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The Omega Egg [A Fictionwise Round Robin Novel]
by Mike Resnick and Various Authors
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Science Fiction

Fictionwise, Inc.
www.fictionwise.com

Copyright ©2006 by Mike Resnick

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

A Note From the Editor

Welcome to the first Fictionwise.com Round Robin Novel. A round robin is a science fiction tradition dating back some 70 years. It works like this: a number of authors agree to write one chapter each of a novel. There is no plot. There is no outline. Author #1 writes the opening chapter and sends it on to Author #2, who has no idea what he's about to receive. He can continue the plot, branch off from it in a logical way, even contradict something that came before if he does it fairly (such as showing that the main character was being purposely misled). It then goes to Author #3 and so on down the line; the final Author wraps it up. Now enjoy!

—Mike Resnick

Congratulations to Jim Barnabee of Haines City, Florida, for winning the suggest-a-title contest ... “The Omega Egg” was chosen over 120 other entries submitted by Fictionwise subscribers.

Congratulations also to Jen Roper of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for being randomly selected from our subscriber list to have her name included in the final version of the novel. Keep an eye out for Jen's debut in Chapter 3!

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Conversation with an Admiral by Mike Resnick

Chapter 2: Conversation with a Dragon by David Gerrold

Chapter 3: Dreams and Nightmares by Nancy Kress

Chapter 4: Smoke and Mirrors by Robert Sheckley

Chapter 5: The Egg and the Dragon by Brian Herbert

Chapter 6: The Da Vinci Code by Laura Resnick

Chapter 7: Your Own Private Gulag by Kay Kenyon

Chapter 8: Altar Ego by Stephen Leigh and S. L. Farrell

Chapter 9: Falling by Bill Fawcett

Chapter 10: Holes in the Universe by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Chapter 11: Choosing Sides by James Patrick Kelly

Chapter 12: Picking a God's Nose by Dean Wesley Smith

Chapter 13: The Search for Bob by Jody Lynn Nye

Chapter 14: The End of Some Things, The Beginning of Others by Jane Yolen

Chapter 15: Mr. Spencer's Blues by Pat Cadigan

Chapter 16: Conversation With His Future Self by Michael A. Burstein

Chapter 17: For Whom the Bellflower Tolls by Tobias S. Buckell

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

* * * *

Chapter 1: Conversation with an Admiral
by Mike Resnick

Spencer waited for the ship's hatch to open, then stepped onto the platform that gently lowered him to the ground. Two uniformed men, a lieutenant and an ensign, were waiting for him.

Both stood at attention and saluted.

“Welcome to Goldmeadow, Commander Spencer,” said the lieutenant.

“Don't call me Commander, and don't salute me,” said Spencer irritably. “I haven't been a member of the Service for seven years.”

“I'm sorry, sir,” said the lieutenant. “But we were told to meet Commander Kendell Spencer and escort him to headquarters.”

“Either stop calling me that, or go find a Commander Spencer and I'll be more than happy to catch the next ship home.”

“I don't mean to offend you, sir. Will you come with us, please?”

“What about my luggage?”

“It will be brought to your quarters, sir.”

“All right,” said Spencer, falling into step behind them as they led him away from the ship. “Where's the Customs kiosk? I didn't have a chance to get a visa. I'll have to arrange for one here.”

“That won't be necessary, sir,” said the ensign as an aircar pulled up. The robot driver, which was actually part of the car, swiveled its head until its prismatic eyes were staring at him.

“I have been dispatched to find and transport Commander Spencer to his destination.”

“I'm no longer a Commander,” said Spencer. “I'm a private citizen and I would appreciate being addressed as such.”

“I am sorry, sir,” said the robot. “I have been programmed to refer to you as Commander Spencer.”

“Have you got a name?” asked Spencer.

“Military Vehicle 3B4178H, sir.”

“What if I called you Marilyn?”

“I would not respond, sir.”

“Perfectly reasonable,” said Spencer. “And I won't respond if you call me Commander again.”

The robot instantly examined a million or so programmed responses, and finally chose the most likely. “Then I will simply call you sir.”

“Fine,” said Spencer. “And I will simply not speak to you at all.”

He entered the vehicle, accompanied by the two men, and it immediately began speeding away from the spaceport, skimming some ten inches above the ground.

The robot's head swiveled one hundred eighty degrees, until it was looking directly at Spencer. “I have a built-in bar, sir. May I offer you a drink?”

“No, and keep your eyes on the road.”

“I have eyes built into my headlights, my fenders, and my tail lights,” answered the robot. “I assure you, sir, that I am watching the road.”

“Well, turn your head around and face it toward the road,” said Spencer. “It makes me nervous.”

“Yes, sir,” said the robot, swiveling its head back and watching the road with yet another pair of eyes.

They drove the next five minutes in silence. The two officers looked very uneasy, and Spencer did nothing to assuage their discomfort. Finally the car halted before a well-fortified building, gently floated up to the fourth floor, and skimmed alongside it until it came to a door that matched its own. It stopped, both doors opened, the ensign climbed out, reached back for Spencer's hand, helped him out, and began walking him down a polished corridor, followed closely by the lieutenant.

They turned left as the corridor branched out, and came to a stop before an unmarked door.

“This is as far as we were told to accompany you, sir,” said the lieutenant. “The Admiral's inside.”

Spencer considered knocking on the door, then decided not to. By now the door would have read his retina, his bone structure, his weight, and would doubtless be reading his fingerprints when he touched the handle.

“Come on in, Spence!” said a hearty voice from behind the door. “Don't stand out in the hall all day.”

Spencer reached for the handle, but the door was quicker, dilating to let him pass through, then snapping shut behind him.

Admiral James Nathan Ktonga, a burly man in late middle age, the chest of his crisp uniform festooned with medals and ribbons, rose from behind a large desk and approached Spencer.

“Good to see you again, Spence!” he said, extending a meaty hand. “How the hell are you?”

“I was fine until two days ago,” answered Spencer, taking the Admiral's hand and shaking it briefly. “I had fondly hoped never to hear from you or the Service again.”

“You don't miss it?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Come on, Spence,” said Ktonga. “It was your life for how many years?”

“Too damned many.”

Ktonga grinned. “You sound like you're not thrilled to see me.”

“Aw ... you guessed.”

“But I asked and you came, like the patriot you are.”

“Did I have a choice?”

“Not really.”

“Okay,” said Spencer, “you want my input on something. What is it?”

“We want more than your input, Spence,” said Ktonga. “We want you.”

“Forget it. I've retired.”

“Let me explain the situation, and then we can discuss it,” said Ktonga.

“I don't want to discuss it,” said Spencer. “Say what you have to say, let me tell you again that I'm retired, and then we can end this farce and I can go home.”

“As you keep pointing out, you're a private citizen, Spence. I can't force you to do anything. I can only ask you. So will you please stop acting as if I'm the enemy and hear me out?”

Spencer stared at him silently.

“Well?” demanded Ktonga.

“I'm hearing you out,” said Spencer. “Do you mind if I sit down? You look like you've been saving up a three-hour speech for me.”

“Sure, sit down, make yourself comfortable,” said Ktonga. He pressed a hidden button and a section of the wall slid back, revealing a well-stocked bar. “You want a drink?”

“No,” replied Spencer, sitting down on the opposite side of the desk. “That would imply that we're friends and that you didn't pluck me out of my nice, happy, peaceful civilian existence and drag me to this ugly little world.”

“It's actually a very pretty world—and as for dragging you, did anyone lay a finger on you?”

Spencer glared at him. “Just make your pitch, add whatever ridiculous request you want to make, and let me get the hell out of here.”

“That doesn't sound like the Kendell Spencer I know,” said Ktonga.

“The Kendell Spencer you knew was under your command and could have been court-martialed for telling you what he thought of some of your hairbrained schemes. This Kendell Spencer is free to say what he thinks.”

“I can't say that I approve of your attitude.”

“I earned the right to hold it,” said Spencer. “Thanks to you, there's bits and pieces of me scattered over half a dozen worlds.”

“I know,” said Ktonga. “And don't think the military isn't appreciative. You were the best, Spence. It seems a shame you decided to hang it up.”

“I am walking around with a prosthetic left arm, a prosthetic right leg, a cloned spleen, and an artificial eye,” said Spencer. “Just how many more body parts did you think I should have given to the cause before I hung it up?”

“Now you know that the Navy gave you a better eye and better limbs than you were born with, and all at our expense.”

“I'd have been happy to foot the bill if the Navy had been willing to suffer the pain.”

“You were honored for your service, maybe more than anyone else,” said Ktonga. “Three Medals of Courage, an Outstanding Service medal, two Diamond Stars, four Exceptional Valor ribbons...”

“Worth 50 credits in any hock shop in the galaxy.”

“You hocked them?” demanded Ktonga in a voice that was half shock and half outrage.

“No, I didn't hock them. They're in a drawer somewhere, or maybe in the attic.” Spencer lit a smokeless cigarette. “Have we exchanged enough pleasantries, or do I have to listen to still more before you tell me why I'm here?”

“Do you remember Ramon Boganda?”

Spencer nodded his head. “A good man.”

“How about Patricia Kelvin?”

“Patsy Kelvin,” he repeated. “I haven't thought of her in years. Tough and smart, and she could pick up an alien language quicker than anyone I ever knew. You couldn't ask for better.”

“Ever meet a little dragon called Plibix?”

“From Beta Loita VII? I never met him—or her, or it—but I heard about him. He had a hell of a reputation. We were lucky to have him on our side.” Spencer paused. “Are we through reminiscing?”

“We're through.”

“And?”

“They were the three best covert agents in the Service,” said Ktonga. “The only better one I ever saw was you.”

“I'm flattered beyond belief,” said Spencer sardonically. “Get on with it.”

“All right,” said Ktonga. “Something's happening on Leonardo.”

“Something's always happening on Leonardo,” said Spencer distastefully. “It's been a trouble spot for decades.”

“This is something big,” continued Ktonga. “We got the beginning of a transmission from the officer in charge of our garrison there. He wasn't a man prone to overstatement, but he said what he'd discovered threatened the very foundations of the galaxy. Those are his exact words: the very foundations of the galaxy.”

“Well?”

“The transmission was cut off—and so was the officer. He was found dead the next day. And the strangest thing, Spence—he had a blue bellflower in his hand.”

“Enlighten me,” said Spencer. “What's a blue bellflower and why is it special?”

“It's a very pretty flower that chimes like a bell when the wind blows through it, and it only grows on MacDougal II, half a galaxy away. I know what your next question will be, and the answer is that there's never been a greenhouse or a botonist that could keep one alive on any other planet.” He paused for the information to sink in. “Anyway, I sent Boganda to Leonardo to nose around and report back to me.”

“And?”

“He transmitted one single message, to the effect that the dead officer wasn't exaggerating, that he was on the track of something big. And then he vanished.”

“Has his body turned up?”

Ktonga shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Let me guess. You sent in Patsy Kelvin and the dragon, and they're missing too.”

“We sent them in one at a time—first Plibix, then Kelvin, maybe a month apart.”

“Any messages from either of them?”

“No. They knew it was a dangerous situation, they knew that Boganda had vanished, and they were damned good at protecting themselves—and they've vanished without a trace.” He paused. “That's three of them, damn it—so I thought I'd better send for the best there is.”

“I'll be happy to give you the benefit of my experience and offer all the sage advice I can,” said Spencer.

“Stop kidding around, Spence,” said Ktonga. “You know what I want. You've been there. You know the language, you know the customs, you know the territory.”

“Have you been there?”

“No.”

“Then let me enlighten you,” said Spencer. “The natives of Leonardo are eight feet tall. They have blue skins. Their arms and legs are not jointed like any humanoid you've ever seen. It is absolutely impossible to covertly infiltrate them.”

“You don't have to be covert,” said Ktonga. “I'll provide you with any cover story you need, and all the firepower required to back you up.”

“We just decimated them fifteen years ago,” said Spencer. “That's why you've got a garrison there to begin with, and that's why they hate our guts. I don't know what your dead officer learned, but the likelihood is that if there's anything there, he stumbled onto it by accident and got killed for his trouble. There's no way he could have talked a native into betraying his people.”

“Maybe there is,” suggested Ktonga. “If money's what it takes...”

“Since they're not allowed to set foot on any of our worlds, why would they want our money?”

“Maybe they're not responsible at all. Maybe it's someone from MacDougal II. Maybe it's someone from somewhere else. Maybe there's an underground movement we know nothing about. All I know is that three top agents are missing, and we still have no idea what the officer discovered. That's why I sent for you.”

“I'm flattered, but my best advice to you is to write it off, forget it ever happened, and hope your man was wrong.”

“What if he wasn't wrong?”

“You really think something on Leonardo poses a threat to the whole galaxy?” said Spencer. “Then get every human off the planet, poison the atmosphere, and search for this mysterious threat at your leisure.”

“We can't do that!” exploded Ktonga. “You're talking millions of living beings!”

“A few million less than there were before you pacified them, to use the military's favorite term.”

“It's out of the question. I need you to go in there and learn what's going on.”

Spencer got to his feet. “Well, it's been nice chatting with you, Admiral. Give my regards to your wife.” He turned and began walking to the door.

“It's locked,” said Ktonga.

Spencer turned and faced him. “Am I to understand that I'm being held prisoner against my will?” he asked, almost amused.

“Well, I hope it won't be against your will. How does half a million credits sound?”

“Like a lot of money.”

“It's yours if you'll agree to go to Leonardo.”

Spencer shook his head. “I wouldn't live long enough to spend it.”

“A million.”

“I have a wife and two kids. I am criminally over-insured. If I die, they won't need your million.”

“Have you considered living?” asked Ktonga.

“Of course I have,” replied Spencer. “And I think the best way to go about it is to tell you precisely what you can do with your million credits.”

“You haven't changed as much as I'd hoped,” said Ktonga wearily. “You always got the job done, I grant you that—but you were a positive bastard to work with.”

“You never worked with me in your life,” said Spencer. “You just sent me into one hellhole after another, and then had your doctors put me together after I'd crawled out.”

Ktonga reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. “This is a contract,” he said. “Sign it, and the moment you set foot on Leonardo we will deposit a million credits in any bank of your choice.”

Spencer smiled. “You know, I don't believe you've heard a word I said.”

“Oh, I heard,” said Ktonga. He pulled out another sheet of paper and laid it beside the first.

“What's that, another contract?” asked Spencer.

“In a manner of speaking. It authorizes me to recall you to active duty, at the reduced rank and pay of Ensign Second Class.”

“You're drafting me?”

“Not necessarily,” said Ktonga. “Sign the other paper and I'll tear this one up—but one way or the other, you're going to Leonardo.”

“It'll never hold up in court.”

“Well, if you can find a court on Leonardo, you can test your theory,” said Ktonga. “But there are only two ways you're leaving this office—as a millionaire subcontractor or as an underpaid ensign. Either way, you're going to Leonardo.”

“You actually sound serious.”

“If the galaxy is at risk...”

“It's a big galaxy. What the hell do you think could threaten it?”

Ktonga shrugged. “Maybe nothing. But the three best operatives I've had since you left the Service have all turned up missing. That wouldn't happen if there was nothing going on.”

“And you won't be happy until I'm missing too?”

“No false modesty, Spence. If anybody can crack this open, you can.”

“You just don't listen,” said Spencer. “I keep telling you: no one can crack it open.”

“Just find out what the hell they're planning. We'll take it from there.”

“May I assume those are precisely the comforting words you gave your other agents?”

“I would be court-martialed and tried for treason, and rightly so, if having heard there was a threat of this magnitude I chose to do nothing about it, and you know it,” said Ktonga. He gestured to the two papers. “Are you going to sign the one, or am I going to enforce the other?”

“You really mean it, don't you?”

“I really mean it.”

Spencer sighed deeply, walked over to the desk, and signed the contract. “At least I know what happened to Boganda, Kelvin and Plibix.”

“What?” asked Ktonga.

“After dealing with you, they all went over to the other side,” said Spencer. “I figure I'll join them as soon as I touch down on Leonardo.”

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 2: Conversation with a Dragon
by David Gerrold

Spencer kept his face hard as he left Ktonga's office, not even the slightest hint of a smile.

The decision itself hadn't been hard, but he'd needed Ktonga to believe he'd won the moment.

This moment had been five years in the making; Spencer had been planning, rehearsing, preparing so thoroughly and so methodically that the actual achievement seemed almost anti-climactic. At one point, he'd considered crossing out the part where the contract said one million and writing in twenty-five million instead, then passing it back for Ktonga to initial—just to see Ktonga's reaction. But he already knew that Ktonga would have signed it, would have signed anything, because he already knew that Ktonga had no intention of paying. And Spencer had no desire for monetary compensation of any size anyway. That wasn't the goal. So how much or how little was irrelevant.

The dropshaft delivered him to a sub-lobby, somewhere underground, no way of knowing just how deep. A blank-featured robot stood beside a table. On the table, neatly laid out, an array of files and reports, travel documents and identity chips, currency and expense cards, goods and tools, clothing and accessories, and of course ... weapons. Spencer left the weaponry for last.

First, he sorted through the other materials, selecting some, pushing most of the rest aside. He took the files and reports, of course, even though he intended to discard most of them unread as soon as he could. He took the travel documents and identity chips, of course, even though he intended to discard most of them shortly after debarkation. He took the currency and the expense cards; he would loot the expense cards as rapidly as possible, then discard them when he disposed of the identities they were attached to. The goods and tools ... they had to be tagged, so he only selected the few he would normally have taken. The clothing—everything from the soft silver underwear to the black travel cloak was hypered, he didn't dare wear any of it; too bad about that, the cloak looked useful.

The weapons—tempting—but they were likely to be tagged as well. He'd take what he could easily conceal, but he knew they had to go into the disposal too. Spencer would have to go through extensive decontam to make sure that none of this stuff was tagging him just by his handling of it, but he didn't dare not take it. It was part of the plan.

An hour later, an ordinary-looking businessman left the building at the pedestrian-mezzanine level, two stories above the growling street-level traffic. The man carried a gray briefcase, and two pieces of luggage trailed obediently behind him. He looked to be in his early 90s, and somewhat unkempt. He looked harried and worn, he had a bald spot, a growing paunch, scuffed shoes, and a coffee stain on his kilt. He looked like he'd been scrambling for the better part of a century without ever getting any traction. By this age, even an average citizen would have earned enough for basic rejuvenation—so this gentleman's sloppy demeanor was clear evidence of his inability to produce a long-term result.

His name was Snorkin Mibble-11 (the eleven was silent) and his identity chips proved beyond doubt that he was the eleventh clone of the original Snorkin Mibble. He was a jobber for a colloquium of small specialty firms whose combined efforts could provide broad spectrum data-mining of allied niche markets. He himself was a specialist in actuarial archaeology for multi-dimensional data-sets. Unfortunately, although the risk-to-return ratio for his specialty should have provided significant cash flow, it apparently did not. Had a disinterested observer performed actuarial archaeology on Mibble-11's life, he would have found a textbook example of the famous dictum: “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”

Mibble-11 arrived at a public loop station, just as the last available vehicle departed. The system promised to deliver empty cars to the stations at such frequency that the average user would see a personal transportation unit arriving just as he or she arrived at the platform. But the way you compute an average to measure the distance between the extremes—and Mibble-11 was apparently closer to the edges of the bell curve than safely in the middle. He was always stepping onto the platform, just as the car was leaving to pick up someone else at another station.

If anyone had approached Mibble-11, he would have sensed a disquieting odor of stale food, bad teeth, and unwashed flesh, not distinct enough to be offensive, but just detectable enough to create an additional feeling of unattractiveness. That, plus his posture, his flaking scalp, his blotchy skin, his nervous manner—that was enough to keep other human beings at a careful distance. In other words, Mibble-11's demeanor had been deliberately constructed to subtly dissuade people from closer examination. He didn't quite stink of failure and despair, but he suggested the possibility strongly enough that he was a walking disenrollment.

While Mibble-11 waited, he fumbled his connect out of his pocket. Laboriously grappling with his briefcase under one arm, he shielded the device from view while he punched in an old-fashioned numerical code. After a moment, a woman's face appeared on the screen—it was not a live connection, but an avatar. Mibble-11 said, “Oops. Sorry. Wrong number.” He broke the connection, shifted around again, and redialed, this time more carefully. He connected to a blank screen—an anonymous message drop. He recited carefully, “Smelly tofu. Pickled mongoose. Feathered mastodon.” Then he broke the connection and pushed the device back into his coat.

If anyone had been monitoring, and Mibble-11 was certain that at least three different agencies were monitoring, they would have determined that the first call definitely was a wrong number. And in fact, it was. But they would probably spend hours, perhaps even days, determining that he had not sent a coded signal through a carefully constructed mail-drop. The second message was also a decoy. The three agencies would assume that Mibble-11 had spoken specific code phrases, designed to trigger prearranged actions. They would not waste much time trying to crack the code—these were clearly phrases from a one-time pad. Instead, they would monitor the mail drop to see if and when the messages were received or forwarded, and to whom. They would specifically look to see what actions occurred afterwards. But that was a decoy too.

Mibble-11 had a foolproof way of sending his signal. He didn't send any signal at all. His silence was the message. The decoy phone calls were merely to waste the time and energy of those who might be monitoring him. He would do other things as well. In his wake, he would leave behind a branching forest of dead ends, false trails, empty possibilities. His actuarial skills projected that the three agencies combined would likely waste a quarter of a million credits determining that these were fruitless avenues of investigation. And even then, they would never be fully certain that their information was accurate. The nature of such agencies was to be suspicious of everything. Nothing was ever a fact, it was always an allegation. The additional avalanche of data that Snorkin Mibble-11 was triggering now would clog the system with enough erroneous material to degrade the confidence of all other data-conclusions by several percentage points. While that was never his primary intention, it was certainly a favorable side-benefit.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, far away, Kendell Spencer's past life had already begun to evaporate.

The woman who had lived for the past three years as his mate had packed their two children into the car and headed toward her mother's for a visit. Somewhere between the entrance to the harbor tunnel and its exit on the far side of the bay, the vehicle ceased to exist. The tracking tags simply stopped broadcasting. Likewise, the tracking tags embedded in the flesh of Carol Spencer, Todd, and Timmy, also stopped broadcasting.

Twenty minutes later, in the warehouse district, a van of roughly the same size and shape as the Spencer vehicle pulled into an underground delivery bay. An unkempt teenaged boy in bagaloons, boots, and sweatshirt, popped open the rear of the vehicle to reveal two crates, each one large enough to hold a child-sized suspended animation capsule. The crates were not labeled. Two men came out of the warehouse and hand-loaded the crates onto a dolly. One of them got into the vehicle and drove off with it, the other pushed the dolly into the warehouse, followed by the teenaged boy.

Several hours later, a perniciously persistent software bot assigned to track the movement of every vehicle exiting the harbor tunnel subsequent to Carol Spencer's disappearance, would finally assemble aerial, satellite, and ground surveillance footage on this particular van. While there was little to distinguish this vehicle from the thousands of others that had also exited the tunnel, the bot had judged the similarity of its size and shape to the target vehicle as sufficient to warrant further investigation of its route both prior to and after its transit through the harbor tunnel. Because there was no evidence of the vehicle entering the tunnel, the assembled footage of its course was examined for additional anomalies.

By the time ground agents could arrive at the warehouse, it would already have been emptied and triple-cleansed, leaving no detectable evidence of habitation by anything larger than a stray dust-mite. While that in itself might arouse suspicion, additional investigation would reveal that level of cleansing as standard procedure for this particular venue. Additional route-tracking of all vehicles leaving the warehouse district would not produce any further leads; the number of possible destinations, connections, transshipments, and tracking branches would quickly escalate beyond the point of practical investigation, no matter how many software bots were generated. That fact, however, would not stop the effort. Software bots were tireless. Who knew what a dogged bot might turn up, given sufficient time and processor cycles? But the effort would eventually be reduced to lower and lower priority as more significant investigations were generated.

Meanwhile, by that time, Snorkin Mibble-11 would already be off-planet, more than halfway up the orbital elevator on an express capsule. His ticket would have him headed toward the fourth moon of Gabrielle, the local system's bloated gas giant. But somewhere between sea level and the station at geosynchrony, Snorkin Mibble-11 would disappear even more completely than Kendall Spencer—because where there had been some record of Spencer's prior existence, there would be no record at all of Snorkin Mibble-11's, because he had never existed at all.

Passenger records would later show that Dame Hester Brint, formerly of Malice Springs, transshipped on the Lady MacBeth, a small starliner of somewhat dubious reputation. The Lady MacBeth's flight plan was clearly false, and no further record of the vessel was found for several years until—but that's a different story.

None of this mattered, because Snorkin Mibble-11 had never become Dame Hester Brint. Instead, somewhere in transit, he had exchanged identities and appearance with another passenger—a passenger who conveniently matched his general size and shape and who had enough of the same skills of disguise and impersonation to fool the station's surveillance bots for the few hours necessary to facilitate this leg of Mibble-11's outward journey. Mibble-11 became Zunida Clash, and Zunida Clash had become Hester Brint. But even if someone tracking Mibble-11 had figured this out, it wouldn't have mattered at all, because Snorkin Mibble-11 had also been a doppelganger. Kendall Spencer had never begun this journey.

By the time Admiral James Nathan Ktonga realized he had been decoyed, conned, snookered, and flim-flammed, it was too late. Kendall Spencer, or whoever it was who had stood in his office representing himself as Kendall Spencer, was far off-planet and effectively beyond his reach. Likewise, his wife—if she ever really had been his wife—and children had also vanished.

Nevertheless, despite whatever annoyance he might have to publicly demonstrate to his underlings, he was secretly very pleased. Commander Kendall Spencer had taken the bait. It didn't matter how Spencer got to Leonardo as long as he arrived, one way or another. Promises were promises—and there were people waiting for this promise to be kept.

Meanwhile, less than three city blocks away from Ktonga's office, in a tiny windowless room, located in one of a cluster of squat bell towers left over from a previous era of history, Commander Kendall Spencer sat quietly with a cup of hot tea. The towers had, in their 1,400 years of existence, served as a monastery, a shrine, a pilgrimage, a museum, a warehouse, a museum again, and now as a site marked for preservation or reconstruction or demolition, depending which way the winds of change might blow in the next century. The nice thing about the bell towers was not just that they were made of very heavy stone, but that they were also conveniently blocked on all sides by a variety of industrial confections that conveniently provided all manner of shielding from prying eyes and probes.

On the other side of the table were a dragon and a fairy.

From the waist up, the dragon was vaguely human; he still had some small essence of humanity in his facial structure; but from the waist down, he was saurian. He had leathery skin, a restless reptilian tail, and two solid stumpy legs. His feet were three-toed claws and he shifted his weight restlessly from side to side in perfect rhythm with the slashing of his tail. Spencer had encountered saurians in the past: most wore little or no clothing, but this one wore a tattered kilt and a vest—probably to hide the disfiguring scars of previous battles. Spencer had never been curious enough to ask.

The fairy was a small green sprite, slender and agile; it leapt nervously from perch to perch around the room. Naked, it was male in general appearance, with puckish curiosity—but its genitalia were female. The possibility that the saurian and the fairy were sexual partners crossed Spencer's mind, but it was not a thought he wanted to dwell on. Once upon a time, Spencer might have wondered why human beings would reinvent their physical forms so drastically, but that had been very early in his career. By the end of his first mission, he'd learned that there were far more important issues than corporeal reconstruction.

“So?” said the dragon-man. The floor boards creaked beneath him.

“He took the bait,” Spencer reported. “He thinks I'm on my way.”

“Good.” There was a small egg-shaped package on the table, next to the tea pot. The dragon pointed to it with one giant claw. “Take it now. It's time.”

“No,” said Spencer. “I told you at the beginning. I won't do that. Not that.”

“We don't need to have this conversation, do we, Commander?” The dragon-man held up his left arm. The fairy dropped easily onto his wrist, as gracefully as a hawk returning to a falconer. It hissed and bared its shiny bright teeth at Spencer.

“Easy, boy,” the dragon cautioned his tiny partner. “Be patient and I'll give you a special treat, just the way you like it.” To Spencer, he said, “Impetuousness is deadly. Don't you agree?” He leaned forward, his muzzle partly open. The stench of his most recent meal—three-day-old carrion—was still on his breath. He stretched out his right arm and laid a giant claw on Spencer's shoulder. The weight of it almost knocked him to the ground. “You and I both know that you have no choice in the matter. You got on board at the beginning, you cannot get off before the end.” He removed his claw; then laboriously, he began turning around in the cramped room, so he could duck out through the narrow door and down the spiral stairs.

Commander Kendall Spencer stood up slowly. Reluctantly, he picked up the egg and hefted it in his hand. The dragon was right. There was nothing left to say. Then suddenly, a loud crash came from below. The tower shook. Spencer and the dragon-man had just enough time to exchange a look of horror, then—

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 3: Dreams and Nightmares
by Nancy Kress

Oblivion.

Cold and pain: distant pain, as if it were happening to someone else. But Spencer knew it was happening to him, was—

“He's awake!”

“Damn it, I'm not done! Put him out again!”

Oblivion.

He woke in a cool, dim room. Yellow curtains fluttered at the window, framing an upland meadow thick with wildflowers and ringed by blue mountains. Incredulous, Spencer stared at the view—where the hell was he?—until he realized that of course it was a holo and the curtains fluttered courtesy of programmed Scented Breeze.

He sat up in the bed, pulled back the cheerful yellow blanket, and examined his naked body, flexing and lifting everything flexible or liftable. It all worked. But a new scar, already healing, ran jagged across his abdomen, and the back of his head throbbed. Spencer raised both hands and felt the plastic plate embedded in his skull.

His motions evidently set off sensors. A door opened and Plibix entered. The dragon seemed unscarred, but the look in his eyes made Spencer's gut clench. Don't ask. But he knew he would have to ask ... only not just yet.

Instead he said, “What happened?”

“Plasma bomb.”

“Plasma bomb? In Goldmeadow?”

“It took out most of the city. If we hadn't been under those shields ... even so ... you ... I...”

Spencer had worked with Plibix for almost five years now. This faltering was completely uncharacteristic of the dragon, who was a professional, despite his weird body choices. Professionals didn't show such grief, or such incoherent rage. So Spencer was obligated to ask now, after all.

“And your friend—”

“Dead.”

“I'm sorry. He ... she ... your friend was beautiful. They'll pay for this.”

“Yes,” Plibix spat, and then, to Spencer's relief, sought refuge in hard information. “Our orbitals assess Goldmeadow's damage as ninety-nine percent above-ground destruction within a five-hundred-meter radius centered on Service Headquarters, the ostensible target. Commensurate damage spreading outward. Below-ground vault damage unknown at this time. Total dead is point eight million. It's now been fifty hours and thirteen minutes since the explosion. You are at our facility in New Barchester.”

Spencer took a moment to absorb this. Service Headquarters gone. Point eight million beings dead, including Admiral Ktonga. A good man, if misguided. But Carol and the children were safe, gone from Goldmeadow long ago ... point eight million dead.

He said, “My injuries?”

“Mostly internal, plus the back of your skull. Brain undamaged, however.”

“Why the hell have I got a plastic plate there?”

“No time to grow your own bone and skin, Spencer. You know that.”

Spencer scowled. “Who did the operation? Anything could be in that plate, Plibix. I don't like it.”

“It was Dr. Jen Roper, one of our own people. She's good, and she was here. We didn't exactly plan on this, you know.”

Spencer knew. God, what a mess.... Belatedly he said, “And you?”

Plibix turned around. A long scar, healing even more rapidly than Spencer's, ran across the dragon's naked back. Spencer studied it, reconstructing in his mind where he had sat in the bell tower, where Plibix had stood, the table between them, the angle of the building to Service Headquarters. Finally he said, “You bent over the table, didn't you. To shield the package. That's how you got hit on the back. Is the package intact?”

Plibix drew the small, egg-shaped bundle from his kilt and laid it on the bottom of Spencer's bed.

Spencer said, “I still say no to that thing.”

“And I still say that you have no choice. Especially now.” And the grief and rage were back in Plibix's eyes, so that once again Spencer looked away, out the window that was not a window, at the meadow that was not a meadow.

The dragon said, “There is something you have not asked. Ask it.”

“All right.” Spencer looked back at Plibix. This, too, he had to ask. “Was the plasma bomb ours?”

“I don't know. But if it was, and Parapara has double-crossed us, I swear I'll tear this organization into bloody shreds and blow all of Leonardo into shards no bigger than my talon.”

Spencer nodded. He knew that Plibix meant it.

* * * *

The New Barchester station was primarily medical, which meant it was more transparent than not. Supplies and personnel traveled in, and what uses they were put to was carefully documented and reported to all concerned authorities. Only those in the locked operating wings knew whether cloned skin was actually used for grafts over burns, as meticulously listed in the OR log, or for changing facial identity. Eyes could be replaced due to vision loss from Blund-Klein Syndrome, or to alter a retinal scan. Only six people had access to the morgue.

But New Barchester's very transparency meant that little real information went in or out. The reasons behind this were simple: Attract as little attention as possible. If nobody knows much, nobody can give away much. For the next two days, while nanomeds repaired his insides, Spencer was limited to what information Plibix brought him from the dragon's trips away from the station, plus whatever Spencer could learn from Dr. Jen Roper.

First he examined all the station records on her, which were accurate if not very interesting: resume, personal situation, genetic profile. She was a widow, no children, had lived most of her life on Goldmeadow, had an exemplary list of medical accomplishments. She lived alone, was blood type A positive, carried the allele for an allergy to roses, had a weakness for chocolate truffles, and kept a pet cat named Crumbs. She had never been on Leonardo, or apparently anywhere near it. Plibix reported that she had been recruited two and a half years ago, halfway into the project, and had come to New Barchester a year after that. Her reasons were purely ideological: She believed in what the organization was trying to accomplish. That alone aroused Spencer's suspicions. Idealists were dangerous. They lacked a sense of proportion.

“She's a good doctor,” Plibix said impatiently. Spencer leaned closer to sniff the dragon's breath: nothing. Plibix wasn't eating. Since the plasma bomb and the death of the fanged green fairy, Plibix looked scrawnier, and his scales had begun to molt. Spencer had never seen a more dangerous look in any being's eyes.

“I know she's a good doctor, Plib. I want to know what else she is.”

“For God's sake, it's just a plastic plate. You had it imaged, didn't you? Let it rest, Spencer.”

“I want to talk to her.” Unbidden, his hand rose to finger the back of his head. He felt all three textures: the thick rough hair giving way to the stubble where his scalp had been shaved giving way to the slick smooth plastic. Yes, he'd had it imaged, and the image had shown a uniform thickness of regular plastic polymers, nothing else. Nothing embedded in the plastic, nothing leading from it deeper into his skull, not even nanofilaments. Spencer still didn't like it.

“You want to talk to her, talk to her,” Plibix said. “Do I look like I care? But I told you, she doesn't get back until late this afternoon and we leave early this evening.”

“I want to talk to her.”

Plibix snarled something no human vocal chords could have uttered, flicked his leathery wings, and stomped from the room.

Spencer was waiting for Dr. Roper when she cleared Decon. She emerged from the last chamber dressed in loose, disposable pants and tunic of soft yellow. Despite himself, Spencer blinked.

He'd seen her picture, of course. But no holo could capture the impact of her presence. Six feet tall, with deep black eyes and skin the color of caramels, Jen Roper had the curves and walk of an ancient African goddess. She radiated pure, musky, have-to-have-it sex. And since no woman looked like that except by choice, Spencer's wariness about her shot abruptly upward, along with his attraction.

“Commander Spencer,” she said. Her voice was husky, pitched low, and the word “Commander” delivered with a playful smile that said she knew exactly how much he disliked it. Who was this woman?

“Dr. Roper,” he said formally. “I'd like to talk to you.”

“Certainly. My office is this way.”

He followed her down the hall, trying not to watch the sway of her buttocks under the thin cloth. Her office was spare, utilitarian, but with framed holos of a grassy savannah dotted with low trees, each holo taken at a different time of day. The savannahs could have been located on innumerable planets, but Jen Roper's history said she hadn't been on numerous planets. Goldmeadow, Talianta, and Terra. That was all. The savannahs were probably Terran.

Although there were also green, grassy savannahs on Leonardo.

“Coffee? Juice?” she asked.

“Nothing, thank you. Doctor, why have I got this plate in my head?”

“Because otherwise you'd be going around with a gaping hole and your considerable brains would spill out.” She smiled. He did not. More seriously she added, “There was no time to clone your own bone and skin—I was told you needed to be in optimum possible condition in three days, max. I had skin and bone on hand that I could have used, but immunosuppressors need to be monitored, and I was told you would be leaving. Of the available materials for a plate, this polymer is the lightest, least susceptible to insertion infections, and the easiest to remove once you do stay long enough in a medical facility to clone your own skin and bone.”

“At the atomic level, this polymer also forms intricate, fractal-like structures rather than, say, regular, crystalline lattices.”

“Yes,” said Spencer. “That's its basic structure.”

“Such a basic structure can be used to encode messages.”

Her dark eyes widened in shock. Spencer watched closely; the shock seemed genuine. “Are you accusing me of ... what are you accusing me of, Commander? And whatever the hell it is, you damn well better be able to substantiate it!”

“I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm merely reciting an inherent quality of the plate you've chosen to put into my head.”

“I'm as loyal a member of this organization as you are!”

“Let's hope so.” He made his tone skeptical, egging her on, watching carefully for every nuance of her reaction.

“I don't have anything more to say to you!” she snapped, and suddenly, in the strain in her voice, Spencer remembered waking during surgery:

Cold and pain: distant pain, as if it were happening to someone else. But Spencer knew it was happening to him, was—

"He's awake!"

"Damn it, I'm not done! Put him out again!"

“Please leave my office,” Jen Roper said, and he did. She'd been perfect, nothing amiss in her reactions except that indefinable strain, and of course anyone would feel strain when implicitly accused of being an infiltrator, or in the middle of a difficult surgery. Her strain was normal, her reactions perfect ... so why didn't Spencer trust her?

What exactly was it that hadn't been “done” when he'd awakened on the operating table?

Walking back down the corridor toward his room, weaker still than he'd like to admit, Spencer put his hand to his head and fingered the plastic plate. Smooth, even, slick. It told him nothing.

An hour later, he and Plibix left for MacDougal II.

* * * *

"It threatens the very foundations of the galaxy!” the garrison officer with Ktonga's face cried, He turned into a blue bellflower covered with blood, and then—

“Wake up, mon cheri,” Patsy Klein said sleepily in French, “you're having a nightmare.”

“I don't ... have nightmares,” Spencer mumbled.

“Well, you're having one now,” she said and then she was asleep again, snoring softly, her sharp hip bone pressing uncomfortably into his side.

It had been a long time since his last nightmare. But Patsy was right—he was having them now.

He lay beside her in the opulent stateroom on the J.D. Peterson and stared at the ceiling. He and Plibix had changed crafts and identities three times on the journey from Goldmeadow. Now Plibix had vanished to take care of his part of the operation, and Patsy had joined him for the last stage of the journey to MacDougal.

They were Monsieur and Madame Jacques Aubert-Bertin, based on Argent Trois, owners of a firm that searched out interesting plant genetics useful for enhancing food crops. Spencer had grown up speaking Terran French with his mother, and Patsy could pick up any language, human or alien, yet discovered. Jacques and Giselle Aubert-Bertin traveled in the most luxurious style, partying every night with the other wealthy passengers aboard, listening to all the gossip and business deals and political speculation. The Aubert-Bertins said little themselves, but then they weren't well, poor elderly dears, and as long as they provided the most scrumptious drinkables in their stateroom ... and did you hear what that fascinating Colonel Matic said about his tour of duty on Leonardo, it was absolutely outrageous, it seems that in the middle of the night certain citizens had just disappeared, and—

Spencer had learned a lot on the J.D. Peterson, although most of it confirmed what he already knew rather than adding anything fresh. He still had no idea who had set off the plasma bomb in Goldmeadow. His superiors, including Parapara, swore they didn't know. Plibix, before he had parted from Spencer, said he hadn't learned anything more, either.

Plibix might or might not have been telling the truth. The answers, whatever they were, lay on MacDougal or on Leonardo. Maybe.

Ktonga had told Spencer, at their meeting that now seemed so long ago (last week) that there “was something happening on Leonardo.” Ktonga had had a gift for understatement. Leonardo had been humanity's most conspicuous failure in human-alien relationships. On every other planet with sentient life—well, almost every other planet—colonizers had been able to use negotiation, trade, or intimidation to settle on worlds already inhabited by some other race. But Leonardoins didn't negotiate, weren't impressed by any technology they were shown, and didn't intimidate. Tall, blue, proud, and unfriendly, they had followed their warrior-wanderer lives for millennia and planned on doing it for millennia more. Twenty years ago, they flat out refused to have humans on the one inhabitable continent of Leonardo, and they flat out refused to say why. The few anthropologists the Leonardoins didn't murder reported that this isolationism seemed to be a religious taboo. Something about a goddess and a native animal—Spencer hadn't paid much attention to this part. Primitive goddesses didn't interest him.

Turning over in the stuffy stateroom, pushing away Patsy's bony shoulder, he suddenly saw an image Jen Roper. Impatiently he pushed the thought away.

With no choice under galactic law, the colonists had prepared to leave Leonardo. If they had, the whole venture might have ended right there and nobody would have ever heard of Leonardo again. Which would have been fine with Spencer, then a junior officer in Space Intelligence. However, just before the colonists had taken off, the Leonardoins had attacked and wiped out the entire encampment.

Which had been under a dome impenetrable by any weapon not operating at an atomic level.

Simultaneously, the colonists’ ship in orbit had blown up, along with seventeen widely scattered orbital probes, a shuttle in transit from the surface, and the Space Navy Belsen-class warship Julius Caesar.

Simultaneously.

Then the Leonardoins had hurled their spears at the rubble left from the dome.

The Navy sent an investigative team. Then another. In twenty years, they had not found out who or what had destroyed the colonists and their military clockwork. But the same thing had happened again, and again. By the third time it was clear to everyone that the Leonardoins had secret champions and that the champions possessed the ability to destroy things that were nowhere near them, or each other. Quantum-entangled weaponry, the physicists called it, because they had to call it something. “Entangle” your target's particles with those physically somewhere else, and blow up things from halfway across the galaxy. Humans could not make such weapons.

So whose weapon was it?

Why was it being used to defend a Godforsaken place like Leonardo?

And what would happen to whatever human group discovered the answers first?

Of the three questions, Spencer could imagine the answer only to the last one. Unimaginable power. No scholar, Spencer nonetheless remembered what Lord Acton had said about power five hundred years ago. It was still true.

Three bells chimed musically. Patsy woke, yawned, and said, “Nous avons arrivées.”

They were docking at the station above MacDougal II. Spencer washed, dressed, and added a few last-minute items to his suitcases, which after a few hours he would never see again. The largest suitcase asked if it should lock and depart. He told it yes. The only item that mattered wasn't even with Spencer; Plibix had taken the egg-shaped package with him.

Dressed, Patsy looked like what she was supposed to be: a gray-haired, very old, very rich woman who still enjoyed a good laugh. That was, of course, nothing like her genuine self, and sometimes Spencer had the sensation that he hadn't been traveling with Patsy Klein at all, or with anyone. Even the carefully managed, sedate sex, suitable for such unrejuvenated ancients, had felt unreal. He didn't worry about that sensation. It was a normal part of working undercover with a good agent.

But what happened next was not part of anyone's plans.

“Allons, cheri,” Patsy said, opened the stateroom door—and gasped.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 4: Smoke and Mirrors
by Robert Sheckley

Spencer heard Patsy gasp, saw her freeze in the doorway.

“What is it?” he asked. When she didn't answer, he walked up to see for himself.

The doorway didn't open into a narrow corridor, as it had when they entered. Now, as though some demonic stage-setter had been at work, the corridor was gone and in its place was a room so long he could barely see the end of it. There was what appeared to be a glow of light from a row of French windows at the rear.

The sole object of interest in the room was a huge pipe organ.

The organ towered up to the ceiling. It was roughly rectangular, painted in garish colors, with multiple keyboards, and above them, a triple row of stops. Its great pipes towered above it, and there were more pipes bristling out from either side. It was a madman's three-dimensional conception of what an organ should look like.

In front of the organ was a raised dais, and upon that dais was a piano bench. Seated on that bench was a tall creature in black evening clothes who looked almost human, except that he seemed to have extra arms. These grew out of his sides and chest. This man or thing was seated on the piano bench in front of the gigantic pipe organ.

Spencer closed his eyes and opened them again. He did this several times, almost believing the impossible organ wouldn't be there the next time he looked. Each time it was still there, and seemed to grow larger each time.

The man, the entity, the player, rocked back and forth on his piano bench, playing the organ in a frenzy of movement. He not only played it, he seemed to adapt to it. Spencer could see extra limbs extruding from his body during certain passages.

It was a stunning performance, but, uncannily, it was all done in perfect silence. Spencer could hear no sounds coming from the organ. Without sound, the performance was terrifying rather than stirring.

Beside him, Patsy Klein was moaning softly, hugging herself, and gasping for breath.

Then the organist began to fade. His firm outline turned fuzzy, hazy, and slowly vanished. The organ itself began to fade. Next, the outlines of the vast room started to waver. Spencer blinked repeatedly to clear his vision, but inexorably, the room faded away. Between one blink and the next, the organ, organist, and the vast room that contained them were gone, and Spencer was looking at the dull gray walls of the corridor.

Beside him, Klein's knees buckled, she sagged, and Spencer put an arm around her to support her.

“You saw it?” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

“It's gone now.”

Spencer nodded.

“Where did it go?” There was horror in Patsy's voice. Her voice shook. She seemed on the verge of tears.

Spencer didn't have any of the answers. But he did have something to say.

“Patsy! Get control of yourself!”

She shuddered and looked at him in horror.

Spencer forced himself to take a dry, lecturing voice.

“We have both seen something impossible. Something we have no immediate explanation for. The intention of showing this to us was to elicit fear, awe, apprehension, self-doubt, and all the other emotions we agents have spent so many years combating, inoculating ourselves against. Patsy, you and I have seen many impossible things in our lives. And we've heard of many others. Now let's take this step by step. After all, you and I are in the smoke and mirrors business. It's not for us to react like a gullible audience. You and I have been in some strange places, and we've seen some unusual things.”

She stared at him. Spencer forced himself to continue, his voice low and controlled, trying to convince himself as much as her.

“The affair on Leonardo is an example of the sort of thing we've seen. We didn't experience it ourselves, and so we are not emotionally devastated by it. We're both working on that case. It has been assigned to us. No matter who we work for, the Leonardo incident is our life. Whatever we may believe about it, it is ours to work on, and to work on in a reasonable manner.”

Patsy gave a shudder as she expelled a long-held breath. “All right,” she said.

She was better now. Spencer saw the look of panic fade from her eyes, to be replaced by the sign of intelligence at work.

“Now I'll ask you what you should be asking yourself. Was what we saw any less strange than what happened on Leonardo?”

Patsy shook her head. Spencer noted that her coloring had returned.

He said, “Was it any stranger than what has been happening in the last 24 hours?” He willed her to speak, but she was not ready yet. So he went on. “No, of course not! In this thing we just saw, no one was killed, no remains were left behind. It could have been a projection of some sort. It might have been a shared hallucination. How and why it was created is not presently our concern. What it is supposed to mean to us is not our present business. We just have to know about the possibility.”

“All right,” Patsy said. “I'm OK now. It's just that the first appearance of that thing was so overwhelming. But of course, it was probably meant to be. People are fishing for big stakes in this game!”

“And so are we,” Spencer said. “Now, it's time we got out of here and see what lies ahead.”

Patsy chuckled. “I didn't know you were quite so level-headed, Spence!”

Spencer forced himself to smile. “I'm just lucky I didn't see that thing alone. It was easier to talk you out of it than to try to talk myself out of it.”

“What bothers me now,” Patsy said, “is why we couldn't hear any sound from that organ.”

“I would conjecture that the organ wasn't built to make sounds,” Spencer said. “But that's the least of our problems. Let's get back to present-time. Let's see what MacDougal has in store for us.”

At first glance MacDougal seemed like a pleasant world, terrraformed on an ideal California model. The air, as they left the Lander, was dry and warm, the sun was bright, the temperature was mild. There were a few big cumulus clouds drifting through a light blue sky. In the parklike surroundings, small open vehicles moved on the paved roads. One of these vehicles pulled up to them.

Two men in civilian clothes got out. Both carried briefcases. They checked the newcomers’ identities with a device one of them carried in his briefcase, then welcomed Spencer and Patsy to MacDougal.

“Nice place you've got here,” Patsy said.

“Just like home,” the older of the two men said. “On this continent, anyhow. Not everything is completed yet. Commander, Miss Klein, welcome. If you'll step into the vehicle, we'll take you to your quarters.”

They were put up in adjoining apartments on the ground floor of a small apartment complex. There was clothing for them both in separate closets. It was late in the day. MacDougal's small red sun was already setting. They went for dinner at the nearby restaurant attached to their complex. By the time they were through, they were both ready for bed.

Spencer closed his eyes. He didn't feel sleep coming. But it must have been sleep, because he became aware that he was dreaming. He was in a cellar. Dim bars of sunlight came through slats in the ceiling. He could see that the cellar was flooded. But he already knew that, because he was standing in several feet of water. The water was cold and unpleasant, and it had a bad odor. He thought he could smell smoke in the air, but he knew nothing could burn in a place as wet as this.

Then something in the water tapped him lightly on the leg, and he thought: entanglement is trying to happen.

Spencer could see slender, long, pale skinny things in the water. Eels, perhaps? Or were they snakes? It was difficult to make out in the dim light, through the dirty water. Then one of them nudged his trouser leg. He kicked it away, and almost fell into the water. More of them were coming at him; he felt a nip on his leg, then another. The nips were not painful, but he objected strongly to them. He felt yet another nip.

He shook his leg, trying to dislodge what was biting at him with a soft, toothless mouth. And then someone was shaking his shoulder and he opened his eyes and saw Patsy.

“Ken! Are you all right?”

He managed to say, “Of course! What's wrong?”

“You were calling out! What happened?”

“Dream,” Spencer muttered. “Bloody awful dream. Sorry I woke you.”

“No problem,” Patsy said. “I was awake anyway. Are you all right now?”

“I'm fine,": Spencer said. He sat up in bed, noticing that his feet and legs were dry. Already the details of the dream were fading from his memory. Both the dream and his instant analysis of it were fading. A moment later, both were gone.

Patsy lay down on the bed beside him and pulled the covers over her. “See you in the morning,” she whispered.

Not long after that, he was falling asleep again. He drifted through various dream images, then felt Patsy stir beside him. Her bare foot touched his leg. Spencer made a little sound and rolled toward her. Soon he was wrapped up in her, coiled around her long, delicious body. Something warned him that this was not as it should be. How did Patsy get so long, so soft yet firm? She was much longer, and there was an indescribable softness yet firmness about her flesh that was not at all reminiscent of Patsy. She even smelled different ... And then it slowly dawned on Spencer that this was not Patsy in the bed with him. This was someone else.

Jen! Again he breathed in her indescribable aroma. He knows it was her. The length of her, the feel of her naked body, the dark unmistakable fragrance of her hair ... But what was she doing here? She didn't even like him! He was sure of that. He thought of asking her why she's here. But it was too pleasant just to lie here beside her. And besides, what was there to say?

Then she spoke.

“Ken?”

“Yes.”

“You're awake?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“But before that, you were dreaming.”

“Yes...”

“Tell me your dream, Ken.”

“I don't remember it,” he said, the words coming out automatically, the result of long years of practice in revealing nothing ... or as little as possible. But as he said it, he remembered what he had been dreaming.

“I think you do, Ken.”

“Hey, if I could remember, I'd be glad to tell you. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I came to exchange something with you.”

“What?”

“A night of pleasure, and information on the plastic plate in your head, in exchange for your dream.”

A night of pleasure. He felt her press against him, felt her arms around his neck. He couldn't think what harm it would do to tell her his dream. Maybe part of her work as a doctor had to do with collecting dreams...

But his work in secret service was telling nothing to no one without specific authorization.

Still, what harm could it do?

He didn't know the answer to that, but he was beginning to suspect it could be a lot. She was offering too much! The habits of years of considering motives, juggling everything from a security angle were strong.

“I'd tell you if I could,” he said. “But I really can't remember.”

He felt her body stiffen. She hadn't expected that! He felt her arms move again. She was lightly caressing his neck and chest. But this, which should have been delightful, seemed to Spencer the worst thing of all. He couldn't get the idea of a succubus out of his mind—one of those beautiful women of ancient legend who sucked the lifeblood out of their helpless victims. He thought of her long, sharp fingernails, now touching him gently on the neck.

A moment later she was gone. He didn't even feel her move, but she was no longer there. Somebody else was lying beside him. Patsy.

“You awake?” he whispered to her.

“Not really,” she moaned, her voice heavy with sleep. “Ken...”

“Yes?” he said after a minute.

“I really need to get some more sleep,” she said. “Then we can...

She rolled toward him in the bed. He felt again her sharp hip in his side.

Soon, from the sound of her breathing, he could tell she was asleep.

A thousand questions tugged at Spencer's mind. A thousand explanations passed in and out of his thoughts. But he had one thought that stuck. It was the notion that tonight, somehow, in some way he didn't understand, he had been given a test. Jen had been a part of it, but he didn't know if she even knew that. She, or whatever that thing in the bed with him had been, was the bait, the reward. Revelation of his dream had been the target. And by not telling her, he figured he had won. But what had he won, from whom had he won it, and what did it have to do with Leonardo?

That left the question of what part Patsy had played. Had she played any part at all? Someday he'd find out. But for now he was aware that he had undergone a test, and had won.

The next morning, Spencer and Patsy went to the communications building. There they were assigned small offices and desks, computers and filers, and given work to do. The work involved assessing risks on a small world called Wolfe-Dexter IV.

Spencer felt strange, doing this work. This was not the sort of thing he was trained to do, though he figured out how to do it easily enough. It took no great smarts for him to realize that he—and Patsy also—had been assigned low-grade intelligence work; enough to keep their minds occupied, but not enough to teach them anything.

Patsy was not in her office at lunch time. Spencer ate alone in the big cafeteria, walked around the grounds for a few minutes afterwards, then returned to his office.

He worked steadily through the long, slow afternoon, doing the sort of thing he thought he was finished with years ago. In late afternoon he noticed that people from other offices were packing up and leaving. He decided to do the same. He had no papers that he wanted to take with him. So he zipped up his briefcase and stood up to leave.

Just then his the door of his office opened and a young woman he didn't know put her head in.

“Someone to see you, Commander Spencer.”

“Show him in,” Spencer said. “Or her.”

The girl disappeared from the doorway. A moment later the door pushed open again and someone stepped in whom Spencer was more than a little surprised to see.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 5: The Egg and the Dragon
by Brian Herbert

A black dwarf stood in the doorway.

Stunned, Spencer half rose out of his chair, and gripped the edge of the desk. “Ramon! What are you doing here?”

A dark-skinned dwarf of Terrafrican origins, Ramon Boganda was a tough, smart agent, a master of espionage techniques who was capable of penetrating the security of any adversary, and of setting up his own formidable defenses to keep the bad guys from getting to him and his fellow agents. The year before, he had supervised the armoring of Service Headquarters, and his efforts had undoubtedly saved the lives of Spencer and Plibix when the plasma bomb went off.

Though in his mid-thirties, Boganda was no taller than Spencer's eldest son Todd, only three years old. The dwarf had been personally responsible for the safety of Carol Spencer and the two boys.

Looking downcast, Boganda said, “I lost them. They were with me one minute and I was talking to little Timmy. Then, right in front of my eyes, all three of them vanished into thin air.”

“Damn!” Spencer swept an arm across the desk, scattering documents and office supplies to the floor. He stood up, kicked the chair over with a loud crash, and came around the desk.

Eyes wide with fear, Boganda took a step backward. “Please believe me. I did everything I could.”

Spencer inhaled a deep breath, tried to calm himself. He paced the office. “You say they vanished. How could that be? Did Plibix have something to do with it?”

“No. I don't think he was anywhere around. He's been having his own troubles, has been acting strangely.”

“He's always strange.”

“More than usual, I mean. Much more than usual. I'll tell you all about it, but first I need some java. You got any around here? I'm feeling wiped out.”

“No idea where my family is? Are they safe?”

“I can't answer any of that, but there's a lot more I can tell you, and maybe we can figure it out together. Show me the nearest java station, OK?”

Spencer nodded. Ramon Boganda's family had owned a large coffee plantation in Terrafrica, and the dwarf had been saturated with coffee from an early age, so that he needed the stuff a lot more than ordinary coffee addicts. His mother probably gave it to him in a baby bottle.

“There's a cafeteria downstairs,” Spencer said. Leaning over his desk, he reached for an intercom button. “Patsy's still in her office, and I want to bring her in on this,” he said.

“Sure. Whatever you say.” One of Boganda's eyelids twitched nervously as he waited.

Spencer spoke over the intercom, and moments later Patsy joined them in the corridor. They caught a dropshaft to the ground floor, then made their way across the marble floor of a large, crowded lobby. Spencer had to keep slowing down to wait for the dwarf, whose stubby legs scuttled along, taking twice as many steps as the average person.

Patsy, a thin brunette barely over five feet tall, looked like a giant next to the little man. The two of them engaged in small talk while they walked, but Spencer was not in the mood for such conversation. He was worried about his family, and hoped he had not done anything to place them in danger.

When Kendall Spencer participated in the five-year plan with his co—conspirators, he wanted revenge against Admiral Ktonga and the Space Intelligence Service, payback time for all the years in which top management abused the agents, sending them on increasingly difficult and dangerous missions, not paying them well or protecting them and their families.

From injuries sustained on the job, Spencer had a prosthetic arm and leg, a cloned spleen, a cryoptic eye, and now a plastic plate in his head. For him, the final straw occurred when his first wife Laura was murdered, reportedly by an enemy agent. It all made him consider revenge against the Service, joining his professional peers who were already making plans. Some of the agents had suffered more than Spencer, especially Lindsey Parapara, whose injuries and collateral losses were voluminous. So much of her body had been replaced that she only had 22% of the original parts left, and all of those had been repaired at one time or another.

Under Parapara's clandestine leadership, the maltreated agents soon developed a viable plan of action.. In secret meetings they resolved to bring down the Space Intelligence Service, taking all of its wealth and replacing the agency with an entirely different, more altruistic organization. The new company, which they named SpaceOp, was owned and managed by the agents, the ones who took all the risks and deserved their fair share of the impounded assets of criminals and the proceeds of other investigative operations. Their coup against Ktonga's organization would turn interplanetary espionage on its ear.

But the new enterprise wasn't supposed to involve a plasma bomb and 800,000 deaths. It wasn't supposed to involve the death of Admiral Ktonga, either, nor of the fanged, unnamed fairy who had been Plibix's mother. Something had gone terribly wrong, and Spencer needed to find out if SpaceOp had any part in it, or if one of Ktonga's other enemies had been responsible. Spencer wanted to assume the best, but Lindsey Parapara had a visible mean streak. Had she murdered all those people just to get to Ktonga?

They selected a table in a corner, where the dwarf seemed to drink more coffee than his body weight. Displaying a superhuman bladder, he held it all in and remained at the table, speaking between gulps of the steaming, dark liquid. Each table in the cafeteria had a built-in beverage dispenser mechanism, and Boganda kept refilling his cup.

Talking faster and faster as the caffeine took effect, he assumed control of the conversation. He had a lot to say, and disgorged information like a computer, downloading into his companions. Some of it Spencer already knew, but he listened while the dwarf recounted how the doppelganger Snorkin Mibble-11 had reportedly seen an avatar.

“That could be a reference to a three-dimensional image in cyberspace,” Boganda said, “assuming he was telling the truth.” Then the dwarf added something new. “An avatar could also mean a reincarnated Hindu deity, such as Krishna or Buddha.” He smiled thinly. “Or Vamana, the Dwarf. In any event, Mibble-11's untimely death prevented further questions, and we all assumed he was talking about cyberspace. But what if he wasn't?”

“I'm having trouble following you.” Patsy said.

“I think I know where you're going with this,” Spencer said, leaning forward intently. “When Parapara showed the egg to Plibix and me, she said it was rumored to have supernatural powers. She also spoke of the Hindu myth in which Brahma ... the Creator God ... was hatched from a golden egg.”

“We're not talking about Aesop's Fables here, are we?” Patsy said, with a sardonic smile. “The Goose With the Golden Eggs?”

“I don't think so,” Boganda said, humorlessly. He looked at Spencer, peering around the side of his coffee cup. “Our egg is golden, right? But you said it is inlaid with rubies and sapphires.”

“That's right,” Spencer said, nodding. “When we asked for more information, Parapara refused to answer, and insisted that her orders were not to be questioned. She became quite upset with our curiosity, only said that the egg must be handled carefully and never opened.” He paused. “As you know, it has a tiny fastener and hinge visible on opposite sides.”

The others nodded, having already heard about the dangerous assignment from Parapara. Aside from the handling instructions, she gave specific orders about where the egg was to be taken, and exactly what Spencer and the dragon were to do with it.

“The minute we had the egg,” Spencer said, “Plibix got weirder than ever. It seemed to cast a spell over him. Sometimes I caught him staring at it, as if in a hypnotic state, with his lizard eyes glazed over. It frightened me.”

For a long moment, they fell silent at the table.

The operations led by Parapara were on multiple levels, which only added to the risks that Spencer faced. Simultaneous with bringing about the downfall of Ktonga and the Service, the conspirators had set in motion steps to continue essential, ongoing espionage operations. The threat to the galaxy could not have come at a worse time, but in such an urgent situation the new organization had to avoid missing a single beat. Spencer and his companions needed to focus on the problems involving Leonardo and MacDougal, and learn who the secret, very dangerous, champions of the Leonardoins were, and what that whole situation had to do with “the very foundations of the galaxy.” Not counting the added perils involved with the egg—which had to be dealt with carefully—the inevitable mission to Leonardo was the most dangerous operation any intelligence agents had ever attempted.

“Then Plibix took the egg and disappeared,” Patsy said.

“Not quite,” the dwarf said, with a scowl. “I've seen him, and he's told me things.” He looked around, added, “I'm feeling a little antsy. What do you say we take a walk and continue this conversation?”

Spencer nodded. Boganda had overdosed on coffee, and now he needed to work it out of his system. Later, when he began to feel rundown, he would want more caffeine again. No one Spencer knew had ever seen him eat anything, and it was rumored that he lived entirely on java. If he was a homeless person lying in the park, he would find a way to mainline the stuff.

They made their way out of the building, into the humid evening. SpaceOp's unmarked headquarters was situated on what the locals called “The Strand,” a strip of offices, restaurants, and shops along the seashore. Humans and aliens strolled by casually, but Spencer hardly noticed them as he and his companions headed for the white-sand beach, where they could get away and have a private conversation. A warm breeze blew in from the ocean.

Spencer knew that Plibix could slip in and out of dimensions, virtually disappearing from view. The little dragon was feared, because he could blindside opponents by emerging out of nowhere and pouncing on them with his sharp talons or other weapons. He called the ability “spectering,” taking cover inside an alternate dimension and then returning to attack. The fairy who had been Plibix's mother had possessed a similar ability, except in her case it had been called “bansheeing.” Essentially it was the same thing, with a few variations in technique.

During his career, Plibix had developed a reputation as the toughest of the tough, an agent with amazing fighting abilities. Outsiders thought he was faster than the eye could see, but his skills were altogether different from that, and only known to members of the Space Intelligence Service.

Under its five-year plan, the new SpaceOp company incorporated the dragon's unique talents, including his handy ability to take people and objects with him into alternate realms. It was in this manner that Plibix made vehicles and people seem to disappear.

In addition, Plibix, unlike his deceased mother, had another very important talent. He could shape shift into virtually any appearance that he wanted. But, inexplicably, he found himself unable to assume the form of a blue-skinned, Leonardoin, thus preventing him (or any of his companions) from engaging in covert operations against that alien race. The immense size of the Leonardoins was not in itself a problem, since Plibix could make himself appear to be quite large, or quite small, by expanding or compressing his cellular structures.

He could also change the sizes of his own body parts at will, thus creating a heavy claw if he wanted one for effect—but always scrupulously refusing to employ the talent for any sexual enhancement purposes. He prided himself as a heroic figure in the history of espionage, and from such a lofty pedestal he held that such behavior would be prurient, fraudulent, and unbecoming of the legacy he wanted to leave.

The trio made their way toward a black rock formation on the beach, where they could conduct a private conversation. On a peninsula in the distance, a shuttle landed, transporting passengers down from one of the orbital stations.

“Patsy and I need to get to Parapara,” Spencer said, “and find out why she shunted us to low-level tasks involving Wolfe-Dexter IV. We're on MacDougal, the only source in the galaxy of the blue bellflower. At the very minimum, we should be trying to find out how one of those flowers—which should not be able to travel across space—found its way to Leonardo, and into the grip of a dead Service officer.”

“They've got somebody working on that,” Patsy said. “The guy in the office next to mine.”

The agents stopped walking and stood together gazing out to sea, with their hair blowing in the warm breeze.

“I hate to say this,” the dwarf finally said, looking up at Spencer, “but Carol might have been a plant, placed by Ktonga or even Parapara.”

“What?” Spencer felt a flush of anger.

“If I'm right, Carol carried out her assignment so completely that she even bore your children.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Spencer said. “You're just trying to make excuses for losing my family!” But he fell silent, as distressing possibilities sank in. Patsy had made a similar suggestion while they were making love, and Spencer had not wanted to believe it, thinking she was only trying to win his affections. Of course, Patsy shouldn't have worried, since his relationship with her went back for more than a decade, long before he ever met Carol and she became pregnant.

Now, Patsy held her silence.

“I hope I'm wrong,” Boganda said. “Originally I thought Plibix, with his interdimensional travel skills, might be able to shed light on Carol's status. The dragon always insisted that only rarely could he remain in an adjacent dimension and eavesdrop on another, but he never elaborated on any of that. So I thought there might be a chance.”

“Plibix doesn't like to answer questions,” Patsy said. “As an agent, he insists he's in the business of questions. It always sounded like a convenient excuse, and made me wonder what important details he might be hiding from the rest of us.”

Spencer pursed his lips, and resisted adding to the conversation.

“Now I'm going to say something that may sound absurd at first,” Boganda said, “but I want both of you to hear me out. Do you agree?”

He looked at each of them and waited until they nodded, then continued.

“Just before Carol and the boys disappeared, Plibix came to me. He was talking about you, Patsy.”

“Me?”

“He told me your name was originally Patsy Kelvin, and now it's Patsy Klein. You aren't married, so what is the explanation?”

Perplexed, Spencer scowled. He felt a sharp lance of pain in the back of his skull.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Patsy said. “I've never been named Kelvin.”

“Not according to Plibix. He said he observed you closely as he traveled through dimensions. According to him, until only a few weeks ago, you were Patsy Suzette Kelvin.”

“Klein,” she insisted.

“He says it's one of the strange occurrences in the galaxy. Your original surname vanished, and all memories of it.”

“My name vanished?”

The dwarf nodded. “Apparently.”

“And all memories of it?”

“That's what he says.”

“Plibix is getting really weird,” Patsy said.

“No denying that,” Boganda agreed. “But he says he's not a creature of this dimension, or of any other. Like his mother used to do, he rides the edges of the galaxy, between light and shadow, between matter and antimatter.”

Spencer felt a shudder course his spine, as he continued to listen.

“Plibix's abilities made him a renowned intelligence agent, almost unstoppable when he got on a case. His genetic structure includes fairy traits, enabling him to follow the aural trails left by a variety of life forms, and if anyone tries to kill him, he can slip away into other dimensions. We know that's true, so his comments about your name might not be so crazy after all. A lot of people have been having bizarre dreams, too, and Plibix says there have been more vanishings than he's caused, like a chain reaction has been set in motion, and things are slipping out of balance.”

Spencer thought of his own strange dreams, of imagining he was with Patsy Klein, then with Jen Roper, and then with Patsy again. Jen had demanded to know what he had been dreaming. Why had that been of such intense interest to her? He also recalled feeling that he had never really traveled with Patsy at all, or with anyone else for that matter, and that his sexual experiences with her had been overly sedate, almost unreal.

Abruptly, Spencer's mind filled with the peculiar, disturbing images of the organ and organ player he and Patsy had seen, before it all disappeared. As if in an eerie vacuum, the organ had not made a sound, and the tall creature playing it had seemed to grow and shed limbs during certain passages.

It was all very, very unsettling.

“Plibix says he's been having increasing trouble traveling between dimensions,” the dwarf said. “He thinks they're rubbing against each other like continental plates, causing the contents of each dimension to leak into others, where they don't belong. The vanishings, the strange dreams, the disappearance of Patsy's surname and Spencer's family. Maybe Plibix is right, and things are getting jumbled. Maybe that's what the agent meant when he transmitted from Leonardo that he had discovered a threat to the very foundations of the galaxy.”

“This is mind-boggling,” Spencer said. He felt a mounting headache, centered on the plastic plate embedded in the back of his skull. He envisioned plots wrapped within plots, crashing into one another, merging and fading, leaving chaos in their wake as dimensions shifted back and forth and entire worlds tumbled into oblivion. One man's reality was another's dream, and vice versa. Doppelgangers and avatars, eggs, dragons, and fairies.

In the background, the black dwarf continued to speak, only making Spencer's uneasiness worse.

“Assuming Plibix is right,” Boganda said, “you were originally Patsy Kelvin, and you became Patsy Klein, pronounced the same way as the famous singer Patsy Cline. C-l-i-n-e.”

This was too much. Spencer wanted to tune it all out, but couldn't.

Fascinated, he listened. It seemed like an odd dream filled with puzzle pieces that didn't quite fit together.

“Consider this as well, Patsy. You seem to have your own ‘ear,’ an ability to learn virtually any language in existence. Put these facts together with the organ that makes no sound.”

“You know about that?” she said.

“Plibix told me. He thinks the music leaked into another dimension ... or dimensions.”

“That must be where lost socks go, too,” Patsy said.

“Don't be facetious,” Boganda said, in a scolding tone.

“But what do a dead singer and a woman with a facility for languages have to do with it?”

“I don't know, but keep in mind, too, that your original surname, Kelvin, refers to a system of measuring temperature.”

“What?”

“Symbol K, a unit of absolute temperature. Plibix didn't say so, but it occurs to me now that we might need to follow a trail involving the five human senses. The vanishings involve our sense of sight. Sounds, even disappearing ones, involve our tympanic sensors, while tactile sensations—such as temperature—form a third.” From his mounting excitement, and the humidity, the dwarf began to perspire.

His dark face glistened as he continued. “In my travels, I have noticed increasingly odd odors, and many that are stronger than normal. Remember how Snorkin Mibble-11 smelled when we had to meet with him—he reeked of stale food, bad teeth, and unwashed flesh, and he insisted that the condition had come over him suddenly. He was about to tell us something more, how it happened to him, when he...”

Spencer grimaced. “Don't remind us.”

Ignoring him, Boganda said, “I'll never forget the terrible image of Snorkin's body ripping apart, as if unseen forces were pulling him from several directions at once.”

“Different dimensions pulling?” Spencer asked.

“Sounds like a torture rack,” Patsy said.

Boganda shot her a disapproving glance, then said, “Based on what Plibix told me, the dimensions are leaking into each other. Maybe—he didn't say so—but maybe forces from each dimension are also capable of exerting powerful pull. These are realms that we can hardly conceive, or find the words to describe.”

“We're still missing one of the human senses,” Patsy said. “Taste. Do you suppose someone is supposed to eat the egg?”

Taking a deep, exasperated breath, Boganda said, “A golden egg is not edible.”

“Are we supposed to follow a trail of senses?” Spencer asked. “Are senses the foundations of the galaxy ... are perceptions reality? Or could that be a false trail left for us?”

“You're thinking like an investigator,” the dwarf said, with a tight smile.

The pain in the back of Spencer's skull intensified, and he thought he heard a distant voice, as if calling to him from afar. New thoughts forced their way into his mind, and he felt compelled to voice them. Grimacing, he said, “We humans have a parochial habit of looking at things in terms of our own experiences and perceptions, of filtering out the unfamiliar and denying the possibility of its existence. Maybe we need to think in terms of more than five senses.”

“You sense that, do you?” Patsy asked. “I thought women were supposed to have a monopoly on the sixth sense.”

Suddenly Spencer cried out and dropped to his knees on the sand. The back of his skull felt as if it was about to explode. Patsy and the dwarf tried to comfort him.

“I have this terrible feeling,” Spencer said, “that we have a ticking time bomb on our hands, and if we don't figure it out quickly the entire galaxy will crumble ... or vanish.”

From out on the sea, he saw something approaching, getting larger. His companions saw it too, and they fell silent. The image of a dragon man came into view, but it was not entirely clear, more like a ghost than a corporeal being.

“Plibix?” Spencer called out. The pain in his head diminished, leaving a dull throb.

“Listen to me all of you,” the apparition said. “I can't sustain this transmission much longer. I tried to investigate Leonardo, but the sentinels entangled me ... the champions ... my powers are fading.”

Unmistakably, this was Plibix. He sounded and looked like a bad videophone connection, with the signal breaking up. Hovering just above the sand, he held the egg-shaped parcel open in his quivering talons, revealing a glittering golden egg, inlaid with tiny rubies and sapphires.

“Some realities are true, while others are not,” Plibix said. “Nothing is random, and nothing is an accident. Master intelligence. Scrambled eggs.” He tried to say something more, but faded, and disappeared.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 6: The Da Vinci Code
by Laura Resnick

Sitting in his temporary office on MacDougal II, Commander Kendell Spencer leaned forward and, with great deliberation, started banging his plastic-plated head against his desk.

Alerted by the noise, perhaps, Patsy Klein stuck her head in the door a few moments later and asked, “Is there a problem?”

The diminutive yet formidable Ramon Boganda looked up at her from his chair in the far corner of the drab, windowless room and said, “We're having a little trouble interpreting Plibix's message.” He blew gently on his java and took a sip.

“'Master intelligence.'” Spencer banged his head on his desk. “'Scrambled eggs.'” Bang. “What does it mean?” Bang!

“Okay, enough of that,” Ramon said. “That plastic head plate cost SpaceOp a bundle, you know. Don't even get me started on how bloated our medical expenses are for this fiscal year, and we're not even halfway through the second quarter yet.”

“Maybe Plibix's message is in code,” Patsy suggested.

“Of course it's in code!” Spencer snapped, wondering why he had ever described this woman to Ktonga, back on Goldmeadow, as tough and smart. Was the apparent disappearance of Patsy's brains, like so many other recent anomalies, due to the strange effects of the phenomenon Ramon had postulated of various dimensions rubbing against each other like continental plates and leaking into each other? And, if so, was it only a matter of time before Spencer himself was no longer the best agent that SpaceOp had to offer, but merely some middle-aged, dim-witted schmuck with a lot of fake body parts? “My God, the galaxy really is going to hell in a hand basket!”

“I told you it wasn't hyperbole. I even told Ktonga,” Ramon said. “The very foundations of the galaxy, man. That dead garrison officer wasn't exaggerating.”

“Ktonga...” Spencer muttered, rubbing his aching head as his thoughts drifted to the Admiral.

Now that Ktonga was dead and the Service headquarters on Goldmeadow was in rubble, would SpaceOp's grand charade continue? For five years, many of SpaceOp's agents had pretended to continue working for the Service, taking orders from Ktonga and reporting back to him. They'd done so for the same reason Spencer had pretended to allow Ktonga to force him back into the Service for this assignment. SpaceOp was new and under-funded; it needed the Service's resources—which its agents used, manipulated, and even acquired and turned over to SpaceOp, all under the guise of working for the Service. (And, really, it was downright amazing how many surface-to-space missiles could go missing without the Service getting suspicious.)

The SpaceOp agents had remained closely connected to the Service for another reason, too, one which the Service itself had taught them in their covert-ops training: Hide in plain sight. They couldn't very well investigate this case on MacDougal II, for example, let alone attempt to infiltrate Leonardo, without being noticed by Service operatives in the field, as well as by standard satellite surveillance. So they made sure the Service thought they were supposed to be investigating such cases—by getting themselves assigned by the Service itself to do this work.

It was all Lindsey Parapara's idea, of course, and typical of her twisted yet practical mind.

As soon as the garrison officer on Leonardo had been killed after leaving that cryptic message, Parapara had ordered Boganda to get himself assigned to the case by the Service. After Boganda confirmed that something was indeed rotten on Leonardo—potentially rotten enough to affect the fate of the whole galaxy—SpaceOp had mobilized to get two more of its most important operatives on the case right away. It still amazed Spencer that Admiral Ktonga hadn't been suspicious that three of his best agents had been careless enough to disappear without a trace, one right after another, on a dangerous mission; but then again, the career staff officers of a bloated, bureaucratic, interstellar organization like the Service were rarely the sharpest knives in the galactic drawer.

The more SpaceOp investigated the garrison officer's death, the more the agents realized this case was complex beyond belief and truly galactic in its implications. So Parapara had reluctantly ordered Spencer to abandon his top-secret deep-cover operation, which had required him to pose for years as a contented civilian and family man, and get on board the Leonardo mission. He was one of the few SpaceOp agents who had on-the-ground experience on Leonardo, and his practical expertise in running ops on that planet was crucial for SpaceOp's success there. So Parapara had engaged a plan to bait Ktonga into “coercing” Spencer back into the Service for the specific purpose of working this mission.

If she had sent Spencer into action without taking this precaution, even the Space Intelligence Service (an oxymoronic title if ever there was one) might eventually have noticed that one of its most-decorated retired operatives was interrogating suspects on MacDougal II and running around Leonardo in search of answers.

“Interrogating suspects...” Spencer muttered.

“Pardon?” Patsy said.

“That's what I should be doing,” Spencer said. “Interrogating suspects. Not trying to decode the semi-mystical utterances of a dragon apparition.”

“Do we have any suspects?” Patsy asked.

“No.” Spencer rose to his feet. “But we do have a lead.”

“We do?”

“Yes. And we're in the right place to investigate it.”

Ramon gazed at him. “Ahhh. Of course.”

“'Of course’ what?” Patsy said.

Really, it was as if she'd left her brains in a bucket back on Goldmeadow.

“The bell wallflower,” Spencer said.

“The what?”

“Uh, the blue bellflower,” he amended. “Bellflowers don't grow anywhere but MacDougal II. They can't survive anywhere but MacDougal. So what was that flower doing in the hand of a dead man on a planet half a galaxy away?”

“Oh.” Patsy shrugged. “I told you. The guy in the office next to mine is working on that.”

“What guy?”

She shrugged again. “Some guy.”

“Since when does SpaceOp let ‘some guy’ investigate crucial leads in missions of galactic import?” Spencer demanded.

“Well, probably whoever assigned him to it knew his name,” Patsy said. “And his qualifica—Hey! Where are you going?”

“Show me this ‘guy.'”

“What? Wait!”

Following Spencer out the door, Ramon said to Patsy, “Humor him. Trying to figure out Plibix's message has made him a little cranky.”

“But—”

“Come on,” Ramon said, dragging her along with them as they headed towards her office. “Now where exactly is this guy?”

“Um, I don't...”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Spencer said. “You can't even remember which office he's in?”

“Stop! You can't just—”

He flung open a door.

“You shouldn't do that!”

Spencer stood stock still and stared into the office.

“Wrong door?” Ramon asked.

“No,” Spencer said. “No, I'd say this is definitely our guy.”

“Oh?” Ramon looked through the door, too. “Oh.”

“Dead,” Spencer said.

“Murdered,” Ramon said.

“I admire your keen observant eye,” Spencer said.

“They'll never get all that blood out of the carpet,” Ramon said. “Especially not now that it's started drying. Believe me. Our carpet cleaning bills at SpaceOp—”

“This was a messy killer,” Spencer noted.

“An amateur?” Ramon guessed.

“Or someone in a panic,” Spencer mused. “This was a risky hit. What had this guy found out that made someone whack him on impulse right here?”

“Hmmm.” Ramon nodded. “Good point. Patsy, your office is right next to his. Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary?”

When she didn't respond, Spencer looked over his shoulder at her. “Patsy? Did you, uh...?”

“Let's all stay very calm,” Patsy suggested in a cold voice, pointing a sub-decibel particle-imploding laser gun at her two colleagues. “I discovered earlier today—in fact, only a meter from where you're standing right now, Spencer—that this thing has a hair-trigger. If I even give a tiny little involuntary reflexive flinch, you'll both die. Pretty messily, as you can see.”

“What are you doing?”

“Back slowly into the office,” Patsy ordered.

“So you can kill us in relative privacy?” Spencer said. “Think again.”

“I don't really want to kill you.”

“Then put down the weapon.”

“You've forced me to this point, Spence!”

Ramon said, “Er, look, if this is a private sexual matter between the two of you—”

“Oh, he wasn't that bad in bed,” Patsy said dismissively.

“Bad? In bed?” Spencer blurted.

Ramon said, “I'm just saying, it's none of my business, so I'd like to be left out of any repercussions or—”

“Me?” Spencer said. “Bad in bed?”

“This has got nothing to do with the sex,” Patsy told Ramon.

He responded, “So you weren't sleeping with, you know, the dead guy, too?”

“No!”

“But you did kill him, right?”

“You're saying the sex wasn't good?” Spencer said. “Is that what you're saying?”

Ramon asked Patsy, “So none of this is personal?”

“Strictly business,” she assured him.

“Then...” Ramon gestured to the laser. “Then, why?”

“Because I will do anything—anything!—to protect the secrets on Leonardo!”

“What exactly did you think was wrong with the sex?” Spencer demanded.

“Spence,” Ramon said, “could we please focus here?”

“Into the office,” Patsy ordered them. “Now.”

“Wait a minute!” Spencer said, pulling himself together. “You're saying you know the truth behind what's happening on Leonardo?”

“And you will never find out what it is!” she cried.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I believe I've already asked that,” Ramon muttered.

“I don't understand, Patsy,” Spencer said. “You're one of us!”

“I'm doing this because—” Her eyes bulged at the same moment that Spencer heard a strange hissing sound, as if someone had just fired a super quiet weapon. Then Patsy keeled over.

She must have given a tiny little involuntary reflexive flinch, because her laser blasted a hole in the wall the size of a small family transport vehicle. Spencer and Ramon dived for cover. Unfortunately, the only available cover was through the open doorway to their left and into the room where the messy corpse lay. Upon hitting the carpet in there and covering their heads, they discovered that the blood hadn't really dried that much after all.

“Damn, and I just bought this shirt!” Ramon said.

A moment later, a woman called from the hallway, “Okay, all clear! It's safe to come out.”

Spencer frowned. That voice sounded awfully familiar. In fact, it sounded exactly like ... “Patsy?”

Patricia Kelvin appeared in the doorway of the murdered man's office. “Patsy?” she repeated. “Hey, that homicidal fanatic with the brains of an over-bred poodle may let you call her ‘Patsy,’ but I never have. And I never will.”

“Huh?”

Spencer stared at her in perplexity. She was dressed differently than she had been only seconds ago. Now wearing sensible khakis and sturdy boots, even her hair was different—a little longer and starting to fall out of a pony tail. And she was heavily armed. As the two men stared at her, she efficiently disabled the laser that had been pointed at them.

Spencer glanced at Ramon. His companion shrugged and shook his head, just as bewildered as he.

Patricia tossed the now-useless laser aside, then looked at them. “Sorry I cut your covert interrogation short. That was a shrewd strategy, pretending to let her get the upper hand so she'd spill her guts to you. But she looked way too jumpy to me. If she wasn't kidding about that hair-trigger, I thought it would cause your deaths in another five seconds.”

“Huh?” Spencer said.

“What's wrong, Spence?” she said. “You're not suffering from shock just because of a bloody corpse, a laser blast, and a near-death experience, are you? Did that civilian deep-cover I.D. make you go soft or something?”

“Huh?” he said again.

Ramon said, “What are ... Who is ... Where did...?”

Patricia studied their expressions for a moment, then her eyes flew wide open. “Oh, my God! Don't tell me ... You mean, you weren't just playing along with her to learn all you could before eliminating her? You actually thought she was me?”

“She? You? Huh?” Spencer wondered if he'd been banging his head against his desk way too hard. “What's going on?”

“Come on, guys.” Patricia beckoned them back out into the hallway. “Have a look at this.”

They rose to their feet and, covered in the dead man's blood, did as Patricia asked. Together with her they looked down at, well ... her. Patsy Klein was breathing, and her eyelids started to flutter.

“You didn't kill her?” Spencer asked blankly.

“Kill a lead before she's talked?” Patricia frowned at him. “Did you leave your brains in a bucket back on Goldmeadow, or something?”

“Oh. Um. Right.”

“She'll come round in a moment, and we'll start getting some answers.” Patricia kicked her captive in the ribs to speed up the process. Patsy groaned.

“Who the hell are you?” Ramon asked Patricia.

“Who the hell is she?” Spencer gestured to the woman lying at their feet.

“Which one of you is the real one?” Ramon asked.

“Possibly,” she said crisply, “the one who can remember that her name is Patricia Kelvin.”

“So the name Patsy Klein wasn't a reality shift due to leaking dimensions?” Spencer asked.

“What? No,” Patricia said, “it was just faulty intel. She was sent to take me out of the picture and replace me, in order to sabotage SpaceOp's mission. But her organization got a few details wrong.”

“What is her organization?”

“That's one of the things we've got to find out,” Patricia said. “Who's she working for? And what's their ultimate goal? Why did she risk exposure by killing that guy in there? What's the secret on Leonardo that could shake the foundations of the galaxy? And just how deeply has SpaceOp been infiltrated?”

It hit Spencer like a metric ton of plutonium. “The plasma bomb on Goldmeadow!”

“Precisely,” she said. “It hit two targets with one blow: SpaceOp and the Space Intelligence Service. Both of which are trying to find out the truth about the secrets concealed on Leonardo.”

“Her organization detonated it?”

“Yes.” Patricia kicked Patsy again. “Come on, wake up. I didn't shoot you with that heavy a dose.”

Studying the unconscious woman, Ramon noted, “The resemblance is amazing. I had no idea it wasn't you!”

“Me, neither.” Spencer looked at Patricia in surprise. “So I haven't really been sleeping with you.”

“You've been sleeping with her?” Patricia said. “For God's sake, have you lost all sense of professionalism?”

“Well...” He shuffled his feet. “You really came ... I mean, she really came onto me, and I, uh—”

“I would never come on to you, Spencer.”

“Why?” he pounced, recalling Patsy Klein's comment about their sex life. “What have you heard?”

“What have I heard?” she repeated. “Well, hmm, let's see. Oh, yeah, I heard that you're married.”

“Oh! Oh, that.”

“Married with children, you philandering jackass,” she added.

“That reminds me! My wife is missing. Disappeared right in front of Ramon. It's very mysterious. I don't suppose you know anything about it?”

“Missing? Gosh,” Patricia said, “it couldn't possibly be because she found out you've been boffing a co-worker, could it? No, of course, not. The mother of your young children is bound to be very understanding about adultery, isn't she?”

“Hey,” Ramon said, “I never thought of that. That's a good point! Maybe Carol's left you, Spence.”

“So, okay, you've got a thing against married men,” Spencer said to Patricia. “Fine, some women do. Patsy liked me, but—”

“'Patsy’ was sleeping with you to monitor your every move, cloud your judgment, and sabotage the mission.”

“That's one interpretation,” Spencer conceded. “Another equally valid one is that she fell for me.”

“Oh, Spencer, Spencer...” Patricia sighed and shook her head. “Okay, I'll lay it on the table. You're fifteen years older than me, you have all the charm of a rock, and you're no Adonis. And yet you never once wondered why ‘I’ suddenly jumped into bed with you on this mission? Look, it's not my call, Spence, but I think maybe it's time for you to retire from the field. You had an obvious imposter right under your nose, and you never even suspected her!”

“Well, I—”

“How could you have possibly thought that this—” she kicked Patsy again “—was me? Have you lost all grip on reality?”

“It was wishful thinking, I guess.” He was by now feeling very, very sorry that Patsy Klein wasn't the real Patricia Kelvin. And equally sorry that the real one had rejoined the mission.

“Actually,” said Ramon, “in fairness to Spencer, reality is becoming increasingly hard to hold onto. Due to the leaking of one dimension into another.”

“Hmm. That's the second time you've mentioned leaking dimensions,” Patricia said. “So that's the theory we're going with then? That's what's threatening the foundations of the galaxy?”

Ramon nodded. “And the key to this dimensional mess is on Leonardo.”

“And she says she knows what it is.” Patricia looked down at their captive. “Come on, wake up! The fate of the galaxy is at stake!”

Patsy's eyes opened. She looked up at Patricia, and horror clouded her expression. Spencer understood exactly how she felt. Then Patsy clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

Patricia cried, “No!” She flung herself to the floor and tried to pry Patsy's jaws apart.

“What are you doing?” Spencer demanded.

“I should have guessed!”

Patsy started foaming at the mouth and writhing around in apparent agony.

Patricia said, “A suicide membrane, affixed to the soft palate! Virtually undetectable. One click of the tongue, and it's all over.”

Patsy Klein stopped writhing and just lay there. Deathly still. Eyes wide open. Lifeless.

“Damn!” said Ramon. “Now we'll never find out what she knew.”

“Or who she really was,” Spencer added.

“You don't know who she was?” Patricia frowned at him. “You still haven't figured it out?”

“Huh?”

“This is Dr. Jen Roper.”

“What? The same woman who put this plastic plate in my head?”

“Right.”

That must explain those hallucinations where he couldn't figure out which woman he was having sex with. It must also explain his initial instinct that Jen might not be trustworthy. Damn, he was good!

“That's some disguise,” he said to Patricia. “Considering that you're white, and you're also a foot shorter than she was.”

“Her appearance as a tall, gorgeous, oversexed black woman was also a disguise, probably one of many,” Patricia replied. “She was a master of short-term prosthetics. Plus, heels always make a woman look taller than she really is.”

“What about this plate she put in my head?”

“I'd say that your behavior of late is proof that it's affecting your judgment and hurting your performance,” Patricia replied.

“Why aren't you dead?” Spencer asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You said her assignment was to take you out before she assumed your identity. So why aren't you dead?”

“Ah. She tried to assassinate me while I was briefing at New Barchester for this assignment. Luckily, she wasn't as efficient with me as she was with the dead guy in there. Men aren't the only ones who underestimate a female op; it's amazing how many women make the same mistake.”

“So if she botched it, how did she wind up with Spencer?” Ramon asked.

“On Parapara's instructions, I let Roper think she'd succeeded, and I shadowed her. Given how devastating that plasma bomb on Goldmeadow was, and how puzzling it is that anyone wants the foundations of the galaxy to be threatened, we've got to get more intel on her org—and she was the best lead we'd come across so far. So I've been on your trail since the beginning. And I naturally assumed that you'd quickly realize she was an imposter and make a point of learning all you could from her.”

“Yeah, uh-huh. Moving on now.”

“That's why, when you arrived on MacDougal, the two of you were shunted to low-level tasks involving Wolfe-Dexter IV,” Patricia continued.

“Of course!” Ramon said to Patricia. “You and Parapara were trying to discover all you could by letting Roper think she was succeeding, but you couldn't actually let her work on the real mission. Because she was out to sabotage it!”

“I'm surprised you didn't wonder about your seemingly pointless holding pattern here, Spence,” she said, “given the urgency and the galactic import of this mission.”

“Well, actually, I did wonder. In fact, I objected to it. I said to Ramon—”

“Anyhow,” Patricia said, “Roper's dead now, we've retrieved no useful intel from her, and we've got work to do. So here's the priority list as I see it.”

Spencer said, “I've been thinking about our priorities, too, and in my opinion—”

“We need to find out who that dead guy in there is and why Roper took such a risk to kill him,” Patricia said. “We need to learn all we can about bellflowers so we can figure out how one wound up in the dead garrison commander's hand on Leonardo. Was that flower a lead or a false trail? Do bellflowers have a practical value or a symbolic meaning we haven't uncovered yet? And we need to develop a plan of action for infiltrating Leonardo.”

“Leonardo can't be infiltrated,” Spencer said gloomily.

“That's why we're the best, Spencer,” she said. “We do the impossible.” Her expression brightened. “Hey! Maybe that's what we should call this op—Mission: Impossible.”

Ramon frowned. “I think we may have used that one before. Besides—”

“Operation Leonardian Freedom?” Patricia suggested. “Leonardo Storm? The MacDougal Connection?”

“How about the Leonardo Ultimatum?” Spencer proposed. “The Klein Identity? The Bellflower Supremacy?”

“Okay, maybe naming the op shouldn't be on our priority list right now,” Patricia said.

“As I was about to say,” Ramon said, “Parapara already named it: Operation Bellflower.”

Spencer frowned. “That sounds so ... so feminine.”

“And you're saying that's a negative thing?” Patricia asked in a dangerously cool voice.

“Oh, never mind.”

She nodded. “Let's examine the corpse and search the dead guy's office.”

As they entered the room with the blood-soaked carpet, Spencer asked, “So was this guy one of ours, one of theirs, one of someone else's, or a bystander?”

Ramon rolled the corpse over so it lay face-up. “My God! It looks like...”

“Snorkin Mibble!” Spencer said.

“But a little younger and cleaner than I remember him,” said Ramon. “Well, apart from the blood, I mean.”

Patricia pulled a device off her belt, lifted one of the dead guy's eyelids, and scanned his lifeless retina. Reading the handheld scanner a moment later, she said, “Yep, this is a Snorkin Mibble clone. Number seventeen-C. He's one of ours.”

“Seventeen-C?”

“The lab's been experimenting with various sub-types of this basic clone,” she said. “This is one that has so far demonstrated an ability to pass unnoticed in white collar employment situations.”

“But Patsy Klein noticed him.”

“Indeed.” Patricia nodded. “Why?”

Spencer noticed something clenched in Mibble 17-C's first. He pried open the dead man's hand and removed the object. “Hey! Here's a partial answer.” He held up a wilted blue bellflower.

“That can't just be coincidence,” Patricia said.

“Thorough search,” Ramon said firmly.

“Right!” Spencer said.

They found the answers they sought in Mibble 17-C's computer. “See these encrypted files?” Patricia said as she sat at the console and the two men looked over her shoulders. “These are the ones we need to review.”

“If we can crack the encryption,” said Spencer.

“Oh, that's no problem,” said Patricia. “That's just the Da Vinci code.”

“The what?”

“The encryption system we use for transmitting any top-secret intel regarding the planet Leonardo. Now we know why Roper killed Mibble.”

“We do?”

“Yes. Mibble had just encrypted these files. He was about to send this info to SpaceOp HQ for analysis.”

“Ah-hah! Patsy found out,” Spencer said.

“And she was so desperate to stop him from delivering this intel that she killed him,” said Ramon.

Patricia said, “It'll only take me a few moments to get these files open. Then we can—Ah! Here we go.” She opened a large document and started reading. A few minutes later, she announced, “We've got it! The Leonardo connection!”

Peering over her shoulder at the computer screen, Spencer couldn't make head or tail of the information there. It was all in MacDougalese, which he didn't speak. Luckily, it was one of the many languages in which Patricia was fluent. “So what is the Leonardo connection?” he asked her.

“Mibble had discovered a bellflower smuggling ring!” she said.

“But how can you smuggle an indigenous plant that doesn't survive off-world?” Spencer wondered. “And why smuggle it to Leonardo, of all places?”

“That's what we've got to find out,” said Patricia, still reading.

“Did Mibble have any idea exactly who the Leonardian connection was?”

“Hmm. According to these records, Mibble was posing as a dealer in hopes of making contact with the top individual in the Leonardian smuggling ring.”

“And?”

“And there's a meeting set up for tonight!” Patricia smiled triumphantly at her colleagues. “We've got our lead!”

“I'll pose as Mibble,” Spencer said. “And tonight, we'll blow this op wide open.”

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 7: Your Own Private Gulag
by Kay Kenyon

As the second moon set, the McDougal night deepened. Three figures dressed in black bagaloons and tunics crossed the plaza from different directions, meeting in the fetid alley.

Patricia carried her malice pistol at the ready. By her side, Boganda's clothing bristled with an array of smalls arms, some of them spiced with interdicted military grade nan. Tonight the lead blue bellflower smuggler would meet the three best agents in SpaceOps. Here was their first break in the most baffling case Spence had ever had the pleasure to pursue. Yes, pleasure. Even with Carol and the kids kidnapped, he couldn't help but feel the old lure of danger. If poor dead Mifflin-17 was right, they'd soon confront a person who knew the secret of transporting the bellflower—and perhaps why agents were strewn across the galaxy clutching the bloom in their cold, dead fists.

Leaving the town behind, the three of them waded into a creek, following the stream bed as Mifflin had been instructed. The water pulled at Spence's bagaloons, reminding him of the dream of tiny teeth nipping ... cold, dark water, and—the image came—Spence towering over it like a lotus flower. Damn Boganda and his Hindu theories. The last thing they needed was poetics and metaphor. Spence had always thought that metaphors were the wrong bird in the wrong tree.

In any case, why had the smuggler insisted on meeting in the woods? The stand of oaks, the instructions said. Sounded like a set-up, but they were ready.

Boganda pointed. “Oaks,” he whispered. “Up at the crest.”

Patricia made a hushing motion with her hands and led the way up the hillside. By the time they entered the grove, they heard a rhythmic huffing from nearby that might be human voices.

“Ambush...” muttered Boganda. But they were armed and Space Intel-trained. No problem, Spence thought.

They crept forward. Soon the trees thinned and they had a view into a broad and shallow depression.

It was Stonehenge.

Replicated from Earth's megalithic ruin, the circle of stones held a small gathering of people, dressed in white body suits.

“Guess we wore the wrong outfits,” Patricia muttered.

Boganda gestured that he would circle around to one side. He disappeared into the blackness.

Spence and Patricia went to their stomachs in the grass, crawling to a spot where they might be able to see the proceedings between two of the stones, but standing worshippers blocked their view. Forced to stand, the two agents sidled up to one of the megaliths and hid behind it.

The view to the altar lay clear before them. They saw that someone led the proceedings, chanting in what sounded like McDougalean. Patricia gripped Spence's arm and pointed. But she didn't need to, Spence was already gaping at the specter in front of them.

The leader was very tall compared to the mass of worshipers. And very blue. The aperture on his throat sounded a melody like a pipe, while the mouth in his jaws simultaneously voiced words. The famous Leonardoin solo duet. As he held aloft a large burden, his arms glowed neon in the candle light. Before Spence could respond to Patricia, the priest—if that is what he was—laid his burden down on the altar in front of him.

A sound behind them. They whirled.

Boganda, with weapon pointed at them.

“You too, Boganda?” Patricia spat.

“Man, I need a cup of joe,” the dwarf rasped.

“And you're going to kill us for it?” Spence growled.

“How about a couple chocolate-covered espresso beans. Just to steady me.”

By the look in his eyes, Spence knew something was up. “Tell, Boganda. I'll fill my hot tub with Java Rejuv and you can soak in it, later. OK?”

“The Leonardoin,” Boganda said. He looked at Spence so searchingly that Spence backed up a step. Was Boganda coming on to him? Not his type. But Ramon was handsome in a jittery sort of way.

“The Leonardoin,” Boganda repeated. “He's...”

At that moment Boganda evaporated like suds on a cheap beer.

Spence blinked. “Did you see that?”

“You mean Boganda disappearing like suds on a cheap beer?” Patricia asked. “You bet I did. And I saw something else, too.”

“Don't say it. I don't want to hear.” He'd seen it too. A claw extruding from thin air. A claw that looked all too familiar. And with that rip in the dimensions, a sickening smell pierced their nostrils.

Boganda, however, was gone. What had he been trying to say? No time to wonder, as a yelp erupted from the center of the stone circle.

Patricia was on the move. “I'm going to keep tabs on the Leonardoin, Spence. Can't let him get away. See if you can help the poor bastard who's being sacrificed.”

“Sacrificed?”

“These are Druids, guy. Meet me back at the stream.” With four steps she became one with the shadows.

Moving into position for a victim-extraction maneuver, Spence saw with chagrin that it was too late for this particular victim. Dark red rivulets ran down the altar sides. Atop it a small lump lay unmoving. Their purpose completed, the human congregants exited in a ritual march, never looking behind where one glance would have exposed the infiltrator. The Leonardoin had left too—with Patricia on his track.

As Spence approached the altar, he saw with disgust that the sacrifice was a dog. A brown and white Pomeranian, of the ankle-biting variety. Still, it hadn't deserved this ignoble death.

In the dog's mouth, a blue bellflower.

Uncharacteristically, Spence felt a surge of dismay. He thought of his own dog from his childhood. Rufus was a mutt, but he was the only one in the family who seemed to like Spence. Maybe the dog was grateful. Given a choice of all the animals at the pound, Spence had chosen old, decrepit Rufus. The pound operators told Spence's dad that normally the dog would be destroyed, but the animal had a propensity for farting, and the euthanizing kiln might have ignited a fire storm. Spence was thrilled to take Rufus, and the feeling was mutual. Rufus spent his declining years gimping along with little Spence and chasing trains on the tracks near the Spenser house. One day Rufus met his match in a Maxim Cannonball Express out of Dubuque...

Spence sobbed.

From behind him he heard, “God almighty, Spence, get a grip.”

“Carol!”

“Here I am lost in interdimensional space-time, and you're slobbering over a dog that's been toast for 25 years.”

“Carol, I...”

“Not to mention Timmy and Todd, your own sons, for crying out loud.” She looked at him with genuine compassion tinged with loathing.

He hadn't noticed that he'd gone to his knees. He stood up and reached out for her, but she was incorporeal.

“Carol, tell me the truth. Is there someone else? Did you leave me?”

“So it's all about your ego and manly honor.”

“No, no ... but still.”

His wife sighed. “I don't have much time. I'm in consonance with this plane for only a short while. Now listen.”

“Carol, your tracking tags went down. We couldn't find you.” Not that he'd had a moment for personal stuff lately.

“Tracking tags.” Carol laughed, a little out of control. “You think those work here?”

Without warning or preamble, Timmy appeared at her side. His face scrunched up into an all-too-recognizable scowl. “I want a pizza.” Pause. “I said I want a pizza.”

Carol waved a hand and Timmy's form sucked back into somewhere else, pizza-less. Her moment of hilarity passed. “The little shit is surfing the worlds like the dataphreak he always was.” Her form wavered, stabilized. “Oh oh. Worse than I thought. I have to hurry. Listen, hon, we got trouble.”

Hon, she called him hon. Maybe it wasn't over, after all.

She tucked a stray wisp of red hair behind her ear and murmured, “Where to begin. Maybe with Brahma? No, too complicated. Maybe the thing about the egg. Yes, better. It all starts with the egg, Spence, as you might have guessed.”

He hadn't, but he nodded.

“You think the big secret is all about the bellflower. You're wrong. I mean it is about the bellflower, but that's not the main thing.”

“OK, so it's the egg. What about it?”

“We'll get to the egg. First, you have to understand that Boganda was right. He always was sharper than you. This deal is sort of about Brahma, although not exactly.”

“Glad you're here to clear things up.” Their old dueling habits were rapidly reasserting themselves. Odd that she'd lavish praise on the dwarf. He was the one that suggested she had always been a plant, making their marriage a sham. Resentment flared. “If you're in a hurry, try getting to the point.”

Carol went on—typically—as though he hadn't spoken. “You think the Leonardoins are aboriginal. Wrong. Eons ago these supposed warrior-wanderers were a supremely advanced civilization, with powers far beyond yours. Er, ours.” She put up her hand to stop his protest. “They may look backward. But it's by choice. They've renounced technology in favor of unfettered and immediate apprehension of reality.”

“Why are you talking funny?”

“You get like that, treading the boards of the cosmos.”

Well, sure. “Go on.”

“Long ago the Leonardoins discovered that powerful thoughts—memes—gave birth to new worlds. We're not talking here about just a half-assed solution to quantum dilemmas, but rather a pesky and horrid side effect of quantum reality. They discovered the power of pessimistic thought. Any depraved thought, if powerful enough, can create little hells, new universes of suffering. You may ask, what about positive thinking?—Well, that gets you nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada.”

“So why is there a Leonardoin on this planet, if they renounce space travel?”

Carol gagged for a moment on the stench that apparently surrounded her. “Bear with me, Spence. I know that plate in your head makes it hard to think straight, and more on the plate anon. To finish this thread, the Leonardoins, having lived long with technology and coming to see it as soulless depravity, were mindful of the awesome responsibility not to create madness and horror worlds such as those based on Survivor re-runs and the cell-phone wars of old Earth. A messianic figure appeared to them at that time and founded the bellflower cult as a perfect avatar of their trans-technological aspirations. The flower, like the lotus, arises from the mud under cold dark waters of the material world and blooms above in supreme consciousness.”

Spence was starting to feel hungry for pizza. “And the point is?”

“Grykalizyfst.” Carol began to fizzle out. Then she snapped back. “Can you hear me now? Good.”

She went on, looking worriedly over her shoulder and dabbing a perfume-filled hanky at her nose: “The Leonardoins, having understood the power of ugly memes, realized that, in the wrong hands, this knowledge could encourage madmen and outlaws to actually build such cosmos on purpose. If they perfected interdimensional travel—and it's the next big thing, believe me—they'd have their own private gulags. To prevent miscreants from discovering this dangerous knowledge, the Leonardoins shunned all outside contact and presented a hostile front to any colonization or interaction. To put it in Hindu terms....”

“Oh please do.”

She gave him her famous stink eye. “Brahma is the good guy, the creator. But the bad people are the avatars of Shiva, the destroyer. And Vishnu is the maintainer of everything that is. To be frank, he's on the verge of being shit-canned.”

Now she was talking more like the old Carol. “So the Hindus had it right, huh?”

“Don't be a ninny. Nobody had it right. We're talking in metaphor here.”

Oh oh. Spence's gut started to tense. What was a metaphor again?

“Zifrigulzed.”

He stretched out a hand. “Carol! Don't fade! Hold on...”

“I'll try!” Wind blew her cloak behind her and her hair fell upwards as she labored to go on.

“I love you, Carol.”

“Never mind about that now. You have to migrate up the shells of the universe.”

“Huh?”

She shook her head. “Spence, Spence. You've been given an enormous task, maybe the biggest that ever existed. But you frankly aren't up to it. You're maybe the best agent in the cosmos, given Plibix's situation....”

“Which is?”

“No time. You may be the best we've got, but you haven't seen the competition. The Sentinels, for instance. This isn't the only cosmos, if you haven't been paying attention lately. You have to migrate your understanding. Bust out of that dead-pan super-hero silliness and become fully formed.”

Spence rolled his eyes. “You haven't gone back to that spooky Church of Universal Potentiality, have you?” In the past, Carol had indulged in an unseemly penchant for silliness.

“No.” She looked around her, as if there was something around her. “I'm just trying to keep it simple. If you want the math...” She saw him wave the offer. “Very well. The point is, my darling, that you need to figure things out. Even Parapara has only limited understanding of what we're all up against. She gave you the lead on this op, but that doesn't mean she trusts you. As a test, both you and Plibix got the egg, to see which one of you would try to use it for personal gain. Plibix stole the egg. But was your innocence in the matter due to moral intention or were you just clueless? In any case, Plibix, I fear, is the wrong one to have such power. You, my dear, are the right one. You are the last hope.”

He rubbed the sore spot in the back of his head. “But what am I supposed to do?”

Carol grimaced. “How the hell am I supposed to know? I've been cooped up in this ratty place for years with Timmy and Todd skating the channels while I'm still reading the manual. I feel like I've left my brain in a bucket somewhere, while you're out having adventures in one of the nice universes.” Her voice rose like a clothes dryer on final spin. “And now you want me to do your work for you. I just can't cope anymore, Spence.”

Spence's reaction to Carol's distress was the same one he always had when she exposed her feminine vulnerability. He thought of other things. How meeting the supposed blue bellflower cabal had been an obvious decoy to bring them into the clutches of the Leonardoin priest. How this Leonardoin was breaking the rules of low tech purity, and was exploiting a McDougal cult for his own purposes. How Plibix had the egg that Spence should have had. How Jen could have killed him in her guise as Patsy—or as his doctor after the plasma blast—but refrained. A true believer in Leonardoin purity? Or what?

No one seemed to be playing with a full deck, yet everyone expected him to conjure a royal flush.

Carol had at last gotten hold of herself. “You've been blind, Spence, and stupid, too. This is your chance to be more than you've been. Crying over Rufus is a step in that direction. Your emotions and thoughts are chaotic. That's good. You've got to flush the old black stuff from your heart, Spence. Parapara sent you to Wolfe-Dexter IV to give you a chance to normalize and adjust to the task ahead. But what did you do instead? Justified yourself, hunkered down, kept on with the old agent bullshit track.”

Even Space-Op was bullshit? Maybe that was the first shell of knowledge, to see all bureaucratic black-ops as dead ends. But what was the second shell? How many were there? And just how much of a stupid fuck was he?

Carol looked behind her. When she turned back her face was bleak. “Break through, my sweet. Break through. Perceive that even an egg may deceive. Perceive that you can't synchronize clocks across sidereal and multiverse time. One day early and the multiverse with its billions of souls is lost. One day late, ditto.”

“Ditto?”

“Dryittooo.” Her hair looked like snakes, then like her usual big hair, then like elephant ears. She was gone.

A movement in his peripheral vision. Patricia stood, as real as a bird in the right tree. Making a “shhh” sound with her finger, she beckoned Spence toward the altar.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 8: Altar Ego
by Stephen Leigh and S. L. Farrell

“Where the hell have you been?” Spencer asked Patricia. “Where'd the Leonardoan go?”

“I lost him,” Patricia admitted, frowning. “The same suds on cheap beer trick that they pulled on Boganda, only this time without Plibix's claw—evidently the Leonardoan did it himself. Poof; gone. But he left this behind.” She held up her hand; a blue bellflower was wilting rapidly in her fingers. “The flower was on the ground where he'd been standing. It was cold when I picked up, and fresh—it's definitely the Leonardoans who are smuggling the flowers.”

“And the way it vanished?”

“I think they're bending light,” Patricia said firmly. “Kind of folding the world around them so we can't see them, even though they're still there. That's how they got Boganda, too—just wrapped him up so we couldn't see to help him and grabbed him. I didn't want them doing that to me, so I headed back here.”

Spencer grimaced. “You can't bend light. Only incredibly massive objects can bend light. That doesn't sound like a reasonable explanation to me, Patricia. There's something else going on. Alternate dimensions. Rips in the fabric of the universe. That's what Plibix does, after all.”

“That's what Plibix says he does,” Patricia responded. “As it happens, I don't think he really knows—it's just something he can do, and I think it's just the same folding light trick. I mean, come on, Spencer. Alternate dimensions are more reasonable than folded light? I think your Occam's Razor is on the dull side.” She inclined her head toward him. Even in the darkness of the false Stonehenge, he could see the hard, unsympathetic glint in her eyes. “By the way, I could have sworn I heard you talking with Carol.”

“I was,” Spencer admitted. “At least I think I was. Then again, I thought you were Patsy Klein, so I'm not certain I want to trust my judgement much. Frankly, it's getting hard to keep a handle on what's real and what's not.”

“Well, she sure sounded like Carol; she had that annoying little ‘I-know-better-than-you-do’ whine down so well. I never understood what you saw in her, or what she saw in you, for that matter. So where is she?”

Spencer started to answer, then found that none of the responses he formed seemed to make much sense when he actually tried to form them into words. “Well ... It's ... complicated. Something about creating shells of new universes and, umm, alternate dimensions.”

“So she's in another dimension and just popped in to chat.” Patricia didn't bother to conceal the mockery in her voice. “Uh-huh. And dogs can talk.”

“Athally, day tan.”

The muffled voice came from the altar. Both Spencer and Patricia spun around; Spencer had to admit that Patricia had the better reflexes of the two of them; not only did she turn faster, but she had a stun-dart in her hand when she finished. All Spencer had for defense was an open-mouthed expression of surprise.

The sacrificed Pooperanian was sitting up on the altar, the blood still dappling its brown-and white coat. As Spencer watched, the animal wrinkled its pug snout and spat the bellflower from its mouth. “That's much better,” the dog said. “Bellflowers make my tongue swell up. What I meant to say was ‘Actually, they can.’ Especially Pooperanians. Under the right circumstances, of course—which is when we're freshly dead—and then only when there's something worth saying.”

“Son of a bitch,” Patricia muttered.

“Correct,” the Pooperanian answered, “though I don't know what genealogy has to do with this. But be that as it may, you did the ritual, so what is it you wanted me to tell you?”

“But we didn't Oof!” The last word was an explosion of breath as Patricia elbowed Spencer in the ribs. “Damn, that hurt, Patricia!”

“Sorry,” she said without any sorrow in her voice at all. “My arm must have slipped.” She smiled sweetly at the dog as she stage-whispered urgently to Spencer. “The Leonardoan performed the sacrifice, so he wanted something this dog knows. I'll bet he was planning to come back here when the dog wakes up, but he must have sensed me following him. We don't have much time—he'll be be coming back with reinforcements.” Patricia took a step toward the dog, watching them quietly from the stone slab. “What my colleague was saying,” she said to the Pooperanian, “was that we didn't sacrifice you just to exchange pleasantries. We're actually in a bit of a rush, and we certainly don't want to waste your time or your words, so if you'd just tell us what we wanted to know...” Her smile widened. “I'm sure we'd be able to find a nice treat for such a good dog.”

The Pooperanian sniffed wetly. “And you humans wonder why dogs bite.” He shook himself as if he'd just come in from the rain, sending blood droplets spattering. Spencer hopped backward; Patricia just looked down at her bagaloons and grimaced.

“I just had these dry-cleaned,” she said, looking at Spencer, whose dodging hadn't managed to spare his bagaloons either. “This line of work's dreadfully hard on clothes.”

“Clothes are overrated,” the Pooperanian said. “They just get in the way.”

Spencer found himself nodding agreement; it was a thought he'd had often enough. “This is fascinating,” he said, “but it's getting late, as Patricia here said, and we really need to be going.” Considering that both the Leonardoan and Boganda had vanished here, Carol was wandering through the shells of the universe (whatever the hell that meant), they were talking to a dead dog in the middle of the night, and the Leonardoan might show up with friends, Spencer tended to agree with Patricia that this didn't exactly seem to be the safest place in the galaxy to be standing. Besides, reality seemed too ... fluid here. Spencer rubbed his head; his brain seemed to be throbbing under the plastic plate in his skull, a dull doom, doom, doom in time with his pulse.

“Then get on with it,” the Pooperanian ssid. “You're supposed to ask me the questions, then I answer in a cryptic manner.” His head inclined and his hind leg scratched behind his ear. More blood spattered, and the head wobbled alarmingly, a gaping wound opening and closing in the dog's throat. “That's the way oracles work. Don't you read the classics?”

“Fine,” Patricia said. “Then tell us who was behind the murder of the SpaceOps agents on Leonardo.”

The Pooperanian gave a high-pitched yap. “That's not a very clear question,” he whined. “Do you mean literally behind or the person responsible? Because that's two different people.”

Patricia sighed. “The person responsible.”

“Ah.” The Pooperanian's ears went erect and the dog seemed to stare at an invisible biscuit being held just out of its reach. “You seek the one who is many. You seek that which is winter but is contained in the hands of a sun.”

They waited. The Pooperanian remained silent, his tongue out and panting. “That's it?” Patricia said at last. “That's all you got?”

“I said it would be cryptic. But it's the truth.”

“No wonder they killed him,” Patricia muttered to Spencer. “'Cause I'm about to do it a second time.”

While Patricia spoke, the pounding in Spencer's head continued to worsen, and he began to feel a strange prickling down his spine as if every one of the many hairs on his back was standing up straight, as if someone were standing right behind him.

He started to turn, but even as he did, he felt a hand on his shoulder, digging into his skin with sharp claws. Like the suds on cheap beer, the replica of Stonehenge vanished around him, there was a burst of incredibly cold air and a flash of blinding white light, and he was...

...elsewhere.

“Here,” someone said in an impossibly deep and booming voice. “Take this. Gently now, you don't want to break it...”

Spencer felt something being pressed into his left hand. He blinked away the worst of the purple afterimages, and glanced down. He was holding an egg. Then he looked up and saw the creature who had given it to him.

“Oh, hell,” he said.

The thing smiled, revealing distressingly pointed rows of ivory-brown teeth snagged with bits of might have been rotting meat, if Spencer could judge from its breath. “Well, that's not quite accurate. But you're close...”

His head was pounding now and the plate seemed to be almost hot against the back of his head. "Any depraved thought, if powerful enough, can create little hells, new universes of suffering.." Carol had said that. Spencer was afraid he'd just discovered that she was right. The creature in front of him was definitely in the classic demon class: red, scaly skin; horns; pupils the same violent red as the skin; a long tail ending in a leaf-blade barb. Whatever it was, it was definitely male, since it seemed to believe in clothes about as much as a Pooperanian. All it was missing was a pitchfork. And flames. Hell seemed a bit chilly to Spencer, actually.

“A constant forty degrees Fahrenheit,” the creature said, as if reading Spencer's thoughts. “Keeps the eggs fresh, you know.” He held out a hand, the long fingers of which ended in curved talons. “The name's Paddy O'Mullin.”

Spencer tentatively shook the demon's hand. “Irish?”

“Partially. Along with some Andromedan, a bit of Kirinyagan, a touch of Neweden, and a dash of Leonardoan on my mother's side. But you know what they say: if you have any Irish blood in you at all, you're green all the way through.” Paddy smiled.

Spencer decided not to make the obvious comment. Paddy seemed pleasant enough, but it didn't seem to be a survival trait to insult the man who'd just snatched you into his dimension. “How did I get here?” Spencer asked instead. He refrained from adding “And how do I get out?”

“Oh, Carol mentioned that this would be a good place for you.”

“She did, eh? I'll have to remember to thank her properly the next time I see her.”

“She said you needed to learn about an egg, and well...” Paddy grinned and shrugged. “This is just the place for that.”

Spencer glanced down again at the egg in his hand. It seemed an ordinary sort of egg, a spotted brown extra-large. “And why is that?”

Paddy grinned. “Oh, you see, it all started some two hundred and fifty-four years ago. I was working on our family's egg and dairy farm on Goldmeadow: thirty years old, unmarried, spending my days with chickens and cows and wondering whether I'd left my brains in a bucket for staying there. I'd made up my mind to leave. When I told my mum that, well, she damned near exploded. She handed me an egg from her basket and said ‘All right, Paddy, I'll give you a chance. If you can balance this egg on its narrow end, you can go with my blessing. But until you do, you'll stay here.’ I agreed. It seemed reasonable enough at the time ... at least until I gave it a shot. Ever tried balancing an egg on its end?—it's just not possible. I tried and tried, and I got angrier and angrier and started thinking the nastiest, most awful depraved thoughts about what I wanted to do to her ... and one night, as I was in my room still trying to balance that egg and thinking, I felt the world bubble up around me. All of a sudden, I wasn't on the farm anymore at all. I was here, and looking like this. And I've been stuck here ever since. My own private little universe, where I can do whatever I want, even reach out and grab the occasional person for company, but a place I can't leave myself until I balance the egg on its end. I've been at it now for over two and a half centuries.”

“Two and half centuries?”

Paddy spun his tail idly. “Well, not constantly, of course. That'd be pretty boring. But every day, at least for a bit. Here, give it a shot yourself...” Paddy waved his hand, and a table appeared in front of Spencer, with two chairs set on either side. Paddy took one; Spencer sat across from him. “Go on,” he said.

Spencer took the egg in his hand and placed it carefully on its end. He held it there with a forefinger, steadying it and trying to find a balance point. When he thought he'd found it, he let go. The egg tipped over and rolled.

“Not as easy as you'd think, is it?” Paddy said. He snatched the egg from the table and trying balancing it himself, with his chin propped up on one taloned hand and a bored look glazing his red eyes. The egg tipped over and he set it up right again, let go, and once more it fell over, wobbling on the table. “I've tried holding it still for an hour or more, thinking maybe the yolk would settle in the middle and give it some stability, but no. It tips over again, every time.”

As Paddy spoke, he kept trying to balance the egg. Spencer watched, his head pounding, the plate in his skull growing warmer and warmer until he thought it might cook his brains. Paddy continued to play with the egg, over and over and over, and Spencer imagined a lifetime of this, stuck here in this dimension with an Irish demon and an egg and nothing else to do. He could feel the frustration and anger building up in him, laced with everything that had happened since Admiral Ktonga had summoned him: the destruction of Goldmeadow, the kidnapping of Carol and his kids, the realization that the problems surrounding the Leonardoans could conceivably involve a galaxy-wide conflagration, Lindsay Parapara's machinations ... As he was mulling over the depressing thoughts, Paddy balanced the egg yet again, let go, and watched it wobble away once more.

Spencer's head felt as if it were about to explode. “The fate of the universe is up for grabs, and you're balancing eggs!” With a poorly-stifled scream, Spencer snatched the egg from Paddy. He tapped it once on the narrow end on the tabletop, feeling the tip of the eggshell crush and flatten. He let go and the egg stayed standing, with egg goo and yellow yolk pooling around the broken end. “There,” he said to Paddy. “I balanced the damned thing.”

Fireflies seemed to be glinting in the air behind Paddy. His mouth gaped open as he stared at the table. “You cheated,” the demon said at last.

“I didn't hear any rules,” Spencer told him. The plate in his head was cooling now and the throbbing in his skull was easing, but the fireflies around Paddy had turned to meteors, as if the sky were raining stars. “Stand it on end, you said. I just did.”

“I've brought in, oh, a hundred people over my time here,” Paddy continued, sounding aggrieved, “and none of them did that.”

“Well, I did,” Spencer answered. He scratched the plate under his hair. “Even better, I think it worked. Take a look.”

Paddy seemed to notice the light show taking place around them for the first time. Celestial fireworks sputtered above; the ground heaved and fans of shifting light arced up through the cracks. There was a sound like a gigantic egg being slowly crushed in a massive hand.

Paddy's universe was cracking open. The air around them was brightening, and the feeling of intense cold made Spencer shiver. Paddy's little universe of negativity disintegrated around them, shattering with the overwhelming white radiance of a nova. Spencer felt himself falling, and he screamed.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 9: Falling
by Bill Fawcett

Spence was falling .. and screaming ... then falling and not screaming. He had been falling for a very long time.

The human mind is very adaptable. Even so, it was some time before the agent realized he did not appear to be falling toward anything. He was just falling, not floating in zero-G, as there was a definite sense of direction with a distinct down. It took some time—how long being impossible to determine—for Spence's muscles to loosen from being braced for impact.

Just thinking about hitting the ground threatened to bring on another instinctive burst of fear. But while he fell, Spence was breathing. Or was he? Spence deliberately took a deep breath and then exhaled. Yes, he was breathing almost totally tasteless air. His hands found his face, but in the absolute darkness he could not see his fingers move even inches in front of his eyes. Were his eyes open? Ouch! The coarse skin of his finger hurt the sensitive ocular tissue, and he blinked away tears. His eyes were definitely open. Was there any light at all? Evidently not.

The falling agent spun around, almost enjoying the sense of diving without end. Even as he moved Spence realized there was no sensation of passing through or against anything. The air he breathed had no other substance. Not a single hair was ruffled by it. He stared “down” and saw nothing. No sounds, no light, not even air rushing past, just his own breath and heartbeat loud inside his ears, the surrounding silence, and the sensation of falling.

So Spence fell through utter darkness and tried to enjoy it. He recalled happy memories and became annoyed there were so few. Worse yet, most involved his lost family. After what seemed a considerable time, even the sensation of falling without danger lost its novelty and became more annoying than intriguing.

Was he cold? No. Thirsty? Not really.

So where was he? Was he been lost between universes? Was he doomed to fall forever, sharing this plane with nothing and no one else? The possibility made the agent shudder. He had to save his family, and maybe the whole galaxy. Spence tried to be analytical, if for no other reason than to calm his racing heartbeat.

In his universe if you fell, you were falling toward something. He was not. Or appeared to not be anyhow. He had fallen long enough now that something capable of generating enough attraction to give his fall direction should have become visible. In his normal world the air he was breathing would also be pushing past him. Yet there was not a stir of a breeze. Time seemed to still be passing, but he was not tired or thirsty.

So what did it mean? If he was lost, then there was little he could do. Wrinkling his brow, Spence tried to just will himself to somewhere, Leonardo ... to appear on Leonardo...

Nothing.

So much for his glimmer of egotism on the slight chance that if Spence was in his own little universe he was its god as well. No mind over matter or relativistic results, it seemed.

So if his situation made no sense, then was it real? Was all this an illusion? Could he break free? Willing himself awake did nothing. Nor did pinching himself. But the agent refused to believe he was lost, and so this had to be something else. There was no other explanation for all this nonsense.

The voice was shocking, showing Spence just how comfortably alone he had been.

“That is a good word for it,” Parapara's voice agreed from nowhere, or maybe just from inside Spence's head.

Telepathy, he wondered?

“Not really,” the voice answered, “though your thoughts are being vocalized to us. Speak normally and it will make it clear which thoughts you desire a response to.”

“Listen, Parapara,” Spence blustered, “what in the mad gods of Vega is going on?”

“Just Para, actually,” he was corrected.

Then a second almost identical but somehow slightly different voice joined the conversation. “I guess you can call me Para too, or Para two or...”

“Or one Para too many,” Spence quipped, trying to get some bearings and gain some sense of control? Now he was hearing voices and they made no sense. Parapara was, well, Para and Para? “Where am I? Why can't I see?”

The first woman's voice continued, “You are basically being subjected to non-sense. It is to protect your sanity during the journey.” It was the same voice, but without the anger Parapara always injected into every word.

“Protect?” Spence sputtered. “With nonsense?”

“No, not nonsense as in silliness. Rather non-sense as in not sensing your environment. I am afraid if you did there would be no saving you.”

Spence looked around. Was there a glimmer of light? He could not tell. There almost seemed to be, but with everything around him being equally uniform and featureless he could have been projecting his imagination onto his surroundings.

“Your kind can sense only a few of the many dimensions you exist in,” it was the second talking Para now, “it would certainly drive you insane when your mind tried to interpret what is happening around you within that limited context. If you had your normal senses your mind would try to bring order to seeing ten dimensions when you don't yet understand the four you do see.”

“You're no doing my sanity much good either,” Spence growled. But he had to admit that talking to even disembodied voices was better than being alone. Then again, maybe he had lost it and was making these voices up?

“We are real; at least in the ten dimensions you exist within we would be defined as such,” Para one spoke.

“I am shifting him in only seven now,” the second Para stated in a business like tone.

“Was I supposed to hear that?” Spence asked..

There was no answer.

“Hey?”

Still nothing.

The agent began to worry. He was alone again. Suddenly it felt very, very alone.

A long time passed. He noticed that the blackness seemed less, well, black.

“We can communicate again,” one of the Para said.

Spence twisted, looking around, still seeing absolutely nothing at all. But now the blackness seemed to have an underlying red behind it, just a hint at the edge of his vision.

“There is little time left,” the voice added.

“Until what? Until I hit?” Visions of finally and abruptly landing with a large, messy thud caused the agent to shudder and look wildly into the red-tinged darkness.

“You are exceptional to remain rational at this point. You will remain intact.” It was the first Para talking. “The naval officer was not so strong-willed. We regret the result.”

“The result?” Spence was not sure he wanted to know, but had to ask.

“In his mind he landed hard, with a thud, as you put it.”

“Gaw,” was all Spence could muster. He recalled the report he had read starting the mission. The naval officer had died without a mark on him.

“Have you noticed that things in your world have suddenly become, well, disjointed? That cause and effect occasionally part company or that someone you know is not always who they were?”

Spence nodded, not sure if they, she, it, them, his unconscious, or whatever could see it.

“Long ago our race evolved on the planet you call Leonardo.”

“You're the freakin’ Guardians...” the agent burst out.

“The current Leonardins evolved from a scavenger that we sometimes kept as pets. They were smaller and much cuter a few tens of millions of years ago. But some of us do feel some responsibility for them.”

“You do?” Spence nervously remembered the naval bombardment of Leonardo's cities. Could they have been bombing these Guardians as well? This could be bad.

“Long ago my race evolved past any physical form. Your bombs could not harm us,” Para one answered his unspoken question. “We bear no ill will for what you or your navy did. Your bombs came only because of what others of my race have done.”

Spence had at this point no idea of what Parapara, or Para and Para Two or the Guardians were saying. He merely tried to look like he understood, and nodded again. Then he realized they were reading his mind and felt foolish. The red glow was brighter now, subtly visible everywhere within the darkness.

“There are not many of us remaining in contact with this, our original planet. Some of those who are still connected here have recently decided to do something long forbidden. They are experimenting with what you call reality, playing with it and watching the results their changes make, if you will. It creates a most exciting and ever-changing story, or stories perhaps, but a mad one with many authors and no direction. So few of the rest of us remain that we are powerless to stop them.”

The agent was beginning to understand, and found he was no happier. What was he supposed to do if fifty-million-year-old ethereal aliens were changing reality? Though now the existence of different Patsys made sense. For a second he wanted to ask if they could bring back the less intelligent, but more complaint, Patsy Kelvin he had, um, known so well. But the Guardians did not answer. They continued their own narrative.

“The problem is that as they change your realities it does not happen instantly; each reality intersects with the last. This is something new for us to see, the unrealities this intersection generates. Novelty is a rare thing for us after so many millions of years. It is rare to not be able to predict every moment and movement, much less to not be in control of the rich tapestry this creates.”

“So some of you are screwing up this corner of my universe just to see what happens? Because it is entertaining? Why tell me?” Spence demanded, letting an edge creep into his tone as he felt his hands clenching into fists. Spence decided he had nothing to lose by being angry, or showing it.

“Not all, or even most of us, agree that this should not be done. Soon they will tire of changing just sentient creatures, but will vary the fundamental laws that rule your corner of this universe. They plan to see what happens if gravity ceases to function, or light moves more slowly.” It was Para Two's voice this time. “When these changes meet your normal ones, it could mean the end of all life in this galaxy.”

“But there is a way to stop it,” Para One interjected.

“There is? What?” Spence asked.

Para Two resumed talking.

“When we chose to be able to interact with all thirteen dimensions, we lost something as well. Physical beings as you know them cannot sense or travel through the higher dimensions. Now we can no longer interact directly with what you call solid objects. Think of us as being a cloud trying to move a stone. We can see it and flow past it, but not move it. We can manipulate some factors of time and space, which is how you are traveling at this moment, but we cannot destroy or create a single atom.”

It was definitely lighter now. Spence still experienced the sensation of falling, and a hurried check showed him that he was still not falling onto anything or anywhere. The area around him was still featureless with not a single ripple or change to be seen change as he moved, but somehow his body knew he was still falling.

Para One took over speaking, “There is a device, hidden deep within the most protected place on Leonardo. It is the last object created by us before we changed. It also is what allows some of us to interact with your realities. Think of it as our last tie to the past. A device we left to allow us to interact with the dimensions we left behind.”

“Eventually,” Para two sounded almost urgent, “the changes will become so great that all structure will be lost.”

“Well, only in the sixth and ninth dimensions,” Para One corrected. Spence almost heard Para Two sniff.

“Nothing in this part of their universe will survive to make the distinction.”

“Wnderful,” was all the response the agent could muster. His fists clenched tighter and illogically, he felt he was falling faster.

“What you need to do is find the object, which will appear to be a glowing, twisted strip of metal with no inside or outside. You must destroy it.”

“How?’ Spence managed to ask. This was better. Destroying was something he could understand.

“You must simply break the circle. But the twisted ring was made to withstand eons of natural changes, volcanoes and ice ages. It cannot be hurt by anything except a sentient being that truly wishes to tear it apart.”

“Oh, I do,” the agent replied, feeling on firmer ground. Break the ring; that was simple.

“Those of us who continue to desire these changes will try to stop you. We can be of no further help. Once you arrive, we will not even be able to communicate with you. If you succeed, we never will be able to contact you again. If you fail, you soon will cease to exist.”

“Those creating the changes cannot harm you directly, but they can occasionally interact with the Leonardins, who will make every effort to protect the twisted ring. Their minions will protect the artifact with desperate determination, even though it will cause their destruction. They have made it the basis for what the Leonardins feel is their place and role. The Leonardin word for the changers is gods. The twisted ring is the most holy object of their faith.”

The nothingness was definitely getting much brighter. Spence began thinking furiously about questions such as where on Leonardo the Ring was hidden and if these two Paras were Parapara in his universe too or had just used her voice, but he got no answer. The agent verbalized more questions and waited.

Nothing.

Then Spence's nonsensical universe brightened even more. After the darkness the light hurt his eyes, but the agent sensed he was alone again. He remembered the Paras had said he was traveling. Where was he traveling to and when would he arrive? Or had it all just been the first manifestation of insanity caused by sensory deprivation? Panic mingled with concern and confusion.

Then Spence stopped falling. He was standing in a hillside. The plants nearby were not from any human world, but were familiar. At his feet was a fresh blue bellflower. Not far away the agent saw he was being stared at. In fact, he was being stared at by half a dozen eight-foot-tall, thin, purple, oddly-jointed humanoids.

He was on Leonardo!

Spence had less than three seconds to enjoy the fact that he was alive, in part of his normal universe, and possibly sane, when the first shot hit a gray rock near his feet. The source of the bullet was a heavy caliber pistol one of the Leonardins was waving as the humanoid yelled and pointed. They all seemed agitated. That made some sense, as not only had they just seen a human appear from nowhere, but it had been less than decade since the Space Navy had bombarded the city whose ruins stood empty in the valley below. The jumble of broken black and red stones looked familiar. He had been here once before and that meant the agent had a chance.

“Nards!” the agent spat. That was the name the garrison had given the locals. He dived for cover as a second shot rang out. Spence realized that there was a possible third reason for the Nards’ hostility: could the evil guardians know of his mission already? Had they sent these Leonardins after him? He was here on a mission, but what mission? Was he here to find out what happened to lost agents? Or did he know? Was he now here to save the galaxy, literally, or because he was no longer sane? Not long ago he was half the galaxy away on MacDougal II. Was he really here, or was this more of the Paraparas’ illusion? The racing thoughts lasted no longer than it took to hurry behind thick, turquoise bushes and lie still. The hill sloped steeply behind him.

Chips struck off a nearby boulder by another bullet stung Spence's face and he scrambled down the slope, kicking stones and dirt loose until he was accompanied by a small landslide. Behind him the Leonardins’ keening cry warned him they were in pursuit.

The sound ululated and then peaked with a painful bark. Having been part of the first unit to land on the planet after it had been bombarded, he knew that war cry only too well. One of the aliens chasing him was from the warrior class. The thought inspired him to hurry down the slope even faster. Two more of his pursuers took up the same cry

The agent's foot snagged on the root of a bush covered with flowers a shade of yellow never seen on Earth. He slammed down onto one shoulder and tried to roll. The roll turned into a fall when the slope dropped off unexpectedly. When Spence had stopped tumbling he was on his back, one leg was tangled in a bush, and lying face up in a small stream.

The war cries sounded louder as Spence pulled free. He was close now to a grove of red and yellow trees that reached twenty meters into the red Leonardin sky. Dragging himself up, the Space Intel agent followed the water down into the tall, thin trees.

It was easier going in the stream and Spence gained some ground on the warriors who were fighting their way through the growth on the land side. His breath came in gasps as he tried to lose himself among the trees. Finally he found a spot he liked and leaned against a tree. Not for the first time, he decided he was too old for this. Only his cybernetic leg didn't hurt.

He could tell when the Leonardin Warriors reached the forest. They grew quiet. He had seen it before at the start of the occupation, when they had hunted Nards who would not surrender. It would be the three from the warrior class. With only one human, they would never share the kill.

He knew that there was no way he could outrun three warriors. Their long legs gave the Nards the edge. They also had reach and were as strong as most humans. In a fair fight he would lose at odds of three to one, but the Space Intel agent had no intention of giving them a fair fight. The gadgetry built into his clothes would give him a chance to survive. It was time to use it. Rubbing his temple, Spence caused his replacement eye to change to infrared. At first the effect of seeing different images with each eye was disorienting and he felt even more vulnerable. The confusion receded, and the agent began removing portions of his clothing. He tapped a long code onto each, then placed them in the locations where they would be most deadly when they exploded. As he recovered from the strain of his dash down and fell into the familiar rhythm of preparing a kill zone, Spence began to smile.

Finishing his preparations, the agent used his artificial arm and hand to break off two branches and shape them into rough spears. The warriors would split up and methodically sweep across the forest. Once they had separated for the search, he would have a few seconds with each one before the next could arrive.

The infrared signature of the first warrior gave him away even as the Nard slinked silently toward the human. This one had a gun; it was likely all three carried weapons. From the shape it was a Space Force gyro pistol. They were the standard issue sidearm for the diplomatic corps, firing a self-propelled round that accelerated after leaving the weapon. Gyros killed by electrostatic force. The energy of their flight tore apart anything they hit. They rarely wounded, only killed. Spence had no intention of letting the warrior fire it.

Setting what remained of his jacket on the ground, Spence moved silently to one side and readied a spear. He crouched low, using his enemy's height against him. The humanoid was wearing only military pants now. That confirmed to the agent his warrior status. The purple Nard had wide-set eyes that were placed almost on the sides of his head. Both focused on the discarded shirt sitting in center the small clearing. As soon as he saw the warrior's eyes lock on the shirt Spence struck. The spear, flung by his cybernetic arm, rammed through the warrior's chest and into his neck. But the Leonardin was tough: even as he died the humanoid slapped a small button on his thick belt. A loud siren, also buried in the belt, began to warble.

The sounds of both warriors rushing through the trees were audible even over the mechanical alarm. The next warrior to arrive raised a gun in Spence's direction. Spence recognized him as the warrior who had fired at him earlier. Falling and rolling toward the side of clearing, Spence almost managed to dodge the bullet. He felt his arm shoved back and for an instant waited for the deadly effect of a gyro pistol. A second later he found he was still alive. The agent realized that the shooter had only a slug pistol. The round had grazed his arm. Then the pain started. It had hit his good arm. Why did they never hit his cyber arm? With that arm he literally could turn the pain off. But the bad guys always shot him in the good one.

Before Spence even finished diving he touched two fingers to his thumb and pressed hard. Behind him, where the tall warrior stood lining up another shot, the trees exploded. Hundreds of splinters literally stripped away the flesh from the arm closest to the blast. Hundreds more buried themselves in the thin humanoid. He died almost instantly.

A few splinters from where a gyro pistol round tore into a nearby tree slammed into the side of Spence's head. His ear and cheek were bleeding and throbbing with pain, but the agent had no time to worry about it. He dived again, this time ending in a roll and then crawling several meters away into the forest.

The agent fought to control his breath. The air on Leonardo was similar to that of earth, but a bit thicker so that sounds carried better. For a moment he lay still, his arm throbbing. The local creatures had been frightened into silence after the noise of the first explosion. Even breathing hard could give away his position. Or that of the last warrior. He could hear nothing.

Carefully Spence shifted and then triggered the second of his three explosive arrays. It was lucky the third warrior had been examining the corpses of the other two. The blast was loud, but apparently missed. He could hear the warrior breaking through the trees, but moving rapidly away from him. Spence had bought some time, but he hadn't won. He was still alone on a planet where every Nard wanted to kill him. The warrior would be going for reinforcements. Dozens of armed Leonardins would be tearing this forest apart within minutes.

The agent had to move. Fortunately there was a good chance that an Intel facility he had hidden among those ruins at the start of the occupation remained. But he had to reach it undetected.

The red sun was high and the pink clouds sparse. Spence ran toward what remained of the city with his teeth gritted. Each bouncing step opened the tear on his arm with a fresh surge of pain. If that wound infected and he had to get another limb replaced, he was going to make someone pay. Ktonga was a good choice, or Parapara if she was real.

The Intel shelter was one of several they had placed in easily-found locations all over Leonardo. Establishing those shelters was standard procedure when a new planet was pacified. Once in it, Spence could call for evacuation to the nearest Space Navy base. He just had to get to the ruins and find the hidden base. The Space Intel agent moved slowly toward the destroyed city. Blood still flowed from his arm and down the side of his head.

A Nard war cry echoed over the forest. Then another cry of rage joined the first, then another, and more alien voices joined in until forest was filled with their promise of death.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 10: Holes in the Universe
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

As the death cry's echo faded, Kendall Spencer scurried toward the Intel shelter. His arm ached. The wound felt like it was tearing open with each and every movement. He stopped behind a tree, grabbed his shirt with his good arm, and ripped off some fabric. Then using his teeth and his good fingers, he tied a sling, placing his arm into it.

The Leonardins were silent now. He didn't know enough about them to know if the death cry was always followed with silence or if this was something new. He didn't know anything about Leonardins, not really. Not enough to fight them alone.

And he was guessing where the Intel shelter would be. He had no real idea. Just like he didn't know where the “most protected place” was on Leonardo, the place the Paras told him about.

If they were real.

If any of this was.

The plate in the back of his head hummed. That was the only sound he heard. That and the slight whisper of a breeze through trees.

He couldn't even tell what kind of trees these were—they didn't look like anything he'd seen before. They seemed to have no odor, either. But he hadn't smelled anything since the temple—and shouldn't he have?

He couldn't remember tasting much either.

Only sight and the occasional voice and pain.

He squinted. Shouldn't he be experiencing all five of his senses? This felt more like a dream than like any kind of reality.

Only he never thought of feeling things in his dreams.

He scanned the nearby trees—searching for more Leonardins. He couldn't see the ruins of the city any longer, but he had a hunch he was getting closer. The trees in this area were black, skeletal and spindly—perfect for hiding a human, but not for hiding the larger, purple Leonardins.

He didn't like the silence, nor did he like working on his own. He licked his upper lip—tasting salt and a bit of blood from his cheek (odd that he tasted that now, right? After he had thought about it? Or had he been so focused before that he hadn't even noticed most of his senses?)

The air shimmered in front of him. He ducked—and something slammed into the trees, some other kind of weapon fire, something he'd never seen before.

He crouched, scuttling through blackened underbrush. It smelled vaguely of smoke.

Had a fire come through here, charring everything, and leaving the impression of its fury in the memory of its scent? Or had his thought reawakened part of his consciousness so that he was noticing now?

He preferred to think he'd been too focused to notice. He didn't like the way everything had become uncertain—the fact that he couldn't even trust his own mind any more.

Everything he had known to be true wasn't any longer.

Bits of the charred growth flaked off on him, like tiny bits of ash. Some landed on his face, stinging as they went into the cut. He kept going, heading uphill.

The farther up he went, the more convinced he became that he was going through the remains of a fire. Maybe this was the beginning of the ruins. Maybe a fire had destroyed the city, a fire caused by some great weapon, or the catastrophe that Ktonga had told him about (had it been Ktonga? Or had it been someone else? It bothered Spence that he couldn't keep track of all the things he'd learned—and unlearned—since he'd gone to the Admiral's headquarters).

The ground crunched beneath his feet, and as Spence looked back, he saw footprints leading anyone who wanted to come to his location.

So how come Leonardins weren't following him?

He straightened his back, and looked around the entire area. Spindly trees and blackened undergrowth. The ruined city was visible again in the distance—think of it and it will appear? Was that what was happening to him?—a series of black broken spires rising toward the sky. Pale pink clouds against the horizon, making it look like the entire planet was on fire. The red sun still high, but not as hot as it would have been on Earth.

He was grateful for that.

Still, his face was covered with sweat, but the sweat came from exertion and the pain in his arm. The sling had helped. He hadn't noticed any more tearing as he had scrambled up here, but when he looked down, he realized he was covered in gray dust.

He crouched again—no sense being the only moving thing in this copse of trees—and kept going uphill.

The Intel shelter wouldn't be in the city itself. That was too dangerous. There would have been an outpost in the city, but the shelter's main location would've been a few klicks away, in some kind of wilderness area (if there were any) to avoid detection.

Intel shelters were usually on the lee side of a hill, high enough to see for miles, but not on the very top where they were most visible. Often they had a slight holo field around them, making them look like native structures. But, if he remembered his training right, Leonardins never built on hills.

So the Intel shelter—if it was anywhere near here—would look like something else.

Or it would be a standard issue structure, as foreign to the landscape as he was, human-sized and house-like, with more forcefields and protections around it than he cared to think about.

In the distance, something warbled. The warble was followed by another warble, and then by a trill. The trill grew to become an ululation, which then rose in the Leonardin war cry again.

They saw him.

He whirled, unable to see any Leonardins at all. How could they all be invisible?

Sound carried here, but wouldn't he be able to see at least one of them? There was no place for them to hide—not here, not in this kind of desolate landscape.

The warble-trill-ululation-war cry happened again, and he realized that it all sounded like it came from one voice.

Before he'd heard countless voices.

Now he only heard one.

He'd been moving. Someone watching him could have shot him already. Were they waiting for a reason?

He decided not to think about it. Thinking too much had gotten him into this mess. Or letting someone else invade his thoughts....

He couldn't think about that either, not now, not so soon after being shot at.

Finally, he reached the top of the hill. He stood slowly, in between some more burned-out trees. The acrid smell of smoke was stronger here—along with something else, something quite chemical-like, but the smell was unfamiliar. It could've been part of the trees for all he knew.

He braced his good hand on the nearest tree, and the entire thing collapsed, splintering around him in a shower of ash. He stepped backwards, hit another tree, and it too shattered.

They were ghost trees, rotted trees, ruined by whatever had gotten to them.

And oddly, no one had touched them since whatever it was had happened.

He wiped at his face, feeling some of the ash smear. His eyes stung. The chemical smell had grown stronger.

Only a few trees blocked his vision of below. He stepped around them, looking for something that could be the Intel shelter.

Instead, he caught a glimpse of purple. He blinked, then looked again. A ring of purple, pressed up against the grayness. Leonardin warriors had lined up around the edge of the devastated area. Rows of warriors, an entire unit or whatever the Leonardins called them, or maybe a brigade, an entire force, maybe three hundred strong.

Lined up like purple rocks around a dead campfire.

He shuddered.

They knew he was in here, but they weren't going to follow him in here. Was that because of the chemical odor? Because of what had happened here?

He turned around, saw that indeed he was right. They had him completely surrounded. They didn't need to follow his tracks. They knew exactly where he was.

A large column of them stood between him and the destroyed city.

He swallowed. His adam's apple bobbed against his dry throat.

They figured he would come out eventually, and then they would have him. They would kill him.

Or they would let this place kill him.

He scanned the gray dirt, the skeletal trees, searching for something that could be the Intel shelter. He—

—picked up the egg and hefted it in his hand. It felt curiously fragile for something so important. He could crush it between his fingers.

The dragon was headed to the narrow door, the green fairy on its right wrist. The fairy looked over its shoulder, hissed at Spence again, baring its bright teeth.

Spence—

—frowned, then put a hand to his forehead. His skin was covered with the grayish ash from the devastated forest. The ring of purple remained below.

A Leonardin raised a meaty arm and shook it, the gesture looking small and fruitless from so far away.

Normally, Spence would have returned the gesture, a show of bravado. But he was feeling uncharacteristically woozy.

His head hummed.

That plate—

—shook. A loud crash came from below. He was in the tower. The dragon whirled, looking at Spence—a look of complete horror. The fairy faced the wrong direction, but it too turned, its pretty eyes wide. Then—

He put a hand to the back of his scalp. The plate was actually hot.

Had one of the Leonardins fired? Had they hit him and had the shot been absorbed by the plate?

In this long strange adventure, he hadn't had that kind of luck.

He pulled his hand away. It was red, the skin irritated from the plate. He had to get the thing off. He should never have let them keep it on him. It had been wrong from the start.

A shimmer beside him.

He ducked—

—the world went white then red then white again—

— but nothing happened. No explosion over his head, no errant shot. He was crouching, and the air still shimmered just a meter or so from him.

He reached out, his dirty fingers shaking as they approached the shimmer. Then he touched something solid.

Plastic.

The Intel shelter.

How lucky was that?

—"C'mon,” someone said.

Spence couldn't breathe. He was covered in debris. His head hurt. Blood ran down the side of his face, into his mouth. He spat, but the taste remained—rusty and acrid, as if he had swallowed ash-covered nails.

He sat up, brought his good arm to his face, and felt an ache, a pull, a tear. He looked down. A large piece of wood had embedded itself in his forearm.

Damn. It had hit his good arm. Why didn't things happen to his cyber arm? In that arm, he could shut the pain off. But he always got injured in his own parts.

Someday there wouldn't be any real parts left.

"Spence, c'mon.”

The fairy hovered above him, gray goo running down the side of its lovely face. A greenish blob formed next to him. Spence realized he was looking at Plibix.

Whose face was a mass of rock and splinters.

"We gotta get outta here before they find us,” the dragon-man said.

"They?” Spence managed. His tongue felt like cotton. His entire brain felt like cotton. He was wrapped in cotton—not literally but figuratively.

Shock. He was in shock and he recognized it. What had happened?

"They,” Plibix said. “The tower's the only part of Goldmeadow still standing. Or probably one of the few parts. And they'll look to see who's here, and what they're doing. We need the egg. You still got it? We need—

It was too lucky to have the shelter here. Just like it was convenient to have Patsy Kline turn into the Patricia Kelvin, like it was convenient to have his wife appear to give him an update on the children (wife? Children? When had he had time to marry? He didn't remember that. He didn't remember any of it, not really, not even how he got the summons from Ktonga), like it was too convenient to have Parapara become two—well, he would say people, but he wasn't sure that was correct.

God, his head hurt.

And below, that trill started again. The warble would follow, and then the ululation and the stupid battle cry, just to remind him that the Leonardins were there.

He would have to do something about them.

Or he would have to go in the shelter.

Someone had made it very easy for him to get to the Intel shelter.

Someone or something—

—will be here. Spence, get up. We have to go.” Plibix's claw dug into his shoulder.

"What happened?” Spence asked.

"Bomb,” the dragon-man said.

"Plasma bomb?” Spence asked, remembering (flashing forward? He wasn't sure) the hospital, Plibix sitting near his bed, having this exact conversation.

"How should I know?” Plibix snapped. “Probably not. We're still here, although you're bleeding pretty bad. You still got the egg?"

Spence sat up—

—stuck his hand through the shimmer, and the Intel shelter appeared before him. The warble had turned into an ululation and then into a battle cry, and it sounded closer than he had thought possible.

The shelter was in its most common form—a door, no windows, and a force field to protect it from curious purple creatures with a terrifying battle cry.

Spence's intel i.d. allowed him through the field (probably allowed him to see the shiver) and he rolled inside the force field, feeling absurdly grateful.

The ash and traces of fire didn't exist here. Here the grass was an odd orangish green and some saplings grew around the shelter itself.

The plate felt like it was burning off the back of his head.

He staggered to the shelter, touched the door, and the codes—thank god—recognized him. The door eased open enough for him to squeeze inside, and then it snapped closed.

The interior was cool and well lit—yellow light, like humans were used to, not Leonardo's orangish crap that made it seem like he was wearing the wrong kind of goggles. An old chair had been pushed against a plastic table—the kind that seemed like it had grown out of the floor—and the remains (covered in mold) of a meal sat on a plate near the camp kitchen.

Someone had been using this place, but they'd stopped—at the time the fire (or whatever it was) had destroyed the trees? Or earlier? Or later?

He couldn't tell.

He punched on the screens, and the walls suddenly filled with color. Tiny surveillance cameras (barely visible dots if they were like cameras on other planets) floated down the hill, searching for movement, and finding it in the Leonardins at the edge of the destroyed areas.

He had miscounted: there weren't dozens of Leonardins. There had to be hundreds, maybe thousands waiting for him. Most of them looked alike (but didn't all natives look similar until you learned how to distinguish them? Weren't they all of an unfamiliar kind?)—large, with wide-set eyes and equally big teeth.

Must be something primitive in humans—the reptile brain, still existing from all those millions of years ago—that found big teeth on big creatures terrifying.

The Leonardins stood six deep and who knew how many wide. They kept shaking their right—hand? Claw? Paws? (he really should've learned the terminology before embarking on this mission. Hell, he really should've learned something about the mission instead of fighting with Ktonga)—and their necks vibrated visibly as they repeated the pattern of yells that formed the battle cry.

He searched for a med kit, found it, and then unwrapped the sling from his arm. The wound was deep and probably infected. Blood kept oozing out as if he were actually squeezing the vein, which he wasn't.

He cleaned the area, cauterized it, then wrapped the wound and hoped that would help him save the limb. In the future, he would refuse any more missions.

They'd cost him too many body parts as it was.

Almost on cue, the plate in the back of his head thrummed again. He—

—held the egg. His thumb had left a print on the side, but miraculously, he hadn't broken the thing. It seemed smaller than it had before the explosion.

Plibix stared at it, stunned. “Whoda thought?”

Who'd've thought, indeed. Something that fragile should've shattered.

"You think somebody's protecting that thing?” Plibix asked.

"I don't know,” Spence said, “but I wish whoever it was would've worked a little harder at protecting me."

He shook his head, felt slightly dizzy, and tried to catch his breath. The Leonardins hadn't moved away from the edge of the devastated area. He could find the codes and send help from the nearest Space Navy base. That'd been his plan when he first set on this course.

The base could pull him out of here, and he'd never have to deal with the Leonardins again. Or at least, not until he got some help for this part of the mission.

He could stay here. It was well protected. Maybe the most protected place on this part of Leonardo. It had survived whatever had caused the devastation after all.

Then he froze.

The most protected place on this part of Leonardo. Wasn't that where the Paras had wanted him to go? To the most protected place on Leonardo?

The plate in his head was vibrating so hard his teeth were chattering. It had started this halfway up the hill, and the first thrums had been annoying, but this was crazy-making. He'd have to find a way to shut the thing off.

He'd have to find a way to have it removed.

He wished it hadn't been attached in the first place. Served him right for always putting the mission first.

What a mistake that was.

The fairy stared at the egg. Plibix peered out what had been the window but what was now just a crumbled wall.

"We don't have a lot of time,” Plibix said again. “You gotta move. I can't do that for you."

Spence knew that. He got up slowly, still cradling the egg, feeling as if he had just awakened from a dream, a dream he couldn't quite shake.

It felt wrong—not being here, being here, not being here. Something was off.

He must've spoken out loud, because Plibix said, “Yeah, it feels like someone blew a hole in the universe."

Spence frowned. He moved closer to one of the walls in the Intel shelter. The vibrating in his head grew worse. His teeth were going to rattle out of his mouth. His eyes ached, and he could—for the first time in his life—actually feel his sinuses, because they were rattling too.

Who knew the human body could do that?

That shimmer was back—what he had thought was the force field was something else entirely. A panel, maybe? A compartment?

A place to hide the device that the Paras had told him about.

He reached into the shimmer, his fingers shaking like they'd done before, and—

"Yeah,” he said. “Not a hole. Holes. And we keep falling through them."

"Not we,” Plibix said. “You. You keep fading in and out of consciousness. Maybe you should give me the egg."

The fairy smiled, revealing big teeth.

What was it about big teeth that terrified humans? He'd thought it was big teeth on big creatures, but even on little ones...

—a panel opened. A floor plate slid out. He stepped back, his head throbbing. A glowing, twisted strip of metal with no inside or outside sat on the floor plate. It looked like a circle, or a strip, or a square, or a rhombus—changing each time he studied it, which he couldn't do very well since his entire head was rattling.

This was the device, made, as the Paras said, to withstand eons of natural changes. It could not be hurt except by a sentient being who truly wanted to tear it apart.

He had said he was that person, and if that glowing strip of metal (which had the same chemical odor as the forest) was causing this horrible head-rattling, then he did.

But he had to wonder how this thing got into a panel in an Intel shelter, and how he had found it so easily, and why the Leonardins weren't attacking him. Breaking something this old and this powerful shouldn't be easy. It should be—

—mine,” Plibix was saying. “Aren't we a team? You should hand the egg over."

Weren't they discussing the holes in the universe? Spence didn't remember changing the topic. He frowned again, his eyes gritty from the explosion, still feeling slightly woozy.

What would happen if he just crushed the damn egg with one hand? Would there be another explosion? Would the universe end?

He felt this incredible

powerful

urge

to destroy

this thing in

front of him.

The urge was so powerful

that it felt like something outside of him

maybe something from the plate in his head

or from those holes in the universe.

He spun around, reached for the control panel on that table, and started to send the evacuation signal.

Then he stopped.

The throbbing in his skull stopped too. He realized he was straddling two realities—and in one, he didn't have a plate in his head.

He didn't want the plate in his head. He'd suspected from the beginning that it controlled him. He wanted it gone, he wanted all of this gone.

He wanted to destroy something

and all it would take was

the crush of his hand

into the glowing strip

around the egg.

Or a push of a button, activating the evacuation sequence from the nearest Space Navy.

If he did, was he missing his only chance?

His only chance at what?

He had no idea what was real, but he knew there was only one way to find out.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 11: Choosing Sides
by James Patrick Kelly

Spence stooped down to have a closer look at the glowing metal thing ... what the hell was it? Impossible to describe. Just looking at it made his vision blur, It churned and twisted in on itself like something alive, although its glowing surface had a burnished metallic sheen like burning chrome or silver fire. He gingerly touched the thing with the tip of his finger, afraid it might be molten. But it was just blood hot. The shining surface yielded to his touch and the thing pretzeled into a new and impossible shape that made his head swim. With a quick swipe, he picked it up with his cyber hand and closed his tensteel fist around it.

Slowly he ratcheted up the pressure. He could crush stone with the prosthetics the Navy had built for him, or if need be, he could catch a butterfly by the wing without harming it. But although he could compress the glowing thing to the size of a marble, when he relaxed, it sprang again to its full size and continued to turn itself inside out. With a cry of frustration he smashed it against the cabinet where he had found the med kit. This also had but a momentary effect. He dropped it and tried to pile drive it through the floor with his cyber leg, but although he succeeded in cracking floorboards, he did it no harm whatsoever. He picked it up again and held it in the palm of his hand. It changed size and shape restlessly, went flat and bulged round. He tried to remember exactly what the Paras had said about it.

Destroy the twisted ring, break the circle.

Our gateway between the dimensions, made to withstand the eons.

But it could be torn apart by someone who truly wished it.

Was that it? He hadn't actually tried to tear it apart. He tried to grip the thing with his injured hand and yank at it with his cyber hand. It stretched and incandesced a little before the pain was too much for him. With a gasp, he let it go. Maybe he would have to wait until his hand healed. It struck him as ridiculous; that couldn't be the way that the universe really worked. Then maybe he didn't truly want to destroy the Guardian's dimensional gateway.

He glared at the thing in his hand. “I hate you,” he said. “You're everything that's wrong with my life just now and there is nothing I'd rather see than you in a million shattered pieces.” The thing continued to pleach and wattle as if it didn't have a care in the world. For some reason, this struck Spence as funny and he laughed, whether at himself or the absurdity of his situation he could not tell. Maybe that was the problem, he realized; he wasn't taking this seriously enough. He tried looking deep inside himself.

Did he truly want to destroy the gateway? The Paras has said that the evil Guardians would start messing with physics unless he destroyed this thing. Spence tried to imagine a universe with the strong force cranked down and the weak force cranked up. Electromagnetism gone wild. Gravity up for grabs. He licked his lips and wished he had gone ahead and uploaded The Idiot's Guide to Leptons that Carol had bought him for Christmas two years ago instead of slipping it into his sock drawer and forgetting all about it until now. What he saw in his soul was not doubt. It was howling ignorance. He didn't know what the right thing was to do. He didn't even know what the next thing he ought to do. Was any of this real?

He perked his head up and sniffed the stale air. There was nothing more real than a bad smell and suddenly the shelter reeked of rotting meat. He slipped the glowing gateway into his pocket and whirled to face a man-sized shimmer in the shape of a dragon. A claw emerged from the shimmer and then an ugly reptilian face that Spence knew all too well.

“Plibix! Where have you been?” he cried. “Where's Boganda? The egg? Have you seen my wife? My kids?”

“That's at least five questions.” said Plibix calmly. “Would you care to prioritize them for me?”

“Just tell me what's going on, Plibix. We thought you'd gone over to the other side.”

“The other side?” Plibix strode across the shelter and peered at the array of screens that showed the Leonardoins surrounding them. “What side is that?

“The side that blew up Goldmeadow. The side that killed poor Snorkin Mibble's clone. The side that put Patsy Klein in my bed and then told her to commit suicide. The side that the evil Guardians are on.” He gestured at the blue-skinned mob. “Their side.”

“One thing that traipsing between the dimensions makes pretty clear is that directionality is in the eye of the observer. There are no sides, Spence, or rather there are an infinite number of sides, each tethered to a individual consciousness.”

A rock hit the side of the shelter with a loud thwock that seemed to ring off the plate in Spence's head.

“Save the fortune cookie philosophizing for another day, Plibix. The natives are restless.”

“So they are.” The dragon nodded and, reaching forward, calmly pressed the button that would signal the Space Navy to evacuate Spence. “So they are.”

Thwock! !

“Hey!” Too late, Spence yanked the dragon's arm away from the control panel. “What did you do that for?”

“Just trying to help.” Plibix's tail lashed, which Spence knew was the dragon's way of shrugging. “You were having such a hard time making up your mind.”

“Maybe you should leave making up my mind to me.”

“Good idea.” With that the dragon began to shapeshift. His body seemed to bunch and flow. His tail retracted into his body and the planes of his face shifted. Hair sprouted on the top of his head. He grew clothes.

Thwock!

The speaker on the control panel crackled and a face swam into view on the flat panel screen above it. “Attack cruiser Santiago to Leonardo Base Juliet-Papa-Kilo.” A young woman in the high-collared uniform of Elite Space Guard stared anxiously into nothingness. She was wearing lieutenant's silver stars with a bronze cyborg cluster. “Base JPK, we just picked up an emergency evac signal. Is anyone there? I don't seem to have video. Repeat, is anyone there? You're in a restricted area.”

“Just a moment,” said Plibix. He turned to Spence and grinned. To his horror, Spence realized what shape the dragon had taken. He was now Spence. “How's this?” The dragon waved the cams on. “Can you see me now?”

“I can,” said the lieutenant. “Identify yourself.”

“Commander Kendall Spencer,” said Plibix. “On a secret mission for Admiral Ktonga.”

“That's not true,” cried Spence, thrusting his double aside. “I'm Kendall Spencer.”

Thwock! Thwock!

“What?” said the lieutenant. “Who's that with you, Commander Spencer? What's that strange thwocking sound?”

“We're under attack, Lieutenant.” Plibix/Spencer pushed Spence/Spencer back. “I was hit by a doppelganger beam just before I reached the safety of shelter.”

“Doppleganger beam!” Spence couldn't believe it. “That's ridiculous! There's no such thing! Don't listen to him.”

“Just get a dropship here double-quick,” said Plibix/Spencer smoothly. “I'll have this all sorted out by the time you get here. Out.” He stabbed at the communicator's power switch and the screen went black.

The dragon stepped away from the control panel, winked at Spence, and stretched. His tail snaked out of his back and his teeth daggered and his shoes curled back into three-toed claws. “I don't know how you put up with that body of yours, Spence,” he said. “Being you was like wearing underwear that was two sizes too small.”

“At least my breath doesn't make dogs pass out.” Spence struggled not to hurl himself at Plibix and beat him to a bloody handbag. He knew he needed to get control of the situation, but before he could do that he needed to figure out what the situation was. “So, would you like to tell me what that was all about?”

“All right, Spence, but let's start at the beginning. Here's the way it is. This whole mess is Ktonga's fault. Or should I say Parapara's, since she was taking orders from him.”

“But Parapara was the head of SpaceOp. She was trying to overthrow Ktonga and the Space Intelligence Service.”

“She wanted to do away with the Service, yes, but not the Admiral. They were a team and he became her sometime lover. Their goal was to undermine a legitimate if somewhat ineffectual arm of the elected government and replace it with a super-secret organization that owed allegiance to no one but its shadowy commanders. SpaceOp was a tyrant's wet dream. Ktonga was in bed with that dream and Lindsey Parapara had crawled in next to him and pulled the covers up over the both of them. She reported to him and he reported only to his conscience, which he had conveniently misplaced back during the Talianta campaign.”

Thwock!

“Are you telling me that he blew up Goldmeadow? And himself?”

“Well, now that is a bit of a mystery.” Pilbix worked a gray-green scrap of something rotten from between his dagger-like teeth. And ate it. “As near as I can figure, Ktonga and Parapara hadn't figured on the Leonardoin troubles undermining the very foundations of the galaxy. I'm guessing that they weren't quite able to coordinate a response to the news that an unspeakably alien and hyper-advanced elder race had decided they were going to mess with us. It's hard to maintain command and control when you're fighting both sides of secret war, you know. So mistakes were made, although I wouldn't necessarily assume that Ktonga was dead. That old man is as slippery as a seed.”

Thwock.

“You'd think the Leonardoins’ arms would get tired,” said Pilbix. “But then I supposed they're rather upset that their gyro pistols aren't much use against the shields here.”

“I'm confused,” said Spence, settling onto a chair. “Now I don't even know whose side I'm on.” He pressed his face into his hands, careful not to let the tips of his fingers touch the plate on top of his head.

“Ah, but you must first be on your own side,” said the dragon, “before you can make any outside alliances.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Spence looked up. “So how come you show up now, spouting these gems of wisdom? We ... I would've liked to have known some of this stuff weeks ago, or even yesterday.”

“I have only just recently come to understand what Ktonga and Parapara were about. And to be truthful, some of what I've just said is conjecture. But I have been trying to warn you, Spence. Back on MacDougall II...”

“Oh, right. That. Do you know how much time we wasted trying to decipher what you said? ‘Some realities are true, while others are not. Nothing is random and nothing is an accident. Master intelligence. Scrambled eggs.’ What was that all about?”

Plibix looked hurt. “I was trying my best, but at that moment I was getting squeezed by a dimensional shift. As the dimensions begin to slide into one another, they close off the interdimensional folds through which dragonkind can travel. You know what happens if I get caught between collapsing dimensions?”

“No,” admitted Spence.

“It isn't pretty. They'd be picking my brains off rooftops in the twelfth dimension and the spatter of my Kirilian aura would make the seventh look an explosion in a paint factory.” He shuddered.

“You'd be sort of like scrambled eggs.”

“That isn't funny.” His reptilian eyes narrowed. “You don't realize how hard it's been to get back to you. The chances I've taken. Everything is different between the dimensions now. So many of the folds have been squashed into a single point of space-time. Others have pulled loose and point into nothingness. I kept circling around, sliding through the few remaining folds, only to hit a dead end. And every so often I would meet up with that Leonardoin high priest and have to make a run for it. Listen.” Plibix put a hand to his ear. “You hear that?”

Spence strained against the silence. “I don't hear anything.”

“Exactly. They've stopped throwing rocks.”

“Maybe they ran out.”

“Of rocks?” He shook his head. “Time is short, Spence. You asked about the egg. I still have it, you know. I've been protecting it.”

“That's good. Carol said this all started with the egg.”

“Oh Carol,” he said with a wave of his tail. “She does like the sound of her own voice, you know. No offense,” he hastened to add. “Actually, the egg is important, but it's not the beginning of the story. It's the end.”

“You know what it's for?”

“I have a theory.” He reached into his sidesack and pulled out the glittering golden egg, inlaid with tiny rubies and sapphires. “Among other things, the egg is the source of enormous power. Think of it as a kind of battery. The source of its power it located in one of the coiled dimensions, I think the twenty-fifth. But what good is a battery by itself?”

“I have a feeling you're going to tell me.”

“Parapara gave us this egg. Where did she get it? Maybe from the officer who discovered the whole Leonardoin problem in the first place. I guessing that it came from right here on this planet. Remember that Parapara said that we must handle the egg carefully and never, never open it? Well, once I realized that she was part of the conspiracy with Ktonga, I thought to myself, ‘Why not?'” He smiled his toothy smile. “She wasn't on my side, so why should I pay any attention to her anymore?” Plibix caressed the top of the egg. “As you can see, it has this tiny fastener and a hinge....”

The dragon flipped it open. Inside the egg was a glowing metal ovoid that would have been impossible to describe if he hadn't just seen an object made out of the very same material. Just looking at it made his vision blur. It seemed to pulse and boil beneath a surface that had a burnished metallic sheen like silver fire.

“It looks molten,” said the dragon, “but it's just warm. Go ahead, touch it.”

“No thanks.” Spence was not conscious of his hand slipping into his pocket until he was touching the Guardians’ gateway.

Outside the shelter, Spence hear the roar of a dropship engine. He realized then why the Leonardoins had stopped throwing rocks.

“Sound like your ride is here, Spence,” said Plibix softly. “You're done with all of this now. I know that's what you really wanted. So you're not going to need the gateway.”

Spence closed his prosthetic hand around it but said nothing.

“I was watching you just before I stepped through the fold. I saw you find it. I knew you wouldn't destroy it. You were meant to come here, Spence. Nothing is random and nothing is an accident, remember? For instance, consider that plate in your head. It's an interface for the gateway. Normally a human wouldn't be able to make use of it; that's dragon work. But Parapara had you altered as a backup, in case anything happened to me. One or the other of us was supposed to open an escape route to another dimension for her and Ktonga in case things went terribly wrong here. But why would we do that now? They're not on our side, Spence. So if you don't mind handing it over, you can be on your way.”

The dragon held out his other hand, his claws curled over his scaly palm. “With the egg to power the gateway, I can reconstruct the folds, even make new dimensions, if I want.” Plibix waved his fingers.

“Commander Spencer!” called an amplified voice from outside the shelter. “Are you all right in there? Someone has tampered with the security codes. Commander Spencer, open up!”

Spence slipped the glowing gateway from his pocket and showed it to Plibix. The dragon breathed in sharply and grabbed for it, but Spence kicked his legs from under him and they both sprawled to the floor of the shelter. The gateway and the egg danced out of reach. Plibix rolled away, whipping his tail across Spence's face, raising a welt that stung like a hot needles at the same time that Spence lashed out with his prosthetic leg, catching the dragon in the stomach and sending him skittering across the room.

As Spence scrabbled toward the glowing Guardian artifacts, he saw to his astonishment that the gateway was entwining itself lovingly around the egg. He snatched them up, turned and saw the dragon gathering himself for another charge.

It was then that he remembered what Carol had told him, that he would have to migrate up the shells of the universe.

“Carol!” he cried. With the plate in the top of his head burning like the sun, he stepped through a fold in Reality.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 12: Picking a God's Nose
by Dean Wesley Smith

The green grass meadow, the flowing blue water of a small stream, the fresh-smelling breeze through tall pine trees just wasn't what Spencer expected to find on the other side of the fold in the universe. Of course, he had no idea what he had expected would be on the other side of a fold.

Maybe he wanted Carol to be there waiting for him.

Or Parapara. Or a dozen Paras.

He glanced quickly around, expecting Plibix to appear at any moment, ready to beat him to a pulp.

Nothing but the branches on the trees moved in the slight breeze.

No dragon, no wife, no dwarf, nobody.

The plate in the back of his head had stopped throbbing and heating up and cooling down like a defective burner on a stove. In his right hand, his good hand, the egg and the twisted metal had formed into a small golden ball that seemed to radiate a sense of comfort and power at the same time.

He had no idea what to do with it, or how many people in all the dimensions wanted it. As he stared at the golden ball, wondering just what he should do next, the thing suddenly melted like a cheap piece of candy and was absorbed by his skin.

“No you don't!” he shouted, shaking his hand, sending stabbing pains through his injured arm as he tried to get what was left off of him.

No luck.

After a moment, the combined remains of the egg and the twisted metal had been completely absorbed into his system.

He stood there, staring in disbelief at his empty hand. “This can't be good.”

His words drifted off with the wind.

He waited for something to happen.

Anything.

He held his breath.

Then after thirty seconds he figured that holding his breath wasn't a good plan and let out a huge sigh.

“Think, you idiot,” he said to himself.

All he could think about was how dead he was going to be. Taking into his system something this powerful had to have a few fairly large side affects. More hallucinations? Maybe drug-like highs? Maybe enhanced sexual ability?

He waited, trying to hold his panic down to humming level, standing there in the middle of the meadow, the wind blowing softly past him.

Nothing happened.

The meadow didn't turn purple and begin to roll. The trees didn't grow big teeth and spit toothpicks. The stream didn't turn into a big snake. The grass of the meadow still felt solid under his feet.

Almost disappointing. Almost.

Two of what were supposed to be the most powerful objects in the universe had just joined like a bad marriage and decided to take up housekeeping in his body. Never, in any imagining, could he have seen this coming.

He stood there, waiting for his body to explode, for all the folds of space to smash in on him like a pile of ancient draperies.

Nothing.

It sure would be nice for a user's manual to appear in his mind.

Nope.

Nothing.

Something had to happen. A person didn't just absorb that much power and then have nothing happen.

Nothing happened.

He waited a good five minutes, slowly turning and studying the meadow around him.

The water flowed, the breeze blew, he kept breathing.

Not much else. He felt normal, and from what he could see of his body, he looked normal.

After the running battle with the big blue guys, and the fight with the dragon, this seemed wrong, as if he was missing something.

Then he realized his arm didn't hurt any more. The wound had healed completely. He felt young, full of energy. Ready to go, take on the entire universe.

Okay, now he had something. Finally. A change.

Around him, the meadow stayed solidly in place, no shifting reality, no merging dimensions, no strange purple humanoids doing war chants and attacking him.

Nothing.

“So this is what migrating up the shells of the universe looks like.”

He wasn't sure if he expected that statement to change anything either. It didn't. He just stood there feeling alive and ready to go. He just didn't know where or how.

He started off in one random direction and after a few steps, stopped because walking seemed pointless. For a start, he didn't know where he was, what dimension he was even in, or what planet in what dimension. Para had mentioned many dimensions, the dragon had mentioned he thought the egg had a power source up on dimension twenty-five.

Spencer had thought the universe was a pretty big place before all this.

He made himself take a deep breath and think back over what had joined to be inside him. The dragon had thought the egg, or more accurately, the ball inside the egg, was a power source for the twisted metal without any ends or sides.

And the Paras had told him that the metal was a gateway to all the dimensions for her people and that it needed to be destroyed. And from the way the egg and the metal acted, they had been made for each other, of that he had no doubt.

And they seemed to like him as a walking condo. But now that he had both inside his body, he had a hunch he had a very large target painted on his back. A multi-dimensional target with more than enough beings willing to take what he had.

Then something the dragon said echoed. Nothing is an accident and nothing is random.

Had he been intended to get both of these things together and take them? Take them where? Who could be directing that kind of plan? Spencer doubted that the good old Admiral Ktonga knew about this level of stuff.

Spencer put his hand up to the back of his head where the plastic plate had been-the one the dragon had said was put there so he could get near the metal strip.

The plate was gone. It now felt like he had a skull and hair and everything was back in place. Thank you, little gold ball. One less thing to worry about.

He tapped his false left arm. Still false. Too bad.

At least he had his head back, and one good arm that was healed as well.

But he was still getting nowhere in what he was supposed to do next, where he was supposed to go next.

Was the very fate of the universe still in doubt? Now that he had the joined egg and strip, could he stop that little problem?

Or had he made it worse?

He needed some answers. And standing in the middle of a meadow on some strange world, pleasant as it was, just wasn't going to get him those answers.

He looked around. Which way should he go?

A thought crawled into his mind like a shouted suggestion from the back of a crowded room. “Why not have the answers come to you?”

“Yeah,” he said out loud. “Why not? Worth a try.”

He took a deep breath and then yelled into the wind, “Carol! Come to me!”

The air rippled for a moment and then Carol appeared about ten feet from him, totally nude and dripping wet. Shampoo coated her hair and she had a sonic shaver in one hand and a leg stuck up in the air, like it had been braced against something while she shaved her legs.

She toppled forward onto the grass like a pink lawn-Flamingo in a slight wind. She tried to catch herself, but all that was cause her to roll over onto her back and her legs to splay upward and out.

He couldn't help but watch. She was a great-looking woman with a great body. Then, the fake Patsy's remarks about his lovemaking came back to him and he wondered what Carol thought of his abilities.

She scrambled to her feet, staring around her, then at him, clearly angry and embarrassed. “Give me some warning next time, would you?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Yeah, I'll bet you are. You are always trying to crawl into the shower with me.”

He waved off her comments before he could think back to those good times.

“So where are we?” she asked. “And you look different somehow. Older. And what new spy trick did you use to get me here?”

“I'm not sure I'm not dreaming.”

“Great,” Carol said in that way that told him he was about to get yelled at, “I'm dripping wet and getting cold and you're not sure you're not dreaming.”

She tried to use her hands to brush what was left of the water and the soap out of her hair.

Spencer stared at her, wondering why she looked so damned good, besides the wet body and total nudity. “What did you mean I should migrate up the shells of the universe?”

She paused and looked at him like he had lost his mind. “I never said anything like that.”

Suddenly her words from a moment before reached his mind. He looked older. And she certainly looked younger. She had mentioned that he was always trying to get into the shower with her. Present tense. Granted, he had done that a lot, right up until the birth of their first child.

And it was his fondest memory of her, those early years together.

He made himself stop and look at his wife. This wasn't the woman he knew. This was a younger version of her.

“So,” she said, “you want to tell me what the Admiral has you doing now and why this trick in yanking me from my shower?”

“I can't,” he said.

“Yeah, that secret stuff.” She shook her head in disgust.

He knew what he had to do before he really screwed up any timeline. He turned into the wind and shouted, “Return!”

Carol was gone, replaced by an odd memory that hadn't been there before, of her being mad at him after one of his missions because he took her from her shower. It had caused a huge argument between them because he had claimed he hadn't done it. The argument had ended up with passionate sex and the conception of their first child.

So because he was standing here in this meadow, looking for answers, their first child had been born years earlier. If the purple guys would have killed him earlier, would he not have sired that kid?

He forced himself to focus back on his present problem. Thinking about time paradoxes always gave him a headache.

It seemed that traveling between dimensions, through folds in the fabric of space, also meant that time could be traversed and changed as well.

And, it seemed, he could do it.

Somewhere, in the back of his head, he heard a faint voice.

Well, duh.

He ignored the sarcasm and tried to focus on the problem. He still wasn't sure just how he would get answers, besides shouting into a slight breeze. There had to be another, more efficient way.

Maybe that distant small voice in the back of his mind that had caused him to bring Carol here had a few answers.

“What dimension am I in?”

He knew, without hearing the words, the answer.

There was no way to number or name the dimensions because there was no starting or ending point as humans liked to think of such things.

Before the egg and strip had melted into him, that kind of abstract thinking would have given him an even larger headache than time travel questions. Now he half understood, at least as much as he thought he might understand.

It was a damn big universe.

No kidding said the distant voice in his head.

He suddenly felt silly just standing in the middle of a meadow having conversations with himself. He needed something to sit on, to give himself time to think.

“Chair.”

As he said that, he thought of his favorite bar stool back when he was just an underling working his way up through the service.

The bar stool appeared. No bar. Just the stool in the middle of the grass-covered meadow.

He made sure it was secure on the rough ground, then climbed on and sat down. He was starting to feel godlike with this ability to make people and things just appear.

Oh, great, human ego.

He ignored the voice in the back of his head and allowed himself, to think about all the amazing things he could do with such power. Finally, he pushed those thoughts away and focused on the task at hand.

Glad that's over. Ughhh.

He needed to migrate up the shells of the universe, to stop everything from falling apart, to save the life of every being in his and many other dimensions.

Oh, yeah, sure. He could do all that, then have lunch.

Not likely, the little, distant voice in the back of his head said.

“Aren't you getting bored just sitting out here by yourself?” a real voice said from behind him.

Spencer spun around and fell off his bar stool, catching himself on his hands and knees in the soft, warm grass. Above him stood a large, yellow-robed man with a white beard and mustache that seemed to go out in all directions, giving his face a cat-like look. The robe was stained with green and red, as if the man couldn't eat without spilling his food.

Spencer sprung back to his feet, keeping the bar stool between him and the being that had suddenly appeared. “Who are you?”

“My name, in your language and dimension, would be Galahad. I'm what you and most other races of beings would call a Guardian.”

Well, this guardian really needed a tissue. He had dozens, if not hundreds of white hairs growing out of his nose in all directions, some of them up to two or three inches long. And a lot of the nose hairs were covered with all kinds of green and red slime. And more slime was coming out of his nose with every breath.

The little voice in the back of Spencer's head said clearly, Don't mess with this guy.

Spencer couldn't tell if the voice was his or coming from his new golden ball residents.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, oh Supreme One,” Spencer said, nodding in his most formal manner. He figured there was no point in not giving this guy all his due and playing along for the moment, even if he did look like the reincarnation of Snot-man, a super-hero of Spencer's wild, youthful imagination.

“Wow!” Galahad the Guardian said, laughing. “What a crock of ho-haw. Lucky I don't have a body in this dimension or your nose would be dark brown.”

Spencer opened his mouth and couldn't think of a thing to say that didn't involve the Guardian's nose hairs and green snot. The voice in the back of his head kept repeating, Don't fool around with this guy.

Finally Spencer laughed and said, “Sorry.”

“So,” Galahad said, “what can I do to help you? You only get me once and then I'm out of this story and you're on your own. I'm only here as a favor for an old friend anyway. I find these dimensions in this neighborhood boring and smelly.”

The Guardian licked his upper lip with a bright red tongue that caught a large number of the things crawling from the Guardian's nose. A few dropped onto his robe.

“How about a few answers?” Spencer asked, trying to keep his stomach from rebelling. “Like what exactly is this ball that's melted inside me?”

“It's a gateway, built by who-knows-who that allows you to fold time and space and dimensions at your will. It's an artificial way of helping lower beings such as yourself do what comes naturally for my kind. But the power supply is limited, so make sure you're where you want to be when it runs out.”

The long speech caused even more green slime to come from the being's nose and the guy took another lick.

Spencer looked away at the trees, trying to take in what he had just heard without thinking about what he had just seen.

Finally, Spencer managed to take a deep breath and ask his next question. “So, what does it mean by migrating up the shells of the universe?”

Galahad shrugged as if the question was almost below him. “Universes inside every time line, when described in a simple three-dimensional way, look like rounded bowls stacked upside down on one another. By many races at different levels of advancement, they are called shells.”

“How do I migrate up them?” Spencer asked.

“Damned if I know,” Galahad said. “With that artificial device inside you, you can go just about anywhere, or any time, you want. You have been given amazing, godlike powers.”

“So, who is messing up the universes around where I originated?” Spencer asked.

The Guardian looked at Spencer with round, yellow eyes. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“Why would I not want to know?”

“Because this being is the leader of a very large group that intends to merge a number of dimensions. His name is feared by billions of different beings.”

Spencer just shook his head and made the mistake of again looking at the Guardian's nose hair.

“Bob.”

“Bob?” Spencer asked.

“Bob,” the Guardian said. The name sort of echoed around the meadow and the Guardian almost shuddered. “He's not a very nice being.”

“Fine,” Spencer said. “So I have to stop this Bob in some way or another to save my dimension and all the beings in it.”

“You go it,” said the Guardian.

“So how do I find this Bob?”

The Guardian pointed to his right. “Go that way, migrate to your heart's content along the bowls, or plates, or shells. But you're going to need a lot of help to get there and after you find Bob.”

With that, laughing harder than before, the Guardian vanished, taking every spot of snot with him, including the one that had stuck to Spencer's chest like a big, ugly garden slug.

Spencer again found himself alone in the peaceful meadow with the slight breeze and the bubbling stream. Far in the back of his brain, he could feel a large sense of relief. It seemed that the golden ball that called his body a home was afraid of the Guardians.

The faint thought reached him. Too stupid to be afraid.

“I resent that,” Spencer said out loud.

Now even the back of his head was as silent as the meadow around him. He climbed back onto the bar stool and sat thinking. Ignoring the man's nose issues, Spencer had managed to get a few questions answered. But the last words of the Guardian were stuck in his mind. He was going to need a lot of help.

So, help he would get.

If he was going to go on a quest, travel up the shells to find Bob, he needed a team around him, the best team he that ever lived.

“Patsy!” he shouted into the wind, making sure he had the image of her the last time he saw her in his mind. “Come to me.”

She appeared in front of him and without an instant's hesitation had a weapon in her hand faster than he could see it happen.

“Spence!” she said after scouting in every direction around her. “What is going on here? And just where is here? And how did you do that?”

Spencer held up his hand and motioned her to move a few steps to her right. “I'll explain it when everyone gets here.”

“Ramon,” Spencer said again into the wind, “come to me.” Again, Spencer made sure he was thinking about Ramon the last moment he had seen him so he would get the most current dwarf, not an old copy.

The Black Dwarf appeared, laying on his back, naked. Clearly he had been in the middle of a very compromising situation that he was enjoying immensely, if the state of his body was any indication.

It took Ramon a moment to adjust to his new reality. Then he stood quickly, not bothering to cover himself from Patsy's wide-eyed stare and large smile.

“Sorry,” Spencer said, not sure what to make of what he had just seen. It seemed that all his friends had more sexual assets. “Clothes and weapons for Ramon.”

A pile of clothes, and knives and guns appeared beside the Black Dwarf.

“How are you doing that?” Patsy asked.

Spencer ignored her.

“I assume that before I kill you for this,” Ramon said, “you're going to tell me what's going on and where we are at.”

“When everyone is here,” Spencer answered.

Then he focused on the last moment he had seen Plibix's mother on Goldmeadow, the moment before she died. “Fairy, come to me.”

The little green fairy appeared in the air, fluttering. She bared her teeth and hissed at Spencer.

“Now I'm impressed,” Patsy said. “She was dead.”

“Still is at this point in time, whatever this point is,” Spencer said. “Let me get Plibix here and we can all talk.”

He thought about the dragon the last moment he had seen him, then said, “Plibix, come to me.”

The large dragon appeared, still in a killing mood.

The dragon spun around, saw Spencer and started at him, then suddenly stopped as the green fairy darted in front of him.

It was like a bad romance story as the two locked gazes, then went for each other in ways that fairies and dragons are not supposed to go at each other.

“Oh, get a hotel room,” the dwarf said, clearly disgusted as he finished dressing. “At least I started in one.”

Like the nose hairs on the Guardian, Spencer tried not to look at what the fairy and the dragon were doing.

After a moment, Patsy stepped forward to face Spencer on his bar stool. “All right, you want to tell us what this is all about?”

“Our mission to save our dimension,” Spencer said. “It's going to take all of us working together to make this happen.”

“And what happened to the egg?” Plibix asked, stroking the fairy perched on his arm. “And the gateway you took from me?6”

“I didn't take them,” Spencer said, staring at his old friend. “I kept them away from you. Their power was eating at your brain.”

“I know it was,” Plibix said. “But you didn't answer my question. What did you do with them?”

“They merged and then flowed inside of me before I could take them to someplace safe.”

All four of his team stared at him like he had just lost his mind.

“You have the egg and the gateway, the thing of power we had all been looking for on Leonardo?” Patsy asked. "Inside you?"

Spencer nodded.

“And you are controlling their power?” Ramon asked.

“I am,” Spencer said. “And my control is only just beginning. I hope to get better. But in the meantime, I think I have found a few answers as to who is causing our problems and how to find him.”

“So, who's doing this?” Patsy asked. “And how did you learn about this? Through your new powers?”

“My new powers are good only as long as the power source that was in the egg lasts,” Spencer said. “And I learned about all this from a Guardian.”

“They say no one has seen a Guardian,” Ramon said.

“What's a Guardian?” the dragon asked.

The fairy hissed at him and Plibix nodded, then said nothing more.

“How did this Guardian appear to you?” Patsy asked, her voice almost in a hush, like she was standing in a big church and afraid to talk too loudly.

“An old cat-like humanoid with a nose hair problem.”

Patsy nodded. “Okay, you talked to a Guardian.”

“I know I did,” Spencer said, annoyed.

The little voice from the golden ball in the back of his head said, If this is your help, the universe is doomed.

“So, who does this Guardian say is causing the problems?” Plibix asked.

“And how do we find them?” Ramon said.

“We go that way up the shells of the universe,” Spencer said, pointing at a spot between the dragon and Patsy.

“Shells?” Patsy asked.

“A term that Carol used. I'll explain later. But I think we'd better get started.”

About time, the voice in his head said.

“You still haven't told us who we are trying to stop.”

“Bob,” Spencer said.

In unison, the dragon, the dwarf, and Patsy Klein said, “Bob?” The fairy just hissed.

“Bob,” Spencer repeated. “Now, is everyone ready? We have shells to migrate before we sleep.”

Without waiting for an answer or more questions, he opened a fold of the universe with his mind and slipped them all up a shell in the direction the Guardian had indicated, leaving his favorite bar stool sitting alone in the middle of a meadow on some unknown planet in some unknown dimension.

Their journey to save the universe from Bob was starting.

Or continuing.

Or just about to end, depending on which time, which dimension, and which planet you were looking at it from.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 13: The Search for Bob
by Jody Lynn Nye

Spence could find only one phrase that would effectively describe the situation in which his band of galactic defenders found themselves: a cocktail party.

In his long experience as an agent, and in the years that followed, cocktail parties could be as dangerous as other assignments, if not more so. The friendly semblance of one's fellow guests, even one's hosts, could conceal malign or fatal intent.

He had seldom, however, wandered around a venue like this one. The room, into which he and his group had emerged with a spectacular burst of light, drawing the temporary attention of the inhabitants, stretched out into a visual infinity. The walls, if they were walls, were midnight blue, dotted with tiny silver stars. If this were indeed a cocktail party, it must be considered a successful one, because it was so dark he could see only the silhouettes of the other guests, and only those who were relatively close to him. They clustered in small groups. Each bobbed gently up and down in the animated fashion of beings everywhere making polite conversation. Occasionally, one would break away and move to another group. There was one difference to cocktail guests on Earth: a matter of scale.

“They're enormous!” Ramon hissed, somersaulting to Spence's side.

And so they were. Spence squinted at them with his cryoptic eye. He estimated that they averaged over a hundred and fifty meters in length, but massed no more than the dwarf beside him. They were shaped rather like an Italian Renaissance artist's rendition of the clouds representing the four winds, but translucent to the point of ghostliness. Their substance was suggested by a golden shimmer here, a gleaming line there, etched upon the dark canvas of their surroundings.

“Let's see if we can make contact.” Spence kicked in the air as though swimming, thrusting himself forward until he was within a few meters of one of the beings. He reveled in the freedom of movement he enjoyed. Gravity in the gigantic room was almost nil, but the atmosphere was a pleasant-smelling mix of gases that contained more than sufficient oxygen for the Earth-dwellers to breathe. The creature gave Spence a surprised glance as it noticed him beside it. Spence looked down at himself, and realized he was glowing like a neon beer sign. Spence kicked again to close the distance. He had no real idea how to be suave to a being that was hundreds of times larger than he, but he would try. He had had experience with dozens of life forms, and had access to a memory-chip containing polite phrases and gestures from the hundreds of intelligent creatures with whom the Space Service had made contact. He was formulating how to open a conversation with the cloud creature when it jerked away hastily before he made contact with one of its thick, translucent pseudopods.

“Back off, Spence. You're scaring the hell out of it,” Patricia ordered, her voice tinny in the vast room. “We don't want them to attack!”

Spence obeyed her instructions, windmilling his arms so that his momentum carried him upward and away in a wide parabolic arc. The creature he had been close to took fright at his sudden change of direction, and shot away toward a group of the luminous beings as if taking shelter with it. Small bursts of lightning passed between them, the local equivalent of conversation. Spence regretted alarming the being.

“What are we doing here?” Ramon asked, as the group huddled into a small knot as far from the other party-goers as they could get. The dark-skinned dwarf floated eye to eye with the others. For once his lack of height offered him no disadvantage.

“This is the next shell of the universe,” Spence said. “We have to find a way to pass through it.”

“Yeah, if you swallow the pop-psych that Carol spouted, which I am not necessarily buying,” the dwarf replied, with a cynical grimace.

Spence looked around. “Maybe one of the beings here will have information we can use to defeat the Guardians.”

“And maybe they're ordinary citizens of this sphere, minding their own business and enjoying a drink, which I wouldn't mind doing myself. What do you suppose the local analog of coffee looks like?”

“Stop it, Ramon,” Patricia said. “It cost Carol something to push through the dimensional barriers to communicate with Spence. He may not be the brightest bulb on the tree, but he has a point. Having the egg move us through the shells of the universe suggests it generates a tropism for the solution to our problem. You said it yourself to Spence, Plibix. ‘Nothing is random, and nothing is an accident.’ The odds are good that there is something here we need, or need to know.”

“But how do we find it?” Plibix asked. “My instruments pick up only energy signatures. Mostly mild ones, like those static interchanges between the cloud-beings. That might mean we're seeking information, or an event that will coincide with our presence here.”

“If we could only communicate with them,” Spence said, “but we don't exactly fit in here.” His voice was all but swallowed up in the vastness of the chamber. This was no way to carry on a covert operation to save the universe, or at least the galaxy.

“I can,” Plibix said. The little dragon glanced at the others. “If you could follow my instructions, the rest of you might be able to, too.”

“I'll try anything,” Ramon said, defiantly. “These people make me feel small, and no one ever makes me feel small.” The little fairy that was Plibix's mother hissed, showing its tiny teeth, as if agreeing with him.

Plibix concentrated. Spence knew that the dragon could change shape at will to disguise himself as a variety of life forms, but he had never witnessed the transformation. Plibix took a deep breath and held it. He took another one. His leathery face wrinkled as he concentrated. He took another breath, then another, not releasing the previous breaths. With each inhalation, he grew larger and larger. The others kicked away to give him room. By actual count, it took him a hundred and fifty-seven increasingly deep breaths before he was the size of the natives. His substance thinned out as theirs had. The dragon was now the ghost of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade float of Plibix. In a few moments, his features smoothed out and became lobular, until he closely resembled the cloudlike beings. Spence almost applauded the feat.

“See?” Plibix boomed. Electrostatic charges shot out of the cavern of his mouth, along with the smell of week-old salami that enveloped all of them in one gust. “No problem. Now, you try!”

“Now, how the hell are we supposed to do that?” Patricia asked, sourly. “If I hold my breath like that I'll just pass out.”

“Never mind,” Spence said. If there was ever a call to use the limited energy of the egg-and-strip, this was it. He pointed his hand at Patricia. “Be a cloud-being!”

Whoosh! Before she could open her mouth to protest, the slender woman expanded hugely. Before her face lost its human planes, she shot him a look of exasperation.

Spence, pleased, turned to Ramon. “Be a cloud-being!”

“Whoooo!” Ramon chortled, blowing up in his turn. Instead of pale gold, his substance was a handsome antique bronze, but he was the same size as Patricia. “This is terrific! I love it!” The armory which the dwarf concealed in his bagaloons and under his cloak appeared briefly as sharp protruberances, but they faded into the soft outlines as well. Spence turned his energy to the fairy, then to himself. The fairy, as bad-tempered as always, tried to bite him. Instead of pain, Spence felt only a crackle as their substance mixed momentarily.

“That's better,” Spence said. “Now, let's spread out and mingle.”

Now that they were the same size as their hosts, the SpaceOp agents were no longer feared and avoided. Instead, as each of them approached a small group, it would open up slightly to make room for them. Spence had done deep-cover work in his career, but this was the most incredible experience he had had yet. Gravity was less of a force than ever. His body relaxed as his muscles and nerves spread out, and he realized for the first time in his adult life he had a complete absence of pain. The relief he felt in what had been his one good hand and was now a shuttle-sized bulb of cloud told him he had been ignoring the onset of arthritis. The plastic plate at the back of his head was all but forgotten, though he was even more aware than before of the blob of golden energy inside his skull. For the first time in his life he was unhampered by physical constraints. He enjoyed it.

The tiny measure of electricity generated by his neurons was sufficient to send him breezing gently toward the first group of cloud-beings.

The natives bobbed around him, as though asking questions. His attenuated aural nerves, far more sensitive than before, picked up faint sounds from the cloud-creatures that had been inaudible to him before. They were mere semes, the smallest possible particles of meaning, but he couldn't combine them into words or concepts. He activated the translation chip, but got nothing out of it but static. It had never heard speech like theirs before, either. He offered polite comments, which passed from his huge mouth as sparks of light. The largest cloud-person dipped its mass, and emitted some sparks in return. Spence couldn't translate the reply, and hoped he had not said anything that could be constituted as obscene in this culture. Feeling awkward, as though he was trapped in a dream of showing up late for a math test for which he had not studied at a school where he had never been before, without books, a pencil or his clothes, he moved on to the next group. They, too, offered pleasantries that he couldn't translate. Spence hung on for a while, hoping that he would pick up a little of the mode of communication.

Patricia was the only one of the group who was not at loose ends. With her talent for language, she passed from one group to another in this huge, star-filled chamber, if chamber it was, interacting far more actively than any of the others. Spence was more inclined to think of it as a postulatum instead of a real place, the place within the mind where ideas were formed. Here, many minds were meeting. He hoped one of them would have information that would allow them to break out of this shell and go on to the next one. Bob was waiting for them.

Spence began to feel hopeless, as he moved on to yet another cluster of party guests. This was the third ‘shell’ through which the small group had passed, in their efforts to find the avatar known as Bob. Spence had taken to heart Carol's admonition to him to break out of his everyday mindset. The first shell he had broken had to have been against believing only in the dimensions of time/space that his senses could perceive. His conversations with Para and Para had done a lot to convince him that there were others. Now, after jumping incredible distances in moments, using only the power of the egg-and-strip artifacts, he couldn't deny that preconception had been smashed for good.

Next had come the perception of space and time as real. This next ... who knew what shell came next? All he knew was that he must break through them all, like a chick hatching out of egg after infinite egg, to save the galaxy from a power that was great enough to destroy it as easily as it could create others.

True, he was furnished for the battle with godlike powers.

The main trouble with having godlike powers, apart from not knowing how to use them, how long they will last, or indeed, how extensive ‘godlike’ really was, was the jealousy factor. Plibix, with all his awesome command of matter and space-time, kept sending the fish-eye Spencer's way. Frankly, the situation was Plibix's own fault. He had offered the jeweled egg to Spence many times in the past. Spence had always refused it, up until the last argument. He had instinctively feared opening the bauble—hah! Bauble. What a small word for what the egg had contained. Together with the moebius strip the glowing sphere inside it proved to be a gateway for the Guardians to pass through dimensions, a feat out of the reach of most beings inhabiting said dimensions.

Yet, Plibix had already proved he could do that. Therefore, there had to be considerably more powers commanded by the egg-and-strip than dimensional travel. Did he, Spence, have time to learn them all before he needed to use them to try to defeat the all-powerful Guardian known only as Bob?

Spence was inclined to think not. If only two little artifacts were involved in destroying Bob, wouldn't someone have tried it in the past? Galahad, the mucus-stained Guardian, had been pretty clear that Spence was out of luck if he thought two little techno toys would be sufficient to take out the biggest, baddest dude in reality. This wasn't the Death Star they were talking about here, with a handy hole in the screen through which any small fly could buzz. Such was his command of matter and energy that mere thoughts could generate whole malign dimensions. What could a dwarf, a translator, a dragon, a fairy and a semi-retired semi-cyborg do against something like that?

He wished that he could confer fully with the others. They seemed to be lost in their own thoughts. The long trip through the cosmos had given them all too much time to think. Spence was troubled by the silence, since they had all been accustomed to spaceflight taking a long time in between star systems. Modern travelers had had to overcome the impatience of old, or they would have gone insane on their first journey from Earth to Alpha Centauri. In fact, the Interstellar Transportation Board still maintained counseling kiosks in every arrival port in every system, even though they were considered obsolete. The possibility still remained that insanity could flare up at any point, and it was the duty of the transit board and every major carrier to treat it when it threatened. Spence felt that he could use a little of that counselling at the moment. He was also concerned about how much power each transit cost the egg. The snot-nosed Guardian had warned him that the energy it contained was finite. He hoped that he and his band of defenders would be able to come up with the needed resources to accomplish their mission. He wished he had asked the Guardian more pointed questions. That was the trouble with having a one-time avatar: you always came up with the questions you needed to ask after he was gone.

After floating aimlessly for what seemed like eons, Spence sensed Patricia returning to him in a great hurry.

“Let them touch you,” she whispered, sparks flying, “but school your thoughts! Only think what you want them to hear!”

Curious, Spence turned to join a group set a few dozen kilometers apart from the others. He drifted close to the most active of the beings. It regarded him mildly with eyes several meters in diameter, then put up a pseudopod to allow contact. Spence brushed it gently with the mass that represented his left hand, thinking hard about Guardians.

Their limbs met, and melded. Spence was so surprised that he nearly flew backwards. No wonder the first cloud-being had refused to let him touch it. He got a feeling of slight discomfort mixed with pleasure at the contact. He knew that he generated surprise, as well as curiosity. He moved his free hand to touch his own chest, and the limb folded into the mass of his body. He could feel his own heart beating in his expanded palm.

/Pleasure-fear-pain/ came from the cloud-being he was touching.

His Space Intelligence Service training kicked in at once, and he dragged his brains back from the bucket on Goldmeadow where they'd drifted. He concentrated on stabilizing his emotions. The cloud-being evinced more interest.

/Origin?/ it asked him, or rather felt at him. Spence sensed-saw an empty void, a request for information.

As clearly as he could, Spence pictured the Sol system. He was proud of it. A youngish star, smallish, yellow, but home. He homed in on Earth, picturing that lovely blue-green marble as best he could.

/Star/ the cloud thought at him. He got an impression of majesty, decay and regret. An old system. Without context he had no way of judging where it was. Perhaps if he got a good look at the satellite of origin.

/Planet?/ Spence sent back.

/Star/ the cloud insisted. Spence gawked, and lightning shot out of his mouth. They came from inside the star? Where were they now?

/Star/ said the cloud.

Spence looked around him, fascinated. They couldn't be in the core of a star in his reality, but this place was several dimensions removed from that plane. He wished he had time to investigate the concept further, but there wasn't time.

/Name?/ the cloud asked him, showing him an image of himself, wreathed by deep curiosity.

/Spence. Yours?/

A molecular diagram introduced itself into the place where thoughts formed in Spence's own mind. /Sodium Hydrochloride/

/Er, nice to meet you/ Spence sent a sensation of cordial acceptance.

/Likewise./

Well, they'd gotten the initial pleasantries out of the way.

/Guardian?/ Spence thought, as firmly as he could.

/Mucous/ A picture formed in his mind of an explosion of nebulous particles, some of which adhered to the ‘camera lens’ in his thoughts. Spence smiled. They had met Guardians here.

/Here now?/ He tried to picture the whole room, with a traveling void in which a guardian like Galahad could fit.

/Void/ No.

/How do they arrive?/

That evinced a much more complicated reply than before. Spence felt his consciousness crushed into a singularity and shoved toward the northwest quadrant of the ceiling. Or, perhaps, he noted, surveying the object to which Sodium Hydrochloride was pointing, moving toward that quarter would naturally crush one into a singularity. What he had taken for stars upon entering the room were indeed stars, not decorations, and the black spot in the distance was a small black hole, probably light-years from his present position, if one was judging by fourth-dimensional thinking. The Guardians used that black hole as their gateway to transit to this place. Spence had no intention of using that portal. The egg at the back of his skull agreed. There was one more thing he had to ask of his new acquaintance.

/Bob?/ he inquired.

The cloud beast jerked. Fear, surprise and revulsion came through their joined limbs, along with a blast of lightning that crackled through Spence like St. Elmo's fire, searing his nerves with white-hot agony. Through the pain Spence tried to glean Sodium's meaning. The cloud being had certainly heard of Bob, but had never seen him. All he did know was that he didn't want to have anything to do with Bob, and he sincerely advised his new friend not to, either.

/Sorry to hurt you/ Sodium added, since Spence was radiating pain broadly enough to reach the others in their little circle.

/No problem/ Spence groaned. /I asked for it./

Spence hastily disengaged and signed to his companions to meet him in an empty quarter of the sun's heart.

“Interesting people,” Patricia said, after he had brought them up to date on his discoveries. “When are you going to tell us that you think we should go through that black hole to find Bob?”

Spence was taken aback. “I had no intention of going through it,” he protested.

“I think we have to,” Ramon said. He pointed. “Did you see that guy?”

“What guy?”

“That one. The one with the blue bellflower.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. Look.”

The bronze pseudopod pointed past the inflated mass of Spence's nose. He followed it to see a very pale, shaggy-looking cloud-beast sailing lazily upward in the direction of the dark spot on the ceiling. Spence focused on the tiny, bright spark at the creature's heart. He activated the telescopic lens of his artificial eye, and zoomed in until he could see it clearly. It was a fresh bellflower, looking like it had just been picked on McDougal II.

“It's a trap,” Spence said.

“Maybe. Maybe it's a sign. We're here looking for signs, aren't we? If that's not a sign, I'm a pedigreed Pooperanian.”

“How are we going to follow him?” Plibix asked. “Even I keep away from black holes. They'll tear us apart. And there's no guarantee we'll all come out of it at the same time. The egg might protect you, but the rest of us will be galactic toast.”

“I have an idea,” Spence said. “Remember what the Pooperanian said? We're looking for ‘one who is many.'”

“So what?” Patricia asked.

“Haven't you noticed that your hands pass right through your own body? In our dimension, physics dictates that two bodies cannot share the same space. Here, the molecules are so far apart that they can! I think that we could meld together into one form, all five of us, so that when we go through the black hole, we'll all be together. We face that ‘one’ as an equal. The egg will protect us all.”

The fairy hissed, but Plibix looked thoughtful. “It could work,” he said, stroking the substance that would have been his chin.

“I've been thinking about it since I noticed the phenomenon,” Spence insisted. “I believe, though I won't be able to prove it until we meld together, but I believe that we will be able to tap into one another's experiences, talents and thoughts. I believe that by pooling our resources, we could become the champion that will be able to take on Bob and save the universe as we know it.”

Patsy raised an eyebrow the size of a jellyfish. “High-falutin’ theory.”

“He might be right,” Plibix said. “I noticed that while I was in contact with some of these cloud people I could understand galactic structure as they did. We might be able to make use of each other's memories and talents.”

“I don't know if I care much for sacrificing my identity,” Patsy said. “I'm not wild about giving up biological integrity or privacy, even to save the galaxy's foundations.

Spence snorted. “You've had worse crap handed to you by the Space Service. What about the body cavity searches? What about the immunizations? What about the speed-learning course to memorize the entire Space Code of Conduct?”

Patricia shivered, the veil of light that was her vastly outspread body shimmering like a bead curtain in a windstorm. “That was five days of my life I'll never have back again. When you put it that way, I have had worse things happen to me. But is this the only way we can save the galaxy?”

“It's worth a try,” Plibix said, after confering silently with the fairy.

“I'm game,” Ramon said. “But the rest of you might end up addicted to coffee as badly as I am.”

“It's a risk I'm willing to take,” Spence said. “Let's try it. I think the best course would be to layer ourselves together, like an onion. I'll be at the core, with the egg-and-strip, powering our transit. I'll be inside Patsy...”

“Watch it, fellah!” she snapped.

“In a purely professional sense, of course,” Spence added smoothly.

“Then stop calling me Patsy,” she said.

“If you insist, Patricia,” Spence said, pointedly. “You'll handle communications for our combined selves. We'll have to put the fairy outside of Patricia, because I want Ramon next, since I freely admit that he's better with armaments than the rest of us, and, I noticed when we went cloudlike, far more heavily armed than the rest of us put together.”

“Ah, you peeked,” the dwarf said, with a grin. “This is dangerous. It's crazy. I like it.”

“And Plibix, you'll be the outermost layer. I want you to guide us, since you're the most experienced in negotiating between dimensions.”

Plibix shot a look of regret at the fairy, but he agreed.

Spence rolled his substance around the nebulous mass that represented the glowing blob of the egg. Radiating obvious reluctance, Patricia curled around him like a blanket. The contact felt good to Spence, for a moment, then he was bombarded by Patricia's inner thoughts. First came the insecurities. She had always done a good job of shielding them, but he was literally under her skin, bones, nerves and marrow in this state. She was afraid of screwing up, much as he himself was. She wasn't particularly afraid of death, but she hated the unknown. He had to deal with her pride, which buffeted his own insecurities backwards like an incoming tide, but he was struck by her intelligence, drive and courage. He had the comfort of discovering that she didn't really think he was as stupid as she frequently suggested—not quite as stupid, anyhow. She had real respect for some of the missions he had accomplished in the past, but she, like the others, were full of doubt about the inevitable confrontation with Bob. He wished that she had been more like the false Patsy. He missed the feel of her body, and her enthusiasm in their sexual encounters. He immediately got a wave of mortification and shock from her consciousness, and shamefacedly damped down his memories.

His fellows would also be able read his thoughts when he did that, so he had to school himself to keep the extraneous thoughts that always ran through his mind buried as deeply as he could. Patsy—Patricia—knew everything that he was thinking or feeling, too. The shock of assimilation would have been too much for them to deal with if they weren't on the most important mission of their lives. They were still arranging their emotional furniture in their shared mental apartment when the fairy's consciousness joined them. To Spence's surprise it had a simple and orderly mind. Its emotions were tied up in devotion to Plibix, flower-arranging, and dirt-track motorcross. Ramon was more easily accepted yet. He was a creature of appetites ruled by a strong intelligence. Spence immediately felt a craving for coffee that overrode every yen he had ever felt, including those of sleep or sex. Plibix threw a calm blanket over the whole, like healing skin covering nerve endings. True, Spence had to deal with the petty jealousy, lust, and a host of other intrusive elemental parts of the dragon's personality, but on the whole he was glad to have him there. Spence's confidence rose. They could do it. Just what ‘it’ would turn out to be, he wasn't sure, but he knew that they could. He sealed them all together with the power of the egg.

The Plibix mentality stated, “That being is nearly at the exit point. It is ascending to another level of the universe.”

“Can we follow?” Spence asked.

“We can try,” Ramon's consciousness said. “We've got to be careful not to touch anyone else before we get there. We can't tip anyone off what we have done, or that we're following that cloud-creature. Distance is our only protection.”

Throughout, the Patricia mind kept passing pleasantries, benevolent proton energy that passed for compliments, spun off with some force, that gently repelled approaching ‘guests’ and kept them out of immediate reach, crackles of pleasurable static wrapped around a molecule or two of solid matter. For the first time Spence was able to understand the murmurs of sound the cloud-beings were emitting.

/Strange people/

/Yes. Hardly said a thing, and now they're going./

As they sailed upward toward the singularity, Spence found the synthesis to be exhilarating. Folding himself into the substance and minds of the others made him stronger than he had ever been. He felt smarter with the addition of the others’ expertise at his fingertips. Now that they were also ‘one who is many,’ as the prophetic Pooperanian in the pseudo-Stonehenge had told them to watch out for, he thought, clearing the spit from his mental lips, he hoped it would give them an advantage that they had not had before. Together, they must find the meme that preserved their galaxy. He felt doubt, fear and resolve from his companions.

“Here we go,” Spence thought, as they crossed the event threshold that separated the inner star of the cloud-beings from whatever came next. They all braced themselves against the whiplike force, concentrating their combined attention on what lay before them.

A shame that they never thought to look behind them.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 14: The End of Some Things, The Beginning of Others
by Jane Yolen

Behind.

The rear.

The End.

It all begins with ending, Spence suddenly thought, before mentally chastising himself: You're sounding like a Pooperanian oracle! He had a brief vision of himself lying on an altar, long tail shivering, mouth already swollen with bellflower poison. It was difficult to get that image out of his head. And with five of his colleagues in his brain as well, it was getting mighty crowded in there.

And now random thoughts began peppering his gray matter, and he was having trouble sorting them out. Little dark flash points that were more questions than answers.

“Coffee,” his inner Ramon said. “Where can we get coffee?”

Pliblix snarled. Probably meant, “Why did we decide to cross this event horizon?”

The fairy, unaccountably, giggled, which was disconcerting.

And Patsy ... well Patsy was the one asking most of the questions. They all had to do with travel arrangements. Thank God he'd never married her. Honeymoon logistics would have been a nightmare.

Spence was on his fourth or fifth iteration of those questions and snarls and arrangements, looking forward, scanning the passing starstreams, when something struck him on the back.

He looked behind for the first time.

Bad move.

Behind him there was a deep rip opening up, blood red, like a dueling scar on God's face. Redness, blackness, nothingness, yet an opening. What had struck him was a flap of that opening.

He had forgotten—they had all forgotten—the first rule in their business: Always cover your rear. Or maybe they'd been made to forget it. Spence tried to remember what they'd been eating at the giant cloud party. Maybe the hors d'ouvres had been soaked in betany from Asher 7, or lovelace from Califunny's second moon.

Stop thinking, do something! Spence told himself. He tried to shout, to let the others know that the shells of the universe were exploding or imploding or falling apart behind them, but all that came out was a whimper.

Patsy's voice in his head whispered, “Oh shit, Spence!”

He turned back. Looked at what was in front of them. Boy! Was she right! They were being exploded out the anus of the universe and into somewhere else. Floating into the great cesspool that was unknown space. A black hole. Images of kaka-ness closed about him.

Spence shuttered his eyes and let go. It was the only sensible thing he could do.

Swirling ... eddying ... he was spun around and around; soon he was dizzy with it all. He could only concentrate on one thing—not losing his lunch. He wondered how the others were faring, hoped to hear Patsy's voice again with a somewhat more upbeat message, but the only sound that he could distinguish was a crazed beating at his temples.

Temples. Altars. Pooperanians. The asshole of the universe. Somehow it all fit. He drifted with no sense of time. A minute, an hour, a day—the swirling seem to go on and on and on.

And then suddenly he landed, spongy earth beneath his feet. He counted to three before opening his eyes.

“Hell's bells!” he said aloud.

It was true. He was in a meadow of bellflowers, about 40 klicks across and thirty long. Acres of blue flowers. A small wind puzzled through the meadow which set the flowers ringing. It was like being in the center of a change-ringing contest. If eight bells could ring 40, 320 changes, he thought, wondering where the figures had come from, how many changes could this huge field ring?

He knew at once that he wasn't on MacDougall II. Above him, in a blue-green sky, three moons swung like a badly designed backdrop for Swan Lake. None of the MacDougals had three moons. Certainly not in an isosceles formation.

The wind suddenly stopped and the bells fell silent.

Spence took a deep breath and turned to look in the opposite direction. Another formation of moons, five in a dipper configuration edged over the horizon.

Nothing made sense. The one thing he'd been sure of was that bellflowers only grew on MacDougal II. And here the stupid ground was covered with them.

The wind swept through the bellflowers once more, and the ringing started up again. Spence put his hands to his temples. It was enough to drive a man mad.

“Where are you?” he called to his cohorts, the ones in his head and their actual bodily counterparts which were nowhere in sight. “All come to me!”

He waited, then waited some more till the bells fell silent again. Then he called a second time. And a third. But whatever had worked before no longer had the power to command. Not a one of them appeared, and his head was as silent as the bells. If Patsy and Pliblix, the savage fairy, and Ramon were inside, they weren't saying anything.

He figured that before any new wind took up permanent residence in the bellflower meadow, he better get as far away from it as possible. Otherwise he'd go mad. Turning to his right, he sprinted toward the nearest edge, thinking: Now I know how that damned cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz felt going across the poppies. Though he knew he was hardly a coward. Just a working operative trying to make ends meet. And to meet the end of this particular puzzle.

Of course as he ran across the field, he created a small wind of his own and the ringing bells followed him all along the way.

It took a good—actually a bad—fifteen minutes to run across the damned meadow. What he thought he could see hadn't taken in the dips and bumps and gullies, all hidden beneath the blue flowers, and all of which managed to make the end of the field a good deal longer than 30 clicks away. Neither of his legs seemed to be working quite right, and as he ran he developed a horrible stitch in his side. A slipstitch, he thought, because it keeps slipping up and down my side. But finally he made it, though he was gasping for breath when he reached the end of the flowery carpet. There he tripped over something—a rock, a root, he was never to be sure—and found himself sliding down a muddy slope. Bellflowers, he recalled, grow mostly in mud. He landed unceremoniously on the mucky bank of a dark river.

He bent down, put a hand in. The water was icy cold. His fingers immediately cramped.

“I'm not hell then,” he told himself.

“Don't be too sure of that,” someone close said. Someone close.

He knew that voice. He distrusted that voice. Turning, he looked to see Admiral Ktonga leaning against a rock under a willowy tree that wept leaves into the dark river. The admiral looked very much as he had when Spence had seen him last: black, burly, his crisp uniform festooned with medals and ribbons. In the fading light Spence could make out the blue collar and five-point gold star of the American Congressional Medal of Honor. He wondered briefly if the Admiral had gotten that for living through the plasma bomb explosion. He certainly hadn't been wearing that particular medal before. Suddenly shuddering, Spence remembered that the US had stopped giving the Medal of Honor out after World War IV.

“Admiral,” Spence said, as casually as he could under the circumstances. The circumstances being ears that were still ringing from the bellflowers, a still-aching stitch in his side, a hand that was half frozen from the cold river, and an increasing sense of disorientation. “Or should I call you Jim. Though I thought you were dead, Jim.”

The Admiral smiled slowly, his teeth whiter than any human's should be in the gathering dusk. “Not dead enough. And actually,” he said, “you can call me Bob.”

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 15: Mr. Spencer's Blues
by Pat Cadigan

Well of course Ktonga would show up now, and of course he would be Bob. Who else but Bob? Didn't see that one coming, no sirree—you should pardon the expression—Bob. Spencer closed his eyes briefly. “And the significance of this development is ... what?” he asked Ktonga/Bob wearily.

Ktonga/Bob's smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of mild bewilderment. “What the hell kind of a question is that?”

“It's—well—” Spencer floundered for a moment and then glared at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“What I mean is, after everything you've experienced since leaving my office, you're still talking like you think—no, believe—there's some inherent reason at work in the universe. Hello? Haven't you been paying attention?”

Spencer shrugged. “OK, I'll concede there's absolutely no rationality here. But the next shell could be different. And even if every shell is irrational, that doesn't mean you personally don't have some sort of intention. So, spill it—why does everyone believe the universe needs to be saved from you? Are you planning to impose something nefarious on this reality—like, say, coherence?”

Ktonga/Bob straightened up; there was a twinkle in his eye. “You got a problem with coherence?”

“If you have to ask me that, then you don't know me at all. Which, considering how this started out, shouldn't surprise me, I guess.”

“Oh, horseshit. You're the one who manipulated me into recruiting you in the first place. You're the one with the agenda—or you were. Didn't lose track in all the excitement, did you? Gotta watch out for that sort of thing. As a wise man once said, ‘If you can keep your head when those about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you—'”

“Oh, spare me—what do you think this is, a greeting card? Don't answer that,” Spencer added quickly.

Now Ktonga/Bob looked offended. “Hey, that was a classic poem—”

“Yeah, yeah, but it was also on the front of the card my kids gave me last Father's Day.”

“Means nothing here. This is a universe without greeting cards.”

Spencer looked around. “OK, that's something in its favour. But that in itself doesn't make me want to stick around any longer than I have to. And I sure don't want to stand around here in the dark. I don't suppose there's a five-star restaurant within walking distance?”

“No, but fortunately, I brought my car.” Ktonga/Bob made a follow-me gesture. Too tired to hesitate or even ask any more questions, Spencer did so.

* * * *

Using a small but intensely bright flashlight, Ktonga/Bob led him along a path down a grassy slope. Spencer could see more bellflowers growing here. There weren't many mature ones yet and not all of those budding were going to blossom. But a lot of them would, apparently enough of them to make their cultivation worth the effort to someone.

“Tulip madness?” Spencer said, speaking aloud without really meaning to.

“Pardon?” Ktonga/Bob glanced back at him. “Oh, right. Seventeenth-century Holland. Interesting, isn't it, all the various things that humanity felt was worth getting excited about, down through the ages. Fire. Tulips. Big Brother. Original recipe. The Beatles. Cosmetic surgery. Celebrity Big Brother.”

“And now bellflowers?” Spencer asked, deciding not to ask about any references he wasn't familiar with. Ktonga/Bob could probably give him a five-hour lecture on beetles and their importance to the rest of the insect world but he didn't need to hear it. And he certainly didn't want to hear about any family stories about Ktonga/Bob's big relatives, celebrity or otherwise. Especially if Ktonga/Bob thought they rated as something that all of humanity would get all excited about. What an ego.

Ktonga/Bob glanced over his shoulder at him again; despite the dark, Spencer could see the twinkle in his eye. “The bellflower was the first naturally-occurring instance of sound-generation in the plant world. Which is to say, not something produced by genetic modification. Did you know that?”

“I figured that was what you meant by ‘naturally-occurring,'” Spencer said, a bit testily.

“Good for you. Ah, here's my car, right where I left it. That's what I love about this world—absolutely no GTA.”

Spencer stopped short, staring at the vehicle in the circle of Ktonga/Bob's flashlight. “That's not a car. That's an egg.”

“Don't be ridiculous, eggs don't have wheels.” Ktonga/Bob tugged at his arm but he wouldn't budge. “Come on, man, it's just aerodynamic design.” He made a motion over the smaller front end to indicate airflow.

Spencer refused to be moved. “If I didn't want to carry the goddamned thing around with me, you can be damn sure I don't want it to carry me around, either.”

Ktonga/Bob raised an eyebrow at him. “But you are carrying it around, inside yourself.”

“All the more reason not to get in there,” Spencer said. “I might end up turning myself inside out sideways through my belly button.”

The other man made a painful face. “All kidding aside now, Spence, old buddy, think for a minute here. If you've got the egg inside you then you can't possibly get inside of it, which means this—” he slapped his hand on the top of the egg-shaped vehicle; immediately, seams appeared in it and a door swung open, revealing a standard and quite unremarkable automobile interior “—is not any kind of egg, let alone that egg.” He reached in, pulled out a seat-belt/shoulder-harness, and held it up briefly before letting it snap back. “See? Pure car.”

This only made Spencer even more suspicious. “I don't like it,” he said darkly.

“Oh, you'd rather walk a hundred klicks?”

“Is that the nearest restaurant worth walking a hundred klicks for? Or just the nearest restaurant?”

Ktonga/Bob stared at him blankly. “What?”

“I asked whether there was a five-star restaurant within walking distance and you said no, but you'd brought a car. Now it seems the car is an egg. I don't think I'd care to see your idea of a restaurant.”

“Right.” Ktonga/Bob's dark face was exasperated now. “OK, how about this, then—you know what a metaphor is? You familiar with the symbolism employed in ritual?”

Should have expected this, too, Spencer thought and rolled his eyes. “So what is my getting into that thing supposed to signify?”

Ktonga/Bob winced. “Well, let's see. This is a car, which is a mode of transportation so how about ‘intent to travel'. That work for you?”

“But it's an egg. It's that egg. I have to climb into it to get to the next shell?” The next eggshell, said a small voice in the back of his mind. He ignored it. “But I'm already willing to travel to the next shell. The ritual isn't necessary.”

The admiral shook his head. “Yes, it is. Otherwise you'll collapse with a fatal case of the psychic bends.”

Spencer hesitated.

“You need that explained, too?” Ktonga/Bob asked.

“No, strangely enough, I know exactly what you mean,” Spencer said. “And even more strangely, I believe you.” He started to get into the egg-car and then paused again, looking intently at Ktonga/Bob's dark face.

Brahma or Shiva? Or just Vishnu, patron god of Same Shit, Different Day? At one time, he'd have thought that was an easy one; at one time, he would even have thought that the answer was relevant to the ritual he had to perform, but now he knew better.

* * * *

The car drove itself while Spencer and Ktonga/Bob sat in the front seat. The windshield and other windows were slightly larger than a standard car's but there wasn't much to see beyond the hard-packed, dirt road directly in front of them illuminated by the egg-car's headlights.

“Because while we don't want to get all caught up in another sensory deprivation experience, we don't want a whole lot of distractions, either,” Ktonga/Bob said, noticing how he was peering intently through the windshield. “Psychic bends are nothing to fool around with.”

“I'll keep that in mind. Should I buy a psychic bathyscaphe, do you think?”

“I don't know where you'd find a dealership around here.”

The egg-car rolled to a smooth stop. Instead of the top swinging open this time, however, the car cracked in the middle just as if a giant, invisible hand were breaking it open; the front seat swung around and tilted Spender and Ktonga/Bob onto the ground without ceremony or warning. Spencer only just managed to land on his feet while Ktonga/Bob, obviously used to this sort of thing, managed a gymnast's tiptoe style dismount.

“Show-off,” Spencer accused him.

“Don't be bitter, it doesn't become you.” Ktonga/Bob turned him around and steered him into an elaborate wooden palace claiming to be Ye Olde Mille. Inside the lights were quite low—too low to eat by, in Spencer's opinion but not too low for him to see that none of the tables was occupied.

“Maybe we should keep going, look for a place with ostrich eggs in the parking lot,” said Spencer. “Those big-rig drivers, they know all the best places. Or so I've heard.”

“Shouldn't believe everything you hear,” Ktonga/Bob said, unperturbed. “Why don't you have a look at the menu?” He produced a large stiff folder and flipped it open under Spencer's nose.

Starters

Primordial Soup (Chef's original recipe)

One (1) Spare Rib (Chef's original sauce)

Unborn Egg in Cup (subject to availability)

Red Herring in Red Sauce

ENTRÉES

Eggs Benedict Arnold

Moebius Strip Steak with Multilayer Onion Rings, Bell-Flower Garnish

Meat Pie (25% meat, 75% filler)

Red Herring in Red Sauce

DESSERTS

Fairy Cakes

Torus Holes (Chef's specialty—better than doughnut holes!)

Bombe Suprise du Jour (Today's Flavour: Plasma)

Sweet Red Herring in Sweet Red Sauce

COFFEE

Ramon's Special Blend

SERVICE IS NOT INCLUDED

Spencer looked up at Ktonga/Bob, frowning. “Not a whole lot of choice.”

“No, but what choice there is is cherce. Now, you probably won't get that reference. It's from an old movie—”

Spencer nodded impatiently. “Yeah, yeah, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. ‘Not much meat on her but what there is is cherce.’ Choice, cherce, very clever. So? What do I care how clever you are? Ever since I walked into your office, all I've met are clever characters and a fat lot of good it's done me. Hell, Carol is cleverer than all of you put together and even she can't seem to dig me out of this quagmire. The best she could do was Migrate up the shells of the universe. Might as well be The answer is whistlin’ down the wind for all the help it's been.”

Ktonga/Bob raised his eyebrows, doing his best to look superior. “Actually, it's not whistlin’ down, it's blow—'”

“I know that, that's part of the joke,” Spencer snapped. “Not to mention that I'm trying to spare us a lawsuit here. I take back that bit about you being clever. Were you born this clueless or did you have to study?”

“My, aren't we in a snit. Have something to eat, you'll feel better.”

Spencer shoved the menu back at Ktonga/Bob. “No, thanks. Lost my appetite.” He turned to walk out of Ye Olde Mill and found himself staring up once again at a huge pipe organ, the very same one he had seen previously while in the company of Patsy Klein (or whoever she had been), being played by the same tall creature in black evening clothes. Almost human except for the extra arms growing out of his sides and chest, the extra arms he needed to cover all those extra keyboards.

Spencer's jaw dropped.

Quantum-entangled weaponry.

Unbidden, the idea bloomed in his mind along with an image of the universe folding, unfolding, and re-folding like origami. Points meeting points meeting points meeting points, brushing past each other and leaving no sign or evidence of the glancing contact that was enough to entangle them all with each other on the quantum level, entanglement that a quantum-level weapon could home in on. No sign or evidence except—

Blue...

Blue shift...

Blue Leonardoans...

Blue bell-flowers...

Abruptly, the almost-human creature at the organ paused and looked over its shoulder at Spencer. It had a bizarre, androgynous face with long, narrow eyes and an all but lipless mouth, which was smiling. “Now you're catching on,” it said. “I don't do requests so try to keep up.”

Before Spencer could think of anything to say the creature had turned back to the organ and resumed playing. There was still no music that Spencer could hear but he could feel it now. Or he thought he could. Not sound vibrations, exactly, or at least not the kind of sound he was used to. Not even sound outside the range of human hearing. This was sound outside the range of human experience altogether. Sound on the quantum level. The sound made by particles becoming entangled as a universe folded, unfolded, and refolded like origami, making layers that some might refer to as shells. And if you followed that sound, you could migrate up the shells of the universe.

Or was it up? Maybe it was down in some configurations and in others sideways. It would depend on where he was when the universe refolded, wouldn't it?

Spencer realized he was getting a stomach ache. He put a hand on his midsection and suddenly found himself holding an egg. No, the egg. The one that had been absorbed into his body earlier.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped.

“Are you sure you're not hungry?” asked Ktonga/Bob solicitously, turning him around. “Maybe just a light snack—a coddled unborn egg, say?”

Spencer folded his arms, trying to look casual as he tucked the hand holding the egg under his left armpit. “C'mon, after all we've been through you can't have forgotten that I don't like eggs.”

“Just coffee, then.” Ktonga/Bob took hold of Spencer's left elbow. “With an order of doughnut holes.”

“They're torus holes,” Spencer corrected him. “So, no. Make that extra no. I don't like to eat in any joint that can't tell the difference between a doughnut and a cup.” He turned back toward the organ and its maestro but the vision had disappeared, as he had known it would have. Had Ktonga/Bob also seen it—and heard it? Spencer couldn't tell—the man had a poker face that any card-player would have died for. Or killed for, rather.

“Doughnut holes. And not doughnut holes, torus holes, as you yourself just pointed out. Dammit, Spencer, what is your mishigas here?”

Ktonga/Bob reached for him and he automatically took a step back, keeping his arms tightly folded. The other man gave him a sharp, suspicious look, his eyes narrowing.

“What are you hiding?” he asked Spencer.

“Hiding? Nothing.”

“Bullshit. What have you got in your hands? Show me.” Ktonga/Bob advanced on him.

“Now who's the one with mishigas?" Spencer said, despairing as he hugged himself even more tightly. If he had been holding an organic egg, it would have broken.

“Come on, man, you didn't want it anyway.”

“I don't. Want what?”

“Aha! I knew it! Give it to me.”

Spencer turned away from him and looked around in desperation. There was nothing but the entrance to the restaurant, the reception/cashier counter and—

And sitting in a vase next to a big brass-coloured cash register, a beautiful single blue bellflower in a glass vase. Spencer flung himself forward, reaching for it with his free hand. The vase shuddered, tipped from one side to the other and then fell off the counter. Spencer made a grab, felt his hand close around a fresh, firm stem. The bellflower in his fist swayed and began to toll.

* * * *

The toll of the bellflower was also a sound that he felt in a way that he had never felt sound before, and although his experience was limited, he decided the bellflower made a sound more aesthetically pleasing than the organ. Perhaps because the organ was a construct and the bellflower was a product of nature. Organic. A non-organic organ and an organic flower. The universe is not only sillier than we imagine, it is sillier than we can imagine, Spencer thought. Wasn't that how the saying went? Or was he misremembering it?

He looked around and saw that he was back in the meadow of bellflowers, holding the one he had plucked out of the vase in the restaurant as if he were picking a bouquet.

No, correction: he wasn't in the meadow. The meadow was sweeping past him, on its way to elsewhere as the universe refolded. It looked like a giant frame of film. It was followed by an image of his own living room decorated for a quaint old historical holiday Carol told him had been called Christmas. Why she had wanted to celebrate it—a flash of blue caught his eye as it passed him, a blue the exact shade of the bellflower in his hand, a blue that was part of a high-definition photo of some planet taken from outer space. Carol had given the photo to him for a Christmas present.

There was a disturbance under his feet. He looked down to see what he had been standing on but he had already lost his balance. He fell over sideways, landing on the hard, dark dirt of the only habitable continent on Leonardo.

“Dammit, why here?” he demanded of no one in particular and the universe in general.

Abruptly he saw the bellflower still in his hand, still looking as fresh and alive as before; it nodded, seemingly at him. I don't do requests so try to keep up, okay?

“Okay,” he said, barely aware of speaking aloud, and took hold of the blossom with his free hand. It was a large blossom and he had to compress the petals a bit to keep the bell from slipping out of his grasp. The thing was surprisingly firm, much firmer than it looked. But that only made sense, he thought; anything that could produce a sound would have to have more than a little substance to it. And while he was on the subject, just how did it do that anyway? “Let's have a look at your little noisemaker,” he said, turning the bell to look inside. He felt the stem harden as it tried to resist the movement; at the same time, the blue petals deepened in colour, like a late afternoon sky slipping into evening.

“Dammit,” he muttered, staring into the darkness inside the bowl of the flower. He'd never known bellflowers did this sort of thing. Did they all do it or was this one a sport? He shifted position, trying for a better angle to the daylight but the interior of the blossom only seemed to get darker.

Frustrated, he sat up and clamped the stem between his knees, intending to probe the bell with an exploratory finger and then paused. He was more likely to do damage than to learn anything that way. Or maybe the bellflower might damage him. Granted, this seemed far less probable than the other way round but stranger things had happened and he had the prosthetic limbs to prove it.

Still holding the stem between his knees, he wrapped his other hand around the blossom and tilted it up toward his face again. The slight resistance it had been giving him lessened. Maybe because it was dying? He felt a sudden, sharp burst of fear at the idea.

Blue...

Blue shift...

Blue Leonardoans...

Blue bellflowers...

And quantum-entangled weaponry, yes. He'd been through that already—

The night-colored bellflower in his hands stared at him like a dark eye.

Blue, blue shift, blue eyes. Who did he know with blue eyes? It was hard to tell these days, people could have any colour eyes they chose.

But all humans are born with blue eyes. Remember?

Spencer frowned. Yes, but so what?

Blue ... blue ... blue ... and quantum-entangled weaponry.

All right, what did he know about quantum-entangled weaponry? What did he know about quantum anything? Think, he commanded himself.

And think fast, added a small distant voice in his mind, because the dark is rising.

When you look at things on the quantum level, you never just look at them. To look at them changes them.

Now he winced. Oh, God, no, not the old chestnut about if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it does it make—

The thought cut off as his gaze fell on the bellflower blossom in his hands. Bracing himself inwardly, he leaned forward and put his eye directly to the bowl of the flower as if he were looking into a telescope.

Blue...

Blue shift...

Blue Leonardoans...

Blue bellflowers...

Indigo.

Indigo exploded soundlessly around him or he around it, he wasn't really sure which. Some unmeasured interval passed, a second or a millennium's worth of millennia—either or both. There was no way to measure. During that time, if you could call it time, Spencer never actually lost awareness but he hadn't held onto it, either. The only thing he held onto was the bellflower and he was still holding it when he came back to conscious, sequential thought in the indigo darkness.

He still had both hands cupped around the blossom, but the opening was now turned away from him. And try as he might, he couldn't turn it toward himself.

Of course he couldn't. Because he was now on the other side of the bellflower.

He could feel it ringing; he could feel the universe folding, unfolding, and refolding.

But you can't see any of it because you went through the bellflower and out the other side. Outside. Because when you look at something on the quantum level, you change it. But to look at something on the quantum level, you have to be on the quantum level yourself, which means it changes you. And if you happen to have a charge identical to the thing you look at/change, the resultant cancellation—

,,oH cHRIST',, Recneps screamed soundlessly. Ktonga hadn't been exaggerating about events on Leonardo jeopardizing the galaxy—he had been understating it. The gateway wasn't a portal to other universes.

It was a portal to the anti-universes.

Anti-matter.

And the key to the gateway was quantum-entangled with blue—not just any blue but the blue bellflowers and the blue Leonardoans.

And now that he knew, what in bloody blue hell could he possibly do about it?

,,I thought you,d never ask,, anti-said another voice behind him.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 16: Conversation With His Future Self
by Michael A. Burstein

Kendell Spencer turned around. He didn't recognize the person he was looking at, although the man looked somewhat familiar.

“What did you say?”

“I said, I thought you'd never ask.”

“But I didn't say anything out loud.”

“I know. But I knew what you were thinking. You were wondering what you could possibly do about your situation.”

“How did you know that?” Spencer moved back slightly, studying the other man's facial features. “You look familiar,” he said.

The man smiled. “I should,” he said.

A sudden thought came to Spencer. “Are you an antimatter version of myself?”

The man shook his head. “No, as a matter of fact. I'm not the anti-you. I'm the future you. If I was the anti-you, you'd have recognized me immediately. From the mirror.”

Spencer considered what his other self had just said. “I suppose that makes sense. Except for the part about you being me from the future.”

The other Spencer smiled again, a smile of superiority, which annoyed Spencer. “Ah, yes, I remember thinking that. But tell me, after all you've seen, is it so hard to believe in a little time travel as well?”

Spencer thought back to the otherworldly meadow, when he had somehow managed to summon a past version of wife Carol. “I suppose it's possible,” he said. “But if I did come back from the future to talk to myself, I probably had a damned good reason to do so.”

“You did. I mean, you do. I mean, I do. I mean, we do.” Still smiling, the future version of Kendell Spencer shook his head. “Time travel. The language just isn't built for it.”

“I agree. This is ridiculous. I can't think of you as me. How about if I call you—”

“—Spencer-2? That was what I decided to call my future self back when I was you. So go ahead and think of me as Spencer-2 if that helps.”

Spencer studied his future self's face for a moment, then sighed. “Spencer-2 it is. So why are you here?”

Spencer-2 took a deep breath. “Because I think it's about time someone explained to you what's going on.”

Spencer nodded. “I agree. It's about time someone did. I just didn't expect it to be myself.”

“Who else can you trust?”

“Point taken,” Spencer muttered. He looked around. “I just wish we had something to sit on.”

“Hang on,” Spencer-2 said. He waved his hand, and suddenly they were surrounded by mists of blue, indigo, and violet.

“What just happened?” Spencer asked.

“I brought us inside the bellflower,” Spencer-2 said. “We're floating on the edge of the quantum foam.”

Spencer waited, and when his future self didn't say anything else, he barked out, “So?”

“So think of a chair and one will appear out of the quantum uncertainties.” Spencer-2 shook his head. “Do I have to think of everything? Wait a minute—I guess I did.”

“You're kidding? Just think of a chair?”

“Why not? You've done this sort of thing before.”

Spencer shrugged, furrowed his brow, and thought as hard as he could of two chairs. Suddenly, two padded comfy chairs emerged from the purple mist that swirled around their feet. Spencer's jaw dropped.

“Yep, just think of a chair,” Spencer-2 said. He walked over to one of the chairs and gestured at the other. “Shall we get comfortable?”

The two Spencers sat down, facing each other, while more of the blue, indigo, and purple mists swirled around them.

“You're disappearing into the fog,” Spencer said.

Spencer-2 waved his hand again, and the mists between them parted. “Better?”

“If you call my sitting opposite from my future self inside a bellflower better than being stuck in an antimatter universe with no idea what to do next, I suppose it is,” Spencer replied.

“Ah, yes, the sarcasm,” Specner-2 said. “It's not going to work on me, Kendell. Remember that I know you better than you know yourself.”

“I don't doubt it,” Spencer said, “assuming you really are who you claim to be.” He paused. “You promised to explain to me what's going on. So explain already.”

Spencer-2 nodded. “I will. Let's go through this step by step, shall we? Everything began when Admiral Ktonga summoned you to Goldenmeadow for a mission.”

“But Ktonga just turned out to be Bob,” Spencer said.

“Let's not jump ahead of ourselves, Kendell. I'm trying to lay this out step by step to help you understand exactly what's been going on.”

“Okay, fine. It's probably time for a recap anyway.”

Spencer-2 smiled. “So I'll go on. Ktonga had received a transmission from a garrison officer on Leonardo, who had discovered something that, and I quote, ‘threatened the very foundations of the galaxy.’ The officer was found dead the next day with a blue bellflower in his hand. So Ktonga sent three operatives, one at a time, to Leonardo—Ramon Boganda, Plibix the dragon, then Patricia ‘Patsy’ Kelvin—to find out what was going on. All three disappeared, so he summoned you to Goldenmeadow, and you volunteered to be the next agent in.”

“I was drafted, more like it.”

Spencer-2 shrugged. “I know. After all, I was too. But so much has happened since then that I can't bring myself to feel upset at Ktonga anymore. Shall I go on?”

Spencer gestured. “Please do.”

“The moment I—sorry, I mean you—left Ktonga's office, things started to go wrong. Because you, Plibix, and Patricia had your own plan. You didn't take the assignment. Instead, you sent someone else in your place, and you went to meet with Plibix the dragon and his mother the fairy. But you refused to take the egg.”

“And then the plasma bomb went off.”

“Yes. You were lucky to escape with your life. In fact, to save your life, Dr. Jen Roper had to put a plastic plate in your head.”

“I never trusted her.”

“You were right not to, but we're still getting ahead of ourselves. You and Plibix left for MacDougal II, the only planet where the blue bellflower grows naturally. But Plibix went on his own mission, and Patsy joined you instead.”

“Undercover.”

“Well, of course undercover. You're operatives. Anyway, on the ship to MacDougal, you reviewed what you knew of the history of Leonardo. A quantum-entanglement weapon had been used to kill human colonists who attempted to land on Leonardo, and no one knew who was protecting the planet's native race from you.”

“It couldn't have been the Leonardoins. Their best weapons were spears.”

“At any rate, when you and Patsy docked at the station above MacDougal II, you opened your stateroom door—”

“—and I had that vision of the weird guy playing the pipe organ.”

Spencer-2 nodded. “That still gives me chills when I think about it.”

“So don't. I've tried not to.”

“Of course. Anyway, the vision faded, you and Patsy investigated the planet, and found nothing.” He paused. “And in the midst of all this, you slept with Patsy, even though you're married.”

“It wasn't Patsy! It was Jen. She was trying to get into my head.”

“She succeeded,” Spencer-2 replied. “Things were rather surreal on MacDougal.”

“That's what Ramon Boganda said.”

“Yes. He showed up when you and Patsy were working undercover jobs in the communications building. He was supposed to be protecting Carol and the kids.” He paused. “It was all about payback against Admiral Ktonga and the Space Intelligence Service. You had managed to keep your real loyalties very clandestine when he summoned you. He had no way of knowing that all of his top operatives were now working for Lindsey Parapara.”

Spencer felt livid. “You're making me sound like a traitor! Parapara created SpaceOp because of Ktonga's mismanagement of the Space Intelligence Service.” He paused. “If you're really the future me, you'd understand.”

Spencer-2 nodded. “I do. You're thinking of our first wife, Laura, killed years ago by an enemy operative. But as much as it pains me to say, that's not important right now.”

“Then what is?” Spencer asked with a snarl.

“The fact that everything started to go weird on MacDougal. That was when Ramon warned you and Patsy that the barriers were breaking between dimensions, between universes.”

“That was also when Plibix faded away, right before our eyes,” Spencer said.

“And shortly afterwards, the real Patsy—excuse me, Patricia—showed up. All that time you had been working with an impostor.”

“As I said, it was Jen.”

“But you didn't know that until Patricia showed up.”

Spencer waved his hands. “Forget that. The important thing is that we went after the bellflower smuggling ring. And then Carol managed to get in touch with me across the dimensions.”

“And revealed to you more than you realized,” Spencer-2 said. “That the Leonardoins had discovered a way to turn thought into reality.

Spencer looked into the distance, at the indigo swirls. “I was trapped in an otherworldly universe with some creature...”

“And you broke yourself out.”

Spencer snapped his fingers. “And I met up with Parapara, who revealed to me that she was really two eons-old aliens, Para One and Para Two, whose race was experimenting with our reality. She somehow teleported me to Leonardo to find the device that allowed her race to tinker with my universe, so I could destroy it.”

“And you got shot.”

“But I made it to a shelter. And then I found the device.”

“Not before the universe started to warp again,” Spencer-2 said. “You found your past changing. And then you ran into Plibix again, who still had the egg.”

“But I left Plibix. I went to that meadow. I met that Guardian, who told me that Bob was behind it all. And I used the power of the egg to summon all my allies to me to fight Bob.”

“Well, we'll get to that in a moment. At any rate, your plan to defeat Bob almost worked too. But you were separated from your allies, surprised from behind by Admrial Ktonga, who turned out to be Bob. He took you along with him, and eventually you got away from him. And then you fell through the bellflower.”

“And then you found me and here we are.”

“Precisely.” Spencer-2 leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. “Do you understand now?”

Spencer shook his head. “Understand what? None of this makes any sense.”

“Finally!” Spencer-2 shouted with obvious glee. “You understand. You're ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“For the explanation. Of what's really been going on behind the scenes, from the day Ktonga summoned you to Goldenmeadow.”

And then suddenly Spencer-2 vanished.

* * * *

Damn it, Spencer thought. Just when the answer was within my grasp.

He pushed himself out of his chair and walked the few steps over to the other chair. Indentations still marked the cushions, and they felt warm to his touch.

What do I do now?

Wait a second! Spencer-2 had said that this place was filled with quantum foam, and all Spencer had to do is think of something and would appear. He had done this before, when he had summoned his SpaceOp allies to assist him.

He sat back down in his own chair and concentrated on summoning his future self out of the time stream. And suddenly Spencer-2 reappeared in the chair. He looked different, though. He had a full beard and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Spencer-2 yawned and stretched. “Ah, that's more like it. Thanks, Spencer.”

“I did it,” Spencer said, amazed at his own abilities.

Spencer-2 nodded. “Yep. You did. I knew you could do it, even though it took a month.”

“Month? It's only been a few minutes.”

“Time travel, remember? I've been gone for a month. Nice long vacation with Carol and the kids, now that all this mishegoss is over.” He smiled and sighed contentedly. “Something for you to look forward to, if you survive.”

“Why did you disappear in the first place?”

Spencer-2 scratched his ear and looked away. “Ah. Yes. Well, sorry about that. Eddies in the time stream.”

“Who's Eddie?”

“Not Eddie, a person. Eddies. Currents. They swept me away. I couldn't get back until you summoned me.”

“Well, before they take you away again, could you finally explain why things have been so surreal ever since Admiral Ktonga summoned me to Goldenmeadow? My life was never like this when I worked for the Space Intelligence Service. Or even when I changed my loyalties to SpaceOp.”

“Okay, I will. But I have to go back a little further.”

“Whatever you need to do to make sense of this whole thing,” Spencer said, leaning back. “I'm all ears.”

Suddenly, Spencer's ears grew to enormous proportions as the rest of his body began to shrink. Spencer-2 sighed. “You've got to be careful what you say inside the bellflower, Spencer. Want to fix yourself?”

Spencer thought of himself as normal. His ears stopped growing and began to shrink, and the rest of his body expanded, until finally he was himself again. “What I mean is, I'm ready to listen.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Spencer-2 took a deep breath. “In the beginning, about thirteen point seven billion years ago, the universe was created.”

“Wait a moment! You have to go back that far?”

“Don't worry. I'll be skipping most of those billions of years soon. But yeah, I have to go back that far to explain what's going on.”

Spencer shook his head. “Fine. What does the birth of the universe have to do with recent events?”

“Very simply, when the universe was born, it wasn't alone. A myriad number of alternate universes were created along with it. Including one singular universe, whose structure was composed of antimatter instead of regular matter.”

“I think I already know this.”

“Yes, but what you don't know is that the antimatter universe's history paralleled your own. Every event that happened in your particular universe also happened in the antimatter universe. Every single person who was born, lived, loved, and died in your universe had a counterpart on the antimatter universe.”

“That's statistically impossible.”

“No, it's just statistically unlikely. With a practically infinite number of positive matter universes around, it was inevitable that the antimatter universe's timeline would parallel one of them. It just so happens to have been yours.”

“But that means—”

“Yes, it does. There's an antimatter version of you around. When you first met me, you wondered if I was the antimatter version of yourself. I'm not, but there is one. And for lack of a better name, we can call him the Anti-Spencer. And it's the Anti-Spencer, not Bob, who's the villain behind everything that's happened to you.”

“You have got to be kidding. If the antimatter universe is just like mine, why would the Anti-Spencer be after me?”

“Yeah, I doubted this part of the conversation too,” Spencer-2 said. “But here's the missing piece. It's true that the antimatter universe played out just like your matter universe. But in the end, there was one significant difference.”

He stopped talking and looked off into the distance. “And what was that difference?” Spencer finally asked.

“Sorry. I was hoping to spare you, and therefore me, some bad memories. But I guess I have no choice.” He paused. “You remember when Laura died?”

Spencer remembered vividly. “She was killed during a mission for the Service,” he said softly. “Which is why I joined SpaceOp.”

“Yes. Well, the Anti-Spencer took the death of his Anti-Laura a lot more seriously. He left the Service completely, rebuffed SpaceOp's offer, and became a physicist. A cosmologist, to be exact. He studied time travel, hoping that he could figure out a way to go back in time and undo his wife's death.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“It is dangerous. Mucking about in the time stream can cause the universe to fall apart. Think about what's happened to you. But to make a long story short, the Anti-Spencer discovered that he couldn't travel back to just any point in time. The equations only allowed for him to view the creation of the universe. And so he got it into his head that if he could understand how the universe was created, he could recreate it in a way that would keep Anti-Laura alive.”

“That doesn't sound like me at all.”

“It isn't you. The problem was that the parallelism wasn't perfect. The antimatter universe's balance was just a little bit off, and it was the death of the Anti-Laura that tipped it over.”

“There's no way Laura and I are that important in the grand scheme of things,” Spencer said.

“Somebody has to be that important. It just turned out to be you.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened was that the Anti-Spencer discovered that his universe was not the only one in existence. He actually witnessed the creation of the myriad positive matter universes, and realized that he could harness their power for himself, provided he destroyed them one at a time. But he can't do that without first taking over and destroying the positive matter universe that most closely resonates with his own.” Spencer-2 paused. “And that's our universe.”

Spencer shook his head in disbelief. “This sounds like the plot of a bad comic book.”

“A very good one, actually,” Spencer-2 said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Neither did I,” Spencer-2 said, “but don't worry, you will. The Anti-Spencer realized that there was only one way he could break through to our universe to confront you. And that was by a combination of a blue bellflower and the quantum entanglement weapon being used to protect the Leonardoins. He had no way of getting to you once he breached the barrier, so he had to figure out how to get you to come to Leonardo. He started by manipulating reality on Leonardo, frightening the garrison officers there. His plan was to spook them so much that Admiral Ktonga would be forced to send you to investigate. But there was a problem. By the time the antimatter version of Kendell Spencer came along, you had already left the service. So the adventure he set you on wasn't a simple one, because with every attempt to get you to Leonardo, he knew you would resist. So the Anti-Spencer had to continue working behind the scenes, manipulating reality off its most probable courses, until it brought you here.”

“Hold on a second,” Spencer said, shaking his head. “You mean everything that I went through, all the bizarre, surreal experiences I had, all the revelations of who was actually manipulating my life—that was all fake?”

Spencer-2 nodded, then stopped. “Well, not quite. It wasn't fake. You really did live through all that surrealism. But what you didn't know at the time was the it was part of a bigger battle. The Anti-Spencer was manipulating your reality, and subconsciously you were manipulating it right back. But because you didn't know who you were really fighting, you didn't have a chance to defeat him. Now you do.”

“Because my future self came back in time to tell me.”

Spencer-2 laughed. “Yeah, well, think of this as the last surreal moment before reality reasserts itself. Because once you defeat him, the universe will hopefully return to normal. You'll remember everything you've been through, but you'll be back at home with your family, before this adventure takes place. And since the crisis on Leonardo won't have happened in the first place—”

“—then Admiral Ktonga will have had no reason to summon me to Goldenmeadow in the first place.” Spencer pressed his hands against his temple. “My head hurts.”

“Time travel will do that to you.”

“It's not just the time travel. It's the multiple realities.”

“Sorry about that. Just one other thing. When you do defeat the Anti-Spencer and return home, be sure to look up a scientist named Milton Pilevsky. He's the guy who invented—well, will invent—the time travel device that allows me—and by me, I mean you—to come back in time and warn yourself about the Anti-Spencer.”

“Pilevsky, got it,” Spencer said. He jumped out of his seat. “Well, let's get on with it. Where is this villain?”

Spencer-2 stood up and waved his arms. “Hold on! Be careful, or you might summon him too soon. You don't want to confront him here inside the bellflower.”

“I don't?”

“No. He's strongest when inside the bellflower. In here is the last place where you want to confront him.”

“Well, where do I want to confront him, then?”

“Inside his own universe. The antimatter universe. He's weakest when there, and you're strongest, because you can use the anti-Leonardoin quantum entanglement weapon, and he can't. He can only use the one in your universe.”

“I don't know how to use that weapon.”

“Sure you do,” Spencer-2 replied. “Here's all you need to know about it. Thought determines reality. At least, until you get the universe stabilized once again. That'll put an end to multiple realities and wanton time travel.” He paused. “Good luck. I hope you survive.”

The words time travel echoed in the back of Spencer's mind, and a question occurred to him. “Wait a minute,” Spencer said to his future self. “If you came back in time to warn me, and you're me, that must mean I survive, right?”

The future Spencer looked glum and shook his head, and Spencer felt a chill run through his body. “I'm afraid that the quantum entanglement doesn't guarantee that. It's possible for you to die, leaving me a potential echo of your future self. But I will tell you this much—if you do manage to get back to this time and place, you'd better remember exactly what I told you, because you're going to have to tell it to yourself. And don't forget to carry this on vacation for when you get summoned back here.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny gun, and handed it over to Spencer.

“What is this?” Spencer asked as he took the gun.

“A matter/antimatter blaster. In case you don't get to the quantum entanglement weapon in time.”

Spencer studied the blaster. “It looks like a toy.”

“It's not. It's tied into the resonance between matter and antimatter. If you're nowhere near the anti-weapon, then the moment you spot the Anti-Spencer, fire this blaster. It's the one advantage you have over him, and he's not expecting it. If you fail to defeat him, you might fall into a stalemate and never get out of your quantum loops.”

“Enough already,” Spencer said. “I got it. Face him in his home court, use the Leonardoin weapon, and if I can't do that, then fire. So now, future self, where do I find him?”

Spencer-2 pointed. “Go through that portal to the anti-universe. It'll take you where you need to go.” He paused. “And Kendell? Please do your best to end this mess. Bring it to a conclusion as soon as you can. I'm counting on you.”

Spencer and Spencer-2 waited in silence for a few seconds, and then Spencer-2 spoke again. “Um, Kendell? That was an exit line. I need you to send me back. Carol's waiting.”

“Oh. Um. Sorry.” With a thought, Spencer sent his future self back to the future.

“Well, that was surreal,” he said to himself. “I hope this works.” He holstered the weapon and took a step toward the portal, when a voice from behind froze him in his tracks.

“Not so fast, Commander Spencer.”

Spencer turned around slowly and found himself facing a familiar-looking man. In one hand, the man held a blue bellflower. In the other, he held a plasma pistol aimed straight at Spencer's heart.

Damn, Spencer thought. He was too late.

The Anti-Spencer had arrived.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Chapter 17: For Whom the Bellflower Tolls
by Tobias S. Buckell

Spencer faced the version of himself that had come from the anti-universe. Then he jumped to the left. The anti-Spencer fired his gun, but Spencer dodged behind a bush. It sizzled and went up in smoke, and Spencer ran behind a rock.

“Seriously,” the anti-Spencer said. “This is ridiculous. Don't make this any harder than it has to be.”

With another dash Spencer took cover behind a tree, but one that he'd conjured up.

“I saw that,” the anti-Spencer said. “A whole tree just appearing out of nothing is a bit of a giveaway.”

Spencer took off again. If he could just get an angle on the anti-Spencer and shoot him, this would all be over. But then the anti-Spencer stepped out in front of him. “Stop. We could do this all day, and I'll just get very tired of it.”

The anti-Spencer had the drop on him. The strange-looking gun he held pointed unwaveringly at Spencer.

But it didn't shoot.

Spencer moved his hand towards the holster, where he could reach for the gun his future self had given him.

“Uh uh,” the anti-Spencer said. “I'd rather you not shoot me right now.”

Spencer paused. “Then we're at a bit of impasse, aren't we?”

The anti-Spencer laughed. “Really? Because I'm pretty sure I could shoot you right now before you'd have a chance to draw on me.” He waved the gun.

“Okay,” Spencer said. “Why don't you?”

The anti-Spencer smiled. “You've been doing a lot of running around, a lot of moving from point to point, with people telling you what's happening, but little detective work of your own.”

“You mean like you standing there waving a gun in my face, and telling me how things are now?”

The anti-Spencer laughed. “Exactly. Look, I don't want to play twenty questions, but I will say this: when you were in the Special Forces, did you just stand there with a dumb look on your face and let people tell you wherever they wanted? Because you've been talked to an awful lot of late.” Spencer flashed back to what he'd done in those days. Memory trawls. They'd shoot the suspect, and once dead scan the brain. Of course you could only access memories in sequence, watching them as if living through them. Once you had the memories trawled and on a computer you could fast forward through, but the process was complicated. Spencer remembered spending days and days digging through memories of operatives and suspects.

If he got the drop on this Spencer he looked forward to trawling the man's memories.

Spencer already figured himself for dead, so he tossed an idea out. “Tell you what, I'll play your game if you holster that gun.”

“So you can draw and shoot me?”

“If we're both Spencer, we should draw at the same speed, it'll be a suicide attempt.”

“Bull,” the anti-Spencer said. “I know you well enough to know that you'll draw on me.”

“Fair enough. I had to try.” Spencer reached into the air and pulled his favorite barstool out of the air and sat on it.

“Damn good thought,” the anti-Spencer said, and he drew the same barstool out of the air.

That made Spencer pause. It was his favorite barstool. Carol had given it to him. Of course, the anti-Spencer supposedly never married Carol, right? He had a different timeline since ... well.

“So you're saying people have been giving me the run-around.”

“I'm not going to lead you around, Spencer, you need to do some thinking. For example, when did all this weird stuff start happening to you?”

Spencer thought about that. “Since just after that plasma bomb.” That's when the plate got put in his head, and when he'd started seeing space and time altered in the corridor of that spaceship, sleeping with Patsy who got shot by Patricia.

“Exactly.”

“So what's happening?” Spencer asked. “Are you saying there is no anti-universe, that I'm not the one who is going to save the entire universe from certain destruction.”

The anti-Spencer laughed. “Just listen to that. Doesn't that sound arrogant? You, Kendall Spencer, are going to save the entire universe. You might be the best SIS agent out there, but get over yourself.”

Slightly offended, Spencer stood up. “It could happen.”

“You sound like a little kid. There really is a Santa Claus,” the anti-Spencer mimed in a high-pitched voice.

That hurt. It had taken young Spence a long time to get over the realization that Santa hadn't existed. “Okay, you make your point.”

Gun still trained on him, the anti-Spencer stood up as well. “Listen, Spence, if I'm anti-matter, then how come I'm not exploding right now?”

“We're in the quantum foam,” Spencer said.

“Right...” the anti-Spencer smirked. “Toss me an object from your pocket, let's see if I explode.”

Spencer rooted around and found a crumb. He tossed it at his opposite and winced.

Nothing happened.

“That doesn't mean anything,” Spencer said. “It could have been changed by the quantum foam.”

“Right, you keep saying that, but it doesn't mean its true. Come over here, I have a little experiment I want to try. Let's touch.”

Spencer shook his head. “You're insane.”

“Oh come on. If we blow up you kill me, right? Then you save the universe!”

“And I kill myself,” Spencer protested.

The anti-Spencer paused and sighed. “Look, I'm you, right?”

“Right.” Kinda. Spencer wasn't sure. It had been a long day.

“Do you think I look suicidal?” the anti-Spencer asked.

“No...”

“Tell you what, point your gun at me, I'll point mine at you, we'll reach out and touch. Trust me, nothing will happen.”

“So you're not anti-matter?” Spencer asked.

“Obviously not.”

Very carefully the two men walked toward each other and touched index fingers. Nothing happened.

At first.

Then everything around them fell apart, cascading in shards and pieces until only Spencer and the anti-Spencer stood in a grey room.

“Oh God!” Spencer groaned. “Don't tell me it has all been a dream!”

“No,” laughed the other Spencer, as Spencer realized he could hardly call the other him the anti-Spencer. “Not a dream. You're in a simulation room, tied to your neural pattern. I had to get you to turn the damn thing off somehow.” Spencer decided to call his opposite number ‘Kendall.’ Kendall waved the gun at the door.

Spencer walked through. Massive arched windows peered down on the planet of Goldmeadow. “What are we doing here?”

“SIS headquarters. This is where it all began,” Kendall said. “Remember arriving?”

Now Spencer frowned, because he didn't. Something was missing. “What's happening to me?”

“The whole story?” Kendall asked. “Even if you really don't want to hear it?”

“Please.”

Kendall looked out of the window down at Goldmeadow. “There are pieces of you and me left all over this damn galaxy, aren't there?”

Spencer nodded. “I know that all too well.”

“And what for?” Kendall cocked his head. “What were we doing down on those planets?”

“Stopping alien insurgents.”

“Indeed,” Kendall said. “All those pesky odd-looking aliens with their blue and green skins that dared inhabit lush planets we wanted for ourselves. Do you really think a spear throw warrants an orbital bombardment? Why is that galactic empires get to just roll over everyone while we square-jawed heroes run around killing the natives for looking at us wrong and everyone just shuts up and cheers us on?”

“You, we, I, went native?” Spencer stared.

Kendall looked coolly at him. “What did you use to call them? ‘Nards?’ An intelligent species whose only offence was to inhabit real estate, bombed. It's a shame they had something to bomb back with, huh?”

“A real shame,” Spencer said.

“Oh, don't be sarcastic with me.” Kendall smiled. “Anyway, here is the missing puzzle piece: if I'm not the anti-Spencer, then who am I?”

Spencer frowned. That was a good point. “A clone?”

Kendall shook his head. “No buddy, you are the clone.”

A long pause, and Spencer laughed nervously. “No. That can't be.”

Kendall nodded. Then he picked something out of his pocket. A blue bellflower. “I'm going to tell you the secret. The bellflower, it's just an amazing thing. Do you know what string theory is?”

Spencer shook his head.

“Well,” Kendall said. “Some eggheads say that the universe's building blocks, on the very, very small scale, aren't atoms, but way deeper down that that, tiny vibrating strings that make up all matter. And the blue bellflower, played just so, can effect the very strings the universe is made of. The Leonardans used them to send us a message: stay off their planet.

“Now they're hard to get to vibrate just so, and to get enough of them together. But the effect is just amazing.”

“That's what could undermine the whole galaxy, isn't it?” Spencer said.

“Yes,” Kendall said. “Exactly.”

Spencer grinned. He'd found it, he'd solved the mystery.

“You're thinking you found it,” Kendall said. “But you already did once. See, I'm not lying to you, you are my clone. I helped the Leonardans fire the bellflowers on the Navy positions. Spencer, the Navy is moving to help clear the way on lots of other worlds all throughout the galaxy. Who knows how many more will have to be wiped out or give up their planets to prevent being wiped out? Remember Plibix, and the fairy? You didn't think the last dragon-man of his species, one wiped out by the Navy, would work happily for us without some resentment? Plibix and I formed a group of humans and aliens working to perfect the bellflower weapon, and now we're going to ship them out all over the galaxy to every threatened race.”

“Plibix too?”

“Grow up, Spencer, he was the last. You came into this wanting nothing more to do with these bastards and suddenly you defend them?”

“Admiral Ktonga will have your heads.”

“Maybe,” Kendall said. “But I doubt it. After sending his best, including Plibix who already was on our side, they disappeared. But Ktonga couldn't leave well enough alone. He wanted me as well, and I could disappear and raise suspicion. I have to deliver the bellflowers over the next few days, in a ship leaving this space station. Now that we've perfected the bellflower holding stasis they can be moved all over the galaxy.”

“Then why all this?” Spencer asked. “Me, the strange visions...”

“Well that's the best part,” Kendall said. “I needed to know what Admiral Ktonga suspected during these last few critical days. So I sent you, a clone, to meet with him, find out what he knew. You were memory wiped, thought you were me, but without my recent change of heart. You did well, Spence, hunting the clues all the way back to where I needed you so we could trawl your mind.”

“Is that what that room was?”

“Exactly,” Kendall said.

“But the weird stuff, what was all that?”

“Admiral Ktonga is nervous. He's going to take your suggestion and destroy Leonardo, and if he hears I'm jetting all over the galaxy with bellflowers, have the entire Navy shoot me down as well. I need a few days of confusion while I distribute the bellflowers. Even we can't destroy the entire Navy with the flowers, they'd take too long to arrange and play.

“When Admiral Ktonga gets you back, he's going to have to trawl your memories. They're going to be bizarre and all messed up, because we've messed them up in our machine. You remember being seduced by Patsy, you remember following a lead at SIS headquarters where you found out about the resistance, only you remember it kind of wrongly, you remember sneaking in on an alien council, where I talked about the bellflowers. You did all that while tracking me back, but they're all muddled now, just to make Ktonga's life a long week while they try and unpack all that. And by that time, the bellflower will have crossed all over the galaxy.”

“You'll unleash madness,” Spencer protested. “Everyone will destroy each other.”

“Oh come,” Kendall said. “The empire has a second amendment, that goes back ages. An armed society is a polite society. When you take the guns away from the indigenes, then they have no way to let everyone know to screw off.”

“They don't have the civilization to be able to handle such a weapon—they'll destroy their planets.”

“That's so patronizing,” Kendall said. “Besides, it's their planets to screw up. It's not like we haven't blown up a few planets here or there. The bellflower is getting handed out to everyone, human, alien, or whatever. Ktonga was right, the galaxy has been turned upside down.”

“But why are you telling me all this?”

“Because when Ktonga gets to the end of the trawl,” Kendall said, “I want him to hear all this. It's no use having a force equalizer if no one knows about it. He'll trawl a long series of confusing memories, and then have this.”

And then the other Spencer shot him. Spencer gasped, staring at himself in shock. The pain spread out as he slumped over.

“Look, I'm very sorry about this, you were an incredible me,” his doppelganger said. “But we're not about to give up control of the galaxy to Ktonga and the SIS and empire at hand. It's time for a plurality in the galaxy, and as that old philosopher once said: sometimes that liberty tree needs some bloody water. Goodbye clone Spencer, hello Ktonga.”

Spencer gasped for air, trying to say something, anything. The other Spencer knelt down next to him and wiped a bit of sweat away from his forehead with a handkerchief. Then he placed something on Spencer's chest and left.

Spencer struggled to focus his eyes.

It was a perfect blue bellflower.

—The End—

[Back to Table of Contents]

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Mike Resnick

Mike was born on March 5, 1942. He sold his first article in 1957, his first short story in 1959, and his first book in 1962.

He attended the University of Chicago from 1959 through 1961, won 3 letters on the fencing team, and met and married Carol. Their daughter, Laura, was born in 1962, and has since become a writer herself, winning 2 awards for her romance novels and the 1993 Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer.

Mike and Carol discovered science fiction fandom in 1962, attended their first Worldcon in 1963, and 81 sf books into his career, Mike still considers himself a fan and frequently contributes articles to fanzines. He and Carol appeared in five Worldcon masquerades in the 1970s in costumes that she created, and won four of them.

Mike labored anonymously but profitably from 1964 through 1976, selling more than 200 novels, 300 short stories and 2,000 articles, almost all of them under pseudonyms, most of them in the “adult” field. He edited 7 different tabloid newspapers and a pair of men's magazines, as well.

In 1968 Mike and Carol became serious breeders and exhibitors of collies, a pursuit they continued through 1981. (Mike is still an AKC-licensed collie judge.) During that time they bred and/or exhibited 27 champion collies, and were the country's leading breeders and exhibitors during various years along the way.

This led them to purchase the Briarwood Pet Motel in Cincinnati in 1976. It was the country's second-largest luxury boarding and grooming establishment, and they worked full-time at it for the next few years. By 1980 the kennel was being run by a staff of 21, and Mike was free to return to his first love, science fiction, albeit at a far slower pace than his previous writing. They sold the kennel in 1993.

Mike's first novel in this “second career” was THE SOUL EATER, which was followed shortly by BIRTHRIGHT: THE BOOK OF MAN, WALPURGIS III, the 4-book TALES OF THE GALACTIC MIDWAY series, THE BRANCH, the 4-book TALES OF THE VELVET COMET series, and ADVENTURES, all from Signet. His breakthrough novel was the international bestseller SANTIAGO, published by Tor in 1986. Tor has since published STALKING THE UNICORN, THE DARK LADY, IVORY, SECOND CONTACT, PARADISE, PURGATORY, INFERNO, the Double BWANA/BULLY!, and the collection, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE THE PLANET PLEASE SHUT OFF THE SUN? His most recent Tor releases were A MIRACLE OF RARE DESIGN, A HUNGER IN THE SOUL, THE OUTPOST, and the THE RETURN OF SANTIAGO.

Even at his reduced rate, Mike is too prolific for one publisher, and in the 1990s Ace published SOOTHSAYER, ORACLE and PROPHET, Questar published LUCIFER JONES, Bantam brought out the Locusbestselling trilogy of THE WIDOWMAKER, THE WIDOWMAKER REBORN, and THE WIDOWMAKER UNLEASHED, and del Rey published KIRINYAGA: A FABLE OR UTOPIA and LARA CROFT, TOMB RAIDER: THE AMULET OF POWER. He has recently completed A GATHERING OF WIDOWMAKERS for Meisha Merlin, DRAGON AMERICA for Phobos, and LADY WITH AN ALIEN for Watson-Guptill, and is working on STARSHIP: MUTINY for Pyr and THE MOEBIUS TRIP and A CLUB IN MONMARTRE for Watson-Guptill.

Beginning with SHAGGY B.E.M. STORIES in 1988, Mike has also become an anthology editor (and was nominated for a Best Editor Hugo in 1994 and 1995). His list of anthologies in print and in press totals more than 35, and includes ALTERNATE PRESIDENTS, ALTERNATE KENNEDYS, SHERLOCK HOLMES IN ORBIT, BY ANY OTHER FAME, DINOSAUR FANTASTIC, and CHRISTMAS GHOSTS, plus the recent STARS, co-edited with superstar singer Janis Ian.

Mike has always supported the “specialty press", and has numerous books and collections out in limited editions from such diverse publishers as Phantasia Press, Axolotl Press, Misfit Press, Pulphouse Publishing, Wildside Press, Dark Regions Press, NESFA Press, WSFA Press, Obscura Press, Farthest Star, and others. He recently agreed to become the science fiction editor for BenBella Books.

Mike was never interested in writing short stories early in his career, producing only 7 between 1976 and 1986. Then something clicked, and he has written and sold more than 140 stories since 1986, and now spends more time on short fiction than on novels. The writing that has brought him the most acclaim thus far in his career is the “Kirinyaga” series, which, with 64 major and minor awards and nominations to date, is the most honored series of stories in the history of science fiction.

He's recently begun writing short non-fiction as well. He sold a 4-part series, “Forgotten Treasures", to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and is a regular columnist for Speculations ("Ask Bwana") the SFWA Bulletin ("The Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues"), and wrote a bi-weekly column for the late, lamented GalaxyOnline.com.

Carol has always been Mike's uncredited collaborator on his science fiction, but in the past few years they have sold two movie scripts—SANTIAGO and THE WIDOWMAKER, both based on Mike's books—and Carol is listed as his collaborator on those.

Readers of Mike's works are aware of his fascination with Africa, and the many uses to which he has put it in his science fiction. Mike and Carol have taken numerous safaris, visiting Kenya (4 times), Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Botswana, and Uganda, and have two more planned for the next four years. Mike edited the Library of African Adventure series for St. Martin's Press, and is currently editing The Resnick Library of African Adventure, and, with Carol as co-editor, The Resnick Library of Worldwide Adventure, for Alexander Books.

Since 1989, Mike has won five Hugo Awards (for “Kirinyaga", “The Manamouki", “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge", and “The 43 Antarean Dynasties", and “Travels With My Cats"), a Nebula Award (for “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge"), and has been nominated for 27 Hugos, 11 Nebulas, a Clarke (British), and six Seiun-shos (Japanese). He has also won a Seiun-sho, a Prix Tour Eiffel (French), 2 Prix Ozones (French), 10 HOmer Awards, an Alexander Award, a Golden Pagoda Award, a Hayakawa SF Award (Japanese), a Locus Award, 2 Ignotus Awards (Spanish), a Futura Award (Croatian), an El Melocoton Mechanico (Spanish), 2 Sfinks Awards (Polish), a Fantastyka Award (Polish), and has topped the Science Fiction Chronicle Poll six times, the Scifi Weekly Hugo Straw Poll three times, and the Asimov's Readers Poll four times. In 1993 he was awarded the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction, and in 2001 and 2004 he was named Fictionwise.com's Author of the Year in open competition with Dan Brown, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Louis L'Amour, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov.

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David Gerrold

David Gerrold is known by most for the popular “Trouble With Tribbles” Star Trek episode. Also known for the Chtorr, Dingilliad and Star Wolf sagas or the books “When Harlie Was One", “The Martian Child” and more...

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Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-one books: thirteen novels of science fiction or fantasy, one YA novel, two thrillers, three story collections, and two books on writing. Her most recent books are PROBABILITY SPACE (Tor, 2002), the conclusion of a trilogy that began with PROBABILITY MOON and PROBABILITY SUN, CROSSFIRE (Tor, 2003), and NOTHING HUMAN (Golden Gryphon Press, 2003). The trilogy concerns quantum physics, a space war, and the nature of reality. CROSSFIRE, set in a different universe, explores various ways we might co-exist with aliens even though we never understand either them or ourselves very well. NOTHING HUMAN concerns a bleaker future, in which we have trashed Earth beyond the point of human habitability. So we genetically engineer our descendants—who may or may not be considered human.

Kress's short fiction has appeared in all the usual places. She has won three Nebulas: in 1985 for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” in 1991 for the novella version of “Beggars In Spain,” which also won a Hugo, and in 1998 for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.” Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian. Kress is the monthly “Fiction” columnist for WRITER'S DIGEST MAGAZINE. She teaches regularly at Clarion.

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Robert Scheckley

Mr. Sheckley wrote more than 15 novels and around 400 short stories; the actual total is uncertain since he was so prolific in his heyday, the 1950's and 60's, that magazine editors insisted he publish some stories under pseudonyms to avoid having his byline appear more than once in an issue. Four of his stories were made into films; the best known, “The Tenth Victim” (1965), starred Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Maplewood, N.J., Robert Sheckley joined the Army in 1946 after graduating from high school, and served in Korea. In 1951 he received an undergraduate degree from New York University and sold his first short story. Over the next two decades, he was a major force in the development of modern science fiction. His first collection of stories, published in 1954, was hailed as one of the finest debut volumes in the field. In the 1960's he found a wider market for his science fiction in magazines like Playboy. Many of his novels were well received, among them “Journey Beyond Tomorrow” (1962) and “Dimension of Miracles” (1968), but Mr. Sheckley was best known for his short stories.

At a time when science fiction was just starting to grapple with the social implications of technology—from atomic bombs to missile-carrying rockets—Mr. Sheckley turned a satirist's eye on the genre and its concerns. Like Ray Bradbury, he was interested in the scientific apparatus of science fiction—space travel, time travel, extrapolated futures—only so far as it served his purpose. While Mr. Bradbury poetically mourns the failure to live up to our dreams of the future, Mr. Sheckley mocked the self-delusions that lead to dreams in the first place. He reveled in the freedom the genre afforded him to dramatize the fears and anxieties of everyday life. When he wrote about the war between the sexes, he conjured a future in which disappointed lovers had the legal option of using real bullets to express their anger.

When he wrote about alienation as a state of mind, he sealed the reader in an endless loop of disaffection that reduced the outside world to a hallucination wrapped in an illusion. Because he leavened his darkest visions with wit and absurdist plotting, he is considered one of science fiction's seminal humorists, and a precursor to Douglas Adams, whose “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” (1979) seems to take place in a Sheckleyan universe. But Mr. Sheckley's work is darker than Mr. Adams's; the smiles he evokes leave a bitter taste on the lips. A better comparison might be to Kafka, a fabulist who could never understood why his friends didn't laugh when he read his stories to them. Mr. Sheckley's fiction has been translated into German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish and Lithuanian. His work is especially popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. Mr. Sheckley's marriages to his first four wives, Barbara Scadron, Ms. Kwitney, Abby Schulman and Jay Rothbell, ended in divorce. At the time of his death he was separated from his fifth wife, Gail Dana. Other survivors include a son, Jason, from his first marriage, a daughter, Alisa Kwitney, from his second marriage; a daughter, Anya, and a son, Jed, from his third marriage; his sister Joan Klein of New York; and three grandchildren.

Robert Sheckley passed away on the morning of December 9, 2005.

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Brian Herbert

Brian Herbert, the author of numerous novels and short stories, has been critically acclaimed by leading reviewers in the United States and around the world. The eldest son of science fiction superstar Frank Herbert, Brian moved 23 times before graduating from high school. Finances were tight in those days, as his father (with success still years away) worked on and off as a newspaperman and sometimes solely as a writer, neither of which brought in enough money to support a family of three children, including Brian, his younger brother, Bruce, and their older sister, Penny.

Funds were in such short supply that Brian's mother, Beverly, would sometimes pick only a few bills out of a hat to be paid and disregard the rest. In one of the places they lived, a small shack on the Tacoma tide flats, the children slept on an unheated porch, and in another—a remote cabin reached by traversing a steep trail—their father heated the house by intentionally getting on mailing lists and then burning the junk mail. There were even years in which the children received no presents on Christmas Day.

Life was never dull, however. An impulsive, restless man, Frank Herbert constantly sought out new opportunities, fresh adventures. This included two writing sojourns with his family to Mexico, including one with fantasy author Jack Vance and another in an old Cadillac LaSalle hearse—the family car.

An honor student, Brian was skipped ahead, so that he graduated from high school at the age of 16. He married at a young age as well, and while a full-time student at UC Berkeley (where he received a BA in Sociology), he worked in order to support his wife, Jan, and their baby daughter, Julie. The marriage has lasted for more than three decades and has produced three daughters, Julie, Kimberly, and Margaux.

Brian has been involved in a wide variety of professions and endeavors, including work as an author and editor, a business manager, an inventor of board games, and as a creative consultant for television and for collectible card games. He did not begin his writing career until he was nearly 30 years old. Prior to that he worked as an insurance underwriter and agent, an award-winning encyclopedia salesman, a waiter, a busboy, a maid (not a typo), and a printer. He and his wife once owned a double-decker London bus, which they converted into an unusual gift shop. Brian also operated a mail-order record and tape business, in which he sold “golden oldies” music to remote regions of the world, including the Australian outback.

His first two books were humor collections, INCREDIBLE INSURANCE CLAIMS and CLASSIC COMEBACKS. After that a steady stream of novels ensued, including SIDNEY'S COMET, THE GARBAGE CHRONICLES, SUDANNA SUDANNA, MAN OF TWO WORLDS (with Frank Herbert), PRISONERS OF ARIONN, THE RACE FOR GOD (preliminary Nebula nominee in 1990), MEMORYMAKERS (with Marie Landis), and BLOOD ON THE SUN (with Marie Landis). Among his edited books are THE NOTEBOOKS OF FRANK HERBERT'S DUNE and SONGS OF MUAD'DIB.

When Brian was in his late 20s and early 30s he began to grow close to his father, a complex, enigmatic man. The son's effort to unravel the intriguing mysteries of his father began with a detailed journal that Brian maintained for years, chronicling the fascinating events of the Herbert family—a document which ultimately encompassed the tragic deaths of his mother and father, and which he expanded into a comprehensive biography of Frank Herbert—DREAMER OF DUNE. The quest to understand one's father—which Joseph Campbell has described as one of the epic hero journeys of mankind, continued as Brian studied the entire six volume DUNE series and created a massive DUNE CONCORDANCE. This would prove to be an invaluable reference book in the writing of additional DUNE books in the three-volume PRELUDE TO DUNE series, which Brian undertook with Kevin J. Anderson in 1998.

Today Brian and his sister Penny manage the magnificent legacy of their father's works, and through projects such as PRELUDE TO DUNE are opening new realms of Frank Herbert's vivid imagination to millions of his loyal fans.

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Laura Resnick

Laura Resnick is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, the daughter of prolific science fiction author Mike Resnick. She was the winner of the John W. Campbell Award for the Best New Writer in Science Fiction for 1993. She also writes romance novels under the pseudonym Laura Leone.

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Kay Kenyon

“I was raised in Duluth, where winters can freeze your eyes open unless you blink often enough. People who know me well say that this explains a lot about me. I am energetic (you have to keep moving in a cold climate) and layers deep (think snow drifts up to the eaves.)

“I began my writing career as a copywriter at WDSM-TV. Moving to Seattle, I spent years in TV and radio, writing copy and voicing commercials. At some point I realized I was a better writer than actress, and began writing-science fiction.

“What else would I write? My father was a brilliant socialist and humanitarian, and my mother was a hard-working saint. We lived in a multi-plex where a neighbor hung himself in the attic and the rent was hard to scrape together. I believed in the possibility of better world. Though I never took much interest in politics, I was an idealist about humanity's fate and I thought science fiction could help.

“I still believe this. My early favorites were Kate Wilhelm and Robert Silverberg. (Think “Downward to the Earth.") I believe that what we can imagine has the power to change us; what evolves socially and scientifically begins with what we can conceive and hope for. And furthermore, science fiction is just so much fun!

“After living in Seattle for a few decades, my husband Tom and I moved to the sunny side of the state of Washington. We live in Wenatchee between the Columbia River and the Cascade foothills. I'm writing full time these days, but every once in a while one or more of our grown sons shows up and we drop everything. Tom and I share a love of motorcycles and the TV show American Chopper. Weekends often find us on the Harley exploring the desert country we've adopted. My cat prefers that I stay home and write. I try not to disappoint him too often.”

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Stephen Leigh

Stephen Leigh has published twenty-some novels and several short stories, under both his own name and pseudonymously. His fiction has won several awards within the science fiction and fantasy fields. He also teaches Creative Writing courses at a local university. His other interests and avocations include music (he spent several years playing full-time for various rock and jazz groups, and still plays in a two bands ... and you can sometimes catch him singing and playing on his own at conventions), the Japanese martial art Aikido (in which he holds the rank of Nidan), art (he has a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art), history, language and sociology, prowling the web (he has a web site at www.farrellworlds.com and a Livejournal account) and finding spare bits of free time. He is married to his best friend and favorite first reader, Denise Parsley Leigh; they have two children who are growing impossibly old.

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Bill Fawcett

Bill has been a professor, teacher, corporate executive, and college dean. He is one of the founders of Mayfair Games, a board and role play gaming company. As a book packager, a person who prepares series of books from concept to production for major publishers, his company Bill Fawcett & Associates has packaged over 250 titles for virtually every major publisher.

Bill's articles in the Dragon began in single digit issues and include some of the earliest appearances of classes and monster types. With Mayfair created, wrote, and edited many of the over 50 “Role Aides” RPG modules and supplements released by Mayfair Games in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period he also designed almost a dozen board games, including several Charles Roberts award winners such as Empire Builder and Sanctuary. Fawcett also acted as the rights agent for a number of established agencies, giving him the benefit of seeing our industry from the inside.

Bill began his own novel writing with a juvenile series, Swordquest for Ace SF. Anticipating cats, he wrote and edited the four novels, beginning with the Lord of Cragsclaw featuring the Mrem, which appear in Shattered Light as a hero class (all rights owned by Bill). The Fleet series he created with David Drake has become a classic of military science fiction. He has collaborated on several novels including mysteries such as the Authorized Mycroft Holmes novels, the Madame Vernet Investigates series, and edited Making Contact, a UFO Contact handbook. As an anthologist Bill has edited or co-edited over 50 anthologies. Bill is the editor of Hunters and Shooters and The Teams, two oral histories of the SEALs in Vietnam. His most recently published work is as co-author of It Seemed Like a good Idea, Great Historical Fiascos and You Did What?; both are a fun look at bad decisions in history.

In 1994 Bill joined with a team of programmers to form Catware featuring him as producer and designer. Catware released Swords of Xeen (New World Computing) as part of the Trilogy game set, Star General, a strategic game based upon the six Fleet books (SSI) that was one of the 20 best selling games in the year of its release, Las Vegas Games (New World) and the On-line RPG .

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an award-winning mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy writer. She has written many novels under various names, including Kristine Grayson for romance, and Kris Nelscott for mystery. Her novels have made the bestseller lists—even in London—and have been published in 14 countries and 13 different languages.

Her awards range from the Ellery Queen Readers Choice Award to the John W. Campbell Award. She is the only person in the history of the science fiction field to have won a Hugo award for editing and a Hugo award for fiction. Her short work has been reprinted in six Year's Best collections.

In 2001, her story, “Millennium Babies,” won the coveted Hugo Award. That year, she also received the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel (for her Kris Nelscott Series) and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award for Best Paranormal Romance (for her novel Utterly Charming, written as Kristine Grayson). In 1999, her story, “Echea,” (available at Fictionwise) was nominated for the Locus, Nebula, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards. It won the Homer Award and the Asimov's Reader's Choice Award. In 1999, she also won the Ellery Queen Reader's Choice Award and the Science Fiction Age Reader's Choice Award, making her the first writer to win three different reader's choice awards for three different stories in two different genres in the same year.

Currently, she is writing a series in all four of her genres: the Retrieval Artist series in Science Fiction; the Smokey Dalton series in Mystery (written as Kris Nelscott); the Fates series in Romance (written as Kristine Grayson); and the upcoming Fantasy Life series in fantasy. Readers who want to get a taste of the Fantasy Life series should read the related short stories: “The Light at Whale Cove,” “Strange Creatures,” and “The Women of Whale Rock.”

She is the former editor of prestigious The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.

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James Patrick Kelly

After graduating from Notre Dame in 1972, Jim Kelly joined the staff of C.E. Maguire, Inc., Architects, Engineers and Planners of Waltham, Massachusetts, as a proposal writer. He later worked for the company as Coordinator of Public Relations. In the course of his career in business, he wrote more articles for professional, technical, and trade publications than he cares to remember.

Mr. Kelly attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1974 and again in 1976. Clarion is a summer workshop sponsored by Michigan State University for writers of science fiction and fantasy. He published his first story in 1975. In 1977 he resigned from full-time employment at C. E. Maguire to pursue a writing career, although he continued as a part-time consultant to the firm until 1979.

Mr. Kelly has had an eclectic writing career. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, audioplays and planetarium shows. His books include Strange but not a Stranger, Think Like A Dinosaur and Other Stories, Wildlife, Heroines, Look Into The Sun, Freedom Beach (in collaboration with John Kessel) and Planet of Whispers. Although primarily known for his science fiction, his work also includes mainstream, fantasy, and horror. He has won the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo award twice and has been a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula. His short stories have appeared in numerous “Best of the Year” collections over the past twenty-three years. His work has been reprinted in France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Finland, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Japan, Brazil, Thailand, Croatia, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic. He has also written five audioplays that have been produced by Scifi.com's Seeing Ear Theater. In 1998, his regular column on the Internet debuted in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. He has been invited to read his fiction at First Night New Hampshire in Concord, New Hampshire, First Night Portsmouth and the Prescott Park Arts Festival in Portsmouth, New Hampshure. In October 1992, his planetarium show, “Destiny or Discovery,” premiered at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord, New Hampshire.

Jim Kelly was born in Mineola, New York in 1951. He has been a resident of New Hampshire since 1975. He currently lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire with his wife, Pamela D. Kelly. He has too many hobbies.

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Dean Wesley Smith

“I was the publisher and senior editor of Pulphouse Publishing for seven years. I have edited Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for Pocket Books for ten years now. I also edited two other magazines along the way. I have not worked a regular day job since 1988, freelance writing since early May that year. I sold my first short story in 1975.

“I was born and raised in Boise, Idaho, and graduated from Capital High School. I also have a five year degree in Architecture and attended three years of law school. I was a professional golfer and I taught snow skiing.

“I am married to Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who also writes under the names Kris Nelscott, Kristine Grayson, and others. She has a more standard and very nifty web site at www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.

“My main writing thrust these days is big thrillers, but at the moment I am finishing up two young adult novels that I have under contract.”

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Jody Lynn Nye

Jody began storytelling to her three younger brothers as a child and became an officially published author when in the 1980's the magazine “Video Action” accepted several technical articles on broadcasting. Her first fiction piece was for Mayfair Games's Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine game and their Role-Aids game supplement line. She currently lives with her husband and two cats rescued from animal shelters. She frequently collaborates with other authors and credits both science news articles and her cats as sources of inspiration for her writing.

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Jane Yolen

Jane Yolen is an author of children's books, fantasy, and science fiction, including Owl Moon, Devil's Arithmetic, and How do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? She is also a poet, a teacher of writing and literature, and a reviewer of children's literature. She has been called the Hans Christian Andersen of America and the Aesop of the twentieth century. Jane Yolen's books and stories have won the Caldecott Medal, two Nebula Awards, two Christopher Medals, the World Fantasy Award, three Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, the Golden Kite Award, the Jewish Book Award, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Award. This web book presents information about her over two hundred books for children. It also contains essays, poems, answers to frequently asked questions, a brief biography, her travel schedule, and links to resources for teachers and writers. It is intended for children, teachers, writers, storytellers, and lovers of children's literature.

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Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan, acclaimed by the London Guardian as “The Queen of Cyberpunk", is the author of four novels, Mindplayers, Synners, Fools and Tea from an Empty Cup; and three short story collections, Patterns, Home by the Sea, and Dirty Work. Some of her short stories also appeared in Letters from Home, alongside work by Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy. Pat continues to publish short fiction. Recent stories are in New Worlds, Dark Terrors 3, Disco 2000 and the Christmas issue of Interzone.

Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Attending the University of Massachusetts on a scholarship, she eventually transferred to the University of Kansas where she received her degree. Pat was an editor and writer for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City for ten years before embarking on her careers as a fiction writer in 1987.

Since that time her Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated short stories have appeared in such magazines as Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Patterns, was honoured with the Locus Award in 1990.

Pat Cadigan moved to England in August 1996, and now lives in North London, with her husband Chris Fowler, and their cat, Calgary.

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Michael A. Burstein

“My first published story, ‘TeleAbsence,’ which appeared in the July 1995 issue of Analog, was nominated for the Hugo Award and was chosen by the readers of Analog as the best short story published by the magazine in 1995. Two years later, I won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 1997 World Science Fiction Convention, LoneStarCon2. I've also received Hugo nominations for ‘Broken Symmetry,’ ‘Cosmic Corkscrew,’ ‘Kaddish for the Last Survivor,’ ‘Spaceships,’ ‘Paying It Forward', ‘Decisions,’ ‘Time Ablaze,’ ‘Seventy-Five Years,’ and ‘TelePresence'; a Nebula and Sturgeon nomination for my novella ‘Reality Check;’ and a Nebula nomination for ‘Kaddish for the Last Survivor.’ (So for those keeping track at home, that's ten Hugo nominations, two Nebula nominations, one Sturgeon nomination—and no wins.) From 1998 to 2000, I somehow found the time to serve as Secretary of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

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Tobias A. Buckell

Tobias was born in Grenada in 1979, just as a semi-Marxist government took over the country. By 1983 the government began executing members of its own party, and thus his earliest memories are of nervous adults, not being allowed near windows, and of the American Intervention/Invasion.

His parents weren't in the military, or missionaries. His grandfather started the odd little story by selling a successful electronics business to buy and move his family aboard a boat to sail the world. Since then most of the Buckell family has had some strong connection to, or lived on, yachts. Tobias grew up on a boat in Grenada, and also lived aboard boats in the British Virgin Islands and US Virgin Islands when his family moved away from Grenada after the war.

In 1995, Hurricane Marilyn destroyed the boat he lived on in St. Thomas. His family moved to Ohio where his stepdad grew up. From beaches and seas to highways and cities.

Tobias began reading at a young age, starting off with Clive Cussler novels, moving to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and then onto Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End well before he was nine years old. Throughout school he read novels in class to stave off boredom, and when those were confiscated, wrote stories. While studying to be an English major at college he started submitting and writing multiple short stories and attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy workshop. He sold his first story in 1999, shortly afterwards, and has since gone on to sell over 20 more.

He recently sold his first novel and is working on a second, and has more short stories scheduled to come out. He works at his alma mater, Bluftton University, and lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, Emily.

Visit www.fictionwise.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.