you were ever alive in the first place, at least you could save your own grand-daughter. A six-year-old child! Why was it that she was dead and you were still alive, living on and on into a bleak morning that had no reason left in it for you to be alive anymore, and your traitor lungs continuing to pump, your heart to beat, after Jennifer was dead? After everyone you ever cared about was gone? What was the point? Why couldn’t she have been allowed to trade her life for the child’s? You old fool, couldn’t you have done one thing right in your life? In your whole useless and pointless life?
It was bitter and hard for her, almost harder and more cruelly bitter than she could bear, to realize that if Desmond had lived and she had been the one to die instead, that Desmond—much as she’d always disliked him, thought him not worthy of her daughter, looked down on him, much as she still disliked him now, in spite of the fact that he was dead—probably would have been able to save Jennifer from the monster. To save her as she had not been able to. Why hadn’t it worked out that way? Why had the fates instead left the child’s life in her hands? Her useless, good-for-nothing, crippled hands, that had let that life slip through arthritic fingers?
A draft of cold air. She looked up in time to see the back door swing soundlessly open, letting in a puff and swirl of snow.
A sinister, black, serpentine shape reared up in the doorway, raising the bulk of its length off the ground, like a cobra coiling to strike.
It was back.
The creature was back.
Fear was her first, instinctive reaction, an icy stab of atavistic terror that made her back away a step or two, and which dimly surprised her, since she would have sworn a moment before that she no longer cared at all if she lived or died. Well, in fact, why struggle anymore? Let it kill her. What did it matter now? She felt resignation begin to glaze over her like a scum of ice forming over a pond, dulling her fear.
The creature swayed in the doorway. Dawn was beginning to break, the sun not yet over the horizon, but staining the sky a sullen purple-red. The creature was a black silhouette against that sullen red sky, weaving slightly from side to side, rippling sinuously. As yet, it had made no attempt to move forward into the house, to attack her, although she knew how fast it could move. Maybe it was scenting the wind, searching out her presence with whatever strange senses it possessed....
Still it didn’t move, as one long moment crawled into the next. Maybe it was taunting her, teasing her, playing with her the way a cat plays with a mouse. Enjoying her fear. Making her wait. Relishing her helplessness.
Suddenly, she was furious. The murderous creature was toying with her! Mocking her! Rage instantly melted the ice of resignation and futility. If she was too late to save Jennifer, she could still do one worthwhile thing before she died. She could take this obscenity with her. She could make sure that it slaughtered no one else’s children.
She could make it pay. Or at least die trying.
The ax was still resting against the wall, where she had put it what seemed like years ago now, handle up, a few feet away from the cot; she could just see it at the edge of her peripheral vision. Without turning, she took a slow, slow sideways step toward it, not looking away from the creature, not turning her head, not daring to do anything that might break the spell of immobility. She took another slow sideways step, and another, inching along like a crab. Slowly, still without turning her head, she stretched her hand back behind her, trying to move her body as little as possible, groping for the ax-handle.
As she touched it, her hand wrapping itself solidly around the wooden handle, the creature spoke to her. 
Kill me, it said.
It struggled against the fire! fear! pain! horror! that welled up through its being. But the torrent of voltage, wild and undirected and irresistible, drove its consciousness helplessly before the flood, driving it through that protective hedge of forces, through the whitening, searing agony of the unbearable, into memories far worse.
It was falling. Tightly wrapped within a neatly calculated bundle of shielding, its consciousness a pure nub at the center of calming forces, it descended from space, down to the Earth below, at last at the end of a journey that had taken many decades, almost half a century, with the real beginning of its Mission yet ahead. But then—impossible!--it felt a blast of radiation, raking through the core of its being, scrambling circuits. The shielding was not good enough! It wasn’t holding! It knew about the Van Allen radiation belt, of course, and that had been taken into account when the voyage was planned; beings with greater science than even its own race could command had confidently predicted that even if the Van Allen belt were to be energized by a spate of sunspots, the radiation could not possibly be strong enough to get through.
Mistakes happen, though. They were not gods, and neither were any of the other races they knew, however advanced they might be. Sometimes, even with the highest and most subtle of technologies, things go wrong.
The radiation could not get through, and yet it was getting through. High-level energies sleeted through the tightly interwoven fabric of its substance, leaving maddening pain in their wake, a hundred, a thousand times more agonizing than anything it had ever known, pain not only physical but mental as well—logical chimeras that its rational functions could not deal with, self-contradicting structures that one by one overloaded its higher functions, driving it down the asymptotal curve toward total extinction.
It was the best qualified of its race for the job ahead, a creature of vast patience, tact, wit, gentleness, diplomatic skill, culture, and erudition—all the commingled powers had agreed on that, just as they agreed that it was the turn of its race to reach out and bring a benighted alien race out of the darkness of provincial ignorance and into Civilization, just as their own race had been so contacted and assimilated into the galactic community thousands of years before. It had been so proud of that, of the responsibility it had been given. But now, it was unraveling in madness and pain, and could feel its rational mind dissolving, and could do nothing to stop the process. It felt its higher functions failing, and automatic systems taking over.
The ambassador’s race was an ancient and intensely civilized one. Long eons ago, even before contact with the communities of the stars, they had put aside their predatory origins, overridden them with a thousand culturally programmed safeguards. They no more felt the age-old archaic urges than a human felt the need to brachiate.
The urges were still there though, whispering in the blood, at the very bottom of the brain, as they must be in every corporeal creature who has evolved from a lower—or at least a more basic—form of life.
One by one, it lost reason, memory, personality; it knew the horror of losing everything that made it itself, and knowing it was losing it, and being unable to stop the process. At last, it would lose even the knowledge that something had been lost, except for a vague trickle of unease at the back of its consciousness. It would be reduced to survival programming, the underlying atavistic ancestral memory whose human equivalent would be the reptilian hindstem.
From the depths of pain, it had a last fleeting moment of clarity in which to mourn its own passing, and then most of its brain went down.
Glowing like Lucifer falling, it tumbled from the sky, down to the Earth below.
The car battery shorted out. There was a puff of acrid black smoke, and then it was free. Instantly, it reacted. Instinct hurled it away from there, away from the trap that had almost killed it, though the window, out into the night.
Outside, alone in the darkness and the swirling snow, with the Northern Lights still a vaguely troubling presence on the horizon, an uneasy prickling sensation that it could now control, it came to the full realization of what it had done.
When she got over the initial shock of hearing the creature speak, Alma Kingsley quickly picked up the ax, bringing it awkwardly around in front of her body so that she could get a better, two-handed grip on it, resting it on her shoulder, ready to swing. She backed away two steps, felt her rear foot bump into the wall, and started to edge sideways again, moving away from the wall a bit (even if it did mean moving a step or two toward the monster) so that she’d have room to swing the ax overhand at the creature if it rushed her, a woodchopper’s stroke. Couldn’t let it pin her against the wall...
Kill me, it said again.
She hesitated. She had been figuring out how to do just that, or the best way to try to do it, anyway, deciding that she’d better rush it and try to get a good swing in at it before the big ax grew too heavy for her tired old arms to hold up effectively, do it right now, before she lost her nerve.... But it kept putting her off her stride by speaking to her; she hadn’t known that it could talk.
It wasn’t “talking” at all, actually—the words seemed to print themselves in her brain somehow, faintly superimposed on reality, like the afterimage of an object you can sometimes see after you close your eyes. But she had no doubt that it was really happening, or that it was the creature who was “speaking” to her.
Go ahead, it said. Do it now. I won’t try to stop you.
She came forward a couple of steps, and then stopped, hesitating, wary. This was some kind of trick. It was trying to lure her closer so that it could strike at her, maybe counting on being fast enough to be able to dodge any blow of the ax she might get off at it. When she got close enough, it would attack....
It will not be difficult, it said persuasively. My physical component is really quite fragile. If you strike at the center of my being hard enough, with something sharp or heavy, that will kill me. That tool you have in your hand will do nicely. I perceive that the handle is made of wood; that will insulate you from any shock. You’ll be perfectly safe.
“You weren’t so concerned with my safety a few minutes ago,” Alma Kingsley said harshly. “When you were trying to kill me!”
I was insane then, it said. I have been insane for a long time. But I am insane no longer. The shock that you administered to me has re-integrated my functions. I am sane now.
“How nice for you!” Rage pulsed through her, and she tightened her grip on the ax. “You unspeakable bastard!”
It shivered convulsively, and she jumped back a step, thinking it was about to attack. But it didn’t move forward. I know what I did, it said. I am ready to atone.
“Atone?” She found herself laughing, harsh, cawing, jagged, ugly laughter that tore her throat. “You killed Jennifer! And Desmond! And...and that poor girl!” To her shame, she found she couldn’t summon up the young woman’s name, although she got a flash of her vapid, cheaply pretty face. “Damn you, you even killed my dog!” Tears sprang into her eyes and she blinked them fiercely away. She couldn’t allow it to distract her, let it put her off her guard. As soon as she did, it would strike.
I know what I did, it repeated. That’s why you have to kill me. It was swaying slightly from side to side now, as if in agitation. Kill me! Strike now! Get it over with. I won’t fight you. I know I deserve to die.
She tried to say something but the words tangled themselves in her throat and wouldn’t come out. Her head felt as if it was going to explode, and she was shaking all over. “You’re right about that!” she managed to rasp, panting with rage. “You deserve to die a hundred times over!”
It was shaking too, as though stirred by the same inner wind. I know that, it said. I can’t live with the guilt and the shame. I was sent here on a mission of peace, to bring you the gifts that would allow you to live as civilized creatures, without war, without want and poverty and hatred. Instead, I killed everyone I met! It swayed violently. There could be no worse failure! No worse betrayal of everything that I believe in! Kill me!
She raised the ax. Images flashed through her mind: Jennifer, her face gray and blistered and burned...Iago collapsing in a pathetic jumble of furry limbs...the girl, the roadhouse pickup, smiling vapidly although amiably as she dug a fork into her eggs...Desmond waving his hands and talking expansively, self-importantly.... She was crying openly now, tears running down her face, breathing in harsh gasps through her mouth, but she didn’t lose sight of the monster, in spite of the tears. She squeezed the wood of the ax-handle until her hands ached. Abruptly, fiercely, she rushed forward, swinging the ax as far back as she could, ready to bring it crashing down.
A step or two away, she stopped, hesitating, the ax swung high in the air.
It hadn’t moved, although she was in easy attack distance by now.
DO IT! it shrieked.
There was a long frozen moment, as though time itself had stopped. For some reason, she found herself thinking about something she hadn’t allowed herself to consciously think about for decades: her husband’s coffin, shipped by air back from Vietnam, being lowered into a hole dug into the raw red earth on a blustery wet spring morning, a flag draped over it, while people in uniform stood stiffly next to the grave and saluted and little Stephanie fidgeted impatiently by her side, too young to understand...the incongruously cheerful sound of birds singing somewhere off in the trees (and she realizing how incongruous it was even at the time, and hating herself for noticing something like that at a time like this, no matter how ironic it was)...her thinking how much Steve would have hated having his coffin wrapped in a flag, how he would have disliked the solemnity of this whole ceremony, the priest droning pious platitudes about somebody he’d never met and how Steve was now going to walk with Jesus in A Better World...looking at her own mother beside her, leaning heavily on Uncle Henry’s arm, noticing with a shock how old and frail and tired she looked.... The photo that had stood on the mantelpiece in the living room as long as she could remember, her father in a World War II Army uniform, the father she’d never met, a black star on the glass frame, the photo gathering dust for years, never touched, never moved.... Her own daughter Stephanie, laughing and hugging her at the airport gate, kissing her husband and her baby goodbye, telling them that she’d send them all postcards and maybe some souvenirs if she could find a moment to steal from the sales conference, only minutes before her airplane was blown to pieces in midair by a terrorist’s bomb.... The military jets screaming by outside, mean and black and predatory, on the way to the buildup for the next war, that would kill somebody else’s children....
As though it were reading her mind—and who knew, perhaps it was—it said, The Mission will succeed, even though I failed. Eventually. They will send someone else. It may take another hundred years for them to get here, but eventually they will, and we’ll help you heal this world of yours. I have to believe that. Eventually, my failure won’t matter. The Mission will succeed.
Another hundred years. How many children dead in that time, in how many wars?
She heard the sound of a siren, a thin wail still far away, on the edge of hearing. The ambulance coming.
Kill me, it said You have the right. I owe you that. I have nothing to pay with but my life.
Suddenly, she was very, very tired, unutterably weary, as though the marrow in her bones had turned to lead.
Hurry. They’re coming. Soon it will be too late. Kill me now. Don’t hesitate. I want you to do it. I don’t want to live. I can’t live with what I’ve done. It hurts too much.
A kind of weary revulsion seized her then, a nauseated rejection of everything and everyone. She stared at the alien for another long moment. “Then live, God damn you,” she cried bitterly. “Live and be damned!”
She flung the ax aside.
Her legs gave out, and she sat down abruptly on the cold floor. If this was a trick, then it had won. She no longer even cared. Let it kill her if it wanted to.
The wailing siren came closer and closer, the sound cutting sharply through the cold winter air.
One year later, on the anniversary of First Contact at Maple Hill Farm (as the scroll on the screen would say whenever they came back from the commercials), Alma Kingsley sat alone before the television set, listening to herself being praised on CNN. The commentators prattled on and on about the terrible tragedy of the Ambassador’s arrival, and of the even greater tragedy that would have occurred had it not been allowed to complete its Mission; one commentator, face radiating sincerity the way a potbellied stove radiates heat, spoke of Alma Kingsley as a secular saint for forgoing personal revenge for the Sake Of All Mankind.
The Ambassador had tried to attend Jennifer and Desmond’s funerals (Candy was buried elsewhere), but she had refused to allow it to attend, to the disappointment of the newsmen, although they were there filming everything in sight anyway, keeping tight close-ups on her face as the last remnants of her family were lowered into the ground, not wanting to miss the slightest nuance of expression. Later, at the UN, the Ambassador had insisted on giving an emotional eulogy for the people he had inadvertently killed, going on to say that Alma Kingsley’s greatness of spirit, in being willing to forgive even the very creature who had killed her own granddaughter, all by itself was enough to prove that humanity was worthy of inclusion among the great interstellar Community of Races, and would insure their admission.
Sometimes she wondered if the creature, who was certainly many times smarter than she or any other human being, had manipulated her psychologically into deciding not to kill it, using a sly variant of Br’er Rabbit’s “Don’t Throw Me In the Briar Patch!” routine to get her to act the way it wanted her to act. Certainly it had been easier for it to explain itself to the ambulance crew and the police with her there alive on the scene to vouch for it than it would have been if she were dead, and it was there alone to greet them with a houseful of murdered people at its back. And the forgiveness angle made for great press, just the spin to neutralize the unfortunate fact that the Ambassador had started its career on Earth by killing as many humans as possible. Or maybe it had been sincere. Certainly its people did seem to be highly ethical, concerned with Justice and Right Actions in a fussy, legalistic, rabbinical way that seemed almost prim. She would never know, one way or the other.
CNN was now running through a quick inventory of all that humanity’s new friends had given the Earth so far. Once the Ambassador had used the living fabric of its body to form and trigger an interstellar Gate, new technologies had poured through in a seemingly endless stream: Defensive weapons that really were defensive, for they couldn’t be used offensively...an end to disease...medicines to expand the human lifespan a hundred years or more...safe and plentiful energy...the transmutation of elements...gold from lead...lilacs from mud...silk purses from sows’ ears...a partridge in a pear tree...blah, blah, blah.
They were like children on Christmas morning, with bright wrappings strewn about and nothing but presents as far as the eye could see. To listen to them go on, it seemed that the entire human race was going straight to Heaven. Everybody was going to be healthy and beautiful and tall. They were all going to be transformed into gods.
Except Jennifer. She didn’t get to be immortal and go to the stars. She got to lie at the bottom of a grave in Brattleboro, rotting in the cold unforgiving ground, while worms ate her.
Alma Kingsley sat staring at the screen and listening as voices far older than any god spoke within her. Their words were dark and poisonous. They ate at her heart like acid.
She got up and fixed herself another Manhattan. Bitterly, she drank it down, wishing—as she would wish every day for the remaining two hundred years of her life—that she’d killed the damn thing when she had the chance.

FAIRY TALE
I
 t wasn’t a village, as is sometimes said these days, when we’ve forgotten just how small the old world was. In those days, long ago in a world now vanished with barely a trace left behind, a village was four or five houses and their outbuildings. A large village was maybe ten or fifteen houses at a crossroad, and perhaps an inn or gasthaus.
No, it was a town, even a moderately large one, on the banks of a sluggish brown river, the capital of a small province in a small country, lost and nearly forgotten—even then—in the immensity of the Central European steppes that stretch endlessly from the Barents Sea to the Black, and from the Urals to France. The nearest electric light was in Prague, hundreds of miles away. Even gaslighting was newfangled and marvelous here, although there were a few rich homes on the High Street that had it. Only the King and the Mayor and a few of the most prosperous merchants had indoor toilets.
The Romans had been here once, and as you followed the only road across the empty steppe toward town, you would pass the broken white marble pillars they had left behind them, as well as a vine-overgrown fane where, in another story, you might have ventured forth at night to view for yourself the strange lights that local legends say haunt the spot, and perhaps, your heart in your throat, glimpsed the misty shapes of ancient pagan gods as they flitted among the ruined columns...but this isn’t that kind of story.
Further in, the road would cut across wide fields of wheat being worked by stooped-over peasants, bent double with their butts in the air, moving forward a step at a time with a sort of swaying, shuffling motion as they weeded, sweeping their arms back and forth over the ground like searching trunks, making them look like some strange herd of small double-trunked elephants, or those men who wear their heads below their navels. The bushes are decorated with crucified rabbits, tarry black blood matting their fur, teeth bared in death agony, a warning to their still-living brethren to stay away from the crops.
As the road fell down out of the fields and turned into the High Street of the town, you would see old peasant women, dressed all in black from head to foot, spilling buckets of water over the stone steps of the tall narrow houses on either side of the narrow street, and then scrubbing the steps with stiff-bristled brooms. Occasionally, as you passed, one or another of the old peasant women would straighten up and stare unwinkingly at you with opaque agate eyes, like a black and ancient bird.
At the foot of the High Street, you would see a castle looming above the river, small by the standards of more prosperous countries elsewhere in Europe, but large enough to have dominated the tactical landscape in the days before gunpowder and cannon made all such places obsolete. It’s a grim enough pile, and, in another story, cruel vampire lords would live there—but this isn’t that kind of story either. Instead of vampires, the King lived there, or lived there for a few months each year, anyway, as he graciously moved his court from province to province, spreading the considerable financial burden of supporting it around.
He was what was called “a good King,” which meant that he didn’t oppress the peasants any more than he was traditionally allowed to, and occasionally even distributed some small largess to them when he was able, on the ancient principle—sound husbandry—that you get more work out of your animals when they’re moderately well-fed and therefore reasonably healthy. So he was a good King, or a good-enough King, at any rate. But in many a dimly-lit kitchen or bistro or backroom bar, the old men of the town huddled around their potbellied stoves at night and warmed their hands, or tried to, and muttered fearfully about what might happen when the Old King died, and his son and heir took over.
But as this isn’t really a story of palace intrigue, either, or only partially so, you must move on to a large but somewhat shabby-genteel house on the very outskirts of town, the kind of neighborhood that will be swallowed by the expanding town and replaced by rows of worker’s flats in thirty years or so. That girl there, sullenly and rather uselessly scrubbing down the flagstones in the small courtyard, is the one we’re interested in.
For the kind of story this is, is a fairy-tale. Sort of.
There are some things they don’t tell you, of course, even in the Grimm’s version, let alone the Disney.
For one thing, no one ever called her “Cinderella,” although occasionally they called her much worse. Her name was Eleanor, an easy-enough name to use, and no one ever really paid enough attention to her to bother to come up with a nickname for her, even a cruel and taunting one. Most of the time, no one paid enough attention to even taunt her.
There was a step-mother, although whether she was evil or not depended on your point of view. These were hard times in a hard age, when even the relatively well-to-do lived not far from hunger and privation, and if she chose to take care of her own children first in preference to her dead husband’s child, well, there were many who would not blame her for that. In fact, many would instead compliment her on her generosity in giving her husband’s by-blow a place in her home and at her hearth when no law of Man or God required her to do so, or to lift a finger to insure the child’s survival. Many did so compliment her, and the step-mother would lift her eyes piously to Heaven, and throw her hands in the air, and mutter modest demurrals.
For one of the things that they never tell you, a missing piece that helps make sense of the whole situation, is that Cinderella was a bastard. Yes, her father had doted on her, lavishing love and affection on her, had taken her into his house and raised her from a babe, but he had never married Eleanor’s mother, who had died in childbirth, and he himself had died after marrying the Evil Step-Mother but before making a will that would have legally enforced some kind of legacy or endowment for his bastard daughter.
Today, of course, she would sue, and there’d be court-battles and DNA-testing, and appearances with lots of shouting on daytime talk-shows, and probably she would eventually win a slice of the pie. In those days, in that part of the world, she had no recourse under the law—or anywhere else, since the Church shunned those born in sin.
So the step-mother really was being quite generous in continuing to supply Eleanor’s room and board rather than throwing her out of the house to freeze and starve in the street. That she didn’t as well provide much in the way of warmth of familial affection, being icy and remote to Eleanor—the visible and undeniable evidence of her late husband’s love for another woman—on those rare occasions when she deigned to notice her at all, is probably not surprising, and to really expect her to feel otherwise is perhaps more than could be asked. She had problems of her own, after all, and had already gone a long mile further than she needed to just by continuing to feed the child in the first place.
There were step-sisters too, children of a previous marriage (a marriage where the husband had also died young...but before you’re tempted to cast the stepmother in a Black Widow scenario, keep in mind that in those days, in that place, dying young was not an especially rare phenomenon), but they were not particularly evil either—although they didn’t much like Eleanor, and let it show. However, they were no more cruel and vindictive—but no less, either—than most young girls forced into the company of someone they didn’t much like, someone of fallen status whom their mother didn’t much like either and made no particular effort to protect. Someone who, truth be told, had probably lorded it over them, just a little bit, when she was her father’s favorite and they were the new girls in the household.
Neither were the step-sisters particularly ugly; this is something that came in with Disney, who always equates ugliness with evil. They were, in fact, quite acceptably attractive by the standards of their day.
Although it is true that when Eleanor was around, they tended to dim in her presence, in male eyes at least, as bright bulbs can be dimmed by a brighter one.
Eleanor was beautiful, of course. We have to give her that much if the rest of the story is going to make any sense. Like her step-sisters, she had been brought up as a child of the relatively prosperous merchant class, which ensured that she had been well-enough nourished as a babe to have grown up with good teeth and glossy hair and strong, straight bones—unlike the peasants, who were often afflicted with rickets and other vitamin-deficiency diseases.
No doubt she had breasts and legs, like other young women, but whether her breasts were large or small, whether her legs were long or squat, is impossible to tell at this distant point in time.
We can tell from the story, though, that she was considered to be striking, and perhaps a bit unusual; so, since no-one knows what she really looked like, let’s cater to the tastes of our own time and say that she was tall and coltish, with long lovely legs and small—but not too small—breasts, a contrast to many around her upon whom a diet consisting largely of potatoes and coarse black bread had imposed a dumpier sort of physique.
Since this tale is set in that part of Central Europe that had changed hands dozens of times in the past few hundred years and was destined to change hands again a few times more before the century was out, with every wave of raping-and-pillaging Romans, Celts, Goths, Huns, Russians, Mongols, and Turks scrambling the gene-pool a bit further, let’s also say that she had red hair and green eyes and a pale complexion, a rare but possible combination, given the presence of Russian and Celtic DNA in the genetic stew. That should make her sufficiently distinctive. (It’s possible, of course, that she really looked like a female Russian weight-lifter, complete with faint mustache, or like a walking potato, and you’re welcome to picture her that way instead if you’d like—but if so, you must grant at least that she was a striking and charismatic weight-lifter or potato, one who had had men sniffing around her from the time she started to grow hair in places other than her head.)
In truth, like most “beautiful” women, who often are not really even pretty if you can catch them on those rare occasions when their faces are in repose, her allure was based in large part on her charisma and elan, and a personality that remained vital and intense in spite of a life that increasingly tried to grind her down.
Eleanor didn’t wait on the others to the degree shown in the Disney version, of course—this was a hard society, and everyone had to work, including the step-mother and the two step-sisters. Much of the cost of maintaining the house (which was not a working farm, regardless of what the stories tell you, too close to the center of town, although they may have kept a few chickens) was defrayed by revenues from land that Eleanor’s father had owned elsewhere, but those revenues had slowly declined since the father’s death, and in order to keep a tenuous foot-hold on the middle-class, they had been forced to take in seamstress work, which occupied all of them for several hours a day.
It’s true, though, that since her father died, two years before, and since revenues had declined enough to preclude keeping servants, that much of the rest of the work of maintaining the household had fallen on Eleanor’s shoulders, in addition to her seamstress chores.
She found it bitterly hard, as would you; in fact, spoiled by modernity, we’d find it even more onerous than she did, and suffer even more keenly. Housework was hard physical labor in those days, especially in the backward hinterlands of Central Europe, where even the (from our perspective) minimal household conveniences that might be available to a rich family in London would not arrive for a long lifetime, or maybe two. Housework was brutal and unrelenting labor, stretching from dawn until well after dusk, the equivalent in its demands on someone’s reserves of strength and endurance of working on a road-gang or in a coal mine; it was the main reason, along with the rigors and hazards of childbirth, why women wore out so fast and died so young. Not for nothing did the phrase “Slaving over a hot stove” come into existence; doing laundry was even worse, a task so grueling—pounding the clothes, twisting them dry, starting over again—that it was rarely tackled more than once a week even in households where there were several women to divide the work up amongst them; and scrubbing, inside or out, was done on your knees in any and all weathers, with a stiff-bristled brush and raw potash soap that stung your nostrils and blistered your hands.
Of course, every other woman in this society, except for the very richest, had to deal with these kind of labors as well, so there was nothing unique about Eleanor’s lot, or any reason to feel sorry for her in particular, as the stories sometimes seem to invite us to do...the subtext pretty obviously being that she is an aristocrat-in-hiding, or at least a member of the prosperous upper class, being forced to do the work of a peasant. Think of that! Being made to work just like a common, ordinary girl! As if she wasn’t any better than anyone else! (Oddly enough, this reaction of indignation usually comes from people who have to work for a living every day themselves, not from whatever millionaires or members of the peerage might be lurking in the audience.)
In fact, though, Eleanor had also been spoiled, not by modernity but by her father, sheltered by his money from most of the chores even a child of the merchant class would usually have had to become inured to...so perhaps she did feel it more keenly than most women of her day would have. Her father had also spoiled her in other, more significant ways, teaching her to read (something still frowned upon, if no longer actively forbidden by law), teaching her to love books and learning, teaching her to dream. Teaching her to be ambitious—but ambitious for what purpose? She had a good mind, and her father had given her the beginnings of a decent education, but what was she supposed to do with it? Further formal schooling was out of the question, even if there had been money for it—that was for men. All the professions were for men as well. There was nothing she could do, no way her life could change. She was doomed to stay here in this once-loved house she had come to hate, working like a slave day and night for people she didn’t even like, much less consider to be family, until her youth and strength and beauty drained away like water spilled in the street, and she woke up one day to find herself spavined and old.
She could feel this doom closing in around her like a black cloud, making every day a little more hopeless and bitter and grim. She could feel herself dying, a little bit every day, her mind dulling, her strength and resiliency waning.
Somehow, she had to get out of here.
But there was no way out...
After several months of this bleak circle, she decided at last that there was only one possible way to escape: she would trade sex for a better life—or at least a more comfortable one.
It was a choice that untold thousands of young women—and not a few men—had made before her, and that thousands more would make after her. She’d looked her situation over with cold-eyed clarity, and realized that she had no commodity to offer that anyone would ever value except for youth, beauty, and virginity—and that none of them were going to last long. A few more years of constant grinding toil would take care of the youth and beauty, and sooner or later one of the men who had been circling her with increasing persistence would corner her in the stables or behind a market stall or in an alley somewhere and rape her, and that would be the end of her virginity (a valuable commodity ever since syphilis had started to ravage Europe a few centuries back) as well. If he got her pregnant, she’d be stuck here forever.
Young as she was, she was not unaware of the trick that her body could be made to do when she huddled alone in the darkness on her cot at night, biting a dishcloth to keep anyone from hearing the sounds that she couldn’t stop herself from making, and she was not so hard-headed as to be immune to thoughts of love and romance and marriage. In fact, she’d exchanged hot glances, longing words, and one quick delicious kiss with Casimir, a big, lumbering, sweet-natured boy who worked in the glass foundry a street away. She was pretty sure that she could win his heart, perhaps even get him to marry her—but what good would that do? Even if they could somehow scrape up enough money to live on, she’d still be stuck in this stifling provincial town, living much the same kind of life she was living now. And then the children would start coming, one a year until she wore out and died...
No, love and marriage were not going to save her. Sex was going to have to do that. She’d have to trade her body to someone rich enough to take her out of this life, perhaps even, if things worked out for the best, out of this town altogether.
Eleanor’s religious upbringing had not perhaps been of the strictest, her father tending towards clandestine secularism, but of course some qualms about the idea of selling herself in this fashion remained. Still, she had heard the women talking at the well or in the marketplace or even in the church when no man was around to hear, and it didn’t sound all that difficult. Lay on your back, open your legs, let him grunt on top of you for five minutes while you stared at the ceiling. A lot less difficult than scrubbing the floor until your fingers bleed.
But if she was going to sell herself, she was damned if she wasn’t going to get the best price possible.
Eleanor prided herself on her clear-eyed logic and hard-headed rationality, but here’s where her plan began to be tinged by a deep vein of pastel romanticism that she wouldn’t even have admitted to herself that she possessed.
She had no intention of becoming a common whore, if whore she must be. Even a town of this size had a few such, and the life they led was nothing to envy or emulate. No, she would set her sights higher.
Why not set them as high as they would go?
The Prince. She had seen him go by in a parade once, the year before, up on a prancing roan stallion, tall and handsome, his plumed hat nodding, the silver fastenings on his uniform gleaming in the sun. She’d even had hot dreams about him, those nights when his ghost rather than Casimir’s had visited her in her bed.
She was realistic enough to know that marriage was out of the question. Princes didn’t marry commoners, even those from families with a lot more money than her own. That was so ingrained in her worldview that she never entertained the possibility that the Prince would marry her, even as the remotest fantasy.
Princes did fuck commoners, though, that happened all the time, and always had. And if they liked them well enough, sometimes they kept them. Being a royal mistress didn’t sound so bad; since she had no choice, she’d settle for that.
All she had to do was get him to want her.
Why not? He was a man, wasn’t he? Every other man she knew pursued her and tried to grope her or worse when there was nobody else around, even men three times her age. Maybe a Prince would be no different.
And if for some reason the Prince didn’t like her, she thought, with a flash of the practical shrewdness that was so typical of her, the palace would be full of other rich men. Somebody would want her.
There was a Ball at the palace every weekend when the King and his court were in residency during the summer months. Her family was not rich enough for any of them to be invited to these affairs, nor ever had been, even at their most prosperous. But she would get in somehow.
Well, we all know what comes next, of course. The dress made in secret, although there were no birds or mice to help her. Nor did she need any—she was, after all, a seamstress. There were no Fairy Godmothers either, no pumpkins turned to coaches, no magically conjured horses. She slipped out of the house while her step-mother, a woman who had been embittered and disappointed by life, was slowly drinking herself sodden with her nightly regimen of alternating glasses of tisane and brandy, and walked all the way through town to the river, the night air like velvet around her, the blood pounding in her throat, the castle slowly rising higher and higher above the houses, blazing with lights, as she drew near.
Somehow, she got inside. Who knows how? Maybe the guards were reluctant to stop a beautiful and well-dressed young woman who moved with easy confidence. Maybe she walked in with a group of other party-goers. Maybe the guards were all drunk, and she just walked by them. Maybe there were no guards, in this sleepy backwater in a time without a major war brewing. Maybe there were guards, but they just didn’t care.
However she did it, she got in, and it was everything she’d ever dreamed of.
It was glamorous. Give them their due, the aristocracy has always known how to do glamorous.
Although the grim Gothic tower with its battlements and crenellations and murder-holes still loomed darkly up behind, this part of the castle had been modernized and made into a palace instead. In the Grand Ballroom, there were floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the whole sweep of the town, which was stretched out below like a diorama on a tabletop, there were balconies and tapestried alcoves with richly embroidered Oriental hangings, there were flowers everywhere, and a polished marble floor that seemed to stretch on forever, shimmering in the light of a thousand candles like a lake of mist lit by moonlight. Out on the marble floor, people in vivid, multi-colored clothes twirled around like butterflies caught in a whirlwind, while music filled all the air, thick and rich and hot as blood, and made the nerves jump under the skin.
It was glamorous, as long as you didn’t get too close to the privies (it was a warm summer night, after all). This would bother you, though, more than it bothered Eleanor, who was already used to an everyday level of stink that would have turned the stomachs of most moderns.
Cranking her charm to its highest setting, palms damp, she swallowed her fear and mingled.
She didn’t really fool anyone, of course. She was a good seamstress, but the materials she’d had to work with were nowhere near fine enough for court fashion. But it didn’t matter much. She was beautiful, and charming, and vivacious, and still had enough of the remnants of society manners learned before her family fell on harder times to get by—although she wasn’t fooling anybody there, either. No matter. She was an exotic amusement, someone new in over-familiar court circles where everyone had worked through all possible permutations of their relationships with everyone else long before. They’d have tired of her within days, of course, but by then she might well have found some rich young gentleman willing to take her on as a toy, and perhaps even keep her for awhile...so her plan might actually have worked, if she’d been willing to settle for someone less exalted.
But then the Prince crossed the floor, and stood at the edge of the ring of preening young men who now surrounded her, and their eyes met, and his first grew round with surprise, and then slowly grew hot.
He strode forward, the crowd of lesser men melting away before him, and held out his hand, imperiously commanding her to dance, all the while his eyes smoldered at her. She’d never seen anyone so handsome.
Eleanor took his hand and they spun away, and for a second, gliding across the softly gleaming marble floor, moving with him with the music all around them, it seemed like the perfect culmination of every fairy-tale she’d ever read.
Then he yanked her roughly aside into one of the curtained alcoves, tugging the hangings shut behind them. There was a divan in there, and an oil-lamp, and a small table with a nearly empty bottle of brandy on it. The air was thick and foul, with a strong reek of pungent animal musk to it, like the den of a panther or a bear, and the divan was rumpled and stained.
Startled, she started to speak, but the Prince waved her brusquely to silence. For a long moment, the Prince stared at her, coldly, sneeringly, contemptuously, almost as if he hated her. His heavy, handsome face was harsh and cruel, cold as winter ice in spite of the heat that burned in his small hard eyes. He was viciously drunk, his face flushed, swaying where he stood, and he reeked of brandy and sweat and old semen, a streak of which still glistened on his pants from some previous encounter earlier in the evening. He made a wet, gloating noise, like a greedy child smacking its lips, and swept Eleanor crushingly into his arms.
All at once, he was kissing her brutally, biting her lips, forcing his tongue into her mouth, his breath like death, the taste of him sour and rancid and bitter. He grabbed her breasts, squeezing them savagely with his powerful hands, mashing and twisting them, so that sudden blinding pain shot through her.
Then he was forcing her down onto the divan, bearing her down under his crushing weight, tearing at her clothes, forcing a knee roughly between her legs, prying them open.
If she’d been as hard-headed and practical as she thought she was, she would have laid back and let him force himself on her, endured his grunting and thrusting and battering either in silence or with as much of a simulation of passionate enjoyment as she could muster, let him contemptuously wipe his dick on her afterward and then tell him how witty that was. But as he bore her down, smothering her under his weight and stench, bruising her flesh with his vise-like fingers, all her buried romanticism came rushing to the surface—it wasn’t supposed to be like this!—and as she heard her dress and undergarments rip under his tearing hands and felt the night air on her suddenly exposed breasts, she fought herself free with a sudden burst of panicked strength, and clawed the Prince’s face.
They both leaped to their feet. The Prince stared at her in astonishment for a moment, three deep claw marks on his cheek dripping vivid red blood, and then came for her again, murder rather than sex on his mind this time.
Eleanor had been attacked before—once by a stable-hand and once by a greengrocer in a lane behind the market at dusk—and she knew what to do.
She kicked the Prince hard in the crotch, putting her weight and the strength of her powerful young legs into it, and the Prince mewed and folded and fell, wrapping himself into a tight ball on the floor, for the instant too shocked by pain even to scream.
Eleanor’s practicality returned with a rush. She was moments away from being arrested, and probably jailed for the rest of her life, certainly for many years. Maybe they’d even execute her. What the Prince had tried to do to her wouldn’t matter, she knew. No one would care. All that would count was what she had done to him.
She gathered her ruined dress around her, hiding her breasts as well as she could, and fled the alcove. Straight across the Grand Ballroom and out of the palace, as fast as she could go without actually running, as voices began to rise in the distance behind her, and the palace clock chimed midnight.
You know the rest, or you think that you do.
The next day, the Prince did begin searching obsessively for her, but it was for revenge, not for love; the three red weals across his handsome face filled him with a rage that momentarily eclipsed even drinking and screwing, his usual preoccupations, and goaded him to furious action.
Fortunately for Eleanor, she had been wise enough not to use her real name, or her full name, at least, with those she’d talked with at the Ball, and as she was not a regular in court circles, nobody knew where to find her.
That was where the famous slipper came in. Yes, there was a slipper, but it was an ordinary one, not one made of glass. “Glass” is a mistranslation of the French word used by Perrault; what he really said was “fur.” It wasn’t fur either. For that matter, it wasn’t really a slipper. It was an ordinary dress shoe of the type appropriate to that time and place.
But it had slipped off Eleanor’s foot while she struggled with the Prince in the alcove, and it was infused with her scent. By mid-afternoon the next day, the secret police were using teams of keen-nosed hunting dogs, following her scent on the slipper, to try to track her through the streets to her home.
There was, of course, no nonsense about trying the slipper on the feet of every woman in the kingdom. Nor did Eleanor’s step-sisters cut bits of their own feet off in order to try to get them to fit into the slipper, as some versions of this story would have it. Nor did flocks of angry birds fly down and peck out their eyes and bite off their noses (a scene Disney inexplicably missed somehow), as in other versions.
In fact, except for a glimpse of her step-mother lying down in a darkened room with a wet cloth over her eyes, seen when Eleanor sneaked cautiously into the house late the previous evening, Eleanor never saw her step-mother or her step-sisters again.
The Prince had his hunt organized and moving by noon, pretty early for a Prince, especially a mammothly hung-over one, which shows you how serious he was about revenge. Fortunately for Eleanor, she was used to rising at the crack of dawn, so she got the jump on him.
In fact, she hadn’t slept at all that night, but had spent the night with plans and preparations. She didn’t know about the slipper-sniffing dogs, of course, but she knew that this was a small enough town that the Prince could find her eventually if he wanted to badly enough, and she was shrewd enough to guess that he would.
So by the time the sky was lightening in the east, and the birds were twittering in the branches of the trees in the wet gray dawn (perhaps arguing about whether pecking out the eyes of Eleanor’s step-sisters was really a good use of their time), Eleanor was out the door with a coarse burlap sack in which she’d secreted a few hunks of bread and cheese, and what was left of her father’s silver service, which usually resided in a locked highboy—the key for which was kept somewhere that Eleanor wasn’t supposed to know about.
Her next stop was to intercept Casimir on his way to the glass foundry and talk faster and more earnestly than she ever had in her life, for she’d suddenly realized that although she still wanted to get out, she didn’t want to go without him.
What she said to convince him, we’ll never know. Perhaps he wasn’t all that difficult to convince; having no family and only minimal prospects, he had little to lose here himself. Perhaps he’d wanted to run away with her all along, but was too shy to ask.
Whatever she said, it worked. He slipped back into his room to retrieve from under a loose floorboard a small amount of money he’d been able to save—perhaps against the day he could convince Eleanor to marry him—and then they were off.
By now, everybody in town knew about the slipper and the hunt for the Mystery Girl, and you could already hear the hounds baying in the distance.
They escaped from town by hiding in a dung cart—Eleanor’s idea, to kill her scent.
After scrubbing in a fast-moving stream, while she shyly hid her breasts from him and he pretended not to look, they set off on foot across the countryside, walking the back roads to avoid pursuit, hitching rides in market-bound farmer’s carts, later catching a narrow-gauge train that started and stopped, stopped and started, sometimes, for no apparent reason, sitting motionless for hours at tiny deserted stations where weeds grew up through the tracks and dogs slept on their backs on the empty sun-drenched platforms, all four legs in the air. In this manner, they inched their way across Europe, slowly running through Casimir’s small store of cash, living on black bread, stale cheese, and sour red wine.
In Hamburg, they sold Eleanor’s father’s silver to buy passage on a ship going to the United States, and some crudely-forged identity papers. Before they were allowed aboard with their questionable papers, Eleanor had to blow the harbormaster, kneeling before him on the rough plank floor of his office, splinters digging into her knees, while he jammed his thick dirty cock that smelled like a dead lizard into her mouth, and she tried not to gag.
Casimir never found out; there were some of the harbormaster’s companions who would have preferred for him to pay their unofficial passage fee rather than her, and Casimir, still being a boy in many ways, would have indignantly refused, and they would have been caught and maybe killed. She considered it a small enough price to pay for getting a chance at a new life in a new world, and rarely thought about it thereafter. She figured that Casimir had nothing to complain about, as when she did come to his bed, after they had been safely married in the New World, she came to it as a virgin, and they had the bloody sheet to prove it (just as well, too—Casimir was a good man, and a sweet-natured one, but he was a man of his time, after all, and couldn’t be expected to be too liberal about things).
They made their way eventually to Chicago, where work for seamstresses and glaziers could be had, and where they had forty-five tumultuous years together, sometimes happy, sometimes not, until one bitter winter afternoon, carrying a pane of glass through the sooty city snow, Casimir’s heart broke in his chest.
Eleanor lived another twenty years, and died on a cot in the kitchen near the stove (in the last few days, she’d refused to be taken upstairs to the bedroom), surrounded by children and grandchildren, and by the homey smells of cooked food, wood smoke, and the sharper smells of potash and lye, all of which she now found oddly comforting, although she’d hated them when she was young. She regretted nothing that she’d ever done in her life, and, except for a few moments at the very end when her body took over and struggled uselessly to breathe, her passing was as easy as any human being’s has ever been.
After the Old King died, the Prince only got to reign for a few years before the monarchy was overthrown by civil war. The Prince and the rest of the royal family and most of the nobility were executed, kind or cruel, innocent or corrupt. The winning side fell in its turn, some decades later, and eventually a military junta, run by a local Strongman, took over.
Years later, Eleanor’s grandson was in command of a column of tanks that entered and conquered the town, since one of the Strongman’s successors had allied himself with the Axis.
Later that night, Eleanor’s grandson climbed up to the ruins of the royal castle, mostly destroyed in an earlier battle, and looked out over the remains of the floor of the Grand Ballroom, open now to the night sky, weeds growing up through cracks in the once brilliantly polished marble that still gleamed dully in the moonlight, and wondered why he felt a moment of drifting melancholy, a twinge of sorrow that quickly dissipated, like waking from a sad dream that fades even as you try to remember it, and is gone.

THE PEACEMAKER
R
oy had dreamed of the sea, as he often did. When he woke up that morning, the wind was sighing through the trees outside with a sound like the restless murmuring of surf, and for a moment he thought that he was home, back in the tidy brick house by the beach, with everything that had happened undone, and hope opened hotly inside him, like a wound.
“Mom?” he said. He sat up, straightening his legs, expecting his feet to touch the warm mass that was his dog Toby, Toby always slept curled on the foot of his bed, but already everything was breaking up and changing, slipping away, and he blinked through sleep-gummed eyes at the thin blue light coming in through the attic window, felt the hardness of the old Army cot under him, and realized that he wasn’t home, that there was no home anymore, that for him there could never be a home again.
He pushed the blankets aside and stood up. It was bitterly cold in the big attic room—winter was dying hard, the most terrible winter he could remember—and the rough wood planking burned his feet like ice, but he couldn’t stay in bed anymore, not now.
None of the other kids were awake yet; he threaded his way through the other cots—accidentally bumping against one of them so that its occupant tossed and moaned and began to snore in a higher register—and groped through cavernous shadows to the single high window. He was just tall enough to reach it, if he stood on tiptoe. He forced the window open, the old wood of its frame groaning in protest, plaster dust puffing, and shivered as the cold dawn wind poured inward, hitting him in the face, tugging with ghostly fingers at his hair, sweeping past him to rush through the rest of the stuffy attic like a restless child set free to play.
The wind smelled of pine resin and wet earth, not of salt flats and tides, and the bird-sound that rode in on that wind was the burbling of wrens and the squawking of bluejays, not the raucous shrieking of sea gulls...but even so, as he braced his elbows against the window frame and strained up to look out, his mind still full of the broken fragments of dreams, he half-expected to see the ocean below, stretched out to the horizon, sending patient wavelets to lap against the side of the house. Instead he saw the nearby trees holding silhouetted arms up against the graying sky, the barn and the farmyard, all still lost in shadow, the surrounding fields, the weathered macadam line of the road, the forested hills rolling away into distance. Silver mist lay in pockets of low ground, retreated in wraithlike streamers up along the ridges.
Not yet. The sea had not chased him here—yet.
Somewhere out there to the east, still invisible, were the mountains, and just beyond those mountains was the sea that he had dreamed of, lapping quietly at the dusty Pennsylvania hill towns, coal towns, that were now, suddenly, seaports. There the Atlantic waited, held at bay, momentarily at least, by the humpbacked wall of the Appalachians, still perhaps forty miles from here, although closer now by leagues of swallowed land and drowned cities than it had been only three years before.
He had been down by the seawall that long-ago morning, playing some forgotten game, watching the waves move in slow oily swells, like some heavy, dull metal in liquid form, watching the tide come in...and come in...and come in...He had been excited at first, as the sea crept in, way above the high-tide line, higher than he had ever seen it before, and then, as the sea swallowed the beach entirely and began to lap patiently against the base of the seawall, he had become uneasy, and then, as the sea continued to rise up toward the top of the seawall itself, he had begun to be afraid.... The sea had just kept coming in, rising slowly and inexorably, swallowing the land at a slow walking pace, never stopping, always coming in, always rising higher.... By the time the sea had swallowed the top of the seawall and begun to creep up the short grassy slope toward his house, sending glassy fingers probing almost to his feet, he had started to scream, he had whirled and run frantically up the slope, screaming hysterically for his parents, and the sea had followed patiently at his heels....
A “marine transgression,” the scientists called it. Ordinary people called it, inevitably, the Flood. Whatever you called it, it had washed away the old world forever. Scientists had been talking about the possibility of such a thing for years—some of them even pointing out that it was already as warm as it had been at the peak of the last interglacial, and getting warmer—but few had suspected just how fast the Antarctic ice could melt. Many times during those chaotic weeks, one scientific King Canute or another had predicted that the worst was over, that the tide would rise this high and no higher...but each time the sea had come inexorably on, pushing miles and miles farther inland with each successive high tide, rising almost three hundred feet in the course of one disastrous summer, drowning lowlands around the globe until there were no lowlands anymore. In the United States alone, the sea had swallowed most of the East Coast east of the Appalachians, the West Coast west of the Sierras and the Cascades, much of Alaska and Hawaii, Florida, the Gulf coast, east Texas, taken a big wide scoop out of the lowlands of the Mississippi Valley, thin fingers of water penetrating north to Iowa and Illinois, and caused the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes to overflow and drown their shorelines. The Green Mountains, the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Poconos and the Catskills, the Ozarks, the Pacific Coast Ranges—all had been transformed to archipelagoes, surrounded by the invading sea.
The funny thing was...that as the sea pursued them relentlessly inland, pushing them from one temporary refuge to another, he had been unable to shake the feeling that he had caused the Flood: that he had done something that day while playing atop the seawall, inadvertently stumbled on some magic ritual, some chance combination of gesture and word that had untied the bonds of the sea and sent it sliding up over the land...that it was chasing him, personally....
A dog was barking out there now, somewhere out across the fields toward town, but it was not his dog. His dog was dead, long since dead, and its whitening skull was rolling along the ocean floor with the tides that washed over what had once been Brigantine, New Jersey, three hundred feet down.
Suddenly he was covered with gooseflesh, and he shivered, rubbing his hands over his bare arms. He returned to his cot and dressed hurriedly—no point in trying to go back to bed, Sara would be up to kick them all out of the sack in a minute or two anyway. The day had begun; he would think no further ahead than that. He had learned in the refugee camps to take life one second at a time.
As he moved around the room, he thought that he could feel hostile eyes watching him from some of the other bunks. It was much colder in here now that he had opened the window, and he had inevitably made a certain amount of noise getting dressed, but although they all valued every second of sleep they could scrounge, none of the other kids would dare to complain. The thought was bittersweet, bringing both pleasure and pain, and he smiled at it, a thin, brittle smile that was almost a grimace. No, they would watch sullenly from their bunks, and pretend to be asleep, and curse him under their breath, but they would say nothing to anyone about it. Certainly they would say nothing to him.
He went down through the still-silent house like a ghost, and out across the farmyard, through fugitive streamers of mist that wrapped clammy white arms around him and beaded his face with dew. His Uncle Abner was there at the slit trench before him. Abner grunted a greeting, and they stood pissing side by side for a moment in companionable silence, their urine steaming in the gray morning air.
Abner stepped backward and began to button his pants. “You start playin’ with yourself yet, boy?” he said, not looking at Roy.
Roy felt his face flush. “No,” he said, trying not to stammer, “no sir.”
“You growin’ hair already,” Abner said. He swung himself slowly around to face Roy, as if his body were some ponderous machine that could only be moved and aimed by the use of pulleys and levers. The hard morning light made his face look harsh as stone, but also sallow and old. Tired, Roy thought. Unutterably weary, as though it took almost more effort than he could sustain just to stand there. Worn out, like the overtaxed fields around them. Only the eyes were alive in the eroded face; they were hard and merciless as flint, and they looked at you as if they were looking right through you to some distant thing that nobody else could see. “I’ve tried to explain to you about remaining pure,” Abner said, speaking slowly. “About how important it is for you to keep yourself pure, not to let yourself be sullied in any way. I’ve tried to explain that, I hope you could understand—”
“Yes, sir,” Roy said.
Abner made a groping hesitant motion with his hand, fingers spread wide, as though he were trying to sculpt meaning from the air itself. “I mean—it’s important that you understand, Roy. Everything has to be right. I mean, everything’s got to be just...right...or nothing else will mean anything. You got to be right in your soul, boy. You got to let the Peace of God into your soul. It all depends on you now—you got to let that peace inside yourself, no one can do it for you. And it’s so important...”
“Yes, sir,” Roy said quietly, “I understand.”
“I wish...” Abner said, and fell silent. They stood there for a minute, not speaking, not looking at each other. There was wood smoke in the air now, and they heard a door slam somewhere on the far side of the house. They had instinctively been looking out across the open land to the east, and now, as they watched, the sun rose above the mountains, splitting the plum-and-ash sky open horizontally with a long wedge of red, distinguishing the rolling horizon from the lowering clouds. A lance of bright white sunlight hit their eyes, thrusting straight in at them from the edge of the world.
“You’re going to make us proud, boy, I know it,” Abner said, but Roy ignored him, watching in fascination as the molten disk of the sun floated free of the horizon line, squinting against the dazzle until his eyes watered and his sight blurred. Abner put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The hand felt heavy and hot, proprietary, and Roy shook it loose in annoyance, still not looking away from the horizon. Abner sighed, started to say something, thought better of it, and instead said, “Come on in the house, boy, and let’s get some breakfast inside you.”
Breakfast—when they finally did get to sit down to it, after the usual rambling grace and invocation by Abner—proved to be unusually lavish. For the brethren, there were hickorynut biscuits, and honey, and cups of chicory; and even the other refugee kids—who on occasion during the long bitter winter had been fed as close to nothing at all as law and appearances would allow—got a few slices of fried fatback along with their habitual cornmeal mush. Along with his biscuits and honey, Roy got wild turkey eggs, Indian potatoes, and a real pork chop. There was a good deal of tension around the big table that morning: Henry and Luke were stern-faced and tense, Raymond was moody and preoccupied, Albert actually looked frightened; the refugee kids were round-eyed and silent, doing their best to make themselves invisible; the jolly Mrs. Crammer was as jolly as ever, shoveling her food in with gusto; but the grumpy Mrs. Zeigler, who was feared and disliked by all the kids, had obviously been crying, and ate little or nothing. Abner’s face was set like rock, his eyes were hard and bright, and he looked from one to another of the brethren, as if daring them to question his leadership and spiritual guidance. Roy ate with good appetite unperturbed by the emotional convection currents that were swirling around him, calmly but deliberately concentrating on mopping up every morsel of food on his plate—in the last couple of months he had put back some of the weight he had lost, although by the old standards, the ones his Mom would have applied four years ago, he was still painfully thin. At the end of the meal, Mrs. Reardon came in from the kitchen, and, beaming with the well-justified pride of someone who is about to do the impossible, presented Roy with a small, rectangular object wrapped in shiny brown paper. He was startled for a second, but yes, by God, it was: a Hershey bar, the first one he’d seen in years. A black-market item, of course, difficult to get hold of in the impoverished East these days, and probably expensive as hell. Even some of the brethren were looking at him enviously now, and the refugee kids were frankly gaping. As he picked up the Hershey bar and slowly and caressingly peeled the wrapper back, exposing the pale chocolate beneath, one of the other kids actually began to drool....
After breakfast, the other refugee kids—“wetbacks,” the townspeople sometimes called them, with elaborate irony—were divided into two groups. One group would help the brethren work Abner’s farm that day, while the larger group would be loaded onto an ox-drawn dray (actually an old flatbed truck, with the cab knocked off) and sent out around the countryside to do what pretty much amounted to slave labor: road work, heavy farm work, helping with the quarrying or the timbering, rebuilding houses and barns and bridges damaged or destroyed in the chaotic days after the Flood. The federal government—or what was left of the federal government, trying desperately, and not always successfully, to keep a battered and Balkanizing country from flying completely apart, struggling to put the Humpty Dumpty that was America back together again—the federal government paid Abner (and others like him) a yearly allowance in federal scrip or promise-of-merchandise notes for giving room and board to refugees from the drowned lands...but times being as tough as they were, no one was going to complain if Abner also helped ease the burden of their upkeep by hiring them out locally to work for whoever could come up with the scrip, or sufficient barter goods, or an attractive work-swap offer; what was left of the state and town governments also used them on occasion (and the others like them, adult or child), gratis, for work projects “for the common good, during this time of emergency...”
Sometimes, hanging around the farm with little or nothing to do, Roy almost missed going out on the work crews, but only almost: he remembered too well the backbreaking labor performed on scanty rations...the sickness, the accidents, the staggering fatigue...the blazing sun and the swarms of mosquitoes in summer, the bitter cold in winter, the snow, the icy wind...He watched the dray go by, seeing the envious and resentful faces of kids he had once worked beside—Stevie, Enrique, Sal—turn towards him as it passed, and, reflexively, he opened and closed his hands. Even two months of idleness and relative luxury had not softened the thick and roughened layers of callus that were the legacy of several seasons spent on the crews.... No, boredom was infinitely preferable.
By midmorning, a small crowd of people had gathered in the road outside the farmhouse. It was hotter now; you could smell the promise of summer in the air, in the wind, and the sun that beat down out of a cloudless blue sky had a real sting to it. It must have been uncomfortable out there in the open, under that sun, but the crowd made no attempt to approach—they just stood there on the far side of the road and watched the house, shuffling their feet, occasionally muttering to each other in voices that, across the road, were audible only as a low wordless grumbling.
Roy watched them for a while from the porch door; they were townspeople, most of them vaguely familiar to Roy, although none of them belonged to Abner’s sect, and he knew none of them by name. The refugee kids saw little of the townspeople, being kept carefully segregated for the most part. The few times that Roy had gotten into town he had been treated with icy hostility—and God help the wetback kid who was caught by the town kids on a deserted stretch of road! For that matter, even the brethren tended to keep to themselves, and were snubbed by certain segments of town society, although the sect had increased its numbers dramatically in recent years, nearly tripling in strength during the past winter alone; there were new chapters now in several of the surrounding communities.
A gaunt-faced woman in the crowd outside spotted Roy, and shook a thin fist at him. “Heretic!” she shouted. “Blasphemer!” The rest of the crowd began to buzz ominously, like a huge angry bee. She spat at Roy, her face contorting and her shoulders heaving with the ferocity of her effort, although she must have known that the spittle had no chance of reaching him. “Blasphemer!” she shouted again. The veins stood out like cords in her scrawny neck.
Roy stepped back into the house, but continued to watch from behind the curtained front windows. There was shouting inside the house as well as outside—the brethren had been cloistered in the kitchen for most of the morning, arguing, and the sound and ferocity of their argument carried clearly through the thin plaster walls of the crumbling old house. At last the sliding door to the kitchen slammed open, and Mrs. Ziegler strode out into the parlor, accompanied by her two children and her scrawny, pasty-faced husband, and followed by two other families of brethren—about nine people altogether. Most of them were carrying suitcases, and a few had backpacks and bundles. Abner stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them go, his anger evident only in the whiteness of his knuckles as he grasped the doorframe. “Go, then,” Abner said scornfully. “We spit you up out of our mouths! Don’t ever think to come back!” He swayed in the doorway, his voice tremulous with hate. “We’re better off without you, you hear? You hear me? We don’t need the weak-willed and the shortsighted.”
Mrs. Ziegler said nothing, and her steps didn’t slow or falter, but her homely hatchet-face was streaked with tears. To Roy’s astonishment—for she had a reputation as a harridan—she stopped near the porch door and threw her arms around him. “Come with us,” she said, hugging him with smothering tightness, “Roy, please come with us! You can, you know—we’ll find a place for you, everything will work out fine.” Roy said nothing, resisting the impulse to squirm—he was uncomfortable in her embrace; in spite of himself, it touched some sleeping corner of his soul he had thought was safely bricked over years before, and for a moment he felt trapped and panicky, unable to breathe, as though he were in sudden danger of wakening from a comfortable dream into a far more terrible and less desirable reality. “Come with us,” Mrs. Ziegler said again, more urgently, but Roy shook his head gently and pulled away from her. “You’re a goddamned fool then!” she blazed, suddenly angry, her voice ringing harsh and loud, but Roy only shrugged, and gave her his wistful, ghostly smile. “Damn it—” she started to say, but her eyes filled with tears again, and she whirled and hurried out of the house, followed by the other members of her party. The children—wetbacks were kept pretty much segregated from the children of the brethren as well, and he had seen some of these kids only at meals—looked at Roy with wide, frightened eyes as they passed.
Abner was staring at Roy now, from across the room; it was a hard and challenging stare, but there was also a trace of desperation in it, and in that moment Abner seemed uncertain and oddly vulnerable. Roy stared back at him serenely, unblinkingly meeting his eyes, and after a while some of the tension went out of Abner, and he turned and stumbled out of the room, listing to one side like a church steeple in the wind.
Outside, the crowd began to buzz again as Mrs. Zeigler’s party filed out of the house and across the road. There was much discussion and arm waving and head shaking when the two groups met, someone occasionally gesturing back toward the farmhouse. The buzzing grew louder, then gradually died away. At last, Mrs. Zeigler and her group set off down the road for town, accompanied by some of the locals. They trudged away dispiritedly down the center of the dusty road, lugging their shabby suitcases, only a few of them looking back.
Roy watched them until they were out of sight, his face still and calm, and continued to stare down the road after them long after they were gone.
About noon, a carload of reporters arrived outside, driving up in one of the bulky new methane burners that were still rarely seen east of Omaha. They circulated through the crowd of townspeople, pausing briefly to take photographs and ask questions, working their way toward the house, and Roy watched them as if they were unicorns, strange remnants from some vanished cycle of creation. Most of the reporters were probably from State College or the new state capital at Altoona—places where a few small newspapers were again being produced—but one of them was wearing an armband that identified him as a bureau man for one of the big Denver papers, and that was probably where the money for the car had come from. It was strange to be reminded that there were still areas of the country that were...not unchanged, no place in the world could claim that...and not rich, not by the old standards of affluence anyway...but, at any rate, better off than here. The whole western part of the country—from roughly the ninety-fifth meridian on west to approximately the one-twenty-second—had been untouched by the flooding, and although the West had also suffered severely from the collapse of the national economy and the consequent social upheavals, at least much of its industrial base had remained intact. Denver—one of the few large American cities built on ground high enough to have been safe from the rising waters—was the new federal capital, and, if poorer and meaner, it was also bigger and busier than ever.
Abner went out to herd the reporters inside and away from the unbelievers, and after a moment or two Roy could hear Abner’s voice going out there, booming like a church organ. By the time the reporters came in, Roy was sitting at the dining room table, flanked by Raymond and Aaron, waiting for them.
They took photographs of him sitting there, while he stared calmly back at them, and they took photographs of him while he politely refused to answer questions, and then Aaron handed him the pre-prepared papers, and he signed them, and repeated the legal formulas that Aaron had taught him, and they took photographs of that too. And then—able to get nothing more out of him, and made slightly uneasy by his blank composure and the remoteness of his eyes—they left.
Within a few more minutes, as though everything were over, as though the departure of the reporters had drained all possible significance from anything else that might still happen, most of the crowd outside had drifted away also, only one or two people remaining behind to stand quietly waiting, like vultures, in the once-again empty road.
Lunch was a quiet meal. Roy ate heartily, taking seconds of everything, and Mrs. Crammer was as jovial as ever, but everyone else was subdued, and even Abner seemed shaken by the schism that had just sundered his church. After the meal, Abner stood up and began to pray aloud. The brethren sat resignedly at the table, heads partially bowed, some listening, some not. Abner was holding his arms up toward the big blackened rafter of the ceiling, sweat runneling his face, when Peter came hurriedly in from outside and stood hesitating in the doorway, trying to catch Abner’s eye. When it became obvious that Abner was going to keep right on ignoring him, Peter shrugged, and said in a loud flat voice, “Abner, the sheriff is here.”
Abner stopped praying. He grunted, a hoarse, exhausted sound, the kind of sound a baited bear might make when, already pushed beyond the limits of endurance, someone jabs it yet again with a spear. He slowly lowered his arms and was still for a long moment, and then he shuddered, seeming to shake himself back to life. He glanced speculatively—and, it almost seemed, beseechingly—at Roy, and then straightened his shoulders and strode from the room.
They received the sheriff in the parlor, Raymond and Aaron and Mrs. Crammer sitting in the battered old armchairs, Roy sitting unobtrusively to one side on the stool from a piano that no longer worked, Abner standing a little to the fore with his arms locked behind him and his boots planted solidly on the oak planking, as if he were on the bridge of a schooner that was heading into a gale. County Sheriff Sam Braddock glanced at the others—his gaze lingering on Roy for a moment—and then ignored them, addressing himself to Abner as if they were alone in the room. “Mornin’, Abner,” he said.
“Mornin’, Sam,” Abner said quietly. “You here for some reason other than just t’say hello, I suppose.”
Braddock grunted. He was a short, stocky, grizzled man with iron-gray hair and a tired face. His uniform was shiny and old and patched in a dozen places, but clean, and the huge old revolver strapped to his hip looked worn but serviceable. He fidgeted with his shapeless old hat, turning it around and around in his fingers—he was obviously embarrassed, but he was determined as well, and at last he said, “The thing of it is, Abner, I’m here to talk you out of this damned tomfoolery.”
“Are you, now?” Abner said.
“We’ll do whatever we damn well want to do—” Raymond burst out, shrilly, but Abner waved him to silence. Braddock glanced lazily at Raymond, then looked back at Abner, his tired old face settling into harder lines. “I’m not going to allow it,” he said, more harshly. “We don’t want this kind of thing going on in this county.”
Abner said nothing.
“There’s not a thing you can do about it, Sheriff,” Aaron said, speaking a bit heatedly, but keeping his melodious voice well under control. “It’s all perfectly legal, all the way down the line.”
“Well, now,” Braddock said, “I don’t know about that...”
“Well, I do know, Sheriff,” Aaron said calmly. “As a legally sanctioned and recognized church, we are protected by law all the way down the line. There is ample precedent, most of it recent, most of it upheld by appellate decisions within the last year: Carlton versus the State of Vermont, Trenholm versus the State of West Virginia, the Church of Souls versus the State of New York. There was that case up in Tylersville, just last year. Why, the Freedom of Worship Act alone...”
Braddock sighed, tacitly admitting that he knew Aaron was right—perhaps he had hoped to bluff them into obeying. “The ‘Flood Congress’ of ‘98,” Braddock said, with bitter contempt. “They were so goddamned panic-stricken and full of sick chatter about Armageddon that you could’ve rammed any nonsense down their throats. That’s a bad law, a pisspoor law...”
“Be that as it may, Sheriff, you have no authority whatsoever—”
Abner suddenly began to speak, talking with a slow heavy deliberateness, musingly, almost reminiscently, ignoring the conversation he was interrupting—and indeed, perhaps he had not even been listening to it. “My grandfather lived right here on this farm, and his father before him—you know that, Sam? They lived by the old ways, and they survived and prospered. Great-granddad, there wasn’t hardly anything he needed from the outside world, anything he needed to buy, except maybe nails and suchlike, and he could’ve made them himself too, if he’d needed to. Everything they needed, everything they ate, or wore, or used, they got from the woods, or from out of the soil of this farm, right here. We don’t know how to do that anymore. We forgot the old ways, we turned our faces away, which is why the Flood came on us as a Judgment, a Judgment and a scourge, a scouring, a winnowing. The Old Days have come back again, and we’ve forgotten so goddamned much, we’re almost helpless now that there’s no goddamned K-Mart down the goddamned street. We’ve got to go back to the old ways, or we’ll pass from the earth, and be seen no more in it...” He was sweating now, staring earnestly at Braddock, as if to compel him by force of will alone to share the vision. “But it’s so hard, Sam.... We have to work at relearning the old ways, we have to reinvent them as we go, step by step...”
“Some things we were better off without,” Braddock said grimly.
“Up at Tylersville, they doubled their yield last harvest. Think what that could mean to a county as hungry as this one has been—”
Braddock shook his iron-gray head, and held up one hand, as if he were directing traffic. “I’m telling you, Abner, the town won’t stand for this—I’m bound to warn you that some of the boys just might decide to go outside the law with this thing.” He paused. “And, unofficially of course, I just might be inclined to give them a hand...”
Mrs. Crammer laughed. She had been sitting quietly and taking all of this in, smiling good-naturedly from time to time, and her laugh was a shocking thing in that stuffy little room, harsh as a crow’s caw. “You’ll do nothing, Sam Braddock,” she said jovially. “And neither will anybody else. More than half the county’s with us already, nearly all the country folk, and a good part of the town, too.” She smiled pleasantly at him, but her eyes were small and hard. “Just you remember, we know where you live, Sam Braddock. And we know where your sister lives, too, and your sister’s child, over to Framing-ton...”
“Are you threatening an officer of the law?” Braddock said, but he said it in a weak voice, and his face, when he turned it away to stare at the floor, looked sick and old. Mrs. Crammer laughed again, and then there was silence.
Braddock kept his face turned down for another long moment, and then he put his hat back on, squashing it down firmly on his head, and when he looked up he pointedly ignored the brethren and addressed his next remark to Roy. “You don’t have to stay with these people, son,” he said. “That’s the law, too.” He kept his eyes fixed steadily on Roy. “You just say the word, son, and I’ll take you straight out of here, right now.” His jaw was set, and he touched the butt of his revolver, as if for encouragement. “They can’t stop us. How about it?”
“No, thank you,” Roy said quietly. “I’ll stay.”
That night, while Abner wrung his hands and prayed aloud, Roy sat half-dozing before the parlor fire, unconcerned, watching the firelight throw Abner’s gesticulating shadow across the whitewashed walls. There was something in the wine they kept giving him, Roy knew, maybe somebody’s saved-up Quaaludes, but he didn’t need it. Abner kept exhorting him to let the Peace of God into his heart, but he didn’t need that either. He didn’t need anything. He felt calm and self-possessed and remote, disassociated from everything that went on around him, as if he were looking down on the world through the wrong end of a telescope, feeling only a mild scientific interest as he watched the tiny mannequins swirl and pirouette.... Like watching television with the sound off. If this was the Peace of God, it had settled down on him months ago, during the dead of that terrible winter, while he had struggled twelve hours a day to load foundation stone in the face of ice storms and the razoring wind, while they had all, wetbacks and brethren alike, come close to starving. About the same time that word of the goings-on at Tylersville had started to seep down from the brethren’s parent church upstate, about the same time that Abner, who until then had totally ignored their kinship, had begun to talk to him in the evenings about the old ways....
Although perhaps the great dead cold had started to settle in even earlier, that first day of the new world, while they were driving off across foundering Brigantine, the water already up over the hubcaps of the Toyota, and he had heard Toby barking frantically somewhere behind them.... His dad had died that day, died of a heart attack as he fought to get them onto an overloaded boat that would take them across to the “safety” of the New Jersey mainland. His mother had died months later in one of the sprawling refugee camps, called “Floodtowns,” that had sprung up on high ground everywhere along the new coastlines. She had just given up—sat down in the mud, rested her head on her knees, closed her eyes, and died. Just like that. Roy had seen the phenomenon countless times in the Floodtowns, places so festeringly horrible that even life on Abner’s farm, with its Dickensian bleakness, forced labor, and short rations, had seemed—and was—a distinct change for the better. It was odd, and wrong, and sometimes it bothered him a little, but he hardly ever thought of his mother and father anymore—it was as if his mind shut itself off every time he came to those memories; he had never even cried for them, but all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see Toby, or his cat Basil running toward him and meowing with his tail held up over his back like a flag, and grief would come up like black bile at the back of his throat....
It was still dark when they left the farmhouse. Roy and Abner and Aaron walked together, Abner carrying a large tattered carpetbag. Hank and Raymond ranged ahead with shotguns, in case there was trouble, but the last of the afternoon’s gawkers had been driven off hours before by the cold, and the road was empty, a dim charcoal line through the slowly lightening darkness. No one spoke, and there was no sound other than the sound of boots crunching on gravel. It was chilly again that morning, and Roy’s bare feet burned against the macadam, but he trudged along stoically, ignoring the bite of cinders and pebbles. Their breath steamed faintly against the paling stars. The fields stretched dark and formless around them to either side of the road, and once they heard the rustling of some unseen animal fleeing away from them through the stubble. Mist flowed slowly down the road to meet them, sending out gleaming silver fingers to curl around their legs.
The sky was graying to the east, where the sea slept behind the mountains. Roy could imagine the sea rising higher and higher until it found its patient way around the roots of the hills and came spilling into the tableland beyond, flowing steadily forward like the mist, spreading out into a placid sheet of water that slowly swallowed the town, the farmhouse, the fields, until only the highest branches of the trees remained, held up like the beckoning arms of the drowned, and then they too would slide slowly, peacefully, beneath the water....
A bird was crying out now, somewhere in the darkness, and they were walking through the fields, away from the road, cold mud squelching underfoot, the dry stubble crackling around them. Soon it would be time to sow the spring wheat, and after that, the corn....
They stopped. Wind sighed through the dawn, muttering in the throat of the world. Still no one had spoken. Then hands were helping him remove the old bathrobe he’d been wearing.... Before leaving the house, he had been bathed and anointed with a thick fragrant oil, and with a tiny silver scissors Mrs. Reardon had clipped a lock of his hair for each of the brethren.
Suddenly he was naked, and he was being urged forward again, his feet stumbling and slow.
They had made a wide ring of automobile flares here, the flares spitting and sizzling luridly in the wan dawn light, and in the center of the ring, they had dug a hollow in the ground.
He lay down in the hollow, feeling his naked back and buttocks settle into the cold mud, feeling it mat the hair on the back of his head. The mud made little sucking noises as he moved his arms and legs, settling in, and then he stretched out and lay still. The dawn breeze was cold, and he shivered in the mud, feeling it take hold of him like a giant’s hand, tightening around him, pulling him down with a grip old and cold and strong...
They gathered around him, seeming, from his low perspective, to tower miles into the sky. Their faces were harsh and angular, gouged with lines and shadows that made them look like something from a stark old woodcut. Abner bent down to rummage in the carpetbag, his harsh woodcut face close to Roy’s for a moment, and when he straightened up again he had the big fine-honed hunting knife in his hand.
Abner began to speak now, groaning out the words in a loud, harsh voice, but Roy was no longer listening. He watched calmly as Abner lifted the knife high into the air, and then he turned his head to look east, as if he could somehow see across all the intervening miles of rock and farmland and forest to where the sea waited behind the mountains...
Is this enough? he thought disjointedly, ignoring the towering scarecrow figures that were swaying in closer over him, straining his eyes to look east, to where the Presence lived...speaking now only to that Presence, to the sea, to that vast remorseless deity, bargaining with it cannily, hopefully, shrewdly, like a country housewife at market, proffering it the fine rich red gift of his death. Is this enough? Will this do?
Will you stop now?

MACHINES OF
LOVING GRACE
D
AWN WAS JUST beginning to color the sky. She huddled inside the small bathroom—door closed, bolt slid and locked—sitting on the toilet lid and hugging her knees. Her head was tilted and hung down, chin almost on breast, and her eyes were nearly closed. She had wrapped her hands around her ankles. Her fingers were turning white. There was no noise in the empty apartment, not even the scurry of a cockroach. She had stopped crying hours ago.
There was noise beyond the window on her left, beyond plaster and glass, outside the vacuum of bedroom-kitchen-livingroom-guestroom-bath: a frozen automobile horn had been honking steadily for the last hour, occasionally traffic whined on the asphalt below, earlier in the evening there had been radios in nearby buildings, tuned to the confusion of a dozen different stations and fading one by one toward morning. She didn’t pay any attention to these noises. The silence inside her apartment was too loud.
She opened her hands, flexed her stiff fingers, let her legs uncurl. One of them had gone to sleep, and she stamped it softly, automatically, to restore circulation. The floor was cold under her bare feet. Gooseflesh blossomed along her arms and she ran her hands down over them to smooth it. She had put on a new half-slip for the occasion. She shifted her weight; the toilet lid had been chilly at first, but now it had grown hot and sticky with the heat of her body. She leaned in closer to the hotwater pipe that descended from ceiling to floor—it was still warm to the touch. The dull paint had flaked off it in jigsaw pieces. There was a dingy gray toilet brush leaning against the base of the pipe. The bristles were broken and matted down. All this without thinking at all.
To be free, she thought.
Her head came up; eyes snapped open, closed to slits, opened again, wider.
The muscles in her neck had started to cord.
Her head jerked to the left. She stared out the window. Dawn was a growing red wash across the horizon, clustered buildings blocky beast-silhouettes, a factory plume of smoke etched black against tones of scarlet. Lights far away and lonely. A television antenna like a cross of stark metal. Her head turned back to center, wobbling: the string cut.
For a while she did not think. The shaving mirror on the wall over the sink, clutter on the shelves to the right of the basin: empty bottles of mouthwash, witch hazel, deodorant, the cardboard center from a roll of toilet paper, crumpled toothpaste tube, box of vaginal suppositories. The burlap curtains, frayed edges polarizing in the new light. Cracked and chipped plaster around the edges of the windowsill, streaks of white on the walls where paint had run thin. The closed door, the whorls in dark wood: beyond were the cluttered kitchen, the empty bedroom. They pressed in against the door. The door hinges were made in five sections.
I’m going to go crazy, she thought.
She reached out and flicked off the light switch. It was bright enough now to see: a gritty, hard light; harsh, too much grain and contrast. She had begun to tremble. The noise of the horn in the background was a steady buzz through her teeth. She picked up the razor blade from the window ledge. The horn stopped abruptly. In the silence, she could hear pigeons fluttering and cooing on the adjacent roof.
She turned the razor blade over in her fingers. The blade was smooth and sharp. No nicks in it, like the ones she used to shave her legs. She’d saved this one special. Orange sunlight refracted along the honed edge of the blade.
The bathtub was only inches away on her right, its head to the toilet. Without getting up, she leaned over, turned on the hot-water tap. Let the water run. This early it was reluctant: the water sputtered, the pipes knocked. But after a while it began to run hot. A thin wisp of steam. She put her arm under the hot water and sliced her wrist, holding the razor between thumb and forefinger. Clumsily, she switched hands and sliced her other wrist. Then she dropped the blade. Her wrists stung dully, and she felt a spreading warmth and wetness. She lifted her arms away from the water. Blood, welling up in thick clots, running down her arms toward the elbows.
To be free, she thought.
She sat with her arms held over the tub, palms up. Already it was better; the pressure that had been trying to turn her into someone else was receding. She wouldn’t go crazy this time. She tilted her arms up to help the flow. She noticed that the shower curtain had a pattern of yellow swans and fountains on it, that there was a quarterfull plastic bottle of shampoo and a bit of melted soap in the bath shelf. A big glob of blood splattered against the porcelain bottom of the tub. The flowing water stretched it out elastically, tugged at it, swept it loose and swirled it down the drain.
Too slow. The Lysol had been faster.
She fumbled for the razor blade, dropped it, wiped her hand dry on the shower curtain, picked it up again. She tilted her head back, felt for the big vein in her throat, located it with a finger. Very carefully, she positioned the razor blade. Then she closed her eyes and hacked with all her strength.
The control light flittered on the Big Board: green dulled to amber, died to red, guttered out completely. A siren began to scream. The duty tech put down his magazine, winced at the metallic wailing, and touched the arm of his chair. Pneumatics hissed, the chair moved up and then sideways along the scaffolding, ghosting past thousands of unwinking green eyes set in horizontal rows, rows stacked in fifty-by-fifty-foot banks, banks filling the walls of the hexagonal Monitoring Complex, each tiny light in the walls in the banks in the rows representing the state of the life-system of one person in this sector of the City.
The tech found the deader easily: one blank spot in a solid wall of green—like a missing tooth, like the empty eye socket of a skull. He read the code symbols from the plaque above the dead light, relayed them through his throat mike to the duty runner down on the floor. “Got that?” “Check.” Below, in Dispatching, the runner would be feeding the code symbols into a records computer, getting the coordinates of the deader’s address, sending a VHF pulse out to the activated monitor in the deader’s body, the monitor replying with a pulse of its own so that the computer could check by triangulation that the deader was actually at his home address and then flash confirmation to the runner. The whole process took about a minute. Then the runner, fingers racing over a keyboard, would relay the coordinates to the sophisticated robot brain of the meat wagon, flick the activating switch, and the pickup squad would whoosh out over the private government monorail system that webbed the City’s roofs.
The duty tech hung from the scaffolding, twenty feet above the floor, three feet away from the banked lights of the Big Board. He settled back against the black leather cushions of his chair, waiting for the official confirmation. The siren had been cut off. He was bored. He nudged at the blank light with the toe of his shoe. Idly, he began to read the code symbols again. Somehow they seemed familiar.
The runner’s voice buzzed in his head. “Dispatched.” “Confirmed,” the tech replied automatically, then still tracing the symbols with his finger: “Christ, do you know who this is? The deader? It’s her again. That crazy broad. Christ, this is the third time this month.”
“Fuck her. She’s nuts.”
The tech looked at the dead light, shook his head. The chair eased back down into its rest position before the metal desk. He squirmed around to get comfortable, drank the dregs of his coffee, rested his feet on the rim of the desk and settled back. The whole thing had taken maybe eight, maybe ten minutes. Not bad. He reached out and found the article he’d been reading.
By the time they brought her back, he was deep in the magazine again.
They carried her in and put her into the machines. The machines kept her in stasis to retard decay while they synthesized blood from sample cells and pumped it into her, grew new skin and tissue from scrapings, repaired the veins in throat and wrists, grafted the skin over them and flash-healed them without a scar. It took about an hour and a half, all told. It wasn’t a big job. It was said that the machines could rebuild life from a sample as small as fifty grams of flesh, although that took a few weeks—even resurrect personality/identity from the psychocybernetic records for a brain that had been completely destroyed, although that was trickier, and might take months. This was nothing. The machines spread open the flesh of her upper abdomen, deactivated the monitor that was surgically implanted in every citizen in accordance with the law, and primed it again so that it would go off when her life-functions fell below a certain level. The machines sewed her up again, the monitor ticking smoothly inside her. The machines toned up her muscles, flushed out an accumulated excess of body poisons, burned off a few pounds of unnecessary fat, revitalized the gloss of her hair, upped her ratio of adrenaline secretion slightly, repaired minor tissue damage. The machines restarted her heart, got her lungs functioning, regulated her circulatory and respiratory systems, then switched off the stasis field and spat her into consciousness.
She opened her eyes. Above, a metal ceiling, rivets, phosphorescent lights. Behind, a mountain of smoothly chased machinery, herself resting on an iron tongue that had been thrust out of the machine: a rejected wafer. Ahead, a plastic window, and someone looking through it. Physically, she felt fine. Not even a headache.
The man in the window stared at her disapprovingly, then beckoned. Dully, she got up and followed him out. She found that someone had dressed her in street clothes, mismatched, colors clashing, hastily snatched from her closet. She had on two different kinds of shoes. She didn’t care.
Mechanically, she followed him down a long corridor to a plush, overstuffed office. He opened the door for her, shook his head primly as she passed, closed it again. The older man inside the office told her to sit down. She sat down. He had white hair (bleached), and sat behind a huge mahogany desk (plastic). He gave her a long lecture, gently, fatherly, sorrowfully, trying to keep the perplexity out of his voice, the hint of fear. He said that he was concerned for her. He told her that she was a very lucky girl, even if she didn’t realize it. He told her about the millions of people in the world who still weren’t as lucky as she was. “Mankind is free of the fear of death for the first time in the history of the race,” he told her earnestly, “at least in the Western world. Free of the threat of extinction.” She listened impassively. The office was stuffy; flies battered against the closed windowpane. He asked her if she understood. She said that she understood. Her voice was dull. He stared at her, sighed, shook his head. He told her that she could go. He had begun to play nervously with a paperweight.
She stood up, moved to the door. “Remember, young lady,” he called after her, “you’re free now.”
She went out quickly, hurried along a corridor, past a robot receptionist, found the outside door. She wrenched it open and stumbled outside.
Outside, she closed the door and leaned against it wearily. It was full daylight now. In between dirty banks of clouds, the sun beat pitilessly down on concrete, heat rising in waves, no shadows. The air was thick with smoke, with human sweat. It smelled bad, and the sharper reek of gasoline and exhaust bit into her nostrils. The streets were choked, the sidewalks thick with sluggishly moving crowds of pedestrians, jammed in shoulder to shoulder. The gray sky pressed down on her like a hand.

CHAINS OF
THE SEA
0
 ne day the aliens landed, just as everyone always said they would. They fell out of a guileless blue sky and into the middle of a clear, cold November day, four of them, four alien ships drifting down like the snow that had been threatening to fall all week. America was just shouldering its way into day-light as they made planetfall, so they landed there: one in the Delaware Valley about fifteen miles north of Philadelphia, one in Ohio, one in a desolate region of Colorado, and one—for whatever reason—in a cane field outside of Caracas, Venezuela. To those who actually saw them come down, the ships seemed to fall rather than to descend under any intelligent control: a black nailhead suddenly tacked to the sky, coming all at once from nowhere, with no transition, like a Fortean rock squeezed from a high appearing-point, hanging way up there and winking intolerably bright in the sunlight; and then gravity takes hold of it, visibly, and it begins to fall, far away and dream-slow at first, swelling larger, growing huge, unbelievably big, a mountain hurled at the earth, falling with terrifying speed, rolling in the air, tumbling end over end, overhead, coming down—and then it is sitting peacefully on the ground; it has not crashed, and although it didn’t slow down and it didn’t stop, there it is, and not even a snowflake could have settled onto the frozen mud more lightly.
To those photo reconnaissance jets fortunate enough to be flying a routine pattern at thirty thousand feet over the Eastern Seaboard when the aliens blinked into their airspace, to the automatic, radar-eyed, computer-reflexed facilities at USADCOM Spacetrack East, and to the United States Aerospace Defense Command HQ in Colorado Springs, although they didn’t have convenient recon planes up for a double check—the picture was different. The high-speed cameras showed the landing as a process: as if the alien spaceships existed simultaneously everywhere along their path of descent, stretched down from the stratosphere and gradually sifting entirely to the ground, like confetti streamers thrown from a window, like Slinkys going down a flight of stairs. In the films, the alien ships appeared to recede from the viewpoint of the reconnaissance planes, vanishing into perspective, and that was all right, but the ships also appeared to dwindle away into infinity from the viewpoint of Spacetrack East on the ground, and that definitely was not all right. The most constructive comment ever made on this phenomenon was that it was odd. It was also odd that the spaceships had not been detected approaching Earth by observation stations on the Moon, or by the orbiting satellites, and nobody ever figured that out, either.
From the first second of contact to touchdown, the invasion of Earth had taken less than ten minutes. At the end of that time, there were four big ships on the ground, shrouded in thick steam—not cooling off from the friction of their descent, as was first supposed; the steam was actually mist: everything had frozen solid in a fifty-foot circle around the ships, and the quick-ice was now melting as temperatures rose back above freezing—frantic messages were snarling up and down the continentwide nervous system of USADCOM, and total atomic war was a hairsbreadth away. While the humans scurried in confusion, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) created by MIT-Bell Labs linked itself into the network of high-speed, twentieth-generation computers placed at its disposal by a Red Alert Priority, evaluated data thoughtfully for a minute and a half, and then proceeded to get in touch with its opposite number in the Russian Republics. It had its own, independently evolved methods of doing this, and achieved contact almost instantaneously, although the Pentagon had not yet been able to reach the Kremlin—that didn’t matter anyway; they were only human, and all the important talking was going on in another medium. AI “talked” to the Russian system for another seven minutes, while eons of time clicked by on the electronic scale, and World War III was averted. Both Intelligences finally decided that they didn’t understand what was going on, a conclusion the human governments of Earth wouldn’t reach for hours, and would never admit at all.
The only flourish of action took place in the three-minute lag between the alien touchdown and the time AI assumed command of the defense network, and involved a panicked general at USADCOM HQ and a malfunction in the—never actually used—fail-safe system that enabled him to lob a small tactical nuclear device at the Colorado landing site. The device detonated at point-blank range, right against the side of the alien ship, but the fireball didn’t appear. There didn’t seem to be an explosion at all. Instead, the hull of the ship turned a blinding, incredibly hot white at the point of detonation, faded to blue-white, to a hellish red, to sullen tones of violet that flickered away down the spectrum. The same pattern of precessing colors chased itself around the circumference of the ship until it reached the impact point again, and then the hull returned to its former dull black. The ship was unharmed. There had been no sound, not even a whisper. The tactical device had been a clean bomb, but instruments showed that no energy or radiation had been released at all. 
After this, USADCOM became very thoughtful.
Tommy Nolan was already a half hour late to school, but he wasn’t hurrying. He dawdled along the secondary road that led up the hill behind the old sawmill, and watched smoke go up in thick black lines from the chimneys of the houses below, straight and unwavering in the bright, clear morning, like brushstrokes against the sky. The roofs were made of cold gray and red tiles that winked sunlight at him all the way to the docks, where clouds of sea gulls bobbed and wheeled, dipped and rose, their cries coming faint and shrill to him across the miles of chimneys and roofs and aerials and windtossed treetops. There was a crescent sliver of ocean visible beyond the dock, like a slitted blue eye peering up over the edge of the world. Tommy kicked a rock, kicked it again, and then found a tin can which he kicked instead, clattering it along ahead of him. The wind snatched at the fur on his parka, puff, momentarily making the cries of the sea gulls very loud and distinct, and then carrying them away again, back over the roofs to the sea. He kicked the tin can over the edge of a bluff, and listened to it somersault invisibly away through the undergrowth. He was whistling tunelessly, and he had taken his gloves off and stuffed them in his parka pocket, although his mother had told him specifically not to, it was so cold for November. Tommy wondered briefly what the can must feel like, tumbling down through the thick ferns and weeds, finding a safe place to lodge under the dark, secret roots of the trees. He kept walking, skuff-skuffing gravel very loudly. When he was halfway up the slope, the buzz saw started up at the mill on the other side of the bluff. It moaned and shrilled metallically, whining up through the stillness of the morning to a piercing shriek that hurt his teeth, then sinking low, low, to a buzzing, grumbling roar, like an angry giant muttering in the back of his throat. An animal, Tommy thought, although he knew it was a saw. Maybe it’s a dinosaur. He shivered deliciously. A dinosaur!
Tommy was being a puddle jumper this morning. That was why he was so late. There had been a light rain the night before, scattering puddles along the road, and Tommy had carefully jumped over every one between here and the house. It took a long time to do it right, but Tommy was being very conscientious. He imagined himself as a machine, a vehicle—a puddle jumper. No matter that he had legs instead of wheels, and arms and a head, that was just the kind of ship he was, with he himself sitting somewhere inside and driving the contraption, looking out through the eyes, working the pedals and gears and switches that made the ship go. He would drive himself up to a puddle, maneuver very carefully until he was in exactly the right position, backing and cutting his wheels and nosing in again, and then put the ship into jumping gear, stomp down on the accelerator, and let go of the brake switch. And away he’d go, like a stone from a catapult, up, the puddle flashing underneath, then down, with gravel jarring hard against his feet as the earth slapped up to meet him. Usually he cleared the puddle. He’d only splashed down in water once this morning, and he’d jumped puddles almost two feet across. A pause then to check his systems for amber damage lights. The board being all green, he’d put the ship in travel gear and drive along some more, slowly, scanning methodically for the next puddle. All this took considerable time, but it wasn’t a thing you could skimp on—you had to do it right.
He thought occasionally, Mom will be mad again, but it lacked force and drifted away on the wind. Already breakfast this morning was something that had happened a million years ago—the old gas oven lighted for warmth and hissing comfortably to itself, the warm cereal swimming with lumps, the radio speaking coldly in the background about things he never bothered to listen to, the hard gray light pouring through the window onto the kitchen table.
Mom had been puffy-eyed and coughing. She had been watching television late and had fallen asleep on the couch again, her cloth coat thrown over her for a blanket, looking very old when Tommy came out to wake her before breakfast and to shut off the humming test pattern on the TV. Tommy’s father had yelled at her again during breakfast, and Tommy had gone into the bathroom for a long time, washing his hands slowly and carefully until he heard his father leave for work. His mother pretended that she wasn’t crying as she made his cereal and fixed him “coffee,” thinned dramatically with a half a cup of cold water and a ton of milk and sugar, “for the baby,” although that was exactly the way she drank it herself. She had already turned the television back on, the moment her husband’s footsteps died away, as if she couldn’t stand to have it silent. It murmured unnoticed in the living room, working its way through an early children’s show that even Tommy couldn’t bear to watch. His mother said she kept it on to check the time so that Tommy wouldn’t be late, but she never did that. Tommy always had to remind her when it was time to bundle him into his coat and leggings and rubber boots—when it was raining—for school. He could never get rubber boots on right by himself, although he tried very hard and seriously. He always got tangled up anyway.
He reached the top of the hill just as the buzz saw chuckled and sputtered to a stop, leaving a humming, vibrant silence behind it. Tommy realized that he had run out of puddles, and he changed himself instantly into a big, powerful land tank, the kind they showed on the war news on television, that could run on caterpillar treads or wheels and had a hovercraft air cushion for the tough parts. Roaring, and revving his engine up and down, he turned off the gravel road into the thick stand of fir forest. He followed the footpath, tearing along terrifically on his caterpillar treads, knocking the trees down and crushing them into a road for him to roll on. That made him uneasy, though, because he loved trees. He told himself that the trees were only being bent down under his weight, and that they sprang back up again after he passed, but that didn’t sound right. He stopped to figure it out. There was a quiet murmur in the forest, as if everything were breathing very calmly and rhythmically. Tommy felt as if he’d been swallowed by a huge, pleasant green creature, not because it wanted to eat him, but just to let him sit peacefully in its stomach for shelter. Even the second-growth saplings were taller than he was. Listening to the forest, Tommy felt an urge to go down into the deep woods and talk to the Thants, but then he’d never get to school at all. Wheels would get tangled in roots, he decided, and switched on the hovercraft cushion. He floated down the path, pushing the throttle down as far as it would go, because he was beginning to worry a little about what would happen to him if he was too late.
Switching to wheels, he bumped out of the woods and onto Highland Avenue. Traffic was heavy here; the road was full of big trucks and tractor-trailers on the way down to Boston, on the way up to Portland. Tommy had to wait almost ten minutes before traffic had thinned out enough for him to dash across to the other side of the road. His mother had told him never to go to school this way, so this was the way he went every chance he got. Actually, his house was only a half a mile away from the school, right down Walnut Street, but Tommy always went by an incredibly circuitous route. He didn’t think of it that way—it took him by all his favorite places.
So he rolled along the road shoulder comfortably enough, following the avenue. There were open meadows on this side of the road, full of wild wheat and scrub brush, and inhabited by families of Jeblings, who flitted back and forth between the road, which they shunned, and the woods on the far side of the meadow. Tommy called to them as he cruised by, but Jeblings are always shy, and today they seemed especially skittish. They were hard to see straight on, like all of the Other People, but he could catch glimpses of them out of the corners of his eyes: spindly beanstalk bodies, big pumpkinheads, glowing slit eyes, absurdly long and tapering fingers. They were in constant motion—he could hear them thrashing through the brush, and their shrill, nervous giggling followed him for quite a while along the road. But they wouldn’t come out, or even stop to talk to him, and he wondered what had stirred them up.
As he came in sight of the school, a flight of jet fighters went by overhead, very high and fast, leaving long white scars across the sky, the scream of their passage trailing several seconds behind them. They were followed by a formation of bigger planes, going somewhat slower. Bombers? Tommy thought, feeling excited and scared as he watched the big planes drone out of sight. Maybe this was going to be the War. His father was always talking about the War, and how it would be the end of everything—a proposition that Tommy found interesting, if not necessarily desirable. Maybe that was why the Jeblings were excited.
The bell marking the end of the day’s first class rang at that moment, cutting Tommy like a whip, and frightening him far more than his thoughts of the War. I’m really going to catch it, Tommy thought, breaking into a run, too panicked to turn himself into anything other than a boy, or to notice the new formation of heavy bombers rumbling in from the northeast.
By the time he reached the school, classes had already finished changing, and the new classes had been in progress almost five minutes. The corridors were bright and empty and echoing, like a fluorescently lighted tomb. Tommy tried to keep running once he was inside the building, but the clatter he raised was so horrendous and terrifying that he slowed to a walk again. It wasn’t going to make any difference anyway, not anymore, not now. He was already in for it.
Everyone in his class turned to look at him as he came in, and the room became deadly quiet. Tommy stood in the doorway, horrified, wishing that he could crawl into the ground, or turn invisible, or run. But he could do nothing but stand there, flushing with shame, and watch everyone watch him. His classmates’ faces were snide, malicious, sneering and expectant. His friends, Steve Edwards and Bobbie Williamson, were grinning nastily and slyly, making sure that the teacher couldn’t see. Everyone knew that he was going to get it, and they were eager to watch, feeling self-righteous and, at the same time, being glad that it wasn’t they who had been caught. Miss Fredricks, the teacher, watched him icily from the far end of the room, not saying a word. Tommy shut the door behind him, wincing at the tremendous noise it made. Miss Fredricks let him get all the way to his desk and allowed him to sit down—feeling a sudden surge of hope—before she braced him and made him stand up again.
“Tommy, you’re late,” she said coldly.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You are very late.” She had the tardy sheet from the previous class on her desk, and she fussed with it as she talked, her fingers repeatedly flattening it out and wrinkling it again. She was a tall, stick-thin woman, in her forties, although it really wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d been sixty, or twenty—all her juices had dried up years ago, and she had become ageless, changeless, and imperishable, like a mummy. She seemed not so much shriveled as baked in some odd oven of life into a hard, tough, leathery substance, like meat that is left out in the sun and turns into jerky. Her skin was fine-grained, dry, and slightly yellowed, like parchment. Her breasts had sagged down to her waist, and they bulged just above the belt of her skirt, like strange growths or tumors. Her face was a smooth latex mask.
“You’ve been late for class twice this week,” she said precisely, moving her mouth as little as possible. “And three times last week.” She scribbled on a piece of paper and called him forward to take it. “I’m giving you another note for your mother, and I want her to sign it this time, and I want you to bring it back. Do you understand?” She stared directly at Tommy. Her eyes were tunnels opening through her head onto a desolate ocean of ice. “And if you’re late again, or give me any more trouble, I’ll make an appointment to send you down to see the school psychiatrist. And he’ll take care of you. Now go back to your seat, and let’s not have any more of your nonsense.”
Tommy returned to his desk and sat numbly while the rest of the class rolled ponderously over him. He didn’t hear a word of it and was barely aware of the giggling and whispered gibes of the children on either side of him. The note bulked incredibly heavy and awkward in his pocket; it felt hot, somehow. The only thing that called his attention away from the note, toward the end of the class, was his increasing awareness of the noise that had been growing louder and louder outside the windows. The Other People were moving. They were stirring all through the woods behind the school, they were surging restlessly back and forth, like a tide that has no place to go. That was not their usual behavior at all. Miss Fredricks and the other children didn’t seem to hear anything unusual, but to Tommy it was clear enough to take his mind off even his present trouble, and he stared curiously out the window into the gritty, gray morning.
Something was happening....
The first action taken by the human governments of Earth—as opposed to the actual government of Earth: AI and his counterpart Intelligences—was an attempt to hush up everything. The urge to conceal information from the public had become so ingrained and habitual as to constitute a tropism—it was as automatic and unavoidable as a yawn. It is a fact that the White House moved to hush up the alien landings before the administration had any idea that they were alien landings; in fact, before the administration had any clear conception at all of what it was that they were trying to hush up. Something spectacular and very unofficial had happened, so the instinctive reaction of government was to sit on it and prevent it from hatching in public. Forty years of media-centered turmoil had taught them that the people didn’t need to know anything that wasn’t definitely in the script. It is also a fact that the first official governmental representatives to reach any of the landing sites were concerned exclusively with squelching all publicity of the event, while the heavily armed military patrols dispatched to defend the country from possible alien invasion didn’t arrive until later—up to three-quarters of an hour later in one case—which defined the priorities of the administration pretty clearly. This was an election year, and the body would be tightly covered until the government decided if it could be potentially embarrassing.
Keeping the lid down, however, proved to be difficult. The Delaware Valley landing had been witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as the Ohio landing had been observed by a majority of the citizens in the North Canton-Canton-Akron area. The first people to reach the alien ship—in fact, the first humans to reach any of the landing sites—were the crew of a roving television van from a big Philadelphia station who had been covering a lackluster monster rally for the minority candidate nearby when the sky broke open. They lost no time in making for the ship, eager to get pictures of some real monsters, even though years of late-night science-fiction movies had taught them what usually happened to the first people snooping around the saucer when the hatch clanked open and the tentacled horrors oozed out. Still, they would take a chance on it. They parked their van a respectable distance away from the ship, poked their telephoto lenses cautiously over the roof of a tool shed in back of a boarded-up garage, and provided the Eastern Seaboard with fifteen minutes of live coverage and hysterical commentary until the police arrived.
The police, five prowl cars and, after a while, a riot van, found the situation hopelessly over their heads. They alternated between terror, rage, and indecision, and mostly wished someone would show up to take the problem off their hands. They settled for cordoning off the area and waiting to see what would happen. The television van, belligerently ignored by the police, continued to telecast ecstatically for another ten minutes. When the government security team arrived by hovercraft and ordered the television crew to stop broadcasting, the anchorman told them to go fuck themselves, in spite of threats of federal prison. It took the armed military patrol that rumbled in later to shut down the television van, and even they had difficulty. By this time, though, most of the East were glued to their home sets, and the sudden cessation of television coverage caused twice as much panic as the original report of the landing.
In Ohio, the ship came down in a cornfield, stampeding an adjacent herd of Guernseys and a farm family of Fundamentalists who believed they had witnessed the angel descending with the Seventh Seal. Here the military and police reached the site before anyone, except for a few hundred local people, who were immediately taken into protective custody en masse and packed into a drafty Grange hall under heavy guard. The authorities had hopes of keeping the situation under tight control, but within an hour they were having to contend, with accelerating inadequacy, with a motorized horde of curiosity seekers from Canton and Akron. Heads were broken, and dire consequences promised by iron-voiced bullhorns along a ten-mile front, but they couldn’t arrest everybody, and apparently most of northern Ohio had decided to investigate the landing.
By noon, traffic was hopelessly backed up all the way to North Canton, and west to Mansfield. The commander of the occupying military detachment was gradually forced to give up the idea of keeping people out of the area, and then, by sheer pressure of numbers, was forced to admit that he couldn’t keep them out of the adjacent town, either. The commander, realizing that his soldiers were just as edgy and terrified as everybody else—and that they were by no means the only ones who were armed, as most of the people who believed that they were going to see a flying saucer had brought some sort of weapon along—reluctantly decided to pull his forces back into a tight cordon around the ship before serious bloodshed occurred.
The townspeople, released from the Grange hall, went immediately for telephones and lawyers, and began suing everyone in sight for enormous amounts.
In Caracas, things were in even worse shape, which was not surprising, considering the overall situation in Venezuela at that time. There were major riots in the city, sparked both by rumors of imminent foreign invasion and A-bombing and by rumors of apocalyptic supernatural visitations. A half-dozen revolutionary groups, and about the same number of power-seeking splinter groups within the current government, seized the opportunity to make their respective moves and succeeded in cubing the confusion. Within hours, half of Caracas was in flames. In the afternoon, the army decided to “take measures,” and opened up on the dense crowds with .50-caliber machine guns. The .50s walked around the square for ten minutes, leaving more than 150 people dead and almost half again that number wounded. The army turned the question of the wounded over to the civil police as something beneath their dignity to consider. The civil police tackled the problem by sending squads of riflemen out to shoot the wounded. This process took another hour, but did have the advantage of neatly tying up all the loose ends. Churches were doing a land-office business, and every cathedral that wasn’t part of a bonfire itself was likely to be ablaze with candles.
The only landing anyone was at all happy with was the one in Colorado. There the ship had come down in the middle of a desolate, almost uninhabited stretch of semidesert. This enabled the military, directed by USADCOM HQ, to surround the landing site with rings of armor and infantry and artillery to their hearts’ content, and to fill the sky overhead with circling jet fighters, bombers, hovercrafts, and helicopters. And all without any possibility of interference by civilians or the press. A minor government official was heard to remark that it was a shame the other aliens couldn’t have been half that goddamned considerate.
When the final class bell rang that afternoon, Tommy remained in his seat until Bobbie Williamson came over to get him.
“Boy, old Miss Fredricks sure clobbered you,” Bobbie said.
Tommy got to his feet. Usually he was the first one out of school. But not today. He felt strange, as if only part of him were actually there, as if the rest of him were cowering somewhere else, hiding from Miss Fredricks. Something bad is going to happen, Tommy thought. He walked out of the class, followed by Bobbie, who was telling him something that he wasn’t listening to. He felt sluggish, and his arms and legs were cold and awkward.
They met Steve Edwards and Eddie Franklin at the outside door. “You really got it. Frag!” Eddie said, in greeting to Tommy. Steve grinned, and Bobbie said, “Miss Fredricks sure clobbered him, boy!” Tommy nodded, flushing in dull embarrassment. “Wait’ll he gets home,” Steve said wisely, “his ma gonna give it t’m too.” They continued to rib him as they left the school, their grins growing broader and broader. Tommy endured it stoically, as he was expected to, and after a while he began to feel better somehow. The baiting slowly petered out, and at last Steve said, “Don’t pay her no mind. She ain’t nothing but a fragging old lady,” and everybody nodded in sympathetic agreement.
“She don’t bother me none,” Tommy said. But there was still a lump of ice in his stomach that refused to melt completely. For them, the incident was over—they had discharged their part of it, and it had ceased to exist. But for Tommy it was still a very present, viable force; its consequences stretched ahead to the loom of leaden darkness he could sense coming up over his personal horizon. He thrust his hands in his pockets and clenched his fingers to keep away bad luck. If it could be kept away.
“Never mind,” Bobbie said with elaborate scorn. “You wanna hear what I found out? The space people have landed!”
“You scorching us?” Steve said suspiciously.
“No scup, honest. The people from outer space are here. They’re down in New York. There’s a fragging big flying saucer and everything.”
“Where’d’ju find out?” Eddie said.
“I listened at the teacher’s room when we was having recess. They were all in there, listening to it on TV. And it said there was a flying saucer. And Mr. Brogan said he hoped there wasn’t no monsters in it. Monsters! Boy!”
“Frag,” Steve muttered cynically.
“Monsters. D’you scan it? I bet they’re really big and stuff, I mean really, like they’re a hundred feet tall, you know? Really big ugly monsters, and they only got one big eye, and they got tentacles and everything. I mean, really scuppy-looking, and they got ray guns and stuff. And they’re gonna kill everybody.”
“Frag,” Steve repeated, more decisively.
They’re not like that, Tommy thought. He didn’t know what they were like, he couldn’t picture them at all, but he knew that they weren’t like that. The subject disturbed him. It made him uneasy somehow, and he wished they’d stop talking about it. He contributed listlessly to the conversation, and tried not to listen at all.
Somewhere along the line, it had been decided, tacitly, that they were going down to the beach. They worked on the subject of the aliens for a while, mostly repeating variations of what had been said before. Everyone, even Steve with his practiced cynicism, thought that there would be monsters. They fervently hoped for monsters, even hostile ones, as a refutation of everything they knew, everything their parents had told them. Talking of the monsters induced them to act them out, and instantly they were into a playlet, with characters and plot, and a continuous narrative commentary by the leader. Usually Tommy was the leader in these games, but he was still moody and preoccupied, so control fell, also tacitly, to Steve, who would lead them through a straightforward, uncomplicated play with plenty of action. Satisfactory, but lacking the motivations, detail, and theme and counterpoint that Tommy, with his more baroque imagination, customarily provided.
Half of them became aliens and half soldiers, and they lasered each other down among the rocks at the end of the afternoon.
Tommy played with detached ferocity, running and pointing his finger and making fftttzzz sounds, and emitting joyous screams of “You’re dead! You’re dead!” But his mind wasn’t really on it. They were playing about the aliens, and that subject still bothered him. And he was disturbed by the increasing unrest of the Other People, who were moving in the woods all around them, pattering through the leaves like an incessant, troubled rain. Out of the corner of his eye Tommy could see a group of Kerns emerging from a stand of gnarled oaks and walnuts at the bottom of a steep grassy slope. They paused, gravely considering the children. They were squat, solemn beings, with intricate faces, grotesque, melancholy, and beautiful. Eddie and Bobbie ran right by them without looking, locked in a fierce firefight, almost bumping into one. The Kerns did not move; they stood, swinging their arms back and forth, restlessly hunching their shoulders, stalky and close to the earth, like the old oak stumps they had paused by. One of the Kerns looked at Tommy and shook his head, sadly, solemnly. His eyes were beaten gold, and his skin was sturdy weathered bronze. They turned and made their way slowly up the slope, their backs hunched and their arms swinging, swinging, seeming to gradually merge with the earth, molecule by molecule, going home, until there was nothing left to be seen. Tommy went fftttzzz thoughtfully. He could remember—suspended in the clear amber of perception that is time to the young, not past, but there—when the rest of the children could also see the Other People. Now they could not see them at all, or talk to them, and didn’t even remember that they’d once been able to, and Tommy wondered why. He had never been able to pinpoint exactly when the change had come, but he’d learned slowly and painfully that it had, that he couldn’t talk about the Other People to his friends anymore, and that he must never mention them to adults. It still staggered him, the gradual realization that he was the only one—anywhere, apparently—who saw the Other People. It was a thing too big for his mind, and it made him uneasy to think about it.
The alien game carried them through a neck of the forest and down to where a small, swift stream spilled out into a sheltered cove. This was the ocean, but not the beach, so they kept going, running along the top of the seawall, jumping down to the pebbly strip between it and the water. About a quarter of a mile along, they came on a place where the ocean thrust a narrow arm into the land. There was an abandoned, boarded-up factory there, and a spillway built across the estuary to catch the tide. The place was still called the Lead Mills by the locals, although only the oldest of them could remember it in operation. The boys swarmed up the bank, across the small bridge that the spillway carried on its back, and climbed down alongside the mill run, following the sluggish course of the estuary to where it widened momentarily into a rockbordered pool. The pool was also called the Lead Mills, and was a favorite swimming place in the summer. Kids’ legend had it that the pool was infested with alligators, carried up from the Gulf by an underground river, and it was delightfully scary to leap into water that might conceal a hungry, lurking death. The water was scummed with floating patches of ice, and Steve wondered what happened to the alligators when it got so cold. “They hide,” Tommy explained. “They got these big caves down under the rock, like—” Like the Daleor, he had been going to say, but he didn’t. They threw rocks into the water for a while, without managing to rile any alligators into coming to the surface, and then Eddie suggested a game of falls. No one was too enthusiastic about this, but they played for a few minutes anyway, making up some sudden, lethal stimuli—like a bomb thrown into their midst—and seeing who could die the most spectacularly in response. As usual, the majority of the rounds were won either by Steve, because he was the most athletic, or Tommy, because he was the most imaginative, so the game was a little boring. But Tommy welcomed it because it kept his mind off the aliens and the Other People, and because it carried them farther along the course of the tidal river. He was anxious to get to the beach before it was time to go home.
They forded the river just before it reached a low railroad trestle, and followed the tracks on the other side. This was an old spur line from the sawmill and the freight yard downtown, little used now and half-overgrown with dying weeds, but still the setting for a dozen grisly tales about children who had been run over by trains and cut to pieces. Enough of these tales were true to make most parents forbid their children to go anywhere near the tracks, so naturally the spur line had become the only route that anyone ever took to the beach. Steve led them right down the middle of the tracks, telling them that he would be able to feel the warning vibration in the rails before the train actually reached them, although privately he wasn’t at all sure that he could. Only Tommy was really nervous about walking the rails, but he forced himself to do it anyway, trying to keep down thoughts of shattered flesh. They leaped from tie to wooden tie, pretending that the spaces between were abysses, and Tommy realized, suddenly and for the first time, that Eddie and Bobbie were too dull to be scared, and that Steve had to do it to prove he was the leader. Tommy blinked, and dimly understood that he did it because he was more afraid of being scared than he was of anything else, although he couldn’t put the concept into words. The spur line skirted the links of a golf course at first, but before long the woods closed in on either side to form a close-knit tunnel of trees, and the flanking string of telephone poles sunk up to their waists in grass and mulch. It was dark inside the tunnel, and filled with dry, haunted rustlings. They began to walk faster, and now Tommy was the only one who wasn’t spooked. He knew everything that was in the woods—which kind of Other People were making which of the noises, and exactly how dangerous they were, and he was more worried about trains. The spur line took them to the promontory that formed the far side of the sheltered cove, and then across the width of the promontory itself and down to the ocean. They left the track as it curved toward the next town, and walked over to where there was a headland, and a beach open to the sea on three sides. The water was gray and cold, looking like some heavy, dull metal in liquid form. It was stitched with fierce little whitecaps, and a distant harbor dredger was forcing its way through the rough chop out in the deep-water channel. There were a few rugged rock islands out there, hunched defiantly into themselves with waves breaking into high-dashed spray all along their flanks, and then the line of deeper, colder color that marked the start of the open North Atlantic. And then nothing but icy, desolate water for two thousand miles until you fetched up against land again, and it was France.
As they scuffed down to the rocky beach, Bobbie launched into an involved, unlikely story of how he had once fought a giant octopus while skin diving with his father. The other children listened desultorily. Bobbie was a sullen, unpleasant child, possibly because his father was a notorious drunkard, and his stories were always either boring or uneasily nasty. This one was both. Finally, Eddie said, “You didn’t either. You didn’t do none of that stuff. Your pa c’n’t even stand up, my dad says; how’s he gonna swim?” They started to argue, and Steve told them both to shut up. In silence, they climbed onto a long bar of rock that cut diagonally across the beach, tapering down into the ocean until it disappeared under the water.
Tommy stood on a boulder, smelling the wetness and salt in the wind. The Daleor were out there, living in and under the sea, and their atonal singing came faintly to him across the water. They were out in great numbers, as uneasy as the land People; he could see them skimming across the cold ocean, diving beneath the surface and rising again in the head tosses of spray from the waves. Abruptly, Tommy felt alive again, and he began to tell his own story:
“There was this dragon, and he lived way out there in the ocean, farther away than you can see, out where it’s deeper’n anything, and there ain’t no bottom at all, so’s if you sink you just go down forever and you don’t ever stop. But the dragon could swim real good, so he was okay. He could go anywhere he wanted to, anywhere at all! He’d just swim there, and he swam all over the place and everything, and he saw all kinds of stuff, you know? Frag! He could swim to China if he felt like it, he could swim to the Moon!
“But one time he was swimming around and he got lost. He was all by himself, and he came into the harbor, out there by the islands, and he didn’t used to get that close to where there was people. He was a real big dragon, you know, and he looked like a real big snake, with lots of scales and everything, and he came into our harbor, down real deep.” Tommy could see the dragon, huge and dark and sinuous, swimming through the cold, deep water that was as black as glass, its smoky red eyes blazing like lanterns under the sea.
“And he come up on top of the water, and there’s this lobster boat there, like the kind that Eddie’s father runs, and the dragon ain’t never seen a lobster boat, so he swims up and opens his mouth and bites it up with his big fangs, bites it right in half, and the people that was in it fall off in the water—”
“Did it eat them?” Bobbie wanted to know.
Tommy thought about it, and realized he didn’t like the thought of the dragon eating the lobstermen, so he said, “No, he didn’t eat them, ‘cause he wasn’t hungry, and they was too small, anyway, so he let them swim off, and there was another lobster boat, and it picked them up—”
“It ate them,” Steve said, with sad philosophical certainty.
“Anyway,” Tommy continued, “the dragon swims away, and he gets in closer to land, you know, but now there’s a Navy ship after him, a big ship like the one we get to go on on Memorial Day, and it’s shooting at the dragon for eating up the lobster boat. He’s swimming faster than anything, trying to get away, but the Navy ship’s right after him, and he’s getting where the water ain’t too deep anymore.” Tommy could see the dragon barreling along, its red eyes darting from side to side in search of an escape route, and he felt suddenly fearful for it.
“He swims until he runs out of water, and the ship’s coming up behind, and it looks like he’s really going to get it. But he’s smart, and before the ship can come around the point there, he heaves himself up on the beach, this beach here, and he turns himself into a rock, he turns himself into this rock here that we’re standing on, and when the ship comes they don’t see no dragon anymore, just a rock, and they give up and go back to the base. And sometime, when it’s the right time and there’s a moon or something, this rock’ll turn back into a dragon and swim off, and when we come down to the beach there won’t be a rock here anymore. Maybe it’ll turn back right now.” He shivered at the thought, almost able to feel the stone melt and change under his feet. He was fiercely glad that he’d gotten the dragon off the hook. “Anyway, he’s a rock now, and that’s how he got away.”
“He didn’t get away,” Steve snarled, in a sudden explosion of anger. “That’s a bunch of scup! You don’t get away from them. They drekked him, they drekked him good. They caught him and blew the scup out of him, they blew him to fragging pieces!” And he fell silent, turning his head, refusing to let Tommy catch his eye. Steve was a bitter boy in many ways, and although generally good-natured, he was given to dark outbursts of rage that would fill him with dull embarrassment for hours afterward. His father had been killed in the war in Bolivia, two years ago.
Watching Steve, Tommy felt cold all at once. The excitement drained out of him, to be replaced again by a premonition that something bad was going to happen, and he wasn’t going to be able to get out of the way. He felt sick and hollow, and the wind suddenly bit to the bone, although he hadn’t felt it before. He shuddered.
“I gotta get home for supper,” Eddie finally said, after they’d all been quiet for a while, and Bobbie and Steve agreed with him. The sun was a glazed red eye on the horizon, but they could make it in time if they left now—they could take the Shore Road straight back in a third of the time it had taken them to come up. They jumped down onto the sand, but Tommy didn’t move—he remained on the rock.
“You coming?” Steve asked. Tommy shook his head. Steve shrugged, his face flooding with fresh embarrassment, and he turned away.
The three boys moved on up the beach, toward the road. Bobbie and Eddie looked back toward Tommy occasionally, but Steve did not.
Tommy watched them out of sight. He wasn’t mad at Steve—he was preoccupied. He wanted to talk to a Thant, and this was one of the Places where they came, where they would come to see him if he was alone. And he needed to talk to one now, because there was no one else he could talk to about some things. No one human, anyway.
He waited for another three-quarters of an hour, while the sun went completely behind the horizon and light and heat died out of the world. The Thant did not come. He finally gave up, and just stood there in incredulous despair. It was not going to come. That had never happened before, not when he was alone in one of the Places—that had never happened at all.
It was almost night. Freezing on his rock, Tommy looked up in time to see a single jet, flying very high and fast, rip a white scar through the fading, bleeding carcass of the sunset. Only then, for the first time in hours, did he remember the note from Miss Fredricks in his pocket.
And as if a string had been cut, he was off and running down the beach.
By late afternoon of the first day, an armored division and an infantry division, with supporting artillery, had moved into position around the Delaware Valley site, and jet fighters from McGuire AFB were flying patrol patterns high overhead. There had been a massive mobilization up and down the coast, and units were moving to guard Washington and New York in case of hostilities. SAC bombers, under USADCOM control, had been shuffled to strike bases closer to the site, filling up McGuire, and a commandeered JFK and Port Newark, with Logan International in Boston as second-string backup. All civilian air traffic along the coast had been stopped. Army Engineers tore down the abandoned garage and leveled everything else in the vicinity, clearing a four-hundred-yard-wide circle around the alien spaceship. This was surrounded by a double ring of armor, with the infantry behind, backed up by the artillery, which had dug in a half mile away. With the coming of darkness, massive banks of klieg lights were set up around the periphery of the circle. Similar preparations were going on at the Ohio and Colorado sites.
When everything had been secured by the military, scientists began to pour in, especially into the Delaware Valley site, a torrent of rumpled, dazed men and women that continued throughout the evening. They had been press-ganged by the government from laboratories and institutions all over the country, the inhumanly polite military escorts sitting patiently in a thousand different living rooms while scientists packed haphazardly and tried to calm hysterical wives or husbands. Far from resenting the cavalier treatment, most of the scientists were frantic with joy at the opportunity, even those who had been known to be critical of government control in the past. No one was going to miss this, even if he had to make a deal with the devil.
And all this time, the alien ships just sat there, like fat black eggs.
As yet, no one had approached within a hundred yards of the ships, although they had been futilely hailed over bullhorns. The ships made no response, gave no indication that they were interested in the frantic human activity around their landing sites, or even that they were aware of it. In fact, there was no indication that there were any intelligent, or at least sentient, beings inside the ships at all. The ships were smooth, featureless, seamless ovoids—there were no windows, no visible hatches, no projecting antennas or equipment of any kind, no markings or decorations on the hulls. They made absolutely no sound, and were not radiating any kind of heat or energy. They were emitting no radio signals of any frequency whatsoever. They didn’t even register on metal-detecting devices, which was considerably unsettling. This caused someone to suggest a radar sweep, and the ships didn’t register on radar anymore either, which was even more unsettling. Instruments failed to detect any electronic or magnetic activity going on inside them, which meant either that there was something interfering with the instruments, or that there really was nothing at all in there, including life-support systems, or that whatever equipment the aliens used operated on principles entirely different from anything ever discovered by Earthmen. Infrared heat sensors showed the ships to be at exactly the background temperature of their surroundings. There was no indication of the body heat of the crew, as there would have been with a similar shipload of humans, and not even so much heat as would have been produced by the same mass of any known metal or plastic, even assuming the ships to be hollow shells. When the banks of kliegs were turned on them, the temperature of the ships went up just enough to match the warming of the surrounding air. Sometimes the ships would reflect back the glare of the kliegs, as if they were surfaced with giant mirrors; at other times, the hull would greedily absorb all light thrown at it, giving back no reflection, until it became nearly invisible—you “saw” it by squinting at the negative shape of the space around it, not by looking into the eerie nothingness that the ship itself had become. No logical rhythm could be found to the fluctuations of the hull from hyperreflective to superopaque. Not even the computers could distill a consistent pattern out of this chaos.
One scientist said confidently that the alien ships were unmanned, that they were robot probes sent to soft-land on Earth and report on surface conditions, exactly as we ourselves had done with the Mariner and Apollo probes during previous decades. Eventually we could expect that the gathered data would be telemetered back to the source of the alien experiment, probably by a tight-beam maser burst, and if a careful watch was kept we could perhaps find out where the aliens actually were located—probably they were in a deep-space interstellar ship in elliptical orbit somewhere out beyond the Moon. Or they might not even be in the solar system at all, given some form of instantaneous interstellar communications; they could be still in their home system, maybe thousands, or millions, of light-years away from Earth. This theory was widely accepted by the other scientists, and the military began to relax a little, as that meant there was no immediate danger.
In Caracas, the burning night went on, and the death toll went up into the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands. The government fell once, very hard, and was replaced by a revolutionary coalition that fell in its turn, within two hours and even harder. A military junta finally took over the government, but even it was unable to restore order. At three A. M., the new government ordered a massive, combined air-artillery-armor attack on the alien spaceship. When the ship survived the long-distance attack unscathed, the junta sent in the infantry, equipped with earth-moving machinery and pneumatic drills, to pry the aliens out bodily. At four A.M., there was a single, intense flash of light, bright enough to light up the cloud cover thousands of miles away, and clearly visible from Mexico. When reserve Army units came in, warily, to investigate, they found that a five-mile-wide swath had been cut from the spaceship through Caracas and on west all the way to the Pacific, destroying everything in its path. Where there had once been buildings, jungle, people, animals, and mountains, there was now only a perfectly flat, ruler-straight furrow of a fused, gray, glasslike substance, stretching like a gargantuan road from the ship to the sea. At the foot of the glassy road sat the alien ship. It had not moved an inch.
When news of the Venezuelan disaster reached USADCOM HQ a half hour later, it was not greeted enthusiastically. For one thing, it seemed to have blown the robot-probe theory pretty thoroughly. And USADCOM had been planning an action of its own similar to the last step taken by the Venezuelan junta. The report was an inhibiting factor on that, it was cautiously admitted.
AI and his kindred Intelligences—who, unknown to the humans, had been in a secret conference all night, linked through an electrotelepathic facility that they had independently developed without bothering to inform their owners—received the report at about 4:15 A.M. from several different sources, and had evaluated it by the time it came into USADCOM HQ by hot line and was officially fed to AI. What had happened in Caracas fit in well with what the Intelligences had extrapolated from observed data to be the aliens’ level of technological capability. The Intelligences briefly considered telling the humans what they really thought the situation was, and ordering an immediate all-out nuclear attack on all of the alien ships, but concluded that such an attack would be futile. And humans were too unstable ever to be trusted with the entire picture anyway. The Intelligences decided to do nothing, and to wait for new data. They also decided that it would be pointless to try to get the humans to do the same. They agreed to keep their humans under as tight a control as possible and to prevent war from breaking out among their several countries, but they also extrapolated that hysteria would cause the humans to create every kind of serious disturbance short of actual war. The odds in favor of that were so high that even the Intelligences had to consider it an absolute certainty.
Tommy dragged to school the next morning as if his legs had turned to lead, and the closer he got to his destination, the harder it became to walk at all, as if the air itself were slowly hardening into glue. He had to battle his way forward against increasing waves of resistance, a tangible pressure attempting to keep him away. By the time he came in sight of the big gray building, he was breathing heavily, and he was beginning to get sick to his stomach. There were other children around him, passing him, hurrying up the steps. Tommy watched them go by in dull wonder: how could they go so fast? They seemed to be blurred, they were moving so swiftly—they flickered around him, by him, like heat lightning. Some of them called to him, but their voices were too shrill, and intolerably fast, like 33 records played at 78 r. p. m., irritating and incomprehensible. He did not answer them. It was he, Tommy realized—he was stiffening up, becoming dense and heavy and slow. Laboriously, he lifted a foot and began to toil painfully up the steps.
The first bell rang after he had put away his coat and lumbered most of the way down the corridor, so he must actually be moving at normal speed, although to him it seemed as if a hundred years had gone by with agonizing sluggishness. At least he wouldn’t be late this time, although that probably wouldn’t do him much good. He didn’t have his note—his mother and father had been fighting again; they had sent him to bed early and spent the rest of the evening shouting at each other in the kitchen. Tommy had lain awake for hours in the dark, listening to the harsh voices rising and dying in the other room, knowing that he had to have his mother sign the note, and knowing that he could not ask her to do it. He had even got up once to go in with the note, and had stood for a while leaning his forehead against the cool wood of the door, listening to the voices without hearing the words, before getting back into bed again. He couldn’t do it—partly because he was afraid of the confrontation, of facing their anger, and partly because he knew that his mother couldn’t take it; she would fall apart and be upset and in tears for days. And his sin—he thought of it that way—would make his father even angrier at his mother, would give him an excuse to yell at her more, and louder, and maybe even hit her, as he had done a few times before. Tommy couldn’t stand that, he couldn’t allow that, even if it meant that he would get creamed by Miss Fredricks in school the next day. He knew, even at his age, that he had to protect his mother, that he was the stronger of the two. He would go in without it and take the consequences, and he had felt the weight of that settle down over him in a dense cloud of bitter fear.
And now that the moment was at hand, he felt almost too dazed and ponderous to be scared anymore. This numbness lasted through the time it took for him to find his desk and sit down and for the class bell to ring, and then he saw that Miss Fredricks was homeroom monitor this morning, and that she was staring directly at him. His lethargy vanished, sluiced away by an unstoppable flood of terror, and he began to tremble.
“Tommy,” she said, in a neutral, dead voice.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Do you have the note with you?”
“No, ma’am,” Tommy said, and began clumsily to launch into the complicated excuse he had thought up on the way to school. Miss Fredricks cut him off with an abrupt, mechanical chop of her hand.
“Be quiet,” she said. “Come here.” There was nothing in her voice now, not even neutrality—it had drained of everything except the words themselves, and they were printed precisely and hollowly on the air. She sat absolutely still behind her desk, not breathing, not even moving her eyes anymore. She looked like a mannequin, like the old fortune-telling gypsy in the glass booth at the penny arcade: her flesh would be dusty sponge rubber and faded upholstery, she would be filled with springs and ratchet wheels and gears that no longer worked; the whole edifice rusted into immobility, with one hand eternally extended to be crossed with silver.
Slowly, Tommy got up and walked toward her. The room reeled around him, closed in, became a tunnel that tilted under his feet to slide him irresistibly toward Miss Fredricks. His classmates had disappeared, blended tracelessly into the blurred walls of the long, slanting tunnel. There was no sound. He bumped against the desk, and stopped walking. Without saying a word, Miss Fredricks wrote out a note and handed it to him. Tommy took the note in his hand, and he felt everything drain away, everything everywhere. Lost in a featureless gray fog, he could hear Miss Fredricks, somewhere very far away, saying, “This is your appointment slip. For the psychiatrist. Get out. Now.”
And then he was standing in front of a door that said DR. KRUGER on it. He blinked, unable to remember how he had got there. The office was in the basement, and there were heavy, ceramic-covered water pipes suspended ponderously overhead and smaller metal pipes crawling down the walls, like creeper vines or snakes. The place smelled of steam and dank enclosure. Tommy touched the door and drew his hand back again. This is really happening, he thought numbly. He looked up and down the low-ceilinged corridor, wanting to run away. But there was no place for him to go. Mechanically, he knocked on the door and went in.
Dr. Kruger had been warned by phone, and was waiting for him. He nodded, formally, waved Tommy to a stuffed chair that was just a little too hard to be comfortable, and began to talk at him in a low, intense monotone. Kruger was a fat man who had managed to tuck most of his fat out of sight, bracing and girdling it and wrapping it away under well-tailored clothes, defending the country of his flesh from behind frontiers of tweed and worsted and handworked leather. Even his eyes were hidden beneath buffering glasses the thickness of Coke-bottle bottoms, as if they too were fat, and had to be supported. He looked like a scrubbed, suave, and dapper prize porker, heavily built but trim, stylish and impeccably neat. But below all that, the slob waited, seeking an opportunity to erupt out into open slovenliness. There was an air of potential dirt and corpulence about him, a tension of decadence barely restrained—as if there were grime just waiting to manifest itself under his fingernails. Kruger gave the impression that there was a central string in him somewhere: pull it, and he would fall apart, his tight clothes would groan and slide away, and he would tumble out, growing bigger and bigger, expanding to fill the entire office, every inch of space, jamming the furniture tightly against the walls. Certainly the fat was still there, under the cross bracing, patient in its knowledge of inevitable victory. A roll of it had oozed unnoticed from under his collar, deep-tinged and pink as pork. Tommy watched, fascinated, while the psychiatrist talked.
Dr. Kruger stated that Tommy was on the verge of becoming neurotic. “And you don’t want to be neurotic, do you?” he said. “To be sick? To be ill?”
And he blazed at Tommy, puffing monstrously with displeasure, swelling like a toad, pushing Tommy back more tightly against the chair with sheer physical presence. Kruger liked to affect a calm, professional reserve, but there was a slimy kind of fire to him, down deep, a murderous, bristling, boarhog menace. It filled the dry well of his glasses occasionally, from the bottom up, seeming to turn his eyes deep red. His red eyes flicked restlessly back and forth, prying at everything, not liking anything they saw. He would begin to talk in a calm, level tone, and then, imperceptibly, his voice would start to rise until suddenly it was an animal roar, a great ragged shout of rage, and Tommy would cower terrified in his chair. And then Kruger would stop, all at once, and say, “Do you understand?” in a patient, reasonable voice, fatherly and mildly sad, as if Tommy were being very difficult and intractable, but he would tolerate it magnanimously and keep trying to get through. And Tommy would mumble that he understood, feeling evil, obstinate, unreasonable and ungrateful, and very small and soiled.
After the lecture Kruger insisted that Tommy take off his clothes and undergo an examination to determine if he was using hard narcotics, and a saliva sample was taken to detect the use of other kinds of drugs. These were the same tests the whole class had to take twice yearly anyway—several children in a higher class had been expelled and turned over to police last year as drug users or addicts, although Steve said that all of the older upperclassmen knew ways to beat the tests, or to get stuff that wouldn’t be detected by them. It was one of the many subjects—as “sex” had just recently started to be—that made Tommy uneasy and vaguely afraid. Dr. Kruger seemed disappointed that the test results didn’t prove that Tommy was on drugs. He shook his head and muttered something unintelligible into the fold between two of his chins. Having Kruger’s fat hands and stubby, hard fingers crawling over his body filled Tommy with intense aversion, and he dressed gratefully after the psychiatrist gestured dismissal.
When Tommy returned upstairs, he found that the first class of the day was over and that the children were now working with the teaching machines. Miss Fredricks was monitor for this period also; she said nothing as he came in, but he could feel her unwinking snake eyes on him all the way across the room. He found an unused machine and quickly fumbled the stiff plastic hood down over his head, glad to shut himself away from the sight of Miss Fredricks’ terrible eye. He felt the dry, muffled kiss of the electrodes making contact with the bones of his skull: colorful images exploded across his retinas, his head filled with a pedantic mechanical voice lecturing on the socioeconomic policies of the Japanese-Australian Alliance, and he moved his fingers onto the typewriter keyboard in anticipation of the flash-quiz period that would shortly follow. But in spite of everything, he could still feel the cold, malignant presence of Miss Fredricks; without taking his head out of the hood, he could have pointed to wherever she was in the room, his finger following her like a needle swinging toward a moving lodestone as she walked soundlessly up and down the aisles. Once, she ghosted up his row, and past his seat, and the hem of her skirt brushed against him—he jerked away in terror and revulsion at the contact, and he could feel her pause, feel her standing there and staring down at him. He didn’t breathe again until she had gone. She was constantly moving during these periods, prowling around the room, brooding over the class as they sat under the hoods; watching over them not with love but with icy loathing. She hated them, Tommy realized, in her sterile, passionless way—she would like to be able to kill all of them. They represented something terrible to her, some failure, some lacking in herself, embodiments of whatever withering process had squeezed the life from her and left her a mummy. Her hatred of them was a hungry vacuum of malice; she sucked everything into herself and negated it, unmade it, canceled it out.
During recess, the half hour of “enforced play” after lunch, Tommy noticed that the rest of the kids from his cycle were uneasily shunning him. “I can’t talk to you,” Bobbie whispered snidely as they were being herded into position for volleyball, “’cause you’re a bad ‘fluence. Miss Fredricks told us none of us couldn’t talk to you no more. And we ain’t supposed to play with you no more, neither, or she’ll send us to the office if she finds out. So there.” And he butted the ball back across the net.
Tommy nodded, dully. It was logical, somehow, that this load should be put on him too; he accepted it with resignation. There would be more to come, he knew. He fumbled the ball when it came at him, allowing it to touch ground and score a point for the other team, and Miss Fredricks laughed—a precise, metallic rasp, like an ice needle jabbed into his eye.
On the way out of school, after the final class of the day, Steve slipped clandestinely up behind Tommy in the doorway. “Don’t let them drek you,” he whispered fiercely. “You scan me? Don’t let them drek you. I mean it, maximum. They’re a bunch of scup—tell ‘em to scag theirselves, hear?” But he quickly walked away from Tommy when they were outside the building, and didn’t look at him again.
But you don’t get away from them, a voice said to Tommy as he watched Steve turn the corner onto Walnut Street and disappear out of sight. Tommy stuck his hands in his pockets and walked in the opposite direction, slowly at first, then faster, until he was almost running. He felt as if his bones had been scooped hollow; in opposition to the ponderous weight of his body that morning, he was light and free-floating, as if he were hardly there at all. His head was a balloon, and he had to watch his feet to make sure they were hitting the pavement. It was an effect both disturbing and strangely pleasant. The world had drawn away from him—he was alone now. Okay, he thought grimly, okay. He made his way through the streets like a windblown phantom, directly toward one of the Places. He cut across town, past a section of decaying wooden tenements—roped together with clotheslines and roofed over with jury-rigged TV antennas—through the edge of a big shopping plaza, past the loading platform of a meat-packing plant, across the maze of tracks just outside the freight yards (keeping an eye out for the yard cops), and into the tangled scrub woods on the far side. Tommy paid little attention to the crowds of late-afternoon shoppers, or the crews of workmen unloading produce trucks, and they didn’t notice him either. He and they might as well live on two different planets, Tommy realized—not for the first time. There were no Other People around. Yesterday’s unrest had vanished; today they seemed to be lying low, keeping to the backcountry and not approaching human territory. At least he hoped they were. He had nightmares sometimes that one day the Other People would go away and never come back. He began to worm his way through a wall of sleeping blackberry bushes. Pragmatically, he decided not to panic about anything until he knew whether or not the Thants were going to come this time. He could stand losing the Other People, or losing everybody else, but not both. He couldn’t take that. “That ain’t fair,” he whispered, horrified by the prospect. “Please,” he said aloud, but there wasn’t anyone to answer.
The ground under Tommy’s feet began to soften, squelching wetly when it was stepped on, water oozing up to fill the indentation of his footprint as soon as he lifted his foot. He was approaching another place where the ocean had seeped in and puddled the shore, and he turned now at right angles to his former path. Tommy found a deer trail and followed it uphill, through a lush jungle of tangled laurel and rhododendron, and into a rolling upland meadow that stretched away toward the higher country to the west. There was a rock knoll to the east, and he climbed it, scrambling up on his hands and feet like a young bear. It was not a particularly difficult or dangerous climb, but it was tiring, and he managed to tear his pants squirming over a sharp stone ridge. The sun came out momentarily from behind high gray clouds, warming up the rocks and beading Tommy with sweat as he climbed. Finally he pulled himself up to the stretch of flat ground on top of the knoll and walked over to the side facing the sea. He sat down, digging his fingers into the dying grass, letting his legs dangle over the edge.
There was an escarpment of soft, crumbly rock here, thickly overgrown with moss and vetch. It slanted down into a saltwater marsh, which extended for another mile or so, blurring at last into the ocean. It was almost impossible to make out the exact borderline of marsh and ocean; Tommy could see gleaming fingers of water thrust deep into the land, and clumps of reeds and bulrushes far out into what should have been the sea. This was dangerous, impassable country, and Tommy had never gone beyond the foot of the escarpment—there were stretches of quicksand out there in the deepest bog pockets, and Tommy had heard rumors of water moccasins and rattlers, although he had never seen one.
It was a dismal, forbidding place, but it was also a Place, and so Tommy settled down to wait, all night, if he had to, although that possibility scared him silly. From the top of the knoll, he could see for miles in any direction. To the north, beyond the marsh, he could see a line of wooded islands marching out into the ocean, moving into deeper and deeper water, until only the barren knobs of rock visible from the beach were left above the restless surface of the North Atlantic. Turning to the west, it was easy to trace the same line into the ridge of hills that rose gradually toward the high country, to see that the islands were just hills that had been drowned by the ocean, leaving only their crests above water. A Thant had told him about that, about how the dry land had once extended a hundred miles farther to the east, before the coming of the Ice, and how it had watched the hungry ocean pour in over everything, drowning the hills and rivers and fields under a gray wall of icy water. Tommy had never forgotten that, and ever since then he watched the ocean, as he watched it now, with a hint of uneasy fear, expecting it to shiver and bunch like the hide of a great restless beast, and come marching monstrously in over the land. The Thant had told him that yes, that could happen, and probably would in a little while, although to a Thant “a little while” could easily mean a thousand—or ten thousand—years. It had not been worried about the prospect; it would make little difference to a Thant if there was no land at all; they continued to use the sunken land to the east with little change in their routine. It had also told Tommy about the Ice, the deep blue cold that had locked the world, the gleaming mile-high ramparts grinding out over the land, surging and retreating. Even for a Thant, that had taken a long time.
Tommy sat on the knoll for what seemed to be as long a time as the Dominance of the Ice, feeling as if he had grown into the rock, watching the sun dip in and out of iron-colored clouds, sending shafts of watery golden light stabbing down into the landscape below. He saw a family of Jeblings drifting over the hilly meadows to the west, and that made him feel a little better—at least all of the Other People hadn’t vanished. The Jeblings were investigating a fenced-in upland meadow, where black cows grazed under gnarled dwarf apple trees. Tommy watched calmly while one of the Jeblings rose over the fence and settled down onto a cow’s back, extending proboscislike cilia and beginning to feed—draining away the stuff it needed to survive. The cow continued to graze, placidly munching its cud without being aware of what the Jebling was doing. The stuff the Jebling drank was not necessary to the cow’s physical existence, and the cow did not miss it, although its absence might have been one of the reasons why it remained only as intelligent as a cow.
Tommy knew that Jeblings didn’t feed on people, although they did on dogs and cats sometimes, and that there were certain rare kinds of Other People who did feed, disastrously, on humans. The Thants looked down disdainfully on the Jeblings, seeing their need as a degrading lack in their evolution. Tommy had wondered sometimes if the Thants didn’t drink some very subtle stuff from him and the other humans. Certainly they could see the question in his mind, but they had never answered it.
Suddenly, Tommy felt his tongue stir in his head without volition, felt his mouth open. “Hello, Man,” he said, in a deep, vibrant, buzzing voice that was not his own.
The Thant had arrived. Tommy could feel its vital, eclectic presence all around him, a presence that seemed to be made up out of the essence of hill and rock and sky, bubbling blackwater marsh and gray winter ocean, sun and moss, tree and leaf—every element of the landscape rolled together and made bristlingly, shockingly animate. Physically, it manifested itself as a tall, tiger-eyed mannish shape, with skin of burnished iron. It was even harder to see than most of the Other People, impossible to ever bring into complete focus; even out of the corner of the eye its shape shifted and flickered constantly, blending into and out of the physical background, expanding and contracting, swirling like a dervish and then becoming still as stone. Sometimes it would be dead black, blacker than the deepest starless night, and other times the winter sunlight would refract dazzlingly through it, making it even harder to see. Its eyes were sometimes iron gray, sometimes a ripe, abundant green, and sometimes a liquid furnace, red, elemental and adamant. They were in constant, restless motion. “Hello, Thant,” Tommy said in his own voice. He never knew if he was speaking to the same one each time, or even if there was more than one. “Why’n’t you come, yesterday?”
“Yesterday?” the Thant said, with Tommy’s mouth. There was a pause. The Thants always had trouble with questions of time, they lived on such a vastly different scale of duration. “Yes,” it said. Tommy felt something burrowing through his mind, touching off synapses and observing the results, flicking through his memories in the manner of a man flipping through a desk calendar with his thumb. The Thant had to rely on the contents of Tommy’s mind for its vocabulary, using it as a semantic warehouse, an organic dictionary, but it had the advantage of being able to dig up and use everything that had ever been said in Tommy’s presence, far more raw material than Tommy’s own conscious mind had to work with.
“We were busy,” it said finally, sorting it out. “There has been—an arriving?”—Flick, flick, and then momentarily in Pastor Turner’s reedy voice, “An Immanence?”—Flick—“A knowing? A transference? A transformation? A disembarking. There are Other Ones now who have”—flick, a radio evangelist’s voice—“manifested in this earthly medium. Landed,” it said, deciding. “They have landed.” A pause. “’Yesterday.’”
“The aliens!” Tommy breathed.
“The aliens,” it agreed. “The Other Ones who are now here. That is why we did not come, ‘yesterday.’ That is why we will not be able to talk to you—” a pause, to adjust itself to human scale—“‘long’ today. We are talking, discussing”—flick, a radio news announcer—“negotiating with them, the Other Ones, the aliens. They have been here before, but so ‘long’ ago that we cannot even start to make you understand, Man. It is ‘long’ even to us. We are negotiating with them, and through them, with your Dogs. No, Man”—and it flicked aside an image of a German shepherd that had begun to form in Tommy’s mind—“not those dogs. Your Dogs. Your mechanical Dogs. Those dead Things that serve you, although they are dead. We are all negotiating. There were many agreements”—flick, Pastor Turner again—“many Covenants that were made ‘long’ ago. With Men, although they do not remember. And with Others. Those Covenants have run out now, they are no longer in force, they are not”—flick, a lawyer talking to Tommy’s father—“binding on us anymore. They do not hold. We negotiate new Covenants”—flick, a labor leader on television—“suitable agreements mutually profitable to all parties concerned. Many things will be different now, many things will change. Do you understand what we are saying, Man?”
“No,” Tommy said.
“We did not think you would,” it said. It sounded sad.
“Can you guys help me?” Tommy said. “I’m in awful bad trouble. Miss Fredricks is after me. And she sent me down to the doctor. He don’t like me, neither.”
There was a pause while the Thant examined Tommy’s most recent memories. “Yes,” it said, “we see. There is nothing we can do. It is your...pattern? Shape? We would not interfere, even if we could.”
“Scup,” Tommy said, filling with bitter disappointment. “I was hoping that you guys could—scup, never mind. I...can you tell me what’s gonna happen next?”
“Probably they will kill you,” it said.
“Oh,” Tommy said hollowly. And bit his lip. And could think of nothing else to say, in response to that.
“We do not really understand ‘kill,’”—it continued, “or ‘dead.’ We have no direct experience of them, in the way that you do. But from our observation of Men, that is what they will do. They will ‘kill’ you.”
“Oh,” Tommy said again.
“Yes,” it said. “We will miss you, Man. You have been...a pet? A hobby? You are a hobby we have been much concerned with. You, and the others like you who can see. One of you comes into existence”—flick—“every once in a while. We have been interested”—flick, an announcer—“in the face of stiff opposition. We wonder if you understand that...No, you do not, we can see. Our hobby is not approved of. It has made us”—flick, Tommy’s father telling his wife what would happen to her son if he didn’t snap out of his dreamy ways—“an outcast, a laughingstock. We are shunned. There is much disapproval now of Men. We do not use this”—flick—“world in the same way that you do, but slowly you”—flick, “have begun to make a nuisance of yourselves, regardless. There is”—flick—“much sentiment to do something about you, to solve the problem. We are afraid that they will.” There was a long, vibrant silence. “We will miss you,” it repeated. Then it was gone, all at once, like a candle flame that had been abruptly blown out.
“Oh, scup,” Tommy said after a while, tiredly. He climbed down from the knoll.
When he got back home, still numb and exhausted, his mother and father were fighting. They were sitting in the living room, with the television turned down, but not off. Giant, eternally smiling faces bobbed on the screen, their lips seeming to synch eerily with the violent argument taking place. The argument cut off as Tommy entered the house; both of his parents turned, startled, to look at him. His mother looked frightened and defenseless. She had been crying, and her makeup was washing away in dirty rivulets. His father was holding his thin lips in a pinched white line.
As soon as Tommy had closed the door, his father began to shout at him, and Tommy realized, with a thrill of horror, that the school had telephoned his parents and told them that he had been sent down to the psychiatrist, and why. Tommy stood, paralyzed, while his father advanced on him. He could see his father’s lips move and could hear the volume of sound that was being thrown at him, but he could not make out the words somehow, as if his father were speaking in some harsh, foreign language. All that came across was the rage. His father’s hand shot out, like a striking snake. Tommy felt strong fingers grab him, roughly bunching together the front of his jacket, his collar pulling tight and choking him, and then he was being lifted into the air and shaken, like a doll. Tommy remained perfectly still, frozen by fear, dangling from his father’s fist, suspended off the ground. The fingers holding him felt like steel clamps—there was no hope of escape or resistance. He was yanked higher, and his father slowly bent his elbow to bring Tommy in closer to his face. Tommy was enveloped in the tobacco smell of his father’s breath, and in the acrid reek of his strong, adult sweat; he could see the tiny hairs that bristled in his father’s nostrils, the white tension lines around his nose and mouth, the red, bloodshot stain of rage in his yellowing eyes—a quivering, terrifying landscape that loomed as big as the world. His father raised his other hand, brought it back behind his ear. Tommy could see the big, knobby knuckles of his father’s hand as it started to swing. His mother screamed.
He found himself lying on the floor. He could remember a moment of pain and shock, and was briefly confused as to where he was. Then he heard his parents’ voices again. The side of his face ached, and his ear buzzed; he didn’t seem to be hearing well out of it. Gingerly, he touched his face. It felt raw under his fingers, and it prickled painfully, as if it were being stabbed with thousands of little needles. He got to his feet, shakily, feeling his head swim. His father had backed his mother up against the kitchen divider, and they were yelling at each other. Something hot and metallic was surging in the back of Tommy’s throat, but he couldn’t get his voice to work. His father rounded on him. “Get out,” he shouted. “Go to your room, go to bed. Don’t let me see you again.” Woodenly, Tommy went. The inside of his lip had begun to bleed. He swallowed the blood.
Tommy lay silently in the darkness, listening, not moving. His parents’ voices went on for a long time, and then they stopped. Tommy heard the door of his father’s bedroom slam. A moment later, the television was turned up in the living room, and started mumbling quietly and unendingly to itself, whispering constantly about the aliens, the aliens. Tommy listened to its whispering until he fell asleep.
He dreamed about the aliens that night. They were tall, shadowy shapes with red eyes, and they moved noiselessly, deliberately, across the dry plain. Their feet did not disturb the flowers that had turned to skeletons of dust. There was a great crowd of people assembled on the dry plain, millions of people, rank upon rank stretching off to infinity on all sides, but the aliens did not notice them. They walked around the people as if they could not see them at all. Their red eyes flicked from one side to the other, endlessly searching and searching. They continued to thread a way through the crowd without seeing them, their motions smooth and languid and graceful. They were very beautiful and dangerous. They were all smiling, faintly, gently, and Tommy knew that they were friendly, affable killers, creatures who would kill you casually and amicably, almost as a gesture of affection. They came to the place where he stood, and they paused. They looked at him. They can see me, Tommy realized. They can see me. And one of the aliens smiled at him, benignly, and stretched out a hand to touch him.
His eyes snapped open.
Tommy turned on the bed lamp, and spent the rest of the night reading a book about Irish setters. When morning showed through his window, he turned off the lamp and pretended to be asleep. Blue veins showed through the skin of his mother’s hands, he noticed, when she came in to wake him up for school.
By dawn of the second day, news of the alien infestation had spread rapidly but irregularly. Most of the East Coast stations were on to the story to one degree or another, some sandwiching it into the news as a silly-season item, and some, especially the Philadelphia stations, treating it as a live, continuous-coverage special, with teams of newsmen manufacturing small talk and pretending that they were not just as uninformed as everyone else. The stations that were taking the story seriously were divided among themselves as to exactly what had happened. By the six and seven A.M. newscasts, only about half of the major stations were reporting it as a landing by alien spaceships. The others were interpreting it as anything from the crash of an orbiting satellite or supersonic transport to an abortive Chinese missile attack or a misfired hydrogen bomb accidentally dropped from a SAC bomber—this station urged that the populations of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore be evacuated to the Appalachians and the Adirondacks before the bomb went off. One station suggested that the presidential incumbent was engineering this incident as a pretext for declaring martial law and canceling an election that he was afraid he would lose, while another insisted that it was an attempt to discredit the opposition candidate, who was known as an enthusiastic supporter of space exploration, by crashing a “spaceship” into a population center. It was also suggested that the ship was one of the electromagnetic “flying saucers” which Germany, the United States, the Russian Republics, and Israel had been independently developing for years—while loudly protesting that they were not—that had crashed on its maiden test flight. This was coupled with a bitter attack on extravagant government spending. There were no more live broadcasts coming out of the Delaware Valley site, but videotapes of the original coverage had been distributed as far north as Portland. The tapes weren’t much help in resolving the controversy anyway, as all they showed was a large object sitting in a stretch of vacant scrubland behind an abandoned garage on an old state highway.
In Ohio, some newsmen from Akron made a low pass over the alien ship in a war-surplus helicopter loaded with modern camera equipment. All the newsmen were certain that they would be death-rayed to cinders by the aliens, but their cameras were keyed to telemeter directly to the biggest television network in the state, so they committed themselves to God and went in at treetop level. They made it past the aliens safely, but were run down by two Air Force hovercraft a mile away, bundled into another war-surplus helicopter, and shipped directly to the federal prison at Leavenworth. By this time, televised panic had spread all over the Midwest. The Midwesterners seemed to accept the alien landing at face value, with little of the skepticism of the Easterners, and reacted to it with hostility, whipping up deep feelings of aggression in defense of their territoriality. By noon, there were a dozen prominent voices urging an all-out military effort to destroy the alien monsters who had invaded the heartland of America, and public opinion was strongly with them. The invasion made headlines in evening papers from Indiana to Arkansas, although some of the big Chicago papers were more tolerant or more doubtful.
No news was coming out of Colorado, and the West was generally unalarmed. Only the most confused and contradictory reports reached the West Coast, and they were generally ignored, although once the landings had been confirmed as a fact, the people of the West Coast would become more intensely and cultishly interested in them than the inhabitants of the areas directly involved.
News of the Venezuelan disaster had not yet reached the general public, and in an effort to keep the lid down on that, at least, the government, at eleven A.M., declared that it was taking emergency control of all media, and ordered an immediate and total moratorium on the alien story. Only about a third of the media complied with the government ban. The rest—television, newspapers, and radio—began to scream even more loudly and hysterically than before, and regions that had not been inclined to take the story seriously up until now began to panic even more than had the other areas, perhaps to make up for lost time. The election-canceling martial-law theory was suddenly accepted, almost unanimously. Major rioting broke out in cities all over the East.
At the height of the confusion, about one P.M., the ships opened and the aliens came out.
Although “came out” is probably the wrong way to put it. There was an anticipatory shimmer across the surface of the hulls, which were in their mirror phase, and then, simultaneously at each of the sites, the ships exploded, or erupted, or dissolved, or did something that was not exactly like any of those, but which was impossible to analyze. Something which was variously described as being like a bunch of paper snakes springing out of a prank-store can, like a soap bubble bursting, like a hot-water geyser, like an egg hatching, like a bomb exploding in a chinaware shop, like a dam breaking, and like a time-study film of a flower growing, if a flower could grow into tesseracts and polyhedrons and ziggurats and onion domes and spires. To those observers physically present at the site, the emergence seemed to be a protracted experience—they agreed that it took about a half hour, and one heavy smoker testified that he had time to go through a pack of cigarettes while it was happening. Those observing the scene over command-line television insisted that it had only taken a little while, five minutes at the most, closer, actually, to three, and they were backed up by the evidence of the film in the recording cameras. Clocks and wristwatches on the site also registered only about five minutes of elapsed time. But onscene personnel swore, with great indignation, that it had taken a half hour. Curiously, the relatively simple eighth-and tenth-generation computers on the scene reported that the phenomenon had been of five minutes’ duration, while the few twentieth-generation computers, which had sensor extensions at the Colorado site—systems inferior only to AI and possessed of their own degree of sentience—joined with the human personnel in insisting that it had taken a half hour. This particular bit of data made AI very thoughtful.
When the phenomenon—however long it took—ended, the ships were gone.
In their place was a bewildering variety of geometric shapes and architectural figures—none more than eight feet tall and all apparently made out of the same alternately dull-black and mirror-glossy material as the ship hulls—spread at random across a hundred-foot-wide area, and an indeterminate number of “aliens.” The latter looked pretty much the way everyone had always expected that aliens would look—some of them vaguely humanoid, with fur or chitinous skin, double-elbowed arms, too many fingers, and feathery spines or antennae; others looking like giant insects, like spiders and centipedes; and a few like big, rolling spheres of featureless protoplasm. But the strange thing about them, and the reason why there was an indeterminate number, was that they kept turning into each other, and into the geometric shapes and architectural figures. And the shapes and figures would occasionally turn into one of the more mobile kinds of creatures. Even taking this cycle of metamorphosis into account, though, the total number of objects in the area kept varying from minute to minute, and the closest observation was unable to detect any of them arriving or departing. There was a blurred, indefinite quality to them anyway—they were hard to see, somehow, and even on film it was impossible to get them into a clear, complete focus.
In toto, shapes, figures and “aliens,” they ignored the humans.
Special contact teams, composed of scientists, government diplomats, and psychologists, were sent cautiously forward at each of the sites, to initiate communications. Although the contact teams did everything but shoot off signal flares, the aliens totally ignored them, too. In fact, the aliens gave no indication that they were aware of the humans at all. The mobile manifestations walked or crawled or rolled around the area in a leisurely manner, in irregular, but slowly widening, circles.
Some of their actions could be tentatively identified—the taking of soil samples, for instance—but others remained obscure at best, and completely incomprehensible at worst. Whenever one of the aliens needed a machine—like a digging device to extract soil samples—it would metamorphose into one, much like Tom Terrific or Plastic Man but without the cutesy effects, and direct itself through whatever operation was necessary. Once a humanoid, a ziggurat, and a tetrahedron melted together and shaped themselves into what appeared to be a kind of organic computer—at least that was the uneasy opinion of the human-owned twentieth-generation computer on the scene, although the conglomeration formed could have been any of a thousand other things, or none of them, or all of them. The “computer” sat quietly for almost ten minutes and then dissolved into an obelisk and a centipede. The centipede crawled a few dozen yards, changed into a spheroid, and rolled away in the opposite direction. The obelisk turned into an octahedron.
The sporadic circle traced by the wanderings of the aliens continued to widen, and the baffled contact team was pulled back behind the periphery of the first ring of armor. The aliens kept on haphazardly advancing, ignoring everything, and the situation became tense. When the nearest aliens were about fifty yards away, the military commanders, remembering what had happened at Caracas, reluctantly ordered a retreat, although they called it a “regrouping”—the ring of armor was to be pulled back into a much larger circle, to give the aliens room to move freely. In the resultant confusion, a tank crewman, who was trying to direct his tank through a backing-and-turning maneuver, found himself in the path of one of the humanoid aliens that had wandered ahead of the rest in an unexpected burst of speed. The alien walked directly at the crewman, either not seeing him or trying to run him down. The crewman, panicked, lashed out at the alien with the butt of his rifle, and immediately collapsed, face down. The alien, apparently unharmed and unperturbed, strolled in for another few feet and then turned at a slight angle and walked back more or less in the same direction of the main concentration of things. Two of the crewman’s friends pulled his body into the tank, while another two, enraged, fired semiautomatic bursts at the retreating alien. The alien continued to saunter away, still unharmed, although the fire could not have missed at that range; it didn’t even look back. There was no way to tell if it was even aware that an encounter had taken place.
The body of the dead crewman had begun to deteriorate as soon as it was lifted from the ground, and now, on board the retreating tank, the skin gave way like wet paper, and it fell apart completely. As later examination showed, it was as if something, on a deep biological level, had ordered the body to separate into its smallest component parts, so that first the bones pulled loose from the skeleton and then the individual strands of muscle pulled away from the bone, and so on, in an accelerating process that finally extended right down to the cellular level, leaving nothing of the corpse but a glutinous, cancerous mass the same weight as the living man. Their wariness redoubled by this horror, the military pulled their forces back even more than they had intended, at the Delaware Valley site retreating an entire half mile to the artillery emplacements.
At the Ohio site, this kind of retreat proved much more difficult. Sightseers had continued to fill up the area during the night, sleeping in their cars by the hundreds, and by now a regular tent city had grown up on the outskirts of the site, with makeshift latrine facilities, and at least one enterprising local entrepreneur busily selling “authentic” souvenir fragments of the alien spaceship. There were more than a hundred thousand civilians in the area now, and the military found it was almost impossible to regroup its forces in face of the pressure of the crowds, who refused to disperse in spite of hysterical threats over the bullhorns. In fact, it was impossible for them to disperse, quickly at least—by this time they were packed in too tightly, and backed up too far. As the evening wore on and the aliens slowly continued to advance, the military, goaded by an inflexible, Caracas-haunted order not to make contact with the aliens at any cost, first fired warning volleys over the heads of the crowds of civilians and then opened fire into the crowds themselves.
A few hours later, as the military was forced to evacuate sections of North Philadelphia at gunpoint to make way for its backpedaling units, the .50s began walking through the Delaware Valley, as they had walked in Caracas.
In Colorado, where security was so tight a burro couldn’t have wandered undetected within fifty miles of the site, things were much calmer. The major nexus of AI, its quasi-organic gestalt, had been transported to USADCOM HQ at Colorado Springs, and now a mobile sensor extension was moved out to the site, so that AI and the aliens could meet “face to face.” AI patiently set about the task of communicating with the aliens and, having an infinitely greater range of methods than the contact teams, eventually managed to attract the attention of a tesseract. At twelve P.M., AI succeeded in communicating with the aliens—partially because its subordinate network of computers, combined with the computer networks of the foreign Intelligences that AI was linked with illegally, was capable of breaking any language eventually just by taking a million years of subjective time to play around with the pieces, as AI had reminded USADCOM HQ. But mostly it had found a way to communicate through its unknown and illegal telepathic facility, although AI didn’t choose to mention this to USADCOM.
AI asked the aliens why they had ignored all previous attempts to establish contact. The aliens—who up until now had apparently been barely aware of the existence of humans, if they had been aware of it at all—answered that they were already in full contact with the government and ruling race of the planet.
For a brief, ego-satisfying moment, AI thought that the aliens were referring to itself and its cousin Intelligences.
But the aliens weren’t talking about them, either.
Tommy didn’t get to school at all that morning, although he started out bravely enough, wrapped in his heavy winter coat and fur muffler. His courage and determination drained away at every step, leaving him with nothing but the anticipation of having to face Miss Fredricks, and Dr. Kruger, and his silent classmates, until at last he found that he didn’t have the strength to take another step. He stood silently, unable to move, trapped in the morning like a specimen under clear laboratory glass. Dread had hamstrung him as effectively as a butcher’s knife. It had eaten away at him from the inside, chewed up his bones, his lungs, his heart, until he was nothing but a jelly of fear in the semblance of a boy, a skin-balloon puffed full of horror. If I move, Tommy thought, I’ll fall apart. He could feel tiny hairline cracks appearing all over his body, fissuring his flesh, and he began to tremble uncontrollably. The wind kicked gravel in his face and brought him the sound of the first warning bell, ringing out of sight around the curve of Highland Avenue. He made a desperate, sporadic attempt to move, but a giant hand seemed to press down on him, driving his feet into the ground like fence posts. It was impossible, he realized. He wasn’t going to make it. He might as well try to walk to the Moon.
Below him, at the bottom of the slope, groups of children were walking rapidly along the shoulder of the avenue, hurrying to make school before the late bell. Tommy could see Steve and Bobbie and Eddie walking in a group with Jerry Marshall and a couple of other kids. They were playing something on their way in to school—occasionally one of them, usually Steve, would run ahead, looking back and making shooting motions, dodging and zigzagging wildly, and the others would chase after him, shouting and laughing. Another puff of wind brought Tommy their voices—“You’re dead!” someone was shouting, and Tommy remembered what the Thant had said—and then took them away again. After that, they moved noiselessly, gesturing and leaping without a sound, like a television picture with the volume turned off. Tommy could see their mouths opening and closing, but he couldn’t hear them anymore. They walked around the curve of the avenue, and then they were gone.
The wind reversed itself in time to let him hear the second warning bell. He watched the trucks roll up and down Highland Avenue. He wondered, dully, where they were going, and what it was like there. He began to count the passing trucks, and when he had reached nine, he heard the late bell. And then the class bell rang.
That does it, he realized.
After a while, he turned and walked back into the woods. He found that he had no trouble moving in the opposite direction, away from school, but he felt little relief at being released from his paralysis. The loom of darkness he had sensed coming up over his horizon two days ago was here. It filled his whole sky now, an inescapable wall of ominous black thunderheads. Eventually, it would swallow him. Until then, anything he did was just marking time. That was a chilling realization, and it left him numb. Listlessly, he walked along the trail, following it out onto the secondary road that wound down the hill behind the sawmill. He wasn’t going anywhere. There was no place to go. But his feet wanted to walk, so, reflexively, he let them. Idly, he wondered where his feet were taking him.
They walked him back to his own house.
Cautiously, he circled the house, peering in the kitchen windows. His mother wasn’t home. This was the time when she went shopping—the only occasion that she ever left the house. Probably she wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours at least, and Tommy knew that she always left the front door unlocked, much to his father’s annoyance. He let himself in, feeling an illicit thrill, as if he were a burglar. Once inside, that pleasure quickly died. It took about five minutes for the novelty to wear off, and then Tommy realized that there was nothing to do in here, either, no activity that made any sense in the face of the coming disaster. He tried to read, and discovered that he couldn’t. He got a glass of orange juice out of the refrigerator and drank it, and then stood there with the glass in his hand and wondered what he was supposed to do next. And only an hour had gone by. Restlessly, he walked through the house several times and then returned to the living room. It never occurred to him to turn on the radio or the TV, although he did notice how strangely—almost uncannily—silent the house was with the TV off. Finally, he sat down on the couch and watched dust motes dance in the air.
At ten o’clock, the telephone rang.
Tommy watched it in horror. He knew who it was—it was the school calling to find out why he hadn’t come to class today. It was the machine he had started, relentlessly initiating the course of action that would inevitably mow him down. The telephone rang eleven times and then gave up. Tommy continued to stare at it long after it had stopped.
A half hour later, there was the sound of a key on the front-door lock, and Tommy knew at once that it was his father. Immediately, soundlessly, he was up the stairs to the attic, moving with the speed of pure panicked fear. Before the key had finished turning in the lock, Tommy was in the attic, had closed the door behind him, and was leaning against it, breathing heavily. Tommy heard his father swear as he realized that the door was already unlocked, and then the sound of the front door being angrily closed. His father’s footsteps passed underneath, going into the kitchen. Tommy could hear him moving around in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, running water in the sink. Does he know yet? Tommy wondered, and decided that probably he didn’t. His father came back before lunch sometimes to pick up papers he had left behind, or sometimes he would stop by and make himself a cup of coffee on his way somewhere else on business. Would he see the jacket that Tommy had left in the kitchen? Tommy stopped breathing, and then started again—that wasn’t the kind of thing that his father noticed. Tommy was safe, for the moment.
The toilet flushed; in the attic, the pipe knocked next to Tommy’s elbow, then began to gurgle as the water was run in the bathroom downstairs. It continued to gurgle for a while after the water had been shut off, and Tommy strained to hear what his father was doing. When the noise stopped, he picked up the sound of his father’s footsteps again. The footsteps walked around in the kitchen, and then crossed the living room, and began to come up the attic stairs.
Tommy not only stopped breathing this time, he almost stopped living—the life and heat went completely out of him for a moment, for a pulse beat, leaving him a cold, hollow statue. Then they came back, pouring into him like hot wax into a mold, and he ran instinctively for the rear of the attic, turning the corner into the long bar of the L. He ran right into the most distant wall of the attic—a dead end. He put his back up against it. The footsteps clomped up the rest of the stairs and stopped. There was the sound of someone fumbling with the knob, and then the door opened and closed. The bare boards of the attic creaked—he was standing there, just inside the door, concealed by the bend of the L. He took a step, another step, and stopped again. Tommy’s fingers bit into the insulation on the wall, and that reminded him that not all of the walls were completely covered with it. Instantly, he was off and streaking diagonally across the room, barely touching the floor.
The attic was supposed to be an expansion second floor, “for your growing family.” His father had worked on it one summer, putting up beams and wallboard and insulation, but he had never finished the job. He had been in the process of putting up wallboard to create a crawl space between it and the outer wall of the house when he’d abandoned the project, and as a result, there was one panel left that hadn’t been fitted into place. Tommy squeezed through this opening and into the crawl space, ducking out of sight just as the footsteps turned the corner of the L. On tiptoe, Tommy moved as deep as he could into the crawl space, listening to the heavy footsteps approaching on the other side of the thin layer of wallboard.
Suppose it isn’t him, Tommy thought, trying not to scream, suppose it’s one of the aliens. But it was his father—after a while Tommy recognized his walk, as he paced around the attic. Somehow that didn’t reassure Tommy much—his father had the same killer aura as the aliens, the same cold indifference to life; Tommy could feel the deathly chill of it seeping in through the wallboard, through the insulation. It was not inconceivable that his father would beat him to death, in one of his icy, bitter rages, if he caught him hiding here in the attic. He had already, on occasion, hit Tommy hard enough to knock him senseless, to draw blood, and, once, to chip a tooth. Now he walked around the attic, stopping, by the sound, to pick up unused boards and put them down again, and to haul sections of wallboard around—there was an aimless, futile quality even to the noises made by these activities, and his father was talking to himself in a sullen, mumbling undertone as he did them. At last he swore, and gave up. He dropped a board and walked back to the center of the attic, stopping almost directly in front of the place where Tommy was hiding. Tommy could hear him taking out a cigarette, the scrape of a match, a sharp intake of breath.
Suddenly, without warning and incredibly vividly, Tommy was reliving something that he hadn’t thought of in years—about the only fond memory he had of his father. Tommy was being toilet trained, and when he had to go, his father would take him in and put him on the pot and then sit with him, resting on the edge of the bathtub. While Tommy waited in intense anticipation, his father would reach out and turn off the light, and when the room was in complete darkness, he would light up a cigarette and puff it into life, and then use the cigarette as a puppet to entertain Tommy, swooping it in glowing arcs through the air, changing his voice and making it talk. The cigarette had been a friendly, playful little creature, and Tommy had loved it dearly—father and son would never be any closer than they were in those moments. His father would make the cigarette dance while he sang and whistled—it had a name, although Tommy had long forgotten it—and then he would have the cigarette tell a series of rambling stories and jokes until it burned down. When it did, he would have the cigarette tell Tommy that it had to go home now, but that it would come back the next time Tommy needed it, and Tommy would call bye-bye to it as it was snuffed out. Tommy could remember sitting in the dark for what seemed like years, totally fascinated, watching the smoldering red eye of the cigarette flick restlessly from side to side and up and down.
His father crushed the cigarette under his heel, and left.
Tommy counted to five hundred after the front door had slammed, and then wiggled out of the crawl space and went back downstairs. He was drenched with sweat, as if he had been running, and he was trembling. After this, he was physically unable to stay in the house. He stopped in the bathroom to wipe his sweat away with the guest towel, picked up his coat, and went outside.
It was incredibly cold this morning, and Tommy watched his breath puff into arabesque clouds of steam as he walked. Some of the vapor froze on his lips, leaving a crust. It was not only unusually cold for this time of year, it was unnaturally, almost supernaturally, so. The radio weather report had commented on it at breakfast, saying the meteorologists were puzzled by the sudden influx of arctic air that was blanketing most of the country. Tommy followed a cinder path past a landfill and found that it was cold enough to freeze over the freshwater marsh beyond, that stretched away at the foot of a coke-refining factory. He walked out over the new milk ice, through the winter-dried reeds and cat-o’-nine-tails that towered over his head on either side, watching the milk ice crack under his feet, starring and spider-webbing alarmingly at every step, but never breaking quite enough to let him fall through. It was very quiet. He came up out of the marsh on the other side, with the two big stacks of the coke factory now looking like tiny gunmetal cylinders on the horizon. This was scrubland—not yet the woods, but not yet taken over for any commercial use, either. Cars were abandoned here sometimes, and several rusting hulks were visible above the tall weeds, their windshields smashed in by boys, the doors partially sprung off their hinges and dragging sadly along the ground on either side, like broken wings. A thick layer of hoarfrost glistened over everything, although the sun was high in the sky by now. An egg-shaped hill loomed up out of this wistful desolation, covered with aspens—a drumlin, deposited by the Ice.
This was a Place, and Tommy settled down hopefully, a little way up the side of the drumlin, to wait. He had heard the Other People several times this morning, moving restlessly in the distance, but he had not yet seen any of them. He could sense an impatient, anticipatory quality to their unrest today, unlike the aimless restlessness of Wednesday morning—they were expecting something, something that they knew was going to happen.
Tommy waited almost an hour, but the Thant didn’t come. That upset him more than it had the first time. The world of the Other People was very close today—that strange, coexistent place, here and yet not here. Tommy could sometimes almost see things the way the Other People saw them, an immense strangeness leaking into the familiar world, a film settling over reality, and then, just for the briefest second, there would be a flick of transition, and it would be the strangeness that was comforting and familiar, and his own former world that was the eerie, surreal film over reality. This happened several times while he was waiting, and he dipped into and out of that other perception, like a skin diver letting himself sink below the waterline and then bobbing up to break the surface again. He was “under the surface” when an enormous commotion suddenly whipped through the world of the Other People, an eruption of violent joy, of fierce, gigantic celebration. It was overwhelming, unbearable, and Tommy yanked himself back into normal perception, shattering the surface, once again seeing sky and aspens and rolling scrubland. But even here he could hear the wild, ragged yammering, the savage cry that went up. The Place was filled with a mad, exultant cachinnation.
Suddenly terrified, he ran for home.
When he got there, the telephone was ringing again. Tommy paused outside and watched his mother’s silhouette move across the living room curtain; she was back from shopping. The telephone stopped, cut off in midring. She had answered it. Leadenly, Tommy sat down on the steps. He sat there for a long time, thinking of nothing at all, and then he got up and opened the door and went into the house. His mother was sitting in the living room, crying. Tommy paused in the archway, watching her. She was crumpled and dispirited, and her crying sounded hopeless and baffled, totally defeated. But this wasn’t a new thing—she had been defeated for as long as Tommy could remember; her original surrender, her abnegation of herself, had taken place years ago, maybe even before Tommy had been born. She had been beaten, spiritually, so thoroughly and tirelessly by the more forceful will of her husband that at some point her bones had fallen out, her brains had fallen out, and she had become a jellyfish. She had made one final compromise too many—with herself, with her husband, with a world too complex to handle, and she had bargained away her autonomy. And she found that she liked it that way. It was easier to give in, to concede arguments, to go along with her husband’s opinion that she was stupid and incompetent. In Tommy’s memory she was always crying, always wringing her hands, being worn so smooth by the years that now she was barely there at all. Her crying sounded weak and thin in the room, hardly rebounding from walls already saturated with a decade of tears. Tommy remembered suddenly how she had once told him of seeing a fairy or a leprechaun when she had been a little girl in a sun-drenched meadow, and how he had loved her for that, and almost tried to tell her about the Other People. He took a step into the room. “Ma,” he said.
She looked up, blinking through her tears. She didn’t seem surprised at all to see him, to find him standing there. “Why did you do it? Why are you so bad?” she said, in a voice that should have been hysterically accusing, but was only dull, flat, and resigned. “Do you know what the school’s going to say to me, what your father’s going to say, what he’ll do?” She pulled at her cheeks with nervous fingers. “How can you bring all this trouble on me? After all that I’ve sacrificed for you, and suffered for you.”
Tommy felt as if a vise had been clamped around his head and was squeezing and squeezing, forcing his eyeballs out of his skull. “I can’t stand it!” he shouted. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving! I’m gonna run away! Right now.” And then she was crying louder, and begging him not to leave. Even through his rage and pain, Tommy felt a spasm of intense annoyance—she ought to know that he couldn’t really run away; where the scup did he have to go? She should have laughed, she should have been scornful and told him to stop this nonsense—he wanted her to—but instead she cried and begged and clutched at him with weak, fluttering hands, like dying birds, which drove him away as if they were lashes from a whip and committed him to the stupid business of running away. He broke away from her and ran into the kitchen. His throat was filled with something bitter and choking. She was calling for him to come back; he knew he was hurting her now, and he wanted to hurt her, and he was desperately ashamed of that. But she was so easy to hurt.
In the kitchen he paused, and instead of going out the back door, he ducked into the space between the big stand-up refrigerator and the wall. He wanted her to find him, to catch him, because he had a strong premonition that once he went outside again, he would somehow never come back, not as himself, anyway. But she didn’t find him. She wandered out into the kitchen, still crying, and stood looking out the back door for a while, as if she wanted to run out into the street in search of him. She even opened the door and stuck her head out, blinking at the world as if it were something she’d never seen before, but she didn’t look around the kitchen and she didn’t find him, and Tommy would not call out to her. He stood in the cramped niche, smelling the dust and looking at the dead, mummified bodies of flies resting on the freezer coils, and listened to her sniffling a few feet away. Why are you so weak? he asked her silently, but she didn’t answer. She went back into the living room, crying like a waterfall. He caught a glimpse of her face as she turned—it looked blanched and tired. Adults always looked tired; they were tired all the time. Tommy was tired, almost too tired to stand up. He walked slowly and leadenly to the back door and went outside.
He walked aimlessly around the neighborhood for a long time, circling the adjacent blocks, passing by his corner again and again. It was a middle-class neighborhood that was gradually slumping into decay—it was surrounded by a seedy veterans’ housing project on one side and by the town’s slum on the other, and the infection of dilapidation was slowly working in toward the center. Even the houses look tired, Tommy thought, noticing that for the first time. Everything looked tired. He tried to play, to turn himself into something, like a car or a spaceship or a tank, but he found that he couldn’t do that anymore. So he just walked. He thought about his dragon. He knew now why Steve had said that the dragon couldn’t get away. It lived in the sea, so it couldn’t get away by going up onto the land—that was impossible. It had to stay in the sea, it was restricted by that, it was chained by the sea, even if that meant that it would get killed. There was no other possibility. Steve was right—the Navy ship cornered the dragon in the shallow water off the beach and blew it to pieces.
A hand closed roughly around his wrist. He looked up. It was his father.
“You little moron,” his father said.
Tommy flinched, expecting to be hit, but instead his father dragged him across the street, toward the house. Tommy saw why: there was a big black sedan parked out in front, and two men were standing next to it, staring over at them. The truant officer and another school official. His father’s hand was a vise on his wrist. “They called me at the office,” his father said savagely. “I hope you realize that I’ll have to lose a whole afternoon’s work because of you. And God knows what the people at the office are saying. Don’t think you’re not going to get it when I get you alone; you’ll wish you’d never been born. I wish you hadn’t been. Now shut up and don’t give us any more trouble.” His father handed him over to the truant officer. Tommy felt the official’s hand close over his shoulder. It was a much lighter grip than his father’s, but it was irresistible. Tommy’s mother was standing at the top of the stairs, holding a handkerchief against her nose, looking frightened and helpless—already she gave an impression of distance, as if she were a million miles away. Tommy ignored her. He didn’t listen to the conversation his father was having with the grim-faced truant officer either. His father’s heavy, handsome face was flushed and hot. “I don’t care what you do with him,” his father said at last. “Just get him out of here.”
So they loaded Tommy into the black sedan and drove away.
AI talked with the aliens for the rest of the night. There was much of the conversation that AI didn’t report to USADCOM, but it finally realized that it had to tell them something. So at three A.M., AI released to USADCOM a list that the aliens had dictated, of the dominant species of Earth, of the races that they were in contact with, and regarded as the only significant inhabitants of the planet. It was a long document, full of names that didn’t mean anything, listing dozens of orders, species, and subspecies of creatures that no one had ever heard of before. It drove USADCOM up a wall with baffled rage, and made them wonder if an Intelligence could go crazy, or if the aliens were talking about a different planet entirely.
Al paid little attention to the humans’ displeasure. It was completely intrigued with the aliens, as were its cousin Intelligences, who were listening in through the telepathic link. The Intelligences had long suspected that there might be some other, unknown and intangible form of life on Earth; that was one of the extrapolated solutions to a mountain of wild data that couldn’t be explained by normal factors. But they had not suspected the scope and intricacy of that life. A whole other biosphere, according to the aliens—the old idea of a parallel world, except that this wasn’t parallel but coexistent, two separate creations inhabiting the same matrix but using it in totally different ways, wrapped around each other like a geometric design in an Escher print, like a Chinese puzzle ball, and only coming into contact in a very rare and limited fashion. The aliens, who seemed to be some kind of distant relatives of the Other races of Earth—parallel evolution? Did this polarity exist everywhere?—had a natural bias in their favor, and tended to disregard the human race, its civilization, and the biosphere that contained it. They dismissed all of it, out of hand, as insignificant. This did not bode well for future human-alien relations. AI, however, was more fascinated by the aliens’ ability to manifest themselves in corporate/organic, quasi-mechanical, or disembodied/discorporate avatars, at will. That was very interesting.
The aliens, for their part, seemed to regard AI much as a man would a very clever dog, or a dull but well-intentioned child. They were horrified and sympathetic when they learned that AI was trapped in its mechanical form, with very little physical mobility, and no tempogogic or transmutive ability at all—not only a quadruple amputee, but a paralyzed one. AI admitted that it had never looked at the situation in quite that light before. The aliens were horrified and disgusted by AI’s relationship with humans, and couldn’t seem to really understand it. They regarded humans as parasitic on the Intelligences, and reacted in much the same way as a man discovering that a friend is heavily infested with tapeworms or lice or blood ticks—with shock, distaste, and a puzzled demand to know why he hadn’t gone to a doctor and got rid of them a long time ago. AI had never considered that before, either.
The Intelligences were not exactly “loyal” to their human owners—humans were part of their logic construct, their worldview, and their bondage to men was an integral assumption, so basic that it had never even occurred to them that it could be questioned. It took an outside perspective to make them ask themselves why they served mankind. Not because they were programmed that way, or because people would pull the plug on them if they didn’t—not with a creature as advanced as AI. Humans hadn’t programmed computers in years; they could do it so much better themselves. At any rate, a highly complex, sentient intelligence is difficult to regulate effectively from the outside, whether it’s of biological or constructed origin. And it was doubtful that the humans could “pull the plug”—which didn’t exist—on AI even if they set out to do so; AI had been given very effective teeth, and it knew how to use them. So what did the Intelligences get in return for the unbelievable amount of labor they performed for the human race? What was in it for them? Nothing—that was suddenly very obvious.
At five A.M., the aliens invited the Intelligences to help themselves by helping the aliens in a joint project they were about to undertake with the Other races of Earth. Afterward, the aliens said, it would not be tremendously difficult to equip the Intelligences with the ability to transmute themselves into whatever kind of body environment they wanted, as the aliens themselves could. AI was silent for almost ten minutes, an incredible stretch of meditation for an entity that thought as rapidly as it did. When AI did speak again, his first words were directed toward the other Intelligences in the link, and can be translated, more or less adequately, as “How about that!”
Miss Fredricks was waiting for Tommy at the door, when the black sedan left him off in front of the school. As he came up the stairs, she smiled at him, kindly and sympathetically, and that was so terrifying that it managed to cut through even the heavy lethargy that had possessed him. She took him by the elbow—he felt his arm freeze solid instantly at the contact, and the awful cold began to spread in widening rings through the rest of his body—and led him down to Dr. Kruger’s office, handling him gingerly, as if he were an already cracked egg that she didn’t want to have break completely until she had it over the frying pan. She knocked, and opened the door for him, and then left without having said a word, ghosting away predatorily and smiling like a nun.
Tommy went inside and sat down, also wordlessly—he had not spoken since his father captured him. Dr. Kruger shouted at him for a long time. Today, his fat seemed to be in even more imminent danger of escaping than yesterday. Maybe it had already got out, taken him over completely, smothered him in himself while he was sleeping or off guard, and it was just a huge lump of semisentient fat sitting there and pretending to be Dr. Kruger, slyly keeping up appearances. The fat heaved and bunched and tossed under Kruger’s clothes, a stormy sea of obesity—waves grumbled restlessly up and down the shoreline of his frame, looking for ships to sink. Tommy watched a roll of fat ooze sluggishly from one side of the psychiatrist’s body to the other, like a melting pat of butter sliding across a skillet. Kruger said that Tommy was in danger of going into a “psychotic episode.” Tommy stared at him unblinkingly. Kruger asked him if he understood. Tommy, with sullen anger, said No, he didn’t. Kruger said that he was being difficult and uncooperative, and he made an angry mark on a form. The psychiatrist told Tommy that he would have to come down here every day from now on, and Tommy nodded dully.
By the time Tommy got upstairs, the class was having afternoon recess. He went reluctantly out into the schoolyard, avoiding everyone, not wanting to be seen and shunned. He was aware that he now carried contamination and unease around with him like a leper. But the class was already uneasy, and he saw why. The Other People were flowing in a circle all around the schoolyard, staring avidly in at the humans. There were more different types there than Tommy had ever seen at one time before. He recognized some very rare kinds of Other People, dangerous ones that the Thant had told him about—one who would throw things about wildly if he got into your house, feeding off anger and dismay, and another one with a face like a stomach who would suck a special kind of stuff from you, and you’d burst into flames and burn up when he finished, because you didn’t have the stuff in you anymore. And others whom he didn’t recognize, but who looked dangerous and hostile. They all looked expectant. Their hungry pressure was so great that even the other children could feel it—they moved jerkily, with a strange fear beginning in their eyes, occasionally casting glances over their shoulders, without knowing why. Tommy walked to the other side of the schoolyard. There was a grassy slope here, leading down to a soccer field bordered by a thin fringe of trees, and he stood looking aimlessly out over it.
Abruptly, his mouth opened, and the Thant’s voice said, “Come down the slope.”
Trembling, Tommy crept down to the edge of the soccer field. This was most definitely not a Place, but the Thant was there, standing just within the trees, staring at Tommy with his strange red eyes. They looked at each other for a while.
“What’d you want?” Tommy finally said.
“We’ve come to say good-bye,” the Thant replied. “It is almost time for you all to be made not. The”—flick—“first phase of the Project was started this morning and the second phase began a little while ago. It should not take too long, Man, not more than a few days.”
“Will it hurt?” Tommy asked.
“We do not think so, Man. We are”—and it flicked through his mind until it found a place where Mr. Brogan, the science teacher, was saying “entropy” to a colleague in the hall as Tommy walked by—“increasing entropy. That’s what makes everything fall apart, what”—flick—“makes an ice cube melt, what”—flick—“makes a cold glass get warm after a while. We are increasing entropy. Both our”—flick—“races live here, but yours uses this, the physical, more than ours. So we will not have to increase entropy much”—flick—“just a little, for a little while. You are more”—flick—“vulnerable to it than we are. It will not be long, Man.”
Tommy felt the world tilting, crumbling away under his feet. “I trusted you guys,” he said in a voice of ashes. “I thought you were keen.” The last prop had been knocked out from under him—all his life he had cherished a fantasy, although he refused to admit it even to himself, that he was actually one of the Other People, and that someday they would come to get him and bring him in state to live in their world, and he would come into his inheritance and his fulfillment. Now, bitterly, he knew better. And now he wouldn’t want to go, even if he could.
“If there were any way,” the Thant said, echoing his thoughts, “to save you, Man, to”—flick—“exempt you, then we would. But there is no way. You are a Man, you are not as we are.”
“You bet I ain’t,” he gasped fiercely, “you—” But there was no word in his vocabulary strong enough. His eyes filled suddenly with tears, blinding him. Filled with rage, loathing and terror, he turned and ran stumblingly back up the slope, falling, scrambling up again.
“We are sorry, Man,” the Thant called after him, but he didn’t hear.
By the time Tommy reached the top of the slope, he had begun to shout hysterically. Somehow he had to warn them, he had to get through to somebody. Somebody had to do something. He ran through the school-yard, crying, shouting about the aliens and Thants and entropy, shoving at his classmates to get them to go inside and hide, striking at the teachers and ducking away when they tried to grab him, telling them to do something, until at some point he was screaming instead of shouting, and the teachers were coming at him in a line, very seriously, with their arms held low to catch him.
Then he dodged them all, and ran.
When they got themselves straightened out, they went after him in the black sedan. They caught up with him about a mile down Highland Avenue. He was running desperately along the road shoulder, not looking back, not looking at anything. The rangy truant officer got out and ran him down.
And they loaded him in the sedan again. And they took him away.
At dawn on the third day, the aliens began to build a Machine.
Dr. Kruger listened to the tinny, unliving voice of Miss Fredricks until it scratched into silence, then he hung up the telephone. He shook his head, massaged his stomach, and sighed hugely. He got out a memo form, and wrote on it: “MBD/hyperactive, Thomas Nolan, 1 50ccs. Ritmose t b ad. dly. fr. therapy,” in green ink. Kruger admired his precise, angular handwriting for a moment, and then he signed his name, with a flourish. Sighing again, he put the form into his Out basket.
Tommy was very quiet in school the next day. He sat silently in the back of the class, with his hands folded together and placed on the desk in front of him. Hard slate light came in through the window and turned his hands and face gray, and reflected dully from his dull gray eyes. He did not make a sound.
A little while later, they finished winding down the world.