Crystalline Sphere Authors

Challenging Destiny Magazine - 2006 - Issue 22 - April

A Few Words About Evolution by David M. Switzer

Acid Man by Caroline Misner

Heroes and Villains by Steven Mohan, Jr.

Interview with Eileen Kernaghan by James Schellenberg & David M. Switzer

Piñons by Uncle River

Heart-Shaped Hole by Marissa K. Lingen

BehaviorNorm by Sue Lange

Fantasy Movies Reign Supreme by James Schellenberg

The Anabe Girls by A. R. Morlan

Eye Teeth by Jay Lake

Upcoming Issue--Number 23

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Publisher Crystalline Sphere Publishing

Editor David M. Switzer

Contributing Editors Luke Felczak & Andrew Hudson

Cover Artist Quynh Mai Nguyen

Challenging Destiny (ISSN 1206-6656), Number 22, April 2006. Copyright (c) 2006 by Crystalline Sphere Publishing. All rights reserved by the individual authors and illustrators. All correspondence: Challenging Destiny, R. R. #6 St. Marys, Ontario Canada N4X 1C8. Email: csp@golden.net. Web site: challengingdestiny.com.

Next time you're in the mood for some dinosaurs, instead of watching Jurassic Park again check out the BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs. It's a series of half-hour episodes done in the style of a documentary, with each episode focusing on a particular dinosaur. Using the latest research and a combination of CGI and animatronics, it's intellectually and visually stimulating. (You'll also want to watch Walking With Prehistoric Beasts and Walking With Cavemen.)

Of course, we continue to learn new things about dinosaurs. For example, when I was a kid one of the dinosaurs we learned about was brontosaurus. But brontosaurus didn't actually exist--the person who discovered it put the skull of one dinosaur with the body of another.

Recently fossils of feathered dinosaurs were found in China--I saw an exhibit about them at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Studying these fossils will help us figure out the link between dinosaurs and birds. One difficulty with establishing the timeline is that at various times throughout history there have been flightless creatures with wings; at first glance it might seem like a flightless creature is an ancestor of a creature that can fly, but that's not always the case.

One of my favourite books I read last year is Evolution by Stephen Baxter. It's a novel that starts in the time of the dinosaurs and progresses to the present and into the far future. Each section focuses on a particular species of mammal. In the hands of a lesser writer this would be boring, but in Baxter's it's absolutely fascinating. One of the things he points out is that there are many species that existed for which we have no evidence, and will never have any evidence, because they didn't leave any fossils. He fills in some of the gaps with intriguing speculation.

For example, Baxter invents an air whale--a huge but very light creature that flies above most of the clouds, in the stratosphere. The air whale evolved from pterosaurs, getting lighter and lighter. Its bones are hollow, and it doesn't need a big brain since nothing much happens up there. It feeds on aerial plankton, and mates on the highest mountain peaks when its instincts tell it to. With wings one hundred meters across, it would have been magnificent to see.

Although most of us have come to grips with the fact that Earth isn't at the centre of the universe, we still like to think that humans are at the centre of things on Earth. In other words, we think of evolution as a progression whose end result is us. But although humans are unique in that we are the only creatures who can conceive of evolution, we're "a tiny twig, born just yesterday on an enormously arborescent tree of life that would never produce the same set of branches if regrown from seed" (Stephen Jay Gould, Full House). Our uniqueness as a species is important--it gives us a certain responsibility. But our nonuniqueness is also important, and should give us a humility and a desire to see our species in the context of a larger whole.

We also need to be careful how we view evolution in the past. From Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor's Tale: "From our human point of view, the emergence of our remote fish ancestors from water to land was a momentous step, an evolutionary rite of passage ... That is not the way it was at the time. Those Devonian fish had a living to earn. They were not on a mission to evolve, not on a quest towards a distant future." What causes an evolutionary change? Dawkins suspects that "major new departures in evolution often start ... with a piece of lateral thinking by an individual who discovers a new and useful trick, and learns to perfect it. If the habit is then imitated by others, including perhaps the individual's own children, there will be a new selection pressure set up."

The Ancestor's Tale is sometimes a tough read, in terms of its scientific content, but it has lots of interesting things in it. Contrary to Evolution, this book moves backwards in time. Each section talks about the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for some number of species: for example, the first section is about the MRCA of all humans (thousands to tens of thousands of years ago), and the second section is about the MRCA of humans and chimpanzees (5 to 7 million years ago). By the time we get to the eleventh section, we're meeting up with rabbits (75 million years ago).

Jared Diamond, in The Third Chimpanzee, imagines that "had a visitor from Outer Space come to Earth in Neanderthal times, humans would not have stood out as unique among the world's species. At most, the visitor might have mentioned humans along with beavers, bowerbirds, and army ants as examples of species with curious behavior." One of the mysteries of recent evolutionary history is what Diamond calls the "Great Leap Forward." Prior to this event our ancestors had been making the same sort of simple tools for about a million years. Around 40 000 years ago something incredible happened: human culture became more complex, for the first time creating more specialized tools, artwork, and music, and leaving objects in the graves of their dead. Diamond hypothesizes that this might have come about with the development of language, or more complex language, but no one knows for sure.

Farther back in time, another mystery is why our ancestors started walking on two legs. Farther back than that, another: why did we lose our tail? You have to think about things in a different way when you're thinking on an evolutionary scale. As Dawkins points out, "the odds against a floating mangrove bearing a pregnant female monkey and reaching landfall in any one year may be ten thousand to one against ... But given 10 million years it becomes almost inevitable."

Dawkins says that "usually, in order for an ancestral species to split into two daughter species, there is an initial, accidental geographical separation between them." For example, the Rift Valley in Africa may have separated the species that eventually became humans from the species that eventually became chimpanzees.

We all know about the huge extinction, possibly caused by a meterorite or comet hitting Earth, that took place 65 million years ago. But that wasn't the biggest extinction--the biggest occurred earlier, about a quarter of a billion years ago, when 95 per cent of the species went extinct.

As for the creationism versus evolution debate going on in certain places, a creation myth is an aspect of religion. As such, it's a perfectly valid topic for a religious studies course but has no place in a science course. Here's Michael Shermer on the subject, from Why People Believe Weird Things: "Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths."

There are, of course, many creation myths from around the world. As Isaac Asimov points out in The Roving Mind, "these Hebrew myths are not inherently more credible than any of the others, but they are our myths and the only ones that the creationists are interested in or (in most cases) have heard of, and the only ones they want to propagate." A friend once took me to hear a creationist speak. It was a very strange experience--I felt like everyone else in the room was very different from me. I wasn't afraid for my life or anything, but it was eerie. And I was annoyed, because the speaker didn't back up any of his points. But everyone else in the audience was predisposed to agree with him and they thought he was great. He had memorized the Bible, giving him an air of authority. But anyone can memorize the Bible--that doesn't mean you know anything about anything.

I'm perfectly willing to entertain the notion that God created the world 6000 years ago--and made it look like the world was created 4 billion years ago. But so what? I don't see that it makes any difference at all.

Dave Switzer is currently trying to decide whether or not to move to a new city, something he hasn't done since 1989. He has become a huge fan of the new Battlestar Galactica series--his favourite character is Commander Adama. And having watched more of Buffy and Angel since last time, he's decided that his favourite characters are Spike and Cordelia, respectively. Two of his favourite CDs to listen to these days are the soundtracks from Shrek and The Rock. Two superb short story collections he's read recently are Gravity Wells by James Alan Gardner and The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Cover artist Quynh Mai Nguyen was born and raised in Saigon, Viet Nam before immigrating to Canada with her family in the mid seventies. In her early teens, Japanese animation or manga greatly influenced her artistic styles. In her early twenties, she experimented with other forms of art medium: oil, acrylics, pastel, pottery and watercolor. However, it was Chinese brush painting that drew her passion and attention. Lingnan brush painting is a departure from the traditional Chinese brush painting styles, in that Lingnan style is bold, vital and full of colors, much like a western oil canvas. Yet Lingnan still retains the traditional and important brush strokes.

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I always thought The Sink Hole was little more than a repository for the damned. A place where the dregs of the village, which even the mines coughed out like diseased phlegm, could waste their hours staring at the filth of the tavern. The clientele wasn't much better, either.

The walls of The Sink Hole were shadowed with the amber stains of thrown drinks from long forgotten brawls and pocked with holes from the days when old posters decorated the bar in a cheerless effort to add some levity to the bleakness that filled the room like the stench of rancid beer. A few still remained: faded images of John Wayne and James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and various other obsolete icons kept vigil over the drunkards that filled the place every afternoon. Over the years patrons have added their own decorations to the posters: Marilyn Monroe now sports a moustache and a gap between her teeth, Elvis has a goatee and a pair of horn rimmed glasses. The drunk who drew it suffered a broken nose at the hands of an equally inebriated patron who felt justified in pummelling anyone who dared deface the King of Rock and Roll.

If not for those posters, I never would have heard of any of those people. I have been told by Doug Sluggard (we call him Doug the Slug, or just plain Slug) who owns the bar that they were celebrities once, years ago before the world overheated and dried out like a dehydrated piece of meat. People clamored to see their movies and listen to their music; women swooned and men fantasized. I stared at him when he told me this. I have never seen a movie in my life; the only music I have heard was the strumming of the badly tuned guitar that hung on a hook behind the bar and was available to anyone who fancied himself a musician and was brave enough to stand before the rabble of drunken miners and play. The performance usually ended in another brawl and Slug would have to force the guitar from the player's hands before he used it to bash in the skull of his assailant.

"What's a celebrity?" I asked him once as we waited for the deluge of miners from the afternoon shift to come pushing through the cracked revolving doors.

Slug stood behind the bar in a tin tub filled with ice. It was another scorching dry day and the heat radiated in through the windows like a living thing and baked the floorboards beneath my bare feet. He rubbed a handful of ice against the back of his rubbery neck and laughed.

"Man, you must be young if you don't remember," he said. "A celebrity is someone who's famous. People who have made music or movies that everyone has heard about."

I still didn't understand, but I nodded as though he made perfect sense. He handed me a chunk of ice from the washtub and I slid it around the back of my own sweaty neck before pushing into my mouth. I bit hard and the ice shattered like broken glass. I had pinned my long hair up around the crown of my head to keep my neck cool and keep the patrons from having something handy to grab whenever they needed my attention. I wore my usual uniform of khaki shorts and a sweat-stained blouse under a beer-stained apron.

"Why would anyone want to have pictures of people they've never met?" I asked. "It would make more sense to keep pictures of people you love."

"Celebrities were loved." Slug began filling heavy glass mugs with foamy beer from the tap. "Some people could identify with them more than with their own families."

I nodded, trying to understand. Somewhere in the distance the whistle trilled across the desert flats, signalling the end of another shift. I could feel the vibration of the company trucks through the floor as they rumbled toward the village, carrying their human cargo of exhausted miners. The Sink Hole was situated on the eastern edge of the village overlooking the boundless stretch of desert beyond. Gazing through the smudged window I saw pillows of dust surging up in clouds over the baking shimmering ground, obscuring the low grey mountains on the horizon as the trucks headed toward us like a stampeding herd of wild bulls. I picked up my tray and waited.

Five minutes later the first of the miners came stomping into the bar, tramping their work boots into the scarred floor and slapping their caps against their thighs to loosen the last of the desert grit from their company-issued coveralls. Everything about them was dry and dusty. Most days they were encrusted with so much sand that had been skimmed from the surface of the desert it clung to their faces like a grainy carapace, cracking around the corners of their eyes and around their mouths and noses. On bad days they were masked with so much grit I could barely distinguish their faces.

Not that it mattered very much. They were all the same to me. The most these guys could hope to attain in life was a transfer to one of the many oases scattered about the barren waste fields where government-operated collective farms provided employment for those with connections. The many that remained were left to toil in the mines and plants for meager salaries in exchange for lung diseases and shortened life spans. I was a step below them. I was the girl who served these masters. I was less than a serf but little more than a slave. I had no identity, no official paperwork as proof of my existence other than a license of employment and transfer, which was little more than a bill of sale. At least Slug was a decent man. Unlike some of my former owner/employers, he never touched me or tried to coerce me into providing special favours for the patrons of the bar. There were many other establishments in the village that provided those services. Instead Slug treated me like a feeble-minded child, almost like a daughter. I never knew my father, but I have often fantasized that he was just like Slug, a big burly man with heavy arms and frizzy hair that betrayed the soul of a gentle giant.

I unloaded my tray of beer mugs and returned to the bar for another round when I felt the flutter of tepid air against my back as another patron entered the room through the revolving door. I didn't notice him at first. By the time I turned around again he had already found a seat at a wobbly bistro table in the furthest corner of the room beneath a faded poster of a character once known as Mickey Mouse. I meandered among the tables, serving drinks and collecting tarnished sticky coins and dodging the usual unwelcome slaps on my ass, when I noticed him sitting alone.

The first thing that struck me was the pallor of his skin. Although he didn't look ill in any way, he looked more sallow than the other miners who sported sunburned ruddy complexions beneath their coating of desert dust. He wore the same blue coveralls as the others, but as I approached his table I noticed subtle differences. The fabric was stiff and crackled like sheet metal when he shifted positions in his chair; small creases at the shoulders and elbows exposed what appeared to be paint flaking off to reveal something metallic in the material. There was not a speck of dust on him. He was the cleanest miner I had ever seen; even his hair gleamed like burnished leather in the dim light of the bar. He sat with his hands folded neatly in his lap, hands that were smooth and uncalloused and scrupulously clean.

"Beer?" I offered and held up my tray.

"Please." He smiled and squinted at the name tag pinned to my apron strap. "Thank you ... Lila."

"You're new," I said and placed the mug of sloshing foam down on the table. I was impressed with his manners. None of the other miners had ever thanked me or even bothered to learn my name unless they were surreptitiously trying to get me into their bed.

"First day," he replied and placed a polished coin on the table beside his beer.

"I can tell," I said. "You don't look like any of the others."

"I have a different job at the mine," he said.

"That must be it," I replied and picked up the coin.

Something bit me in the palm and I gasped and almost dropped my tray. The coin fell out of my hand and clattered on the table.

"I'm sorry," the man said. "I should have warned you not to touch it for a few minutes until it dries. Let me help."

He picked up the coin and placed it on the small mound of money on my tray. It shone like a chip off a broken mirror.

"What was that?" I asked.

"There might be a little acid on it," he replied. "From the mine, of course. It's just a little bit. It won't hurt you."

"Warn me next time," I said. I still felt the tingle against the skin on my palm and I rubbed it in my apron.

"I will." He smiled. "I'm sorry, Lila."

I brought the empty tray back to the bar and dumped the money into the strongbox beside the tap. Slug grunted and held the shiny coin to the light as though trying to see through it.

"So this is what money looks like when it's not covered with crud," he said and dropped it back into the strongbox. "Where'd you get it?"

"From the new guy over there," I replied and pointed to the corner where he sat.

"Where'd he come from?"

"Who knows?" I shrugged and began placing more beer mugs on my tray.

"I don't like the looks of him." Slug scowled.

The man sat alone at his table with his hands folded in his lap. He frowned into the mug of beer before him, watching the layer of foam slowly dissipate. Every once in a while he picked it up and took a sip before placing back down on the table. I found that unusual; most of the miners sat with their dirty calloused hands protectively cradling their beer mugs as though I would snatch it away from them at any moment.

"He's all right," I said and turned with my loaded tray back to the tables. "He won't cause any trouble."

"He looks strange," Slug said. "He's too quiet and too clean. And what's he doing sitting in the back by himself like that?"

"He's new." I shrugged and walked away. I had noticed that he was ostracized by the others. Some of the miners cast suspicious glances in his direction before turning to mutter among themselves behind cupped hands. A few snickered and shook their dusty heads. I had no doubt that by the end of the evening when they were all drunk, one of them would approach him and challenge him in some way until the evening ended up in another brawl.

"Would you like another?" I asked him as I approached his table.

"Please," he replied and nudged his empty mug with its film of amber foam still clinging to the sides. Silvery coins were queued up on the table like polished moons.

"These are safe," he said. "Just take one every time you bring me another beer."

"You better be careful," I said as I collected the money. "I don't like the way those guys over there are looking at you. The owner of this place doesn't like the looks of you either and he's just looking for an excuse to kick you out."

"I know." He nodded. "Tell him I'll be good. I won't cause any trouble."

"It's not you," I replied and cocked my head to the table behind me. "It's them. They can get real mean when they've been drinking."

"They've been riding me all day at the mine," he said. "I'm used to it."

"I just don't want to see anything happen to you," I replied.

"Thanks, Lila, but I can take care of myself."

He returned my smile, revealing perfectly aligned alabaster teeth, so unlike the grey-green chalky teeth of the miners who more often than not had wide gaps in their crooked smiles.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Peter," he replied.

"Take care, Peter," I said and turned back toward the bar.

The major altercation I had predicted never came to pass. By the time the sun plunged below the horizon, casting the desert in hues of purple-pink and luminescent orange, the miners were inebriated and boisterous. A few staggered out the door to whatever grotto they dwelled in while the more clamorous rabble remained and grew increasingly rowdy. Peter remained in his solitary corner, waving me over each time he wanted another. It grew dark in the bar and Slug lit the few lamps he was permitted because The Sink Hole was designated a public house. Just before last call, one of the drunken miners, probably on a dare from his companions, rose from the table and weaved across the room toward Peter. I was standing at the bar unloading the last of the evening's dirty mugs when I noticed him approach the little bistro table in the corner. He was a big man with wide hulking shoulders, whose facial scars revealed a penchant for brawling. I couldn't hear what he said even though the pandemonium in the bar dwindled down to whispers as he leaned both calloused fists onto the surface of the table. Peter shook his head and said something back to him.

"Here we go." Slug sighed and reached out to grab the iron crowbar that hung on the wall behind the bar.

The big man roared like an enraged bear. He grabbed the little table and threw it across the room where it smashed against the far wall, sending splinters of shattered glass and wood flying in all directions. Peter sat in his chair, nonplussed by the man's reaction, his hands folded placidly in his lap.

"Get up!" the man roared.

He held both fists up at the ready. Behind him, the small clique of miners gathered around to either watch the show or lend their friend a helping hand. Not that he would need support; the big man must have outweighed Peter by at least fifty pounds. Slug leapt over the bar and stood ready for trouble with the crowbar held up before him.

"I don't want to fight." Peter shook his head and gazed up at his antagonist.

"You some kind of pussy?" the big man goaded him with a shove to the shoulder. "Get up you little faggot!"

"Don't touch me!" Peter warned.

"Don't like to be touched, eh?" Big Man smirked and shoved Peter hard enough to send him toppling out of his seat.

"I said I don't want to fight," Peter said from the floor. "Now don't touch me!"

"Sissy white boy doesn't like to be touched." Big Man laughed with a chorus of chuckles from his companions.

Peter leapt to his feet and backed away until his back pressed into the poster of Mickey Mouse. The papery image began to smoke.

"Do something!" I pleaded to Slug. "This isn't a fair fight. Peter can't take them all on himself."

"I'd love to see the little bastard get a beating," Slug said, "but you're right. It ain't a fair fight."

He pushed his way through the cluster of miners and held the crowbar over his head like a club. Big Man was determined to get at least one good punch in. Before Slug could stop him with a butt from the curved tip of the crowbar, he drew his fist back and smacked Peter across the jaw. Peter's head snapped back and banged against the disintegrating poster with a muted thud.

"Ow!" Big Man hollered and covered his fist with the cup of his other hand.

Peter turned his head to look back at him, his expression blank and impassive. Big Man moaned and hunched over his injured hand. Slug shoved him back with the tip of his crowbar.

"Out!" he hollered. "We're closing early today. Everybody out!"

He waved the crowbar over his head to emphasize his point. The group of miners stepped back and began to disperse; the show was over for the evening.

"My hand!" Big Man wailed. "What the hell did you do to my hand?"

"I don't give a bug's ass about your goddamn hand!" Slug shouted and held the crowbar over his head. "Everybody out!"

The miners filed out through the revolving doors; a few stopped to examine the injuries on Big Man's hand and shook their heads in consternation when they saw the raw wound across the row of freckled knuckles, oozing and sizzling as something slowly ate away at the flesh; thin tendrils of smoke trailed behind.

"You too!" Slug held the crowbar toward Peter. "Out! I don't want you in here if you're going to be making that kind of trouble."

"He didn't do anything," I shouted from the bar. "He never wanted to fight in the first place. He didn't even punch the big guy back."

"Don't care!" Slug replied. "Out! We're closing up."

"I'm leaving," Peter said and headed toward the door. Wafers of burnt paper fluttered behind him like mythological snowflakes.

I waved at him as he left, a feeble attempt at amiability, and shrugged when he smiled back as though to say sorry for the trouble. I turned back toward my work as Slug hung the crowbar back on its hook.

"Look at this," I said and handed him one of the glass mugs that Peter had drunk from. "What do you make of that?"

Slug held the mug up to the yellow-orange light from one of the lamps and frowned. Shallow grooves had been chiselled into the handle where Peter had touched it as though his fingers had somehow bored into the handle.

"Don't know," Slug replied and handed it back to me. "Just wash it with the others. It's still good."

I finished washing the mugs and mopping the floor as Slug counted the evening's haul. He kept no receipts or books of any kind. He kept his cash stashed away in an impenetrable vault in the rear office. Yawning, I finally bid Slug goodnight and stepped out into the cool night air.

The tavern was situated in a far corner of the main courtyard of the village. Few lights burned in the windows at that hour of the night. Most people were either toiling away the night shift at the mines or sleeping off whatever they had consumed at establishments like The Sink Hole. I felt sorry for those who worked the shift between dawn and dusk. The only light they ever saw outside the florescent tubes in the mine shafts was the light of the searing stars overhead. At least they had the solace of knowing they would probably outlive everyone else since their pallid complexions were never exposed to the lethal sun.

The gradual depletion of the topmost atmosphere had magnified the stars until they shone like infant suns. Slug once told me that when he was a child he could always distinguish the stars from the planets because stars twinkle and planets don't. Fifty years later nothing twinkled in the night sky. Everything up there blazed like the headlights on those fabled super highways I had heard so much about but were now buried beneath a carpet of sand.

Peter stood in the centre of the courtyard. He was so still I thought I was looking at the silhouette of a mannequin or a statue someone had left out on a lark. Both hands were shoved into the pockets of his coveralls and his head was thrown back as he gazed heavenward, his long hair pooling on his shoulders like molten brown crystal.

"Hey there," I called and flinched as my voice echoed off the stone walls of the surrounding buildings. "What are you doing out here so late?"

"Just looking at the sky," Peter said without looking at me.

"Sorry about what happened in there," I said. "I warned you those guys can get pretty mean if they get drunk."

"That's all right." Peter smiled. "I'm used to it."

He turned and finally looked at me, a small smile creasing his lips. His pale skin reflected the light of the stars and I was grateful it was a night of a new moon. A full moon would have illuminated him like a ghost.

"They only pick on you because you're so different," I said. "No offense, but you tend to stand out in a crowd."

"I know," he replied. "I'm the painted bird."

"The what?"

"Nothing," he said and looked back up at the sky. "It's from a book I read once when I was young."

"You like to read?" I asked.

"I used to," he said. "Way back when I could still touch a book."

We stood in awkward silence: Peter staring up at the sky and me staring back at his profile, waiting for him to say something else. I curled my toes and dug the nails into the sand until they scraped against the rough concrete underneath.

"I have to go now," I said and turned to leave.

I headed toward the corroded three-wheeled trailer behind The Sink Hole that Slug had given me to sleep in. It was the only home I knew.

"Have you ever felt so deprived you feel as though you're disappearing?" he asked.

I stopped in my tracks. I didn't turn around but I knew he was still gazing up at the discuses of light pinned to the sky.

"Who are you?" I said and twirled around to face him. I was suddenly angry, though I didn't know why.

"I'm one of the acid men. From the mines," he replied.

Peter turned and smiled at me. His features were nestled in shadows, revealing only half his face. I have never seen a more forlorn expression on anyone before or since. He was a stranger to me, but I felt an overwhelming urge to rush up and encase him in my arms, though I knew to do so would be fatal. I had heard of the acid men. Their bodies were slowly dissolving; every muscle and nerve, every gland and drop of sweat and saliva was mutating and fermenting into a corrosive organic substance more caustic than battery acid. No one knew why. It was a rare genetic anomaly; some scientists claimed it was the body's response to the excessive radiation that poured down on us from a denuded sun; others insisted it was the human race's next evolutionary step as our bodies adapted to an increasingly changing environment.

Whatever the cause, the individuals who suffered from it were herded into mines and factories where their body fluids were painfully extracted for their corrosive properties. They were the government's cheapest source of raw acid.

"No!" Peter stepped back, holding both hands up before him when he saw me approach. "Don't touch me. You saw what happened to that goon's hand when he hit me."

I stopped in my tracks and stared at him. The sudden flash of anger evaporated and I was overwhelmed with a sense of pity and loss.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"Does what hurt?"

"The changing," I said. "Feeling your whole body transform into acid."

"I don't feel it," he said. "All I feel is the burn whenever they pump me for my blood."

"It must be pretty awful," I said.

"It leaves me weak, but I've gotten used to it." He shrugged.

"I don't mean that," I said. "I mean it must be pretty awful going through the rest of your life not being able to touch anything or anyone."

"It's lonely," he admitted. "That's why I waited out here for you. You're the first person in a long time that has been kind to me. Everyone else treats me like a freak."

I nodded sympathetically. I wasn't a mutant, but I was an outsider just like him. I stepped toward him and looked into the shadowy sockets of his eyes. They blazed tawny gold in the dim light and I didn't know if that was their natural colour brought about by his transformation or if they were reflecting the starlight from above. He didn't flinch or move away this time.

"I'm sorry for what's happening to you," I said. "I can't imagine what it must be like."

"You're the only person who's ever said that to me." He smiled.

"Would like to come to my trailer and spend the night?" I asked.

Peter hesitated.

"No one's offered me that in a long time," he said. "But I can't. What would be the point? We can't touch."

"It doesn't matter," I replied. "We can just talk."

"I'd like that." He smiled.

I would have taken his hand, but I knew if I did the acid in his skin would burrow into my flesh like a branding iron. I touched his shoulder, clothed in stiff metallic fabric, and looped my arm through the crook of his elbow as I led him out of the courtyard.

So here I am, the girl with deformed lips. Scar tissue has formed around my mouth, red and pouty like a blood clot. I find it difficult to smile; the tough fibrous skin pulls painfully against my jaw, but I try anyway. I also bear scars on my hands and arms and other places on my body that are not so discernable. Peter wears his gloves most of the time, but sometimes I just want to touch him and the risk be damned. I think I may have started a fad among the other girls in the village. Burns and scars are appearing on their faces and bodies also. More acid men are appearing out in public and they have never looked happier.

At first Slug was angry with me. He was afraid my disfigurement would scare the regular customers away. He can't send me back to the market stalls. No one would buy a girl with a grotesquely malformed face, and he would lose his investment in me. I find it to be a blessing; it keeps the patrons' greasy hands from grabbing at me when I'm serving them their beer. I notice them averting their eyes many times when they think I catch them staring at me or whispering about me behind my back. Now they ask me the usual question:

"What happened to your face?"

And I tell them the truth. I tell them in have no regrets. This deformity is worth each and every kiss I receive from my acid man.

Caroline Misner was born in a country that at the time was called Czechoslovakia. She immigrated to Canada in 1969 and has been reading and writing and following her muse ever since, wherever it may take her. Her work has appeared in numerous journals throughout Canada, the USA and the UK. In 2004 her novella "Groghelm" received Honourable Mention in the prestigious L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Competition.

As I see it, our biggest problem is that we've effectively got a planetary government that's running on autopilot, governed by international treaty law and the fundamental systems of the way the global free-trade regime has been set up. Not only is there nobody at the controls, there's nobody to complain to when things go wrong--it's unaccountable. Traditional empires had safety valves for public protest--the current system doesn't have one.

--Charles Stross, "Charles Stross: Fast Forward" in Locus (Jan 2005, Vol 54 No 1)

[Back to Table of Contents]

Charlie Strong made the mistake of talking to Tracy Miyazawa on the good holophone downstairs in the living room, the phone with Real-As-Life(TM) resolution.

It was a mistake he wouldn't have made even six months before, but Charlie had just turned fourteen and Tracy had silky black hair and a shy smile and the fact that her tee-shirt was radically tight hadn't escaped his attention.

In fact her tee-shirt commanded so much of his attention, he could barely string three words together. Between Tracy's tee-shirt and the suddenly treacherous shoals of the English language, he didn't realize the full magnitude of his error until the kitchen door slammed shut.

The words "Sorry gotta go" tumbled out of Charlie's mouth and his hand jerked through her holographic body and hit the disconnect button. Her pretty mouth formed a surprised "oh" and then she faded to nothing.

Charlie stood in the middle of the living room, breathing hard, trying to get hold of himself.

That had been close.

A slurred voice said, "Charlie," and he nearly jumped out of his skin.

He wheeled around to see his father half-slumped against a door frame. Daniel Strong wasn't a big man, in fact he stood only five nine, but he was fully grown, so he easily towered over his fourteen-year-old son.

"H-hi, Dad," said Charlie.

"H-hi, Dad," said Daniel in a mocking falsetto. His face was flushed and one tail of his stylish shirt hung out of his slacks. Charlie smelled the sour reek of gin.

"I thod I tol' you never use da good phone," his father muttered.

Charlie thought quickly and decided to try the truth. It probably wouldn't help, nothing ever did, but that's what he decided to try.

He swallowed and said, "You're right, Dad. I'm sorry."

The bigger Strong snorted and poked a finger hard into the boy's chest. He leaned in so that his face was only inches from Charlie's. "I don won you talkin' to whores on da good phone."

Something in Charlie snapped. "She's not a whore, Dad, she's a nice girl and I--"

Daniel's fist snapped forward and smashed into Charlie's face so fast that the boy never saw the blow coming. One second he was talking and the next he was on the floor, his jaw throbbing and the salty taste of blood thick in his mouth.

Daniel muttered something unintelligible. Charlie didn't answer and he didn't get up.

He'd been through this before.

After a moment, Daniel staggered off to collapse on his bed. Only then did Charlie climb to his feet.

He ran a hand over his jaw and winced. His father hadn't hit him hard enough to break it and anyway his nanomed was already releasing pain killer into his bloodstream and repairing the damage cell by cell. In another few hours there would be no physical sign that his father had hit him.

But some wounds are slower to heal.

I wish you could've seen the look on his face right then, because there's no doubt in my mind. That was the exact moment when Charlie decided to become a superhero.

And who am I, you may be asking, and how did I come to see the look on Charlie's face when there was no one in that house save Charlie and his father?

Well, don't worry about that, we'll come to that part in a bit. For right now I want to tell you a little more about Charlie and how I think he ended up where he did.

(That's right, how I think. Because, although I know exactly what happened to Charlie, I never got the chance to ask him why he did the things he did.)

I think Charlie Strong got the idea of being a superhero because of his last name. Well, that and the fact that he was an American boy raised on a steady diet of the Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader and a thousand others.

Charlie's favorite reading material were vintage comic books: flimsy newsprint magazines which reproduced the originals so well that if he squinted he could see the little dots of pink (or, less commonly, brown) that gave the hero's skin its color. From the age of seven to fourteen, Charlie's world was filled with tales of anguished people irradiated by new and bizarre forms of radiation.

Who would be surprised that he wanted to become a superhero? No, the surprising part was that Charlie actually made his dream come true.

It probably never would've happened if he hadn't had a serious problem.

Now if you read comic books you probably don't understand what kind of problem I'm talking about. Maybe you think I mean that the Earth was about to be destroyed by a giant solar flare or an asteroid or an evil supergenius, but you'd be wrong.

The truth was that not only were these threats pretty damn unlikely but Charlie lived in a world where there wasn't much crime and you'd have to look pretty hard to find someone who went to bed hungry. Thanks to the wonders of nanomed the people of Charlie's world didn't even have HMO's to complain about.

No, Charlie's problems were entirely common and mundane. They weren't the kinds of problems that could've driven the action-packed plot of a comic book. They were the kinds of problems wholly related to being a fourteen-year-old boy in the 21st Century.

If you've been a fourteen-year-old boy you know what I'm talking about and if you haven't then you have to take my word for it because you have no idea how awkward it is to wake up from one of those dreams all sweaty and (ugh) sticky or to be thrust into an alien social scene you don't remotely understand, driven by a need you can't describe in words, even if you were inclined to, which you aren't because you're a fourteen-year-old boy, hello.

Anyway, take it from me it's no picnic.

Plus, as you know, Charlie had one other problem that (hopefully) most other teens didn't.

His father hit him.

You can see how this might tend to fix a guy's attention on the idea of justice.

Charlie was a reasonably methodical and logical boy and so the first thing he did was design and nanofacture a costume.

The costume was woven out of flexible polysteel fibers, so it was both lightweight and strong. It was chocolate brown with a bright green sinusoidal pattern running down the legs and it had a matching cape and hood. (Unfortunately he lived during an age of transcendent ecoconsciousness.)

In the center of the chest was a bright green "S" for Strongman. (I said Charlie was methodical and logical, not creative.)

The next thing he did was obtain some surplus military grade nanomed. (Surplus, because in Charlie's world there was hardly any need for militaries any more.)

And then he took flying lessons.

This last part was harder than it sounds.

People were able to fly by changing the gravitational constant in a small annular region around their bodies. In zero gee a powerful jump would get you going and then you turned the gravity back on and swooped Earthward to pick up some speed.

Knowing exactly when to turn gravity on and off was a skill that required great dexterity, a trait not generally associated with fourteen-year-old boys. Charlie broke more than one bone working on his flying skills and it turned out that the milgrade nanomed came in very handy, after all.

All this took up a lot of time, so while Charlie was planning to become a superhero he didn't see a lot of his dad. And as so often happens, after a while Charlie forgot what exactly he'd been so mad about.

The superhero plan became a kind of therapy, a way to deal with his problems without actually dealing with them, which is the perfect strategy for a fourteen-year-old boy.

Things went on happily like that for some time until one day when Charlie's father woke up from his latest drunk.

Now I don't mean that Daniel was flying high on spark or poppers or VR-augmented feelgood, no he was actually drunk. He'd spent the night before, as he so often did, swilling cheap gin. (And not because he couldn't afford anything better, he actually liked the taste of cheap gin.)

You may wonder why this happened to Daniel (and, by the way, to Charlie) when they lived in a world where alcoholism could be undone with a teensy genetic modification and a pill that you took for a week. I mean, when the world you live in is so wonderful that drunks don't have to suffer through twelve-step programs, really, what do you have to get drunk about in the first place?

It boiled down to this: Charlie's mother had flounced out of their lives some time ago. This wasn't unusual; in fact it happened all the time. There was no AIDS, no herpes, no unwanted pregnancy, and best of all, no God looking disapprovingly over your shoulder when the lessons with the local tennis pro graduated to something of a more personal nature.

Consequently, everyone could have sex with everyone else and usually did. So Charlie's mother lit out for greener pastures, leaving Daniel with the suspicion that he was inadequate in some way, a suspicion confirmed by year after grinding year of leisure unleavened by any kind of meaningful work.

So Daniel spent just about ever day drunk out of his mind, and one day his alcohol-sodden mind led him down to the local rec center where Charlie and two boys from school were running a total immersion program.

Charlie flipped to an IR filter and the dark corridor lit up with the phantasmal green glow of heat.

"See anything?" Brian asked anxiously.

Charlie heard the fear in his friend's voice. The truth was Brian didn't really like these sims. Gunslinger or Daytona Drag? Sure! Soar? Well, maybe on a good day.

But not Bughunt. Not ever Bughunt. Brian was only here as a special favor to Charlie.

"Point, all clear," Charlie answered crisply.

Kevin McIntyre snorted over the common freq.

"What's your problem, Kevin?" Charlie snapped.

"You can't see nothin'," sneered McIntyre. "You don't got any lights on, I can see it from back here."

"For your information," snapped Charlie, "I'm scanning in IR." He glanced behind him. Kevin was a great hulking shape, more the size of a man than a kid.

"Jee-zus, Strong. I knew you were stupid, but I didn't think you were a moron. Aldebaran spider-cats are colder than space ambient. IR's not gonna help you see shit."

Charlie jerked his eyes around to the front. Damn it, McIntyre was right. How had he forgotten that?

Even now the spider-cat could be creeping toward him. He imagined the slinky creature working its way forward, ready to emit a beam of full spectrum EM, enough to fry all his sensors before he could even get his rifle up, and that ladies and gentlemen would be that.

"Cuh-mon," said McIntyre. "Let me up there. I'll show you how a real man walks point."

"Maybe that's a good idea," said Brian.

No, what's a good idea, Charlie thought, is the two of us dumping McIntyre. How'd you make friends with such a jerk, anyway? What he said was, "It's my turn."

Brian bit his lip. Charlie could see him on IR. Brian was a smallish boy for fourteen with a ready smile and wide, expressive eyes. He was also the best friend Charlie had.

"Yeah," said Brian heavily. "Yeah, it's your turn."

McIntyre let out an exasperated sigh.

Charlie turned and static danced across his visor's HUD. It startled him and his trigger finger spasmed.

The weapon discharged and in that hellish flash of orange-yellow, Charlie saw the outline of a large mass of sharp teeth and insectile legs.

"Spider-cat," Charlie screamed in a high-pitched voice, and fired his weapon.

A rough keening filled the corridor, something half-way between the call of a mountain lion and the hiss of steam. It was soon followed by the smell of burning dog shit.

"Got him," Charlie shouted. He saw the writhing shape of the emerald-bright creature against his facemask. "Now you can see it on IR."

Brian glanced at the chrono display built into his left wrist. "Seventeen minutes and 33 seconds," he said. "I think that's a new record."

McIntyre peeled off his helmet and tossed it down. "You know, Strong, you scream like a woman."

"Really?" said Charlie. "Was that before or after I shot the spider-cat?"

"You just got lucky," McIntyre said hotly.

"Yeah," said Charlie, "and it only took me seventeen minutes and 33 seconds."

Brian laughed and gave Charlie a high-five.

Kevin McIntyre scowled like someone was making him lick the dust off Charlie's shoes. It might have been the best moment of Charlie's life.

Right up until the abandoned space station and the roasted corpse of the spider-cat dissolved into nothingness.

And Charlie turned to see his father standing there, his arms folded across his chest, lips set into a tight little line, his face flushed.

Ohmygod, Charlie thought, this is gonna be an "I thod I tol' you" moment. He glanced at the guys. Brian was studying the simspace wall like it was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.

Not McIntyre, though.

McIntyre was looking straight at him, a smug little smile hidden in the curve of his lips.

Charlie turned back to his father, the sour taste of acid at the back of his throat, a light, fluttery fear growing in his belly.

What did I do? he thought. I didn't do anything. What did I do?

"I thod I tol' you to clean up the kitchen before you went out," said Daniel Strong.

What was he talking about? Charlie frantically rifled through his memories. His father had come home last night very late and had knocked over a few glasses in the kitchen and then lumbered off to bed. He hadn't said two words to Charlie in almost 24 hours, so how could he have told him to clean up the kitchen?

It took Charlie a second to realize that it didn't matter. He licked his lips. "Yeah, sorry, Dad. I'll go do it right now."

But his father wasn't listening. He was doing something to his left foot. Charlie realized with mounting horror that his father was taking off his shoe. His sock was stained the dark color of brick. He pulled it off to reveal a foot encrusted with dried, black blood.

Charlie glanced back at the guys. Brian's eyes were huge and round, staring-in-shock round. McIntyre's hidden smile was no longer so hidden.

Daniel Strong dropped his shoe and bent down to retrieve it. The way he grabbed for it and missed suggested that he might be seeing more than one.

Charlie was so flustered that he stepped toward his father to pick up the dropped shoe.

Daniel reached forward and shoved him, hard.

Charlie stumbled backwards and landed on his butt. No bones were broken that time, no skin bruised, but it was still the worst blow his father ever gave him.

Because his friends were there to see the whole thing.

That's what I think, anyway.

Charlie sprinted out of the simspace, leaving the two boys with his half-drunk father still trying to pick up his left shoe.

Now Charlie was smart enough not to try to become a superhero on his own world. On Charlie's Earth he was just one more indestructible thrill-seeking teen dressed up in a stylish brown-and-green suit flying around looking for adventure. And deep down in a part of himself Charlie couldn't name, he knew it.

The answer, of course, was to go into the past where people had real problems and they couldn't fly and shit, but of course you can't go into the past, I don't care what comic books say.

At least you couldn't go back into your own past.

Fortunately Charlie lived just a few hundred kilometers from a quantum portal.

Now because this is not a comic book, I'm going to tell you what a quantum portal is.

Everything that could happen has happened. When you come to an intersection instead of turning right or left you turn right and left, and the universe turns with you, one universe turns right and another turns left so now there are two.

Every time a decision point is reached the universe-that-is births more universes to cover every possible outcome. All this means that reality is lousy with universes, an immense number of them exactly like ours except a free neutron in the Cretaceous took nine minutes to decay instead of ten, or whatever.

The number of universes like ours isn't infinite but it is such a big number that if I tried to tell you what it was you'd lose interest and go away before I finished.

It turns out that everything we think is real: books and people, tables and porno mags, everything is made outa these little particles that arise from the quantum foam, so essentially we're all made of nothing. Think about that next time someone shoots his mouth off about the emptiness of space.

Anyway, the important point is this. Every one of these particles carries with it this huge number, this immense, gargantuan number that describes everywhere it's been and everywhere it could've been. With a big enough quantum computer you can untangle it all, look into any corner of the universe you like.

Any corner of any universe you like.

And given enough energy you can go there.

Now Charlie lived at a time of vast wealth and just about zero problems, so there was plenty of money available to develop a quantum portal.

Charlie took a maglev out to the university where they kept it. The portal was protected by security, but the security was pretty casual, partly because everything that could happen had happened, but mostly because whatever damage anyone could do would happen to someone else.

Charlie uploaded a crude virus that disabled the university's security system. (The effect was only temporary, but that was OK, temporary was all Charlie needed.) He selected a time in the late 20th Century of a universe that was all but identical to our own. Then he pushed the big red button (these kinds of devices always have big red buttons) and the quantum portal decomposed him right then and there.

And when it reintegrated him, he was somewhere else.

Charlie blinked. One moment he'd been standing in the portal's control room and the next he was standing in a vacant lot overlooking a busy, downtown street.

And this was not Charlie's time.

He could tell by the steady stream of rumbling, honking, idling vehicles that crowded the street, belching clouds of gritty, gray-black smoke, tires squealing against the hot pavement while their owners rode in air conditioned comfort.

He could tell by the garbage strewn in and amongst the lot's weeds: gum wrappers and broken glass scattered over the ground like the leavings of some horrible parade, the torn, faded pages of skin mags, and the sad, sticky shapes of used rubbers.

He took a deep breath. He could tell by the foul stink of the air.

He had made it.

He grimly pushed aside a pile of garbage with one chocolate-colored boot and thought that it was a good thing, because these people sure could use his help.

Charlie took a second deep breath (this one meant to be resolute and heroic) and leapt straight up into the air. His leap would have earned him a sad shake of the head from Mr. Dabruskin, his flying instructor, but it was good enough to get the attention of all the people in their ugly, noisy vehicles on the crowded road.

Apparently they'd never seen anyone fly before.

Charlie whooped in delight as he soared and banked over the city. It was a magnificent thing, the city, a beast of glass and steel and reinforced concrete that growled in its own deep voice and radiated heat in waves. And it seemed to go on forever, except where it met an arc of deep blue as if a great, watery God had taken a bite out of the monster's dingy gray hide.

In Charlie's day and age the Earth's population was only a few hundred million and what cities there were blended nicely with the surrounding ecosystems. There was nothing like this great monstrosity.

Nothing at all.

Which probably explains why he spent two hours swooping over the steel towers with their shimmering mirror faces, attracting a crowd wherever he went, and causing more than one poor, unsuspecting corporate executive to faint dead away when he (or, less frequently, she) glanced up and saw Charlie floating there, arms folded over his chest, emerald cape flapping magnificently behind him on the winds that twirled between the skyscrapers a hundred meters up.

More than one CEO was rushed to Northwestern Memorial with a heart attack that day.

Eventually the sun began to set, bathing the city in molten oranges and tawny yellows shot through with streaks of iridescent red.

There was no smog in Charlie's world and he had never seen a sunset like this before. He hovered over downtown until the last glowing bit of the sun's limb finally slipped below the horizon. Then he shivered slightly (superhero or not, it was starting to get cold up there between the skyscrapers) and adjusted the local gravitational constant until he was falling at a gentle rate.

About twenty meters from the ground he heard a scream, a woman's piercing shriek that suddenly cut out.

Charlie swooped toward the jaundiced light of a sodium street lamp, pulling himself up at the last second and settling more or less gracefully to the ground.

(He came down hard on his left ankle, but his mask hid his wince and the nanomed got to work fixing the sprain before it swelled up. Actually, it was one of Charlie's better landings.)

The orange light revealed a lanky man with greasy, blonde hair and a peach fuzz moustache struggling with a woman wearing a shimmery green blouse and a gray skirt.

The man, for those of you interested in trivia, went by the handle of Shane T. Crewter, and had been booked four times on sexual assault charges. (Though never convicted, praise be to the American legal system.)

"Hey, you, leave her alone," Charlie said in his deepest voice, which might have provided a nice effect if his voice hadn't cracked in the middle.

The man looked up, startled, then saw who had challenged him and started laughing. Charlie was wearing a superhero costume, but underneath it he still had the build of a scrawny, fourteen-year-old boy.

"Help," screamed the woman. "Please help me."

Charlie stood rooted to the spot. He might be a boy wonder, but Shane T. Crewter was a man.

The woman tried to pry Crewter's hand off her wrist and he turned and slapped her.

Charlie discovered he could move after all.

He covered the few meters between him and the man in a single long jump. His milgrade nanites sensed the sudden surge of adrenaline and amplified and shaped it. They flooded his bloodstream with tailored drugs that fed his anger and braced his musculature.

Without thinking about it Charlie drew his fist back and smashed the man in the face. Shane T. Crewter crumpled to the ground, his jaw broken in three places.

Unfortunately, as a close look at his rap sheet would later show, Shane T. Crewter was not a man to give up easily. He was not strong, nor, it must be said, especially smart, but he was fast. A switchblade flicked open with an evil snicker. He plunged it into Charlie's side.

Only to see it bend like tinfoil against Charlie's polysteel costume.

With superhuman speed, Charlie's hand darted down and crushed the perp's wrist, an injury so severe that even the dull-witted Shane T. Crewter figured out that his best course of action was to lie on the ground and moan.

Charlie pushed Crewter's arm away and bent over the woman who'd fallen to the sidewalk. She lay on the concrete, her face pressed against her arm, sobbing inconsolably.

Charlie gently touched her shoulder and she cringed. He jerked his hand away. "No one's gonna hurt you," he said in a low voice. "I promise."

Slowly she turned to look up at him.

And Charlie fell in love.

Even with her shoulder-length blond hair disheveled and her blue eyes rimmed with red and her skin streaked with watery mascara, even with all that, she was beautiful.

"Wh-who are you?" she asked in a lost, little girl voice.

"I'm--Well, I'm Strongman. Uh, what's your name?"

Not very impressive, I suppose, but you have to remember that Charlie was new to this.

"Karin. Karin Tadorovic."

She was absolutely beautiful. She was older than Charlie, but not by too much.

Charlie swallowed. "Are you OK, uh, Karin?"

She gave a jerky nod. And then she seemed to think of something. "W-why are you here?"

Charlie hadn't thought of a clever slogan yet, so he leaned down, took her hand, and said the first thing that came into his mind. "I'm here to help."

Then he let go of her hand, kicked Shane T. Crewter hard (to make sure he stayed down), and leapt straight up into the night.

It went on like that for a while. Charlie spent the next couple of months foiling bank robberies and interrupting drug deals, flying the injured to hospitals and generally making life miserable for the scumbags of 20th Century Chicago.

Charlie was well rewarded for his efforts.

There were parades and three-part features on Eyewitness News. He was on the cover of both the Tribune and the Sun-Times and the mayor gave him the key to the city.

And there were women--young women, older women, pretty women, not so pretty women--all of them screaming his name as he swooped low over State Street or Lincoln Park or the Oak Street Beach.

In short, it was everything, absolutely everything, a teen-aged boy mired in a serious wish-fulfillment fantasy could hope for.

And then it happened.

Charlie was responding to a fire in the John Hancock Tower. He could see it half-way across the city, see the great black clouds of smoke billowing out of the damaged building, like blood billows out of a sea lion mutilated by a great white.

The fire was a big one and Charlie knew there were people trapped inside. He flew up to the 86th floor and put his fist through a window. It shattered into a million pieces and smoke poured out.

But inside there was a woman, huddled on the floor, shielded from the fire by a massive row of filing cabinets.

"Hey!" Charlie called. "Over here."

She crawled over to the shattered window. Her clothes and her face were stained black and she was bleeding from the broken glass, but she was alive.

Charlie held his hand out to her. "I'll save you."

She glanced down and shuddered. "I can't," she cried. "I just can't."

"You have to jump," he said. "It's the only way."

She climbed to her feet, terrified eyes fixed on the long drop. "I can't can't can't," she whispered fiercely.

"I'll take you to safety," he said. "I promise."

She screwed her eyes shut. "No," she whispered.

"Then don't look," he said. "We'll count to three and then you'll jump and I'll catch you."

"Do you promise?" she whispered.

"Yes, absolutely."

She drew a deep breath and said, "One."

Together they said, "Two."

"I'm going to save you," Charlie said.

"Don't you think you'd better check with me first," said a deep voice behind him.

Charlie's head whipped around. A caped figure hovered behind him. His costume was a perfect black (even the cowl and the cape), save for a golden ring on his chest.

"Who--" Charlie began.

"Three," said the woman and jumped.

Charlie's head whipped around again and then he dove after her. He might have saved her still, but the figure in black, dove after him and caught his ankle.

Charlie broke away and pursued the woman's terrified scream all the way down, but he didn't quite get there before the ground reached up and smashed the life out of her.

A superhero never appears in a comic book without a supervillain. There's a certain logic to this. A superhero's story rapidly becomes boring without the challenge of an archenemy.

Strongman's nemesis called himself Collapsar, and like Charlie he came from another universe, in fact he came from Charlie's very own universe.

Have you pierced Collapsar's secret identity? Have you figured out who it was?

It was me.

After the woman's untimely and, indeed very messy, demise over the greater part of North Michigan Avenue, Charlie launched himself toward the dark figure still hovering up near the 86th floor, screaming with rage the whole way up.

Unlike Charlie, the villain was a full-grown man and he possessed the same technological advantages as the lad, but when Charlie hit him he was going better than 100 kph.

The pair smashed through a window, scattering office furniture everywhere, and crashed out another window on the other side.

Collapsar hit Charlie and he saw stars. He shook it off.

"I could've saved her," Charlie cried.

"Now why would you want to do that?" asked the supervillain.

Charlie opened his mouth, but no words came out. It was a monstrous question. Why wouldn't he want to save the woman? Collapsar might as well have asked him why he wanted to breathe.

"They're all just bugs, Charlie," said the villain. "There's a million, billion more of her somewhere else. What difference does it make if this particular one lives or dies?"

"How do you know my name?" gasped Charlie.

The villain smiled a smug little smile beneath his ebony cowl. "I think you'll find I know a great many things about you, Charlie Strong."

Charlie shook his head. "How?"

"Come now, Charlie. I know you're a little slow, but surely you've figured that much out, at least."

He stared at the villain blankly.

Collapsar sighed. "Think, Charlie. The quantum portal. I've watched you in the quantum portal. I know about your father hitting you," he said almost gently.

"Who are you?" Charlie whispered.

"I call myself Collapsar, the Living Black Hole. Catchy, huh?"

Charlie frowned.

"Hell, it's a lot better than Strongman."

"No," said Charlie, "who are you really?"

"Want to know?" The villain put his hand to his cowl as if to pull it up, then he gave a maniacal laugh and dropped it again. "If you want to know, you'll have to catch me."

He turned and pointed his arms at the burning building, hands palm out, like a wizard gathering up the power of a storm. The top of the building exploded.

Then he zipped away.

Charlie tore after him.

They fought all over the city. Collapsar flew low, cutting through high-tension lines and sending showers of golden sparks raining down on the people below. Sometimes the villain used his power to blow up buildings, sometimes buses, and in one particularly dramatic sequence which was caught on film by Eyewitness News reporter Juan Gutierrez before his sudden death, Collapsar destroyed the Eyewitness News helicopter while it hovered in mid-air.

Charlie tried his best to stop the rampage. He used his body as a missile, smashing into Collapsar. He rained down blows on the dark villain. The man and the boy collided with skyscrapers as they fought their titanic battle, shattering windows, scattering desks and chairs like confetti, sending the power of their blows shivering through the buildings' steel skeletons.

But in the end, it resolved nothing. Collapsar was just as indestructible as Strongman. And so they ended up facing each other, exhausted, hovering in mid-air five or ten meters apart.

"Well, it's been quite a day," said the villain cheerfully.

Charlie balled his hands into fists. "I'll find a way to stop you."

"Not before I do a lot of damage." Collapsar sighed. "But you did give it the old college try. I suppose you're entitled to a reward." He reached up and pulled off his cowl.

Charlie squinted at me. It took him a moment to recognize me (I'd done a good eight years of growing since the last time I saw him, since I followed him into the portal). Finally he said, "Brian?"

I laughed. "That's right. Good to see you again, bud."

"Why?" Charlie asked in a shaky voice.

"For the same reason your father hit you, Charlie. I was bored. And in the future there was no way for me to feel important. But here..." I held my hands out, indicating the burning city. "Here, what I do matters."

"That's horrible," said Charlie.

"Don't be like that, Charlie." I offered him a sly grin. "Besides, it's your fault."

Charlie blinked.

"That's right. I got the idea from you."

His face twisted in horror. He shook his head frantically back and forth. "I would never--Brian, you killed all those people."

I shrugged. "It's not real. It's just like those full immersion sims we used to play at when we were kids. It feels totally real, but it's not."

Charlie drifted toward me. "Brian," he said softly, "you have to stop."

I grinned then, a grin so wide that it felt like it stretched clear across my face. "This is too much fun, Charlie. I'll never stop. Never, never, never."

Then I rammed my body into his and he went spinning down into the canyons between the skyscrapers, a stricken look on his face.

I watched him plummet to the Earth. Somehow he managed to arrest his fall. I could've pushed him harder, could've killed him, most likely. Remember I was twenty-two and a lot stronger than him.

But I wanted our joust, our duel, to go on forever. There could be no Collapsar without Strongman. No Strongman without Collapsar.

So I let him go.

He landed gently on the street and saw a certain woman who, if you've been paying close attention to your portals, ladies and gentlemen, should look familiar.

Charlie turned and saw her. A young woman in her mid-twenties, a curl of blond hair in her eyes, eyes that were wide with terror.

It was Karin Tadorovic, the very first person he'd saved.

She sat on the street, a man's body cradled in her lap. It might've been her brother or her lover or just someone she met on the street, someone she happened to watch die.

"Karin," Charlie called out and she looked up.

She saw him and her eyes narrowed. A scowl marred her pretty face.

He reached out to her with a trembling hand, took her chin in one bloody palm and gently lifted her head. "Karin, are you all right?"

She shoved his hand away. "What do you care, you son of a bitch?"

Charlie's head jerked back as if he'd been slapped.

"I-I d-don't--"

"I wish you never came." She spit the words out like they tasted bitter in her mouth and then she lowered her head and sobbed.

Charlie's eyes filled with tears. You have to remember that for all his powers he was still just a boy, a boy who'd just had the worst day of his life.

Still crying, Charlie took a deep, shuddery breath and disappeared into the smoky black sky.

I don't know what happened next. I've been trapped in this universe for almost two decades and if it's anything like ours, I'll have to wait another century before they develop their quantum portal.

Until then I'll just have to guess what happened to Charlie.

I can imagine him alone in some abandoned building, sobbing, going around and around in circles, trying to find an answer.

There was no quantum portal in this universe so he couldn't run away. And he was weaker than Collapsar so he could never win. And I'd told him that I would never, never, never stop.

Charlie would've replayed the image of Karin Tadorovic in his mind, seeing again and again that look of utter contempt on her pretty face. A look that he'd earned by bringing this horrible storm down on the heads of the people of her city, her world.

And in the end there was only one answer, could be only one answer. How stupid I was to have missed it.

As long as there was a Strongman there would be a Collapsar.

I close my eyes and I can see our final battle like it was yesterday. His costume looked different somehow, maybe a little shinier. I dismissed it without thinking.

Usually Charlie chased me all over the city, trying to keep me from killing people in new and imaginative ways, but this day was different. This day I had to chase him.

How it made me furious, as he darted between buildings and swooped beneath the Michigan Avenue Bridge, skimmed over the surface of the Chicago River.

How dare he deny me my fun.

Finally he zigged when he should've zagged. My hand clamped around his ankle and I jerked him upright. My fist smashed into his chest.

And just as I hit him, I knew, I knew, he wasn't wearing his regular costume. This costume was nothing more than regular, ordinary 20th Century fabric.

I threw my head back and screamed, "No."

But his lifeless body tumbled to Earth.

"No," I whispered. Charlie was my friend. Charlie was real.

I never wanted to kill him.

I know it's not the kind of ending you'd find in a comic book, but on that day Charlie and I discovered that real life is a lot more complicated than comic books.

I see him in my mind's eye, in his ridiculous costume silhouetted against that perfect blue summer sky, as he waits for the blow that will end it all.

But I have no illusion that I beat Charlie. I was merely the instrument of fate's cruel verdict. For Charlie Strong was felled by a truth, a truth so terrible that it is never spelled out in comic books.

The truth is that life demands all kinds of heroism and most of them don't involve flying around in tights and fighting crime. The truth is that a true hero takes responsibility for his actions, for the pain he causes.

The truth is, sometimes to be a hero, you have to lose.

Steven Mohan, Jr. lives in Pueblo, Colorado where he works as a manufacturing engineer. When not writing, he helps his wife keep track of their three small children. Steve's fiction has appeared in Interzone, Polyphony, Paradox, and On Spec, and has won honorable mention in The Year's Best Science Fiction and The Year's Best Fantasy And Horror. This is his fourth story for Challenging Destiny, following "The Day the Zombies Came Walking Up Out of the Sea" in Number 21.

[Back to Table of Contents]

CD: You wrote a book titled The Upper Left-Hand Corner: A Writer's Guide for the Northwest. What's special about writers in the northwest?

EK: First let me give you a bit of background on The Upper Left-Hand Corner. The original 1975 edition was the first ever co-published project by a British Columbia publisher (J. J. Douglas) and a Seattle press (Madrona Publishers). During the early seventies there was an explosion of regional publishing throughout the northwest--much of it environmental, small press literary, alternative and radical--but there was no single source of information for writers who wanted to take advantage of these markets. What we put together was a kind of Whole Earth Catalogue for northwest writers. It was a modest bestseller and went through several editions. Now, of course, all that painstakingly compiled information is readily available on the internet.

Which leads me to your question: what's special about northwest writers? For a start, Cascadia isn't quite like the rest of North America. To quote from our preface to the ULHC, "In the upper left-hand corner of North America there is a large, uncluttered region that comprises the Pacific rain forests, the northern prairies and a lot of mountains and snow. It is not so much a geographical area as a state of mind." Our climate is different, and so, generally speaking, are our politics and our world-view. Out here, we're isolated from the power centres, and so it's as though we're watching events unfold at a slight remove. Maybe that's why we tend to be more liberal, more open to innovation, maybe a bit off-centre--or in some cases, just plain weird. (Besides which, people who don't fit in well on the east coast tend to move west.)

The northwest has produced some very distinguished, internationally celebrated writers--I'm thinking among others of William Gibson, Douglas Coupland, Tom Robbins, Ursula Le Guin--each one an innovator, an experimenter, a thinker-outside-the-envelope, who has brought radical change to their genre.

CD: Your Grey Isles trilogy is based on the origins of Stonehenge. Have you been to Stonehenge, or what inspired you to use it in your books?

EK: I've always had an interest in prehistory and the megalithic cultures, but the Stonehenge suggestion actually came from my husband Pat, who said, "You know, I've never read a fantasy novel about Stonehenge." What we didn't realize, of course, was that even as he spoke, other people were writing them (Cecelia Holland' s 1985 Pillar in the Sky comes to mind). But back in the late 70's I imagined I had the field to myself.

When I wrote the Grey Isles novels, I hadn't been to Stonehenge--my research came from books and from scholarly articles. Then in 1990 I made my first trip to England, and spent some time in Wiltshire, visiting the megalithic sites in my books: the valley of the Grey Wethers on the Marlborough Downs--the original source of the sarsen stones; West Kennett Long Barrow; Avebury; and Stonehenge itself. Stonehenge at that time was roped off to visitors, but my daughter Sue arranged a letter of permission from English Heritage that allowed me, as a writer and researcher, to go inside the rope after hours and wander freely among the stones. We--my husband, my daughter, a friend and myself--stayed till well after dark. It was an odd experience, visiting the sites that until now had existed only in my imagination. I was worried that my descriptions of the sites might not be accurate. To my relief, I seem to have got things right. On the same trip we visited Glastonbury, which plays a large part in The Alchemist's Daughter--so in that case, yes, I did do the on-site research before I wrote the book. The book I'm working on at present (as yet untitled) is set in Victorian London and probably in Paris--also places where I've actually been.

CD: How did you become interested in Tibetan Buddhism, which provided the background for Dance of the Snow Dragon? What kind of responses to this book have you gotten from readers?

EK: My interest in Tibetan Buddhism really started with some interviews I was editing for a Vancouver filmmaker, on reincarnation and past life experience. One of the more interesting interviews was with the Dalai Lama. However, the tape had been damaged and the transcription garbled, so to sort out what the Dalai Lama was saying, I had to go back to his autobiography, some other interviews, and various writings on Tibetan Buddhism. That's where I discovered the legends of the journey to Shambhala, the mystical kingdom somewhere north of the Himalayas. It was Shambhala that James Hilton re-invented as Shangri-La in his novel Lost Horizon. Part of the original Buddhist legend was a prophecy that one day a great king would come out of Shambhala to defeat the forces of evil, and establish a new golden age. The resonances with the western legends of King Arthur, Charlemagne and the Fisher King are inescapable. So there was a piece of the plot for a fantasy novel, practically ready-made. Then a friend brought me photos of the Royal Bhutanese Dance Troupe performing at an Asia Pacific Festival, masked as gods and demons of Buddhist myth. At her suggestion I decided to set the story in the mysterious kingdom of Bhutan, where Tibetan Buddhism, with its roots in the old Bon animist beliefs, still exists in a practically pure form.

As to response, readers seem to enjoy the story and the unusual setting, and the book got some great reviews. Though one reviewer thought that no modern teenager would be able to identify with an 18th century Bhutanese monk. (A reflection, I think, on the current YA enthusiasm for teenage angst, as opposed to the kind of book that lets you escape from the angst into another time and place.) My most satisfying response was from the small English-speaking expat community in Bhutan--certainly the toughest imaginable audience--who circulated the book and gave it a general nod of approval. There were a few small errors, they said, which you'd only pick up if you lived in the country--"But it's a fantasy, after all."

CD: Winter on the Plain of Ghosts is about the collapse of an ancient civilization. How closely was the book modelled on real events? Are there any records from that time period? How do you go about finding characters and writing about them convincingly for such a different era?

EK: The Indus Valley civilization has left a wealth of physical evidence--the foundations of buildings, pottery, statuary, terracotta toys, jewelry, traces of food and fabric. And the famous Mohenjo-daro steatite seals, with their cryptic animal symbols and pictographic markings. From the various excavations carried out since the first discovery of the ruins in 1921, we know that Mohenjo-daro was a settlement of about 5000 people, with streets and buildings neatly laid out in a grid pattern, and some huge brick structures that have been identified as a granary, a kind of giant tank or bath, assembly halls, and massive fortifications. The only written records are the mysterious seal inscriptions. However, we do have existing records from ancient Mesopotamia of the same period, which suggest trading links with the Indus Valley. That trade declined, and then apparently came to an end, around the time that the Indus Valley civilization collapsed. Another sign of economic decline was the increasingly shoddy construction of the houses in the upper levels of Indus Valley ruins.

So the events in Winter are modelled on a combination of physical evidence, archaeological interpretation, my own imagination, and some parallels from recorded history. For example, the purchase of children for ritual sacrifice described at the beginning of the book was still practised in some tribal areas into the last century. In the description of the looting and the massacre at the end of Winter, there are some echoes of the Indian rebellion of 1857. Sometimes, watching the evening news, I've felt that I was seeing the events of my novel re-enacted--although when I wrote the book, I could not have predicted those present-day events.

As to the characters in my book: the character of Bima was inspired by the famous bronze statuette of a dancing girl, found in the ruins of Mohenjo-daro. The priests had their prototypes in surviving sculptures of what may have been priests or kings. I was struck by their expressions--cold, remote, and to my eyes, at least, ruthless and domineering. As for the rest, I imagined what sort of person would be likely to survive and even prosper in that society: hence, thieves, merchant-adventurers, financiers, alchemists, sorcerers--clever, ambitious people, with the craft and intelligence to stay well under the priestly radar. Their motives are pretty much the same as ours--greed, ambition, honour, courage, religious conviction, need for love and lust for power.

CD: Could you tell us about the reasons for the collapse of civilization that you used in Winter? Do historians have alternate explanations for the real collapse? Are you worried that our civilization is about to collapse?

EK: Among archaeologists, the reasons for the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization is still a matter of lively debate. Every generation tends to interpret the evidence from its own perspective. The early twentieth century theory of straightforward invasion by Aryan horsemen from the north has given way to a more complicated scenario of ecological and climatic change. That is, even before the northern tribespeople moved in, conditions in the Indus Valley were steadily deteriorating, and the invasion was one more contributing event. In Winter, I used some of those environmental theories--recurring floods caused by a mud dam on the Indus, deforestation, overgrazing, crop failure, an influx of tribespeople into the cities--and then I factored in a rigidly orthodox theocratic government, with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Not one cause, in other words, but a continuing series of disasters, leading to civil unrest and vulnerability to invasion.

Sooner or later, all civilizations collapse. Right now, we're facing so many potential threats--environmental, biological, political--that it would foolish to make any predictions about our own survival. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about our immediate survival. I do worry about the kind of world my grandchildren will have to deal with.

CD: Why did you choose Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen as the basis for your book of the same title? Do you see an influence of old fairy tales on current fantastic literature? On your own books?

EK: Quite simply, because it's my favourite fairy tale (and nearly everyone else's favourite, I've since discovered). In actual fact, it's not a fairy tale at all--it 's a novelette, or a very short novel, with three-dimensional characters, realistic dialogue and vividly described settings. The underlying theme is a central preoccupation of the mid-19th Century--the conflict of scientific inquiry with traditional religious belief. (How curious that we're revisiting that very question at the beginning of the twenty-first century!) Beyond that, it has that rare thing in fairy tale literature--a strong female hero who embarks on a quest to rescue a boy. In the bad-tempered, tough-talking Robber Maiden, with her totally dysfunctional family situation, Andersen created one of the most memorable characters in all of children's literature.

My retelling of Andersen's tale started out as a poem, and later became an adult short story ("The Robber Maiden's Story") both of which were published in Canadian small press magazines. But somehow the story just wouldn't let go of my imagination, and eventually I decided to write it as a young adult book. The only part of Andersen's story I found unsatisfying was the conventional mid-Victorian ending, when Gerda goes home with Kai to a life of peaceful domesticity. The great thing about rewriting fairy tales is that you can change them to suit yourself--and so I let Gerda dump Kai and sent her off with the Robber Maiden on further adventures.

That wasn't the only change, of course. In the meantime I'd become interested in northern shamanism and the Finnish myth cycle The Kalevala, and thought I could hear echoes in Andersen's Snow Queen of the Kalevala's Woman of Pohjola, the Terrible Enchantress. And so that older, darker mythology was woven into my retelling of Andersen's Christian fantasy.

The influence of fairy tales on modern fantasy literature is huge--the retellings, and books using fairy tale themes and motifs, are too many to list. Some of the best, I think, are the ones by Robin McKinley. A. S. Byatt's are High Literature, and Tanith Lee's re-imaginings are wonderfully perverse. The better known tales, like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, are the most often retold, but writers are discovering some of the more obscure stories as well. The Snow Queen is the only one of my books I've based entirely on a fairy tale. However, if I look for fairy tale motifs in my other books, I find a few. The Marsh King's Daughter turns up in a Sumerian marsh in Journey to Aprilioth. I thought when I started writing The Alchemist's Daughter, I'd be drawing on the plot of Rumpelstiltskin (the maiden spinning gold from straw for the king--or in my case the queen) but then it went off in quite another direction.

CD: What attracts you to young adult fantasy? How do you judge what would interest a young reader? Where do you see young adult fantasy going?

EK: What attracts me to fantasy, per se, is that for as long as I can remember I've loved stories of magic, and ancient peoples and places, and the far distant future. I grew up on Weird Tales and Thrilling Wonder Stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, A. Merritt. When I started to write my own stories--at about age six, as I recall--that was my chosen genre. My first novels were marketed for an adult audience, but looking back at them, I think they would work just as well as young adult books. In fantasy, particularly, there's really no hard and fast line between adult and YA literature (Harry Potter being one case in point). My books are marketed to the upper edge of the YA age group--12 to 16--and I suspect that just as many adults read them as do teens. Maybe more. I write about what interests me, and just hope I can make it exciting enough to interest a young reader. Your protagonist has to be young (say a year or two older than the average reader) and the challenges they face should be challenges that speak to that age group--whether in real life, or in an historical setting, or in pure fantasy. Those are the usual rules of thumb--but in fact I don't think about them much while I'm writing. Nor am I conscious of writing for a particular demographic. I just try to get into the heads of my protagonists, as they embark on whatever journeys I send them on, and face whatever challenges may present themselves.

Where do I see YA fantasy going? Well, since the Harry Potter phenomenon, there seems to be no limit to the demand for more Harry Potter, and also for epic fantasy series, especially those written by teen-age prodigies. My own little subgenre of historical fantasy has a more modest following, but I like to imagine that the readers are loyal. Every trend has its day. I make no predictions.

One thing that attracts me to young adult fantasy, as a writer, is the opportunity to interact with readers, face to face. Over the years I've done a great many talks and readings, and answered vast numbers of questions about writing and publishing, in schools and libraries across the province. Not all adults read fantasy--but most young adults do. Another consideration, a purely practical one, is the fact that I publish my fantasies in Canada. Many Canadian publishers have a lively interest in YA fantasy, whereas the market here for adult fantasy (apart from the Alberta publisher, Edge) is almost non-existent.

CD: What was your best experience as a writing instructor?

EK: That's not an easy one to answer. But I think my most gratifying experience has been with an adult student who had suffered a serious brain injury, and had problems with short-term memory. When he first came to my class, quite a few years ago, he was planning to write the history of his family, but all he could manage at one go was a single paragraph. Gradually that paragraph grew into a page, then two pages, until he was bringing a full chapter every week. In the meantime he was doing extensive research in newspaper archives. Since then he's finished his family history, and is contributing to a book on surviving brain injury. All the credit goes to his own perseverance, the enthusiastic support of the group, and a facility with words he didn't know he had.

CD: You do a lot of research for your books on some wildly varying topics. How do you get interested in a topic?

EK: Often it's pure serendipity. I've mentioned the Dalai Lama interview and my friend's photos of the Bhutanese dance troupe, which inspired The Dance of the Snow Dragon. Winter on the Plain of Ghosts had its start in a Victoria, B.C. used bookstore, where I came across a small self-published pamphlet, The Indus Script of the Mohenjo-daro Shamans. The only thing I knew about the Indus Script was that no one had succeeded in deciphering it. Now it appeared that somebody had. Or thought he had. I bought the pamphlet, and contacted the author, John Newberry, who lived in Victoria. He told me that this was the first of a series of monographs which recorded his ongoing efforts to decode the Indus Valley script. When I was working on my first fantasy, Journey to Aprilioth, which is set partly in ancient Mesopotamia, I'd come across references to trading links between the city of Ur and a mysterious land called "Meluhha"--which some archaeologists identified as the Indus Valley. And since no one as far as I knew had ever set a fantasy novel in the early Indus Valley, I decided to do some further research.

CD: How do you go about researching a topic? How do you know you've done enough research to write about something convincingly? Do you run your resulting stories past experts in the field?

EK: I tend to research on a "need to know" basis. With my first novel, Journey to Aprilioth, I was following the hero from England to western Europe, then across the Caucasus through the Middle East, south to ancient Sumer, and eventually back to the Mediterranean. As he progressed on his journey, I researched the geography, history, culture, architecture, etc. of each new region--using archaeological records where they existed, and extrapolating where they didn't. So in effect I was discovering each of these new territories hand in hand with my protagonist.

You can't ever be sure you've done enough research. I try to know enough that I'm not violating established theory--what is generally accepted to be true. The problem is, that with new technology and new archaeological discoveries, that established theory can be abruptly turned upside down. Case in point: the new radiocarbon dating methods developed in the mid-sixties, that pushed the building of Stonehenge back by hundreds of years, and in the process badly messed up some academic careers.

I haven't made a habit of running my stories past experts in the field, though I do have useful resources within my own family. My daughter, who had been travelling in the Himalayas, checked out a lot of details in Dance of the Snow Dragon. My son the fungal ecologist provided some useful expertise for The Snow Queen and for several short stories.

CD: How do you decide which facts to include and where to embellish? Why do you prefer to write historical fantasy rather than historical fiction?

EK: I include the facts that contribute to the story, that are necessary to advance the plot. And sometimes a newly discovered fact will lead to new plot twists, or even send the plot spinning off in an entirely new direction. If I'm writing about a time before written records existed, I rely on generally accepted archaeological theory (or where there is debate--as there often is--I choose the theory that best suits my purposes). I imagine the daily lives of the people on the basis of the artifacts they've left behind. All the rest--social structure, religion, culture, has to be extrapolation where possible, and otherwise embellishment.

If I'm writing about an historical period, there's less room for embellishment. We know how people lived, how they dressed, what they ate, the kind of world in which they moved. The embellishment, then, is the element of fantasy, the "what if." Gerda and Ritva journey through the real, historic world of mid-Victorian Scandinavia--until they cross into the Snow Queen's uncharted country. That's where the real world ends, and fantasy begins.

Why do I write historical fantasy rather than historical fiction? In fact, I think my recent books are moving closer to historical fiction, with the fantasy element playing a lesser role. But where does the line actually fall? Can you write a purely realistic novel about 18th century Bhutan, without accepting that to the Bhutanese, the gods and demons are real? Or about alchemy--magic to us, but science to the Elizabethans?

CD: How did you get started writing?

EK: I've been writing as long as I can remember--I think I must have started writing stories shortly after I learned to read and hold a pencil. The earliest one that comes to mind was a shameless rip-off of Alice in Wonderland, called "Molly in Mouseland." It didn't show much originality, but my Grade Four teacher was impressed. When I was twelve, without mentioning my age, I sold a children's story to the Vancouver Sun, about a boy trapper in the north woods. (It required some research, since I lived on a dairy farm in rural B.C.) That one earned me a byline and a cheque for $12.65, and I think determined my future career. Meanwhile I was churning out an epic tale of interplanetary adventure with lots of starship chases, which I handed out, one installment a week, to my Grade Seven class.

After high school came university, work, marriage and children, and it was twenty years before I started writing again. I floundered around between genres for a while, attempting a horror story and a mystery, neither of which went anywhere. Then in the early seventies I sold a long science fiction story, "Star Cult," to Galaxy Magazine. After that came the first of the Grey Isles books, Journey to Aprilioth, which sold to Ace, and came out in 1980. In those days there was far less fantasy being produced, but if you wrote a publishable book, chances are it would find a publisher. Sadly, that's no longer always the case.

CD: Are there particular authors you think are influences on your writing?

EK: I think the authors that first influenced my writing were the ones that first influenced my choice of reading material. Writers like Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith and L. Sprague de Camp gave me a life-long fascination with far-off times and exotic places. But the one book that made me a devoted reader of fantasy was Jack Vance's Dying Earth. It's still my all-time favourite.

It was a previous generation of historical novelists, rather than contemporary fantasy writers, that helped to shape my style and choice of subject matter. I'm thinking in particular of Evangeline Walton, Mary Renault, the British historical author Henry Treece, and a wonderful writer of young adult historicals, Rosemary Sutcliff.

As to my fondness for research, I should give some credit to the bad movies of the fifties--those historical sagas that had Tony Curtis proclaiming, "Yondah is da castle of my faddah." After watching the Hollywood version of history, I would grab the family encyclopedia to find out what actually happened.

CD: What's the best fantasy movie you've seen lately?

EK: I guess the expected answer would be either the final Lord of the Rings movie, or Narnia. I enjoyed and admired them both, but really, my vote goes to the latest Wallace and Gromit clay-animation, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. A close second would be Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

CD: What are you working on now?

EK: Another YA historical, set in London and Paris, 1888-89. It involves, among others, Madame Blavatsky, the doyenne of the Theosophist Society; and the fin de siècle enthusiasm for spirit-raising, table-rapping and all manner of psychic phenomena.

CD: What's the best thing about operating a used bookstore?

EK: Definitely, the customers. Nobody in their right mind would open a used bookstore in order to make money, but the conversations with the fascinating variety of people who wander in, make it well worthwhile. And then there was the thrill of the hunt--finding a treasure trove of saleable books at a garage sale. And in the days before Abebooks and Google made it so easy, the satisfaction of tracking down an elusive title from an obscure publisher that you'd never find in Chapters.

You can find Eileen's web site at home.portal.ca/~lonewolf/kernaghan.html.

The problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another--particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

--Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

[Back to Table of Contents]

"Let us reason together," said Ray Salisbury to the ground squirrels in general. "If you continue to eat all the lettuce, I will shoot you. Neither one of us will like that. So eat something else for a change."

The only ground squirrel in sight was sitting up very straight, staring intently at a rock on the other side of the canyon.

The ground squirrel twitched its tail three times. "Cheep," it said.

"Cheep," said Ray back.

"Cheep," said the ground squirrel again.

"Cheep," answered Ray.

The ground squirrel turned to Ray. All of a sudden, it realized what it was talking with and dashed off chittering. Ray laughed, then clumped back up to the house with the two buckets of water he had filled at the well.

Soon Ray heard the mail truck coming. He needed to buy a book of stamps, so he walked out to meet it.

"Want to buy a paper?" asked Andrea Holguin. She had been driving the eighty-mile-long rural route for twenty-five years. The route to Dust Devil, Cowflop, and San Gordo used to run six days a week; now it was just two. Mondays she also turned west to Ocotillo Mesa. Thursdays, she brought the mail up Cyanide Canyon where Ray had lived on a worthless gold claim the past seventeen years. If Ray and Andrea both felt sociable at once they razzed each other about getting grey.

"No," said Ray today. "Don't guess I will. I haven't finished the last one."

Andrea headed on up the canyon. Ray spread his mail on the leprous hood of his ancient blue Ford pickup and looked through it. The usual solicitations to buy things he had no place for and could not afford would renew the firestarter pile. Ray also had two letters.

The one from Ray's friend, Water Bowl, turned out to be a photocopied poster on lilac paper. The picture showed tipis and stars and a bunch of people holding hands in a circle. It read: "RAINBOW RENEWAL. June 9--13. Paradise Hot Springs." Water Bowl had added a note: "Overflowing. Danger. Unity heals."

The second letter was from Ray's niece, Gwen, in New York:

Dear Uncle Ray,

Apogee is sleeping through the night now. Dad and Mom are coming in June 15--23 to meet their new granddaughter. Bill and I would love to have you too. Here's a voucher on our cash account for gas and four meals. Travel on the 14th if you can. My astrologer says inflation should be at its lowest all month that day. My tube account is 709-AH4-730. Your ticket is 00267-139-96. They'll hold it till the 20th, but I hope you can be here the whole time Dad and Mom are here. Don't forget your ID. You'll need it for the ticket.

Love you.

Gwen, Bill and Apogee.

Ray had not been much of anywhere in six months. He had not seen his family in more than a year.

Ray walked back up to the house, smiling, and turned on the computer he ran off photovoltaic-charged batteries. The TRIPS file had a permanent note in it: "Bring fatso pants. You put on thirty-five pounds the last time." This was not true, but Ray usually did fill his biggest pants by the end of a trip to the city. He now made a short list:

Garden Waterer

Piñons

The piñon trees on the ridges above Cyanide Canyon had produced a crop last year, something they did not do all that often. Ray figured he could squeeze at least twenty pounds of piñon nuts into his bag. They were the best bet he had to import a little money home from New York.

That night, a golden eagle soared through Ray's dream. The magnificent bronze bird circled towards him, each round a little closer to earth, searching for a place to land.

In the morning, Ray walked half a mile down the canyon to the home of his neighbors, Alice and Andy Optimer.

"Coffee's fresh," Andy sang out in greeting.

Julio Zapata, another neighbor, was there too. "I got Ma sending my chaps. It's all mesquite out there," he was saying.

"Howdy Andy, Al, Julio," said Ray. "What's happening?"

"Goin' on gathering for Doc Weatherbee," said Andy. "Might have room for you too if you need a job."

"What's he payin'?" asked Ray.

"Seven hundred bucks a day. Inflation stays over a hundred percent for a week it goes up to seven fifty."

"That cheapskate," said Ray.

"Al might hire on too as cook." Andy nodded at his wife.

"Now that's not such a bad deal."

"You're just fishin' for an invite to breakfast," said Alice with a grin.

"Now Al..." said Ray.

"You're invited anyhow," Alice added.

"Round up them cows!" Julio whooped.

"When you start gathering?" asked Ray.

"Day after tomorrow."

"Hmh, I'd have to scare up a horse and a pair of chaps. I'm too old for ground crew."

"You're just squeamish about castratin'," Andy said, grinning.

"I do hate gettin' all covered with blood," said Ray. "But what I'm squeamish about is gettin' kicked in my rapidly aging knees."

"I hear you there," said Andy. "What are you up to?"

"Lookin' for a ride to the hot springs next month."

"What's goin' on there?" asked Alice.

"Little Rainbow Gathering on their way to the big one."

"You still hangin' out with them loony tunes?" asked Andy.

"Water Bowl's coming."

"Oh?" said Alice. "Gee. If the gas can be had, maybe she'd like to come up here for a few days after. I'd love to see her."

"Maybe," said Ray, "But I'm hoping to get her to take me to the tube at Albuturkey. My niece in New York had a baby, and she's buying me a ticket to come see them."

"Wow!" said Alice. "Congratulations."

"New York!" Andy shook his head. "That'll be a trip!"

"Oh yeah," said Ray. "She sent me gas vouchers too."

"Oh yeah?" Julio was suddenly interested. "When you wanta go to the hot springs?"

Rural people got enough gas ration stamps for the long distances they often had to cover--almost. No one had much cash, though. Free market vouchers were good as gold.

"How 'bout the ninth."

"Yer on. Maybe I'll catch me a little Rainbow filly."

"One track mind," said Andy.

"Ah, youth," said Ray.

Paradise Hot Springs bubbled up in the Adobe River Valley, two miles north of San Gordo and about thirty miles from Ray's home in Cyanide Canyon. The Adobe River ran eight inches deep and fifteen feet wide most of the year. It was the only piece of water big enough to be called a river in eighty miles.

When Ray and Julio arrived they found ten dilapidated vehicles parked in the brilliant high desert sunshine. Some ran on gas. Some used more esoteric fuels, such as wood chips or cow chips. Water Bowl's "Buffalo Buggy" hunkered among them. It was a hybrid of General Motors' concept of a personal rocket ship and a prairie schooner fabricated from industrial waste. Several horses also stood tethered in the shade of a sycamore grove.

Ray spotted Water Bowl in a circle of fifteen or twenty women of all ages. The women held hands and danced slowly, singing about a river in the desert and a great blue heron who lived there. Several children around the circle listened and joined in on the chorus. Four men stood off to one side talking. Two of them held babies. Most of the people were naked.

Julio ogled the circle of women eagerly. Several were young and good looking.

"Mind your manners," Ray said quietly. "They're friendly if you behave yourself, but they'll tear a man limb from limb that gets fresh."

Julio blushed and grinned.

Ray recognized one of the men near the circle and headed over to say hello. Before he got there, a ten-year-old girl, naked and tanned from head to toe, rushed into his arms. Ray picked her up and spun her around in a big hug.

"Ray, you made it! Grandma said you would."

"Aster, good to see you," said Ray as he set her down.

Water Bowl noticed them and slipped out of the circle to join them. Soon Ray got naked too. The three of them reclined in the steaming water.

"Whooee!" said Water Bowl. "New York! You certainly are calm."

"Didn't nobody drop a bomb on me or slit my throat the last time," said Ray.

"You been keeping up with the news on Brazil?"

"Sure. I read a paper just last week."

"Oh, they were still arguing about Uruguay then."

"What'd they do, divvy it up?"

"Nah," said Water Bowl. "Chile convinced Brazil and Argentina both to leave it alone and use it for a free trade zone. Now all they gotta do is settle on the money. Brazil joins the Alliance, it's gonna be fireworks on the high seas."

"Ah," said Ray, "That war talk's just politicians trying to distract us from the economy mess. Nobody wants another war, and the Alliance can't afford one. They got no credit as is."

"Brazilian small arms and Chilean missiles, they might not need credit," said Water Bowl.

"Don't you believe it," said Ray. "They still gotta eat. I thought they settled on the money. Print it in both Spanish and Portuguese."

"They can't agree whose picture to put on it," said Water Bowl.

"Oh," said Ray.

"Look!" Aster pointed. "An eagle!"

"And there's the other one," said Water Bowl.

Ray looked up. A pair of golden eagles circled just above the bluff across the river. "Think they got a nest over there?" he said.

"Could be."

The eagles coasted round and round, rising steadily, till they disappeared from sight.

"Seen any sheep?" asked Ray.

"Yeah," said Aster. "Huge herd this morning. "I counted eighty."

"Lot of young ones too," added Water Bowl. "Good to see. I was afraid poaching'd be bad."

"Nah," said Ray. "Lose a few, but that bighorn herd's expanded its range every one of the last four years. Harder money gets to come by, the more people give up and move to town to get on the soup lines."

Water Bowl rolled her eyes.

Aster submerged. Water Bowl and Ray did the same. Then they all lay silent in the hot water.

After a while, Ray stood up, slowly. When his head stopped spinning he walked the ten feet to the river, waded in and lay down in a knee-deep pool. In the high desert June sun the river was warm, but still enough colder than the hot spring to be a rush.

Aster and Water Bowl did the same. "Wahoo!" Water Bowl shouted.

Later, over a joint, Ray explained about the piñons. "You got any idea who I ought to take 'em to?"

"Sure do," said Water Bowl. "You remember Alexandra, don't you?"

"Sure. Didn't she and Lucy Saxtabe get together when Lucy broke up with Fred?"

"Yeah."

"They're in New York now?"

"Yeah. Lucy's running a school, and Alex has a little natural foods store on Avenue B."

"Wow. That sounds like the place ... But won't I have to get all sorts of inspections and permits and shit to sell them in a store?"

"Oh probably, but Alex'll know how to do it."

Julio had to get back to work in the morning. So Ray used the restaurant vouchers treating him, Water Bowl, and Aster to dinner at the Endurance Café in San Gordo. Restaurant food was a treat for them all, and the proprietors were grateful for the business.

Like any place thick enough for public transportation, Albuquerque bustled. Ray saw more beggars than last time he'd been there, and there had been plenty then; but even the beggars did not look to be starving.

A purposeful throng filled the tube station. Ray boarded a car that would be switched for New York at the new terminal in Arkansas across the river from Memphis. It was easier to travel the twenty-five hundred miles from Albuquerque to New York than the two hundred fifty miles from Cyanide Canyon to Albuquerque.

Following the success of the Dallas-Houston magnetrack, developments in electromagnetic mass transportation had been rapid. Once weight problems were solved, the trains could carry their own field generators and fly like planes, at a sixth the cost. The same electromagnetic field that lifted a train while it followed the track became the instrument of structural integrity when it left the track.

Turbulence had caused some initial problems over the placement and size of wings, but because the electromagnetic field provided most of the structural strength, there was an acceptable range of workable options. Landing and take-off from the electromagnetic cushion was far safer than from a runway. The new tracks in and out of cities followed the old railroad rights of way right to the downtown stations, a huge cost saver. The inconvenience of being inside the magnetic field was minor.

The train rolled up the track in a conventional manner to Waldo, where it picked up a few more cars from Santa Fe. Then the stewardess stood up and gave her safety speech:

"Please turn off all radios, videos and computers during take-off. Anyone using a pacemaker who needs a shield, please press your call button. When the field stabilizes, the captain will turn off the take-off light. In the highly unlikely event of a field failure," she continued, "Bend down, take hold of your knees..."

"And kiss your ass good-bye," growled the jowly businessman next to Ray loudly enough for half the car to hear.

Several people laughed.

The trip was uneventful. At the terminal in Arkansas vendors hawked a variety of goods. Ray opened the window and bought a lunch of black-eyed peas and fresh salad.

The New York landing field actually lay in Connecticut. It was raining in the east and very green, despite a lot of dead trees. Cars peeled off both ends of the train, bound for New Haven, Hartford, and various local connections. Then Ray's portion rolled down the tracks to Pennsylvania Station. Bill, the new father, greeted Ray with a hug just outside the security gate.

A man approached them.

"I am not a mugger. 'Xcuse. Let me pass. Thank you. We sleep in the subways. We don't do you any harm. I know a person should earn a living, but we got no jobs and none to be had. So I'm gonna do what I can to entertain you. Anything you can spare for the show will be much appreciated."

The beggar looked to be about thirty-five and healthy. His clothes were tattered and filthy, but he had taken the trouble to tuck in his shirt, and his hair and beard were neatly trimmed.

Bill gave the man a ten-dollar food voucher. A few other people did the same. "He may get a meal today," Bill said as the beggar passed down the subway car.

"How do you decide which ones to give to?" asked Ray.

"I start at two o'clock and give to the next five I see. It's a good system. Lots of people do it. It's gotten to where the beggars only do their routines on the hour."

The new grandparents arrived next day. Ray's brother Hugh was forty-four, five years younger than Ray. Hugh and Artichoke (whose name derived from a back-to-the-land movement of her parents' youth) lived on a different planet from Ray--literally. Nonetheless they remained close.

Artichoke was a botanist. Her present job was nursing botanical variety towards ecological self-sufficiency on the new world of Ganymede.

"Looks like I'm finally going to start earning my salary," said Hugh.

"What have you been doing the past three years?" asked Ray.

"Playing shrink to terraforming engineers mostly," said Hugh.

Hugh's professional title read: social psychologist. The Ganymede Project had hired him for his pioneering work in mythography. His work was based on the principle that any society big enough to preclude personal communication between all its members maintains coherence through the unconscious. The patterns, visible in myth and dream become a common vocabulary. But in new or rapidly changing circumstances, there is confusion, called the Tower of Babel Syndrome. Hugh's job was to discover and articulate the emerging myths of the rapidly evolving Ganymede settlement. Hugh was the sort of artist on whose work a science might later be based.

"How's life at the hermitage?" asked Hugh.

"Quieter every year," said Ray.

"Man! Remember what it was like first time we went out there?"

"Dust all weekend. Cliff dwelling was elbow to asshole."

"I read recently there are more horses parked at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center these days than cars," said Artichoke.

"Wouldn't doubt it," said Ray.

Gwen joined them. "Apogee'll sleep a couple hours now."

"Dear, how do I turn off the alarm?" Artichoke asked. "It's such a nice day, I'd love to open a window."

"It's just as well if we don't, Mom," said Gwen. "Bill's asthma."

"Oh, of course."

"We could go for a walk in the park. I know a very reputable agency. Groups leave several times a day."

"That sounds great."

Ray called his old friend Alex that afternoon. Phones were mostly a memory where Ray lived. Line maintenance costs made the base rate prohibitive. At the same time, long-distance rates had become negligible. No one thought twice about calling New York to Albuquerque, and when Ray had bought his tube ticket, his time of arrival had printed out at Gwen and Bill's for no extra charge.

"Good thing you called today," said Alex. "I'm going to be up to my armpits in co-op business the next week or two. You remember Lucy Saxtabe, don't you? We're having lunch; why don't you join us. Bring the piñons. Just remember not to set them down anywhere and you'll be all right. New York's really a pretty safe city. I haven't heard of anyone carrying piñon nuts this year. For twenty-five pounds we won't even bother with the store. I may even be able to find you customers that'll pay in silver."

"Alex, you're a wonder," said Ray.

"We'll meet at the store. One sound good?"

"Sure."

"Between Sixth and Seventh on Avenue B. You know how to find it?"

"I've got a map."

"Good. Oh, and delighted you're in town."

Gwen gave Ray a voucher for ten tokens. "Rumor is they're going up to sixty bucks any day. People are hoarding them. Won't let you buy more than ten at once."

"Look at this," said Lucy at lunch. Ray looked up from his succulent squid and bluefish. Seafood was not something he got to eat at home. Lucy showed him reprints of two articles about the school she ran. The title of the New York Times Magazine piece read, "Education for Adaptability." The one from Urban Ecology was headlined: "Discovering the Future: How Children Learn To Learn in a Changing World."

"Pretty impressive," said Ray.

"And we still can't afford New York rent," said Lucy.

"Where are you located, then?" asked Ray.

"Third African Methodist, bless their hearts. Over on East Fourth. They let us have three rooms six hours a day and twenty minutes for cleanup. Almost eleven hundred square feet, with windows. They aren't even charging us cost."

Alex looked at her watch. "Hate to run off," she said.

"Of course," said Ray. "I'd like to walk back. Can I? My niece lives on West Sixtieth."

"That's a long walk," said Lucy.

"Not for a country boy like me."

"Go straight west to Eighth Avenue. Then north to the park," said Alex. "Only Abandoned Zone's north of here, so you should be okay."

"Four subway stations they've had to seal now," said Lucy. "Can you imagine?"

"Had to deliver an order of figs at the U. N. last week," said Alex. "It was worse than customs when I came back from Morocco."

Bill's brother, Dave, and Dave's partner, Mercurius, joined the family for dinner that night. Dave and Mercurius had a houseplant shop. Dave was also an aspiring sculptor, working primarily in beaten copper and enamel. Mercurius was an aspiring actor.

Bill worked as a state liaison officer for a license broker serving the construction, waste removal, and automobile repair trades. (This last really meant trucks and taxis. Anyone who could afford a private car in New York could afford a private mechanic whose references would render a license both superfluous and an insult.) Gwen crunched numbers for the city.

"Heard the union's backing down on maternity leave," said Mercurius over the fresh water chestnut soufflé.

"Union backs the mayor's self-respect program," said Gwen. "With Smith Bonding Technique, three months is enough for a baby. You can apply for an extension."

"I guess," said Mercurius. "Nanny subsidy's the way."

"Heard you've got a new show on," said Bill.

"You've got to come," said Mercurius. "I play a corpse, but I haven't noticed I'm dead, and neither has anyone else. We have whole conversations. Never do figure out we're not hearing a word each other says."

"Sounds pretty good," said Bill.

"It's a scream," said Dave.

Everyone thought it would be fun to take in a show. Dave said he would watch Apogee in the Green Room. That way Gwen could go.

"Sandra Litvak's nursing too," said Mercurius. "She's playing a police woman. Tells me to lie parallel to the sidewalk so I don't block traffic. Her shrug when I don't respond's a real show stopper. Be looking for it. She'll be feeding just before curtain."

Next day, Ray, Hugh, and Artichoke went to the Natural History Museum. They were looking at the dinosaurs when Artichoke asked how Ray's visit about the piñons had gone.

"The Lucy Saxtabe?" said Hugh. "The educator?"

"Uh, sure," said Ray.

"That article about her in Urban Ecology was excellent," said Artichoke.

"Sure was different," said Ray. "Lucy's school; Alex running the store ... Last time I saw Alex, we were lyin' in the hot spring counting bighorn sheep on the bluff."

"Uh, Ray..." said Hugh.

"Yeah?"

"Do you suppose ... Do you think Ms. Saxtabe might consider a position on the Ganymede Project?"

"You could ask. She'd probably want Alex with her."

"I bet there'd be a place for Alex in Food Distribution Management," said Artichoke.

They got ahold of Lucy that evening.

It was mid September when Ray heard how things turned out.

K'pop.

Ray loaded another short in the single shot twenty-two. Then he walked over to the dead ground squirrel.

"I warned you. I ain't greedy. You can have the pears that drop. You can even have some of the pears on the tree. But I want some too."

Ray clumped back over to his truck and leaned the rifle against a dent. Then he hauled another log off the load and carried it to the growing firewood pile. After a bit he heard the mail truck coming.

"Hear about Julio?" asked Andrea.

"What happened to him?"

"He's getting married."

"I'll be! Who to?"

"Frances Villanueva."

"Villanueva ... Don't her folks have a horse ranch just this side of Apex?"

"That's them."

"Well, I'll be."

"Hear tell they're going to set Julio up for breeding."

"Yep," said Ray.

"Here's your mail," said Andrea.

The latest postage increase had not reduced the quantity of junk mail, but it had induced the advertisers to print on smaller sheets of paper. Ray's weekly postal pile also included two letters: one from Water Bowl and one from Alex. Ray opened Water Bowl's first.

A picture showed birds flying all around a rainbow over mountains. The note read: "Have horse; will travel. Equinox Gathering at the Springs. Hope you can come."

Then Ray opened Alex's letter:

Sure feels different writing to a place where the mail is still delivered physically. I guess it's gonna be even more different soon. We leave for Ganymede in six weeks.

I'm mostly writing to say thank you. This is really the break Lucy's been waiting for. Recognition in the press was nice, but recognition in your work is what counts. We've really enjoyed Hugh and Artichoke on the videophone. Looking forward to meeting them in person.

Thanks again for making it happen.

love,

Alex.

Ray finished unloading the firewood and swept the truck bed clean. Then he got a one-and-a-half-gallon plastic bucket and headed down the canyon with that and the rifle. By the time he arrived at Alice and Andy's, blackberries nearly brimmed the bucket, and Ray carried two cleaned tassel-eared squirrels as well.

"Now that's my idea of a neighbor," said Alice. "Invites himself to dinner, but brings something for the pot."

"Hah!" said Andy. "He don't fool me. Fastest nose in the West, Ray is. You just knew I got that new batch of beer ready to sample, didn't you."

"Of course," said Ray.

Over dinner Ray asked, "You know anyone's got a horse I can afford?"

"No," said Andy. "Not unless you're looking to eat 'im. But Pete Bustamante's been saying for two years he wants to put a little herd in the pasture just above you. He's never gonna get around to that fence, and someone's got to break ice in winter. You'd be doing him a favor to exercise them beasts."

"Now that sounds like the kind of horse I can afford," said Ray. "Al, the chicken in this stir fry's great."

"It's not chicken," said Alice.

"Oh?" said Ray.

"It's snattlerake."

"Good snake."

"Heard anything from your niece since you been back?" asked Andy.

"Oh, yeah," said Ray. "She said the nanny's a dear, and she's finally found a brand of milker that doesn't hurt her breasts. She wants to keep nursing another few months."

The moon was a little past full. Ray set out for home just as it crested the eastward bluff. He saw three deer on the road and heard a bull elk bugle. First one of the year.

That night Ray dreamt he was with Water Bowl, Aster, and Artichoke.

"Thank you," said Artichoke. "Those piñons were just what Ganymede needed. Look how well they take root."

She pointed, and Ray looked. There was a healthy piñon tree growing, stout-trunked and already taller than he was.

"Look!" said Aster. "An eagle!"

They all looked up. A golden eagle circled above them regally. Slowly, the majestic bird glided down and landed right in Artichoke's piñon tree.

Places where Uncle River's work has appeared recently include the novella "Firebirds And Truth" in the Amityville House of Pancakes Omnibus Vol. 2, stories in the June '05 Analog and Space & Time 99, and a story and narrative poem in Tales of the Unanticipated 26. Uncle River's story "General Density," originally published in Challenging Destiny 16, has also now appeared in the Northwest Passages anthology of Cascadiacon. "Piñons" was originally published in Tales of the Unanticipated in 1989.

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I didn't tell Nancy I was dying when I asked her to go to Greenland with me. It seemed like it might spoil the mood or make the trip into something ... else. I didn't know what. A funeral procession of sorts. Across a glacier.

Instead, we romped in Nuuk, drinking beer with Danish sailors, laughing at their heavily accented Village People karaoke, and groping our way back to our tiny hotel room late into the night.

"I never thought of you as a party girl, Ginny," said Nancy as I was brushing my teeth.

I rinsed and spat. "Neither did I."

She laughed. "Well, we all need a change sometimes, right?"

She had it there: despite the commonality of snow, Greenland felt like it was several worlds away from Milwaukee. That may have been why I chose it; or it may have been that it was the only exotic place my Minnesota-college Swedish would help us get along with the locals. Whatever it was, I was glad we'd come, even with the hangover that followed the next morning.

The sun off the snow at dawn offended our eyes with its glittering brilliance, but our guide was sympathetic. Aleqa had studied at university in Denmark, and her English was excellent. We had hired her for the trip up the coast along the Davis Strait to the shores of Baffin Bay, to the village where her family lived. "Do you have aspirin in your bags?" she asked, grinning as toothily as her dogs. "Good. It's a long ride."

The dogs fanned out in front of the sled, ready to go. I had expected them to be hitched two and two, like in the Iditarod pictures I'd seen, but the Greenlandic system was more anarchic. Aleqa only used vocal commands. "Some people are willing to use the whip," she confided, "but I just can't. No one from my family whips their dogs. It would be like hitting our children."

Sheets of snow and ice covered the pristine wilderness I'd dreamed of, and Aleqa's gentle hand with the dogs just completed the idyllic picture. By the time we got to her family's village up the coast, my hangover was entirely gone, and the glistening natural beauty of the fjords and glaciers gave me a buoyant sense of well-being. I barely flinched at the raw sunburned patch between my hood and my scarf. It was all part of the experience.

Aleqa introduced us to her family and friends, including her father, Unaleq, and her sister, Arnanguaq. They had cooked up seal meat for us--although they also offered us bites of the raw liver, with laughter. Nancy grimaced, but I bit down obediently, to the cheers of the Greenlanders. They laughed even harder when they saw my face, but I chewed the cold gobbet and forced myself to swallow.

"Good," I said.

Aleqa grinned. "Very polite. Well done." I felt warmly satisfied that I was a good tourist, fitting in well in this foreign land, picking up the cultural mores smoothly. I didn't bat an eye when Nancy and I were given a single large bed to sleep in and our hosts' children piled into their bed with them. If I'd wanted to see what I already knew, I thought with satisfaction, I'd have stayed in Milwaukee.

In the morning, the happy calm of the village was fragmented, with everyone running around babbling Greenlandic at each other. Our host family had run outside sometime in the early hours. Aleqa didn't come to get Nancy and me, so we had cereal bars from our luggage for breakfast and ventured forth with a bit of concern.

"We should tell the travel agent about this part," Nancy whispered. "I'm not sure they should use Aleqa if she's going to abandon the people she's been hired to guide. Nobody else speaks English!"

"It's just one morning," I replied. "Yesterday was fine. Let's give her a chance today."

We wandered through the chattering Greenlanders until we saw Aleqa standing with her sister and father, staring glumly at a hole in the ice. I noticed that it had formed in the shape of a heart. Nancy fumbled with her camera.

"Oh, good morning," said Aleqa. "I'm so sorry. We have a problem with ... folk tradition."

"What are you telling them?" Unaleq asked her in Danish. I could tell that Aleqa's father's use of Danish was a calculated slap to her.

"Just that we have a problem."

"I'll say, a problem! The heart-shaped hole is the sign of Nerrivik's wrath! A problem! Make them go away. Tell them they must stay in the house until we tell them to come out."

"And when would that be?" Aleqa snapped back in Danish. "Without a shaman, who will placate Nerrivik? They could be in the house forever."

"Safer than out here with an angry Nerrivik," Unaleq muttered, glaring at the hole.

"Who is Nerrivik?" I asked Aleqa in Swedish.

It was close enough to Danish; she had no problem understanding. "Did you understand all that?" she asked in English, and she didn't look entirely happy when I nodded. "Nerrivik is the sea-goddess. When she's unhappy, she puts holes like that in the ice, and then the shaman, the angakok, must dive in and placate her by caring for her needs. Here, we have no shaman. The ice will remain ... difficult. Hunting will be impossible. We will starve. Or rely on airlifted charity from Denmark, but the longer we can't hunt..." She shrugged.

"You should go," said her sister Arnanguaq in Danish. "Grandmother would have trained you for an angakok, if you hadn't gone." Aleqa gave her a glare that promised retribution later.

I had a strong feeling that I knew why I had come to Greenland.

"I'll go," I said.

Nancy blinked at me. The Greenlanders all ignored me.

Unaleq picked up his younger daughter's refrain, addressing Aleqa with a scowl. "If you had not run off to Denmark to abandon our people--"

"Then I would be no more willing to jump into that water than my sister is!" snapped Aleqa. "She could have learned a serratit spell. She could have spoken for us, into her anorak and the wind at the break of dawn, in the old ways. She could have listened when Grandmother spoke. But she didn't."

Arnanguaq glared at her. Aleqa glared back. Unaleq turned his face away from both of them.

"I said I'd do it," I said in careful Swedish. "I will. I'm supposed to go down under the water and placate Nerrivik? And then you will all be able to go on with your lives?" I repeated myself in English for Aleqa, just in case the Swedish was incomprehensible to the rest of them.

"I thank you," she said gently in English. "Truly I do. But we're not discussing some bit of playacting. It isn't a ritual reenactment. You would have to jump into the freezing water and dive down under the ice. You would never return. I know you don't believe in Nerrivik, and you would die."

"I'm dying anyway," I said.

Nancy yelped, "What? You didn't say anything--"

I bit my lip. "I'm sorry, Nancy. I should have said so. But I got the diagnosis before I left. The cancer metastasized so quickly. The doctor thought I could try chemo, but it would only give me an extra few months, maybe a year, and I'd spend the whole time, the whole rest of my life, so weak ... I thought it was for the best."

"Cancer. My God. Do Lily and Benjamin know?"

I flinched. "No."

"So they'll think you went off to Greenland and killed yourself and I let you? No! Ginny, I won't let you."

"You're not going to have anything to say about it." I turned to Aleqa. "Will they let me?"

She relayed the question to the villagers in Greenlandic. They shuffled their feet and mumbled to each other, entirely in Greenlandic this time. I thought Aleqa might have warned them that I understood most of their Danish.

"If you still want to do this after dinner," said Aleqa, "and if you leave a note with your friend swearing that you were not coerced, and if she swears not to hold us liable for your death. Then yes, we will gratefully accept your sacrifice."

"No!" said Nancy.

"You can't blame them for this, can you?" I asked her.

"Of course I can't blame them, but God, Ginny, be reasonable. You don't believe in pagan sea gods. You're not thinking clearly--I don't know if it's the cold or the cancer or what, but you need to fight this, and jumping into the Arctic Ocean--"

"Actually, I think it's Baffin Bay this far north," I said.

"Whatever! You know what I'm saying. It won't solve any of your problems."

"My problems can't be solved at this point. It's inoperable, and the chemo isn't going to work. I'd say that puts it beyond a solution."

"No, it--" she started, but I pressed on.

"But these people's problems can be solved. They believe they're going to have bad hunting and possibly have their way of life ruined until someone placates their goddess. And maybe they will, and maybe they won't, but I can ease their worry for a while. Doesn't that seem like a good thing?"

Nancy's face twisted, and I thought she was going to cry. "Compared to having you alive? No!"

Aleqa's face was impassive. "I know Americans are attached to the notion of 'alone time.' We'll give you each some 'alone time' to think about this before suppertime. We'll fetch you then."

She said something in Greenlandic, and villagers came between me and Nancy. She shouted after me and cried then, and I cried, too, but I went with them, back to the tent we'd stayed in. I knew I should think about it some more, but something felt right inside me when I thought about helping these people keep their ancient way of life even a little more--I didn't want to dwell on the rational.

And the cancer diagnosis had allowed me no peace since I'd gotten it. Something else had given that peace to me here, and I was grateful.

I wrote letters to my son and daughter separately, and another to Nancy herself, and then one to my friends and family in general. They verged on the poetic, but I didn't reread any of what I wrote. I think there was a part of me that knew it wouldn't hold up under logical scrutiny. I didn't really believe in Nerrivik or any other Greenlandic sea deity. What I believed in--what I wanted to hold onto--was this fragile peace.

When Aleqa came to me at dinnertime, I simply nodded. She nodded in reply and departed, returning when everyone else was done eating. She led me out to the ice, where the whole village waited in silence.

They restrained Nancy well back from the ice. She had given up crying and shouting and was watching me with a hopeless resignation. "What am I going to tell your kids?"

Aleqa paused. "You have children?"

"Tell them I went down to save the village. I wrote them each a letter. There's one for you, too."

"You don't believe in this shit!" she screamed, and then slumped against the Greenlanders who still held her.

I turned my back to her and walked out on the ice towards the heart-shaped hole. It creaked a little, but it didn't matter if I fell in--falling in was the goal--so I ignored it.

I wanted to execute a neat swan-dive into the hole, but I've never practiced swan-dives in full parka, fleece pants, and boots. It came out something less than balletic. But after the slap and the cold of the water, I didn't care. I could barely focus on struggling downward. I knew the parka would get heavier wet, but it felt more like I had wood planks tied to my limbs, or concrete blocks. I had planned to sleep with the fishes anyway. I had no air to giggle with, and if I'd been rational, I would have realized that I was drowning and freezing simultaneously, just as planned.

Waking up again with air in my lungs was not the plan at all, and for a moment I thought I'd come up above the surface again. Which meant that the Greenlanders would believe their goddess to be unappeased. I sat up, ready to apologize to them and to Nancy, for opposite reasons.

"So this is what passes for angakoks these days," said a voice softly. I scrabbled on the ice to turn and see who it was.

She was about eight feet tall, with arms that could have cradled a walrus and legs I could have driven a snowmobile beneath. She had a mass of tangled green-black hair knotted around her head, and her stink felt as if it pulled the ice dome close around me. I swallowed hard.

"Are you Nerrivik?" I asked.

"Of course," she said scornfully.

I hadn't thought beyond that part. I grasped for conversation.

Nerrivik was not in a patient mood. "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?"

"They'd really like it if you closed up that heart-shaped hole in the ice," I said. "And the rest of it, too."

"'The rest of it?' Don't you know any of this?" asked Nerrivik angrily.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not from your lands."

"All lands are my lands now," she said, but I marked a hesitation in her voice. "You tell me what is wrong, then."

"There are holes in the ice, and the water is choppy," I said. "They can't hunt."

"You mean, 'Those above can no longer help the seal out of the sea?'"

"Generally. Yes."

"Well, it is your ill-doing that bars the way," she said gleefully, with the tone of ritual. "You must comb my hair until it shines. I look as scruffy as any of you, with my hair in this state. Get the lice first."

I looked at the greenish mass dubiously. "Do you have a comb?"

"Of course I have a comb, you little fool." She sat down next to me and shoved a human-sized comb at me. "How else would the little angakoks get things done?"

"I didn't know."

"You don't know much, do you?" She peered at me. "I knew a few of your kind. They didn't last long after they got here. You--the water ran right off you. An angakok. But a pale one. Barely snowburned."

I wanted to touch the pink patch where my hood and scarf had left my face exposed to the sun, but instead I picked up the comb and pulled, gently, at the lowest level of tangles in her hair.

"Nits first, I said!"

I reached into the main masses of her hair and pulled out squirming things the size of my hands, white and pink and eyeless. I felt a pinch on one of my fingers: a tiny white crab with blue pincers had joined the squirming eyeless things. I shuddered.

"Just squash them," said Nerrivik. "Hurry up. You have much more to do."

I planted my boot heel on the nearest squirming thing and pried the crab off my fingers. It scuttled away. I pulled out a dozen more slugs and five white-and-blue crabs before I could start in with the comb.

My hands became cold and almost too numb to grasp the comb: though the rest of the undersea cavern was comfortable enough, Nerrivik's hair managed to maintain its chill. But I kept at it, and she complained much less than my daughter Lily had when she was little. In the hours it took to work the tangles out, I got hungry, but I didn't ask for anything to eat. Maybe it was only the Greeks who trapped people in their underworlds with food, but I wasn't going to take the chance.

Then again, maybe the Greenlanders didn't have any way out of their underworlds at all. The thought was more depressing than I expected: not even a day earlier, I had been willing to sacrifice myself for the village, and there I was worrying about eating some food that would keep me in that sacrifice. And yet I did worry.

"It's about time for the piss, don't you think?" asked Nerrivik, knocking me entirely off balance.

"I, ah, I don't need to just now, thanks," I said. "You go ahead." I waited to see if she'd just hike up her skirts and do her business right there, but instead she laughed.

"For my hair, I mean." At my baffled look, she said, "Don't tell me they're not doing that any more on the surface! It's wonderful for the hair in the cold, to comb piss into it."

"Where I'm from, nobody combs piss into their hair," I said flatly.

"Is it warmer where you come from?"

"Oh, yes."

She nodded, satisfied with the explanation, though I couldn't see how it related. "Well, then ... why don't you do it the way you would in your own home? Bones, string, anything you like."

Pressing my lips down on any further comment, I swept her hair up into a giant bun. It hurt my arms to hold it up until it was pinned, but the effect was much tidier, satisfying. I walked around to admire the look, and Nerrivik smiled at me.

For the first time, I noticed her hands.

The right one was normal, but the left had just a thumb, no other digits at all. I stared at the mutilated left palm, bereft without its fingers. "What happened to your hand?"

"You are the stupidest angakok I have seen in decades," said Nerrivik. "Centuries. Millennia."

She was wounded in her vanity; with a new hairdo, she wanted to be noticed, and all I could see was that hand. Not very bright. "I know it."

She looked slightly appeased. "Sit down, and I'll tell you about my hand. I was an orphan, did you know that, at least?"

"I'm sorry," I said softly, sitting down cross-legged in front of her.

"Sorry! Hah. You must be the only one, then. Other orphans, among those above, are taken into families. They are passed around from one family bed to another. Everyone snuggles into them as siblings. But not Nerrivik. No. She ate what she could wrestle away from the dogs, and she had to sew her own clothes from what she could find on the scrap piles. And one day they decided they would move and see no more of Nerrivik."

"What did you do?"

"I tried to run after them, but they jumped into their kayaks and paddled away from me. So I jumped into the icy water and swam as hard as I could. I'm a fast swimmer."

"I would think so," I said.

"But when I caught them and tried to pull myself up into a kayak with them, they took out their knives and sliced off my fingers."

I didn't have to feign shock. "That's awful. And you were just a child?"

"That's right. I sunk into the icy water. My fingers slipped into the freezing brine with me. Together we sunk, my fingers and me, and I thought I would die. But somehow, I didn't. I ended up here."

"This is meant to be your place," I said.

"That's right," she said, "and I'll kill anyone who tries to take it from me."

I saw my chance. "As long as hunting is good on the surface, the people up there can live peacefully on the surface of the ice. It's just when the ice is thin and poor that they begin to worry, and to consider allowing the outsiders to come in and do their mining and their research under the oceans."

As far as I knew, there was nothing in particular that anybody wanted to mine off the coast of Greenland, but Nerrivik didn't know that.

"Mining, hah!" she said. "I am Nerrivik! I could crush their little chisels."

I shook my head. "Things have changed since you lived up on the surface. It's not just the piss in the hair. They have giant drills, twice your height or more, to dig through the ice. They have special machines for traveling underwater."

"I would wreck their machines," said Nerrivik, but I could hear uncertainty growing in her voice. "I would send my walruses at them to snap them like icicles."

"It would take a lot of walruses," I said. "These things are the size of whales."

"Then I would send whales." But she looked even less certain.

"That would be a lot of trouble, wouldn't it? Sending the whales when you could just smooth the ice for your own people? And then they would remember who takes care of them, who gives them all the good creatures they need to live."

"Who is the lady of walrus and seal and narwhal and whale," she said.

"Exactly."

She eyed me. "Little strange angakok, you think you're tricky. But you're not tricky, you're as transparent as day. Your mind is a single sheet of ice, a scant inch of water."

I sighed. "I know."

"But you face both death and unpleasantness. Most people can only stand one. Even angakoks."

"I suppose that's something."

She laughed. "Angakoks. Just when you think you know them all, someone new comes. Listen to me, angakok: you have faced death, and that proves your powers."

"I thought it proved your powers," I said.

"No. Don't be silly." She frowned. "You think you're being clever, but you offer me something of value, information and the ability to protect myself. I think I'll let you go. You must be a lesson to my people. They have neglected me of late. I think they've become cowards."

I thought about Aleqa, Danish-educated, running her dogs with joy. "Their lives have become more complicated."

"Silly little angakok," she said. "I don't care about that."

I wanted to tell her that she had to care, that it would matter to her whether she wanted it to or not, but instead I was hit with a wall of cold that felt like nothing else in my life--except, of course, for the last time I'd been submerged in the waters of Baffin Bay.

She'd sent me back with a vengeance. I emerged coughing and choking, through the hole in the ice, which closed under me as I tried to pull myself up. The voices of people around me were like summer gnats in Milwaukee. I ignored them and focused on breathing, both the in and the out part. With the part of my brain that could process any ideas at all, I tried to decide whether breathing in was harder than breathing out.

When I finally snapped out of it, I was wrapped in blankets, lying in the dwelling I'd used before, with my host family and Nancy sitting at the dining table not too far away.

"I'm, uh, I'm back," I told her. "How long has it been?"

"Since you came up from the ice? Twelve hours," she said. "We've got dinner for you."

"No seal liver," I whispered.

"No, it's broth," she said seriously. "Nice hot broth." She helped me prop myself up.

"Before that, how long?"

"A day."

I closed my eyes and sipped some of the broth when she tipped the cup for me. It was strong and salty. "It didn't feel like a whole day."

"It didn't--" She pulled the broth back away from my lips, sloshing a little on my shirt. "It didn't feel like a whole day. How on earth do you know what it feels like to spend a whole day submerged in water that cold and still survive? Maybe this is what it always feels like."

She was still angry with me. Relieved and angry, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before she broached the subject of not telling my kids any of this.

"I wasn't submerged," I said. "I was in an underwater cavern. I think it was an ice cavern, but it was fairly warm."

"Oh," she said. "How did you have the strength to--"

"Their goddess Nerrivik was there," I said. "I had to do her hair."

"Their shamans are cosmetologists?"

"Their gods are kind of gross and demanding," I said. "At least, this one was. She had a rough childhood."

"That's a shame," said Nancy, and then, "What the hell are you talking about, Ginny? Are you delirious? Do you feel--"

"I feel as good as I'm going to feel given that I've got pancreatic cancer and just took an arctic dip," I said. "I don't think that could cause hallucinations like this. And I'm alive. That's got to count for something."

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah. Let's not tell Lily and Benjamin any of this, okay?" I smiled wearily. Of course.

"I don't know how else to explain my angakok powers."

"Your angakok powers," said Nancy. "Well. Maybe you won't have to explain them. You can just go for a dip in the lake when you feel distant from--"

"Nerrivik," I supplied.

"Jesus! Angakok powers. You've never had to talk about them before."

"But I hadn't faced death before."

"You didn't tell your kids about it when you started to face death," she snapped. Then her face softened. "See, here's the thing. I don't know how they're going to take this. They weren't here. Maybe they'll think the Greenlanders fed us hallucinogens. Maybe they'll think we were just really drunk. It's easy to explain all kinds of things away. So ... why bother?"

"We'll see when we get there, I guess," I said.

She looked unhappy. "All right."

We sat there in silence as I finished the last of the cup of broth. It was hard for me to even think about going back to Milwaukee, seeing the doctor and putting things in order. I was going to bring it up, but Nancy spoke first.

"I wondered why you asked me to come along with you, you know," she said. "I mean, sure, we're both single, we've been friends for a while. But why not one of your kids, why not your sister, why not ... someone else?"

"I don't know," I said. "I thought we'd have fun. I honestly didn't plan ... what happened. I never would have left you alone here, if I hadn't thought..."

"You didn't think it was real!" said Nancy. "Don't tell me about 'if you hadn't thought,' because you didn't."

"But it is," I whispered. "There's no other way I could be back. I saw Nerrivik with my own eyes. It's real."

She looked at me bleakly. "I know."

"So ... what do we do?"

"I don't know."

"What else is real?"

"I don't know. Maybe now ... maybe now that I'm a shaman, I'll have a sense for these things."

Nancy snorted. "You haven't had a lot of sense in other ways lately. Maybe the shaman thing is by way of compensation."

We thought about that in silence, and the Greenlanders must have taken that as a sign. Several of them, including Aleqa, her father Unaleq, and our hosts, filed into the room.

"Here, angakoks are highly honored," said Aleqa in English. The other Greenlanders fixed bright smiles to their faces.

"They wear on their belts talismans to show how they have faced death and won," Aleqa continued. "Yours was easy. Our best carver has finished it already."

At her nudge, one of the men stuck out his hand and deposited a small whitish object on the bed. I picked it up. It was carved in the shape of a slightly lopsided heart with a spike next to it.

"Heart and icicle," Aleqa said. "You have faced Nerrivik and saved our village, coming out stronger. None of our own people have accomplished so much in generations. Well done, angakok."

They toasted me into the night, but Nancy wouldn't let me drink anything but more broth. They laughed at her. My head was swimming enough without the liquor, and I was grateful for her ministrations. When I fell asleep, they were all still there, and Nancy sat by my side.

When I awakened the next morning, the room was empty, and Nancy was gone. "Hey, Nance?" I shouted.

Aleqa walked into the room instead. "We're taking care of Nancy. There's something you must do for us."

"What?"

"Our weather god, Sila. He is threatening us."

"Oh, God," I groaned.

"I'm sorry," Aleqa told me. "Really I am. But Unaleq and the others ... they insist. They will hold your friend safe for you, but you must appease Sila."

"Sila?" I said.

"Please understand--we have not had an angakok in years. Sila, the weather consciousness ... he has been many years without the company of a human. They don't think they can let you go home without at least sending you to talk to him."

"Where do I have to go?"

"Up in the air. Into the clouds. He has a tent up there, in the sky."

I sighed. "You've got Nancy. I don't see that I have much choice. I've never heard of Sila, though. What's he like?"

Aleqa looked relieved. "He's a giant baby. You must refasten his diapers and appease him. Sing him lullabies, stroke his hair. That sort of thing."

"A giant baby. Well, I've dealt with babies before, and Lily was about ten pounds when she was born. That was giant enough for me. How do I get to Sila's giant baby sky tent?"

"You leap from the top of a glacier," said Aleqa.

"I should have expected that," I said. "I had to jump into the water for Nerrivik, and now into the sky for Sila, is that it?"

"Angakoks should know these things," said Aleqa solemnly. Then she squinted at me. "You really are an angakok."

"I know it."

"Let me take you to the leap point."

"Let me pee and get dressed first," I grumbled. "And get me some breakfast. Honestly. I thought these villages were supposed to honor natural rhythms and all that."

Aleqa's smile included only her teeth, not her eyes. "I'm not responsible for what you heard."

"You're responsible for my breakfast, dammit," I said. "So scoot! I'm saving your ass. The least you can do is get me a packet of dry cereal from my bag. And let me talk to Nancy. I'll take on Sila, but let me see my friend."

Aleqa gave me a narrow look, but after a moment, she said, "All right." She tossed me the cereal from my bag and stalked out.

When she returned with Nancy, I could hear Nancy before I could see her, "...just pulled her out of the ice yesterday from saving your ass, and now you want her to jump off a cliff?"

I smiled wearily at her. "Hey, Nance."

"Tell them you won't do it, Gin," said Nancy.

"Who else is going to?"

"I don't care who else! Honestly!" Nancy balled her fists up in frustration but was not foolish enough to hit Aleqa. "I know you've always been the do-gooder, always time for another volunteer group, but this is really too much! You have to think of yourself for a change, or if not yourself, me and your kids!"

"I came back from Nerrivik, didn't I?"

Aleqa cleared her throat and looked at the floor.

"Exactly," said Nancy. "Sila and Nerrivik are totally different. Who knows what'll happen?"

"They need me to do this, Nancy," I said.

"We do," said Aleqa.

Nancy shook her head. "I know you're going to do this anyway. I just wish you'd fight for yourself half as hard as you fight for these people you don't even know."

"It's possible to win for them," I said as gently as I could. "'It's crazy, but it just might work'--you know? Whereas cancer..."

"If Baffin Bay can be circumvented, so can cancer," said Nancy stubbornly.

But the gods were in my mind, or near it. I climbed the cliff anyway, and stood looking out at the angry, gathering stormclouds over the glistening blue sheets of ice, and I jumped.

I curled into myself as the wind whistled past me, and tried to remember how to land to do as little damage as possible. But as I cannonballed through the air, I realized that I was not falling headfirst, but was flying directly up into the air. The clouds were a moist mass on my face. I opened my eyes just in time to see a tent flap approaching at top speed, and then I skidded to a halt on the floor of the tent.

"Angakok," said a voice that managed to coo and boom at the same time.

"Hello, Sila," I said wearily.

"Sila got angakok."

"Yes, you did." I made myself look at Sila. Aleqa had understated in describing him as a giant baby. He was immense, at least as large as Nerrivik, with a round, pouty chin and cheeks and milky blue eyes with ball lightning somewhere in their depths. His wisps of hair swirled like the outlines of dark clouds on his head.

He wore a cloth or skin diaper that had come undone on one side, and the ties of it trailed around his knee. He also had a cloak around his shoulders, but his pudgy belly--immense, on a creature of eight feet or more--was exposed to the elements. He didn't seem cold, and then I remembered he was the elements.

I didn't want to think of what would happen if he filled his diaper with it drooping. "Let's get you done up here, shall we?"

He eyed me warily but made no move to stop me when I crossed to his side and hoisted the flaps of cloth over my shoulder to tie them in a knot twice the size of my fist.

"Sila stinky," he observed proudly.

"Good for you," I said. "Can we stop with the baby talk, please?"

He scowled, and the ball lightning rolled. "Sila baby."

"Like hell. You've had this weather god job for millennia. You're older than I am. Speak coherently, or don't talk to me."

"I don't have to let you go back," he said in a deeper, angrier voice. "Nerrivik was a fool to let you go. The first real angakok in years, decades, who knows how long? But I'm not that much of a fool."

"Nerrivik knew I could do more good back on the ice than cooped up with her."

Sila smiled. "But Nerrivik cares about how much good is done, even if it's not the same kind of good as you people like. Me, I just don't care."

"I'm sure you don't."

"You don't believe me!"

I rolled my eyes. "No, I'm sure you're extremely amoral. It's just that that doesn't impress me any more. I've raised two kids. I've had toddlers. I know amoral."

"Angakoks," he said bitterly. "They just see too damn much."

"Why do you gods keep pitching your fits anyway?" I asked, seating myself on the tent floor without being asked. "What good does it do you?"

"It gets us angakoks to tie up our diapers or comb our hair. Or else we get to watch them go splat." He grinned.

"Wonderful. It's like cartoons for you."

"I don't know what that means."

"That's all right. It's what children watch where I'm from."

"Where you're from?"

"Further south. Less ice. Still lots of storms, though."

He thought about it. "So Nerrivik can't go there, but I can."

"I don't know. There are probably other gods down there. I mean, I don't know them personally, but if you're real..."

"There are always other gods," he said peevishly. "And angakoks are so slippery they nearly always find a way to get to those other gods instead."

"Maybe you should be nicer to the angakoks," I suggested.

"You have no idea how many angakoks suggest that."

"Well, it's worth a try." I thought about it some more. "It still might be a better strategy than making us be so awful you want us to leave."

"They did that on purpose?"

I nodded, fully confident even without knowing any of the other angakoks.

He sighed. "Slippery. I told you. Always making tupilaits, never changing to walruses when I want to wrestle..."

"We can change to walruses?"

"Angakoks can change to anything at all. You're not very bright, are you?"

"It's my first week on the job," I snapped. "What's a tupilait?"

"It's a statue you put your spell into. Usually a curse. Then you tell it what to do, and it goes and does it for you." He squinted at me. "They're no match for gods, though."

"I'm sure you're vast and mighty."

"You're doing it again." He chewed on his big baby lip and looked ready to cry. "Maybe I shouldn't let people with children be angakoks any more. At least not for me."

I shrugged. "Suit yourself." Tupilaits and shapeshifting--what could I do with those? I thought about my own children as toddlers. "Do you want to play a game?"

"Is it 'who can be quiet the longest?'" said Sila suspiciously. "Because I don't like that game."

"No. It's more of a contest. Kind of like a bet."

"I like contests."

"I thought you might," I said.

"I always win."

"Good for you."

"What do I get if I win?"

"If you win, I promise to stay and play games with you for as long as you keep winning."

"That sounds good," said Sila, the anger almost entirely evaporated from his voice. "What if you win?"

"Then I get to go back down where I came from, and you don't bother the people down there for a whole year."

He was trying to hide his curiosity, but he had the transparency of a toddler, and the ball lightning in his eyes had receded. "What kind of game?"

I remembered what he'd said about wrestling and angakoks turning into walruses. "I'll try to get to that side of the tent. If you can make me touch the tent wall behind me, you win. If I can touch the wall behind you, I win."

He grinned, visions of walruses dancing in his head. "Okay."

My ears burned and buzzed, and I felt lightheaded, but I didn't know any way to get home. And I needed to test the shapeshifting thing sometime. The dull ache in my midsection reminded me that I was not as fit for a wrestling match with a god as I once might have been--not that I was ever making the divine championships on that.

It didn't matter. If I actually had to wrestle, I was lost anyway.

I changed myself to a sizzling streak of lightning and shot through his arm to set the tent wall ablaze. I turned back to human form, panting, before I even knew what I was doing.

Sila's roiling blue eyes looked wounded. "That's my thing. Lightning. You used my thing!"

"You didn't say I couldn't," I pointed out.

"But that's not fair!"

The tantrum that ensued was no surprise to me; "not fair" were Lily and Benjamin's favorite words when they were small. Sila cried and raged; he stamped his feet and shook the tent; he flung his head about and soaked me through with his tears and putting out the fire in the tent wall. I stood with folded arms, waiting. Saving the village, fighting cancer, changing my body into a lightning bolt ... all that was new. Outlasting a toddler was work I thought I'd finished, but at least it was familiar.

Sticking his lip out so far it was comical, Sila shouted, "Fine! Leave me all by myself, then! I don't care!" I found myself falling from the tent, and wondered if he'd sent me to my death.

Of course he has, I thought, and since when does that matter, lately?

I was relieved to touch down.

Sila slammed me into the ice--not as if I'd fallen from the sky, but maybe as if I'd jumped from a little hill and landed wrong. Toddler pettiness for a lost toy, not the deep revenge of a grown god spurned. My breath jolted out of me, I glanced around to see what was going on.

The villagers all paused in their daily activities to stare at me. Without prompting, I wandered back to my host family's place and collapsed on their guest bed.

Nancy's bag was packed by the bed, I noticed when I woke up: she was ready to go. And so was I. I packed up my own stuff and headed out to find Aleqa on the ice. She was a little ways away from the main village, with a ring of villagers around her. They parted when I showed up, smiling at me.

"Before you go, there is one last power to see to," said Aleqa. "I want you to know that I am very sorry about all this."

"Who is it this time?" I asked.

"Nuna," she said. "The earth. In order to find her, you must--"

"Wait a minute," I said. "What happens if another power starts acting up while I'm gone appeasing Nuna?"

"Well..."

"Then I would come back and find that there was more work for me, wouldn't I?"

"You are the angakok," said Aleqa sheepishly. "Without you, we would have to--"

"Learn to do it yourselves," I said sharply. "The way I did. Nobody in Milwaukee trained me to be an angakok for a bunch of Greenlanders. You think they teach you about Nerrivik and Sila, at Milwaukee Lutheran High? You think anything in my life prepared me for a sea goddess who would want me to comb her hair with urine?"

Aleqa cringed.

"Forget it," I said. "I think your earth spirit just decided she wanted a facial. Fight your own battles."

"But the ground under our feet will--"

I got up in her face. She tried to back away, but I followed. "I fought two battles for you that you could have fought--should have fought!--for yourselves. I have been dying of cancer since before I got here. I have new mystical powers. And I've been using them to make sure you pathetic whiners don't have to deal with your own gods? No. This is over now."

"Your friend Nancy--" she began.

I reached my hand out and felt it clumping and elongating as I went. I watched it shift into a paw before my eyes--a white, furry paw, with long, black claws. Aleqa screamed. I waved the paw under her nose. The claws missed her face.

I should have paid more attention to her terror, but I was too fascinated with my shapeshifting ability. I hadn't had time to pay attention to it with Sila--I was too busy getting out of there. But this time I could enjoy it. The rest of me had slowly gone polar bear as well, and my favorite part was having a broad snout with a powerful nose. I sniffed at the air until Aleqa's fear-stink nauseated me. Then I felt my hands clump together even further: I changed into a seal before I did anything to her I would regret.

The slide of my belly on the ice was fascinating, too, but the change from bear to seal caught my attention even more. Before Aleqa's eyes, I changed from seal to walrus to albatross to Arctic tern to sled dog to moose. I wondered if I'd have the ability to do temperate zone animals when I got home.

I changed myself into an iceberg, and could feel the melting black pulse of the tumor even in my icy heart. Aleqa forgotten, I focused on it. What was it doing in there?

Nothing, of course; or rather, nothing that had to do with me, except that I was its food source, its life support. Something in me recognized it as other, more different than my breakfast or even the ice beneath me.

Experimentally, I prodded myself into the shape of another iceberg, this time with the tumor on the outside. There was a steaming hole on the exterior of the iceberg, its edges still defined with the tumor's heat. I couldn't tell what Aleqa was doing from my glacial perspective. I just knew that I had to get rid of the cancer.

It was not me, but it had shapeshifted, too, to match the form of the iceberg. My last leap in forms was back to my own form, standing next to something else that had also been transformed.

I hardly dared open my eyes when I felt that I had my human fingers and toes again, but there it was on the ice beside me, an ivory-colored seal with runes chasing around its outside. The seal's mouth was open to bark or bite, I didn't know which. My cancer. My curse. No longer mine.

Aleqa's family and friends had joined her while I was shifting from form to form. They all edged away from the seal sculpture, shining like wet bone on the ice. They looked at it and at me, and I knew that I would have no more welcome there, no matter how many gods I appeased.

"I will require a dog team to take me and my friend to the flight rendezvous," I said, "or I will speak the words that will instruct the seal to come after you."

"Tupilait," muttered one of the villagers.

I fixed him with a scowl. "Tupilait is right," I said. "Out of my own body, made with my own pain. You've never seen tupilait like this before. And if you take care of Nancy and me really carefully, you never will again."

"Tupilait."

Only Aleqa would drive the dogs for us, and she kept looking around her anorak hood at me. "How did you, an outsider, know how to make a tupilait when none of our village would? Are you a powerful angakok shapeshifted to look like a European?"

"I am a powerful angakok," I said. "And what I look like is what I am."

Marissa Lingen lives in the suburbs of Minneapolis. She is currently revising a novel and training a little brown puppy, and she isn't sure which is more exasperating (or more rewarding). The novel never chews on her fingers, but the puppy never demands that she read about religious movements among the Finnish Saami in the 19th century. Tough call. This is Marissa's third story in Challenging Destiny, following "Dark Thread" in Number 17 and "Anna's Implants" in Number 19.

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result--eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly--in you.

--Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

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7:30 a.m.

As usual Shoalie McHandler skipped breakfast because she had no appetite. She paused in her morning preparations only to go through yesterday's mail, consisting of a pile of faxes, automatic bill payment slips, a yellow overvacuum packet from the Nasturtium Galaxy Development Consortium.

It was the same yellow envelope that came to her every third week. Some glitch somewhere had them resending it to her for the past four months--ever since she'd contacted the group for an employment application. Unfortunately they kept sending her apps for managerial positions. She always returned them the same day with a voice answer attached, pointing out she wasn't interested in management and please resend a worker app. A few weeks later the packet would come back with the exact same forms inside. She answered again, and again the management forms came back to her.

Not that she wouldn't try a boss job if given the chance. Just wasn't in the cards for her. One time she almost filled out the forms for a joke, knowing full well their computer would spit back her app with a big "No Management" stamped across it. Maybe then Nasturtium would understand her place in this life as defined by the psychtest experts at BehaviorNorm Labs--the arbiters of career choice, the talent coordinators, the king makers.

She looked at the packet and frowned, tossing it over to the ready-for-the-rotocinerator pile.

She finished her morning ritual--the packing of her boots, the rinsing of her face mask, the grabbing of the binky bag for lunch--and stepped out into the hot salty air of Xeres. It hit her like a burlap sack of needles, scraping and stinging her exposed skin, getting into her lungs and choking her, urging her on to the bus and its conditioned atmosphere. Yeah, it was some great place, this Xeres.

But she was not complaining. Not for a minute. Not on this fifth day of the fifth month of her fifth job in as many years. No way was she quitting, getting fired, being asked to leave, or getting laid off. She would not agitate, question, bemoan, or even so much as notice there was room for improvement here.

10:15 a.m.

"Hey, ho! Wait up. Hold that thought!" Fub Rainey, Shoalie's pal, was calling to her to hold the lift to the top.

"Yeah? And who died and left you foreman?"

"Ha. Ha. Old joke." Fub made it in just as Shoalie released her toe from the hold button. "Up!" they called together.

"So we're getting volleyball started," Fub said, leaning against the side rail of the lift. She breathed heavy as if the run for the lift had taken a lot out of her.

"And?"

"And you wanna play?"

"Yeah, okay, maybe. What's the deal?"

The lift reached the surface and bumbled to a stop. The two swayed with the box just before the gates opened. Fub stepped out first, stretched her arms and inhaled deeply. Shoalie passed her at a clip, holding a hand over her mouth and running for the break shack.

"God I love summer, don't you?" Fub called after her.

Once inside Shoalie took a deep breath. Fub entered at a leisurely pace, as if she hated leaving all that salt behind.

"How can you stand it?" Shoalie asked.

Fub followed Shoalie as she wended her way through the seats and tables to the smoking section.

"It's like those mountain men," Fub said. "When you're born to it, you develop the lungs for it. You acclimate."

"Yeah, I got your acclimation." Shoalie sat at a table over at the far wall. Fub pulled a cigarette out of her overalls front pocket before taking a seat.

"You know we don't have to sit here," Fub said. "I'm not really smoking. I quit. I'm just going to fumble."

"Mm."

"So how about it, we need a captain?"

"Oh I get it. You need some loser to do the paperwork so all of sudden you need me on the team. Forget it, I just wanna play."

"What's the problem? You show up at the first meeting of the season and tell them who's on the team, schedule a few throwaways and boom, we're league champions."

"Yeah, but in between there's all that nagging to get people to practice. No thanks."

"How hard is that? Set up an automatic tickler that goes out every Tuesday. We'll all show up on Wednesday at six, practice for a few, and be on our drunken way home by ten.

"If it's so easy, whyn't you do it?"

"Nah, the kids are always on the terminal. Besides nobody's as organized as you. I see you with pencil and paper in your back pocket everyday."

"You should carry too. Beats memorizing."

"Well think about it, anyway."

"Think about what?"

"Volleyball." Fub patted her side pockets, upper pocket, and seat pocket, searching for an unknown item. Finally she extracted a mini striker from the back one. She fumbled now with both the ciggy and the striker.

"Yeah, sure," Shoalie answered. "Wait a minute, you don't play outside do you?"

"Hey, now that's an idea!" Fub's eyebrows shot up, light bulb fashion.

"I was kidding! You can't breathe now as it is."

"No, you can't breathe; the rest of us are fine. You'll get use to it eventually."

"When? I've been here almost half a year already."

"Jeez, really? Time flies. I remember when you were here only a week, crying that you couldn't take it, had to get out of here. Now look at you; half a year almost. You're practically a lifer now."

"That's for sure. Looks like I'm stuck, too!"

"Aw come on. It's not that bad here."

"Not for you, but it's just not where I'm looking to settle."

"So what's happening with that nostalgium thing?"

"Nasturtium. Nothing. Still sending me manager stuff."

"So go for that. What's the problem?"

"Can't. BehaviorNorm flunked me out of the corps. Definitely not management material."

"I guess." Fub lit up her ciggy and immediately stubbed it out on the table top, placing the butt back in her upper pocket.

The two stood up together, as if the call had hit at the same time, and wended their way to the little room in the back. Break was almost over.

Noon

Lunchtime came. Shoalie and Fub sat at a table with Rube and a couple of other cutters in the cafeteria. Shoalie extracted a cream of whatever and bowl of wilted greens from her binky bag. What passed for food on this planet would have been unmentionable in more civilized sections of the galaxy. The places that were more sophisticated with clean golden air and boys with long hair. Not like here.

"Didja hear what's happening?" Rube asked, gossip like.

"Yeah, I'm getting shafted," Shoalie answered.

"Very funny!" Rube answered in mock disgust. "You been in the mines long enough, you need to learn a new joke."

Rube opened a prepackaged carton of something like juice glop and continued. "I'm talking about the pay strike."

Shoalie's stomach sank. It was the last thing she wanted to talk about. "I heard something about it, but I couldn't believe it," she said.

Rube continued. "Well, you have to do a lot more'n hear about it; we're voting at afternoon break."

"Jesus Christ! Already?" Shoalie jumped. "Has anybody even thought about this?"

"What's to think about? The Dushens got a pay raise and nobody's even looking at us."

"Yeah, well, maybe they deserve it. What's the COL there?"

"Look Shoalie, you've only been here a short time. You don't even know these birds. We gotta fight for every cent we get. They wouldn't give a Bubonic rat if we had to breathe straight sodium chlor. If they could legally scrimp on the lights down there, they would do that too. We gotta fight just as a matter of form. Otherwise they'd just forget we were here."

"That's the case since the beginning of time, Rube, but you gotta pick your fights. Has anybody done the research on this one? Is this anything more than a blank rumor even? What's the union say?" Shoalie was fighting an urge to do something. She wasn't exactly sure what: spit, argue, fight, throw up maybe.

"Yeah! The union. They don't even do their once yearly over here, we're so damn far away."

"So nobody's even EasyFaxed them yet? There's no confirmation, no recommendation?"

Silence. Shoalie stared at Rube.

"You all are wildcatting?"

"We take care of our own," Rube finally answered.

"Jesus!"

Shoalie looked down into her cream of whatever. Despite the fact that she'd eaten very little today, she had no appetite and so excused herself and carried the mealware over to the big hole in the wall. She stood and stared for a few moments after the vacuum had sucked up her refuse and then walked out into the steaming, caking, painful air. There was nothing else that could make her feel better at the moment.

She picked up a leaf of eelgrass growing behind the cafeteria building. The salt-water gel oozed out of the stem and out onto her hand, coating it white in a matter of seconds. Every day the liquid in the grass became more concentrated. It'd be another month before rain came, diluting the solution in the plants' xyla, giving the leaves relief.

She'd be gone by that time of course--thrown off the planet by management along with the rest of the probationary types. Less than two months from now they wouldn't have been able to do it to her. They wouldn't even care whether or not she took part in the agitation. But as it stood now, they were going to need a scapegoat to punish just to show they were serious. The ones on probation were always the easiest to give the shove off.

Shoalie'd then have to write a sobby letter to the Union board and ask for another position. They'd bark at the fact that she had participated in an unsanctioned strike and lovingly put her on detention for a year and after that maybe they'd find her an assignment. Until then she'd have to scrape for scab jobs.

There was no way she could support this strike, wildcat or no. Just wasn't in the cards for her. The sad part was, the union would not look kindly on her not supporting her brethren--or sistren--either. She could not win with them in a wildcat situation.

On top of all that, she'd had no time to pile up the savings for the unemployment haul. Unlike most of the cats who'd been here since they were born, her life was not set up for an emergency.

Nope. This strike simply could not take place. Not now; not to her; not for their flimsy reasons. These misguided people simply had it too good. And they had no idea how to be in a union.

She returned to work starved but lacking an appetite. Her stomach churned and palms sweated and she got less than an hour's worth of halide preps done. The laser housing just kept slipping from her hands no matter how much she chalked them. Sweat kept trickling into her eyes. Her mind raced, working out arguments.

2:30 p.m.

Breaktime and the workers swarmed like bees into the central cavern, the only place all of them could fit. A few were raising their voices in indignation to inspire cohesion in the troops, but most of the workers were yakking and laughing amongst themselves in paragroups. Everyone was just so jovial. This was going to be easy, Shoalie figured.

At one point Champy Gran materialized on some sort of riser over on the side. All eyes turned to him. "Eh Champy!" went up here and there.

Champy put on his best mad face and started in with the typical anti-company rhetoric.

He spoke for five minutes. There wasn't much to say since everyone knew the score and had agreed ahead of time. An easy thing to accomplish when you agitate in small groups and mention raises in other people's pay. These goofs would say yes to a wide-awake tonsillectomy at this point if Champy suggested it.

"So we're going to vote now. We have to be together on this thing, you know the score. Rube'll take a snapshot of the votes." Everyone watched while Rube jumped up on the table beside Champy holding her insta-scan. "Of course we know how you all feel, we've been talking a month now. But for formality's sake, I gotta ask if anybody's got something to say."

Shoalie took her only chance and sucked in a big breath before raising her voice: "How's the union gonna feel about this wildcat?"

Champy was thrown off balance. He hadn't been expecting an answer. He took a moment to focus on the part of the crowd where the voice came from. Shoalie took advantage of his confusion.

"I mean we're all in the union. You folks ready to get suspended for a year? It'll happen if they get pissed. Who's the steward here?"

Shoalie was walking up toward the front, keeping her eyes on Champy the whole time.

A low mumble rose from the crowd as it tried to figure out who the rep was.

"Why Dod over there, ask him," somebody answered.

Shoalie turned and found Dod standing behind a clump of people.

"Dod," she called. "What's the union say?"

"Um, well, I ah ... kinda..."

"Didn't ask, did you?" Shoalie jumped in. "So nobody here even knows how the union feels."

"They're too far away," Dod defended himself, hastily trying to save the only status--undeserved as it was--he'd had in the last 30 years of his life. "They have no idea how things are here."

"And no one here has any idea what's going on out there, do they?" Shoalie puffed herself up, preparing for the blow she'd worked out ahead of time.

"You folks do these wildcat things here on a regular basis? Does anybody know what the consequences will be? Anybody besides me even been out in the world in the last year?"

"I been out." A voice came from the back.

Shoalie jumped up on the riser to see who it was. She knew there'd have to be somebody. There was always a handful of strangers like herself at a job site. She didn't recognize the face amidst the other workers.

"Girt Gruder's my name," the face said. "I been out."

"And you were going to go out on strike here?"

"They ain't had the vote yet," Girt said indignantly, as if someone might have been stupid enough to presume she would give "Aye."

"And you would vote against?" Shoalie asked.

"There's no jobs out there right now. That's why I'm here. I wouldn't be here for any other reason."

"Bullshit!" someone shouted. "That new galaxy's opening up. There'll be jobs in development.

"Not happening for a long time," Shoalie interrupted. "Believe me they're not funneling workers in yet. I know, I've been trying to get an app. They won't even send me one for future work. All they want are specialists and managers. You folks are not specialists. Any of you good with a tracker or can read the stars go ahead and strike, you got a job there because that's all they want besides bosses--explorers. The Big Three have it all sewn up as usual, and they're not exploiting for a long time. That's their stand at the moment. My guess is that the economy is not presenting a favorable climate.

"The Dushens got a raise," someone hollered.

"Girt, you been there?" Shoalie asked. This was so easy.

"No, that was my choice after this dump."

"And why is that?"

"You ever worked on a landfill planet?"

"Actually I have," Shoalie said. "If they doubled the pay from what we get here, I still wouldn't go. Yet those people are no doubt only getting a small percent more than what you get. Well, that's okay because when you all get fired from here you can go work there because the turnover rate is so high they always need people. Don't forget the yellow filter for your masks. The ones for carbon tet, sulfuric, and the lovely quantanium family of gases. And there's nothing like a good wire scrub at the end of the day to get your skin feeling invigorated once the bleeding stops. I'm sure all the Dushens will be tickled to slip-slide on over here to get your vacancies after you're all shit-canned. Who's ready to vote?"

Champy jumped at the opening finally. "You don't know if any of that's true; you're just guessing."

"And you do? You been out there grubbing on dozens of planets in the last ten years like I have?" Shoalie's eyes blazed. "Champy, you've been here so long you've turned into a pillar of salt of the community. There's no way you know what's going on out there."

She turned to the people below her. "Anybody else besides Girt been out there?"

No one answered.

She continued. "You all have been watching too much Hollywood. Life is not always like it is on TV. I've been out there a long time. Too long. I've seen a lot of places. You people got it good here. Most of you been here most of your lives. There's the proof; otherwise you'd have left like Girt and me did. My advice--don't draw attention to yourselves. Shut up and dig."

"Oh, that's great! Management's gonna piss all over themselves to see a bunch of complacent sheep that don't give a Bubonic rat's ass when everybody else but us gets a raise." Champy said.

"Oh, I get it," Shoalie said. "It's a pride thing. Well, let's see, maybe we can come up with something.

"Uh, Dod, contact the union, send them a letter with your pay bands and the conditions here--health risks, recorded cancers, hearing losses, insanity numbers, that sort of thing. Get their opinion.

"Champy, elect a spokesman to go with Dod to management and discuss pay. Find out what the climate is. For all you know they're on the brink of closing this planet down. Salt is pretty plentiful throughout the universe after all.

"Fub, sign these folks up for volleyball. They're turning into zombies from lack of exercise.

"Last thing: Rube, get the vote."

With that, Shoalie stepped down and walked through the group, returning to her previous work chunk, the designated break having been over by five minutes. She soon heard the muffled voices of her co-workers returning to their own stations and one by one lasers being switched on. The rhythmic thuds of falling chunks of crystal soon followed.

4:30 p.m.

As the quit-time alarm rang out, a much-relieved Shoalie packed up and out. People nodded to her as she moved past. Some shook her hand or slapped her on the back. No one ever really wants to strike.

Up at the surface, a boy that looked to be 12--but as per child labor laws had to be at least 20--ran up to her and asked if she was Shoalie McHandler. The high feeling she'd been experiencing since hearing the sounds of muffled voices returning to work instantly departed, replaced by the grinding of her stomach.

"Yeah," she answered but kept walking, looking straight ahead.

"My boss wants to see you."

"Yeah? Who's your boss?" Shoalie knew the answer--the human resources stooge. She was getting sacked. Agitation. A spy reported on today's afternoon break activities, her name got mentioned, they looked up her file and found out she was still on six-month probation. They'd have someone to fire just to keep everyone in line regardless of the fact that they hadn't struck. Some companies were like that--just plain evil. No explanation would be given or taken. At least the union wouldn't be excommunicating her.

She stepped into Heron Stahl's office in the corrugated tin shack admin building. She barely had a chance to sit down in the waiting area when Stahl himself called her in and had her sit in the interview chair.

He held out his hand over the intervening desk, greeting her like he was a politician and she owned a vote. He held his tie back with his free hand so it wouldn't dangle unceremoniously in front of him. If he stated his name and that he was "damn glad to meet her," she wouldn't have been in the least surprised. He gave her the creeps, being so happy while handing her the sack.

"Well, well," he said, returning to his seated position. "So you're here almost, what, six months now?"

"Er, yeah, five actually."

"You like it here?"

"No problem, really."

"Yeah? A lot of people that aren't born on Xeres don't like it here. Not used to the dryness or something. Doesn't seem dry to me. You could get used to it." He said it all with an appalling wide smile. She chomped on her back teeth, clenching her jaw.

"I, ah, watched the action this afternoon," he continued.

"Yeah," she answered. "We had a good day; no breakage. That doesn't happen too often."

"Forget the work, McHandler. You've got other things to do." He just couldn't stop the chuckle burbling up from his petty lungs.

"Yeah, on what grounds?" she demanded, not waiting for him to say the words.

"What are you talking about? I saw you at the break."

"You were there?" she challenged.

"No, we knew Champy was starting a dispute so we taped."

"Great." She said it almost imperceptibly. "And the sound got garbled, right?"

If Stahl knew what she was alluding to, he ignored her, bulling right through to the chase.

"Did you ever consider going into management?"

"Look, that's it." She rose to go, too indignant to be hurt by the sick question. "Quitting time's been and gone."

"I'm serious, McHandler." His smile vanished. "I don't think we're understanding each other. No, you did great this afternoon! We'd like you to jump up."

"What are you talking about?" She was having a hard time getting Stahl into focus and considered sitting back down. She stood there, half up and half down, staring at him.

"I'm talking about Sutton Clope just moved up into heavy management. He checked out last week for the Sugar System; we had to kick Geester up to his spot. We'd like you heading the equipment team where Geester was. It's a mean job--first line super--I know, but you wouldn't stay there for long. And you'd be great. You have a grip. I've been checking your records since three. You need to get out of your slump, girl. You're in the wrong place!"

Stahl was still not coming into focus and Shoalie was just starting to come to grips with the fact that for the second time today she was not going to lose her job. She turned her head sideways and tried to look at him from an angle, like he'd clear up if she squinted a little at him. She did, in fact, finally sit down.

"What are you talking about?" she said.

"Management, a promotion. Do you like it here, McHandler?"

Instantly her vision cleared and the feeling eating at her stomach since the office boy summoned her left.

"What are you talking about?" she sputtered. "If you've been checking my record since three, you know there's a big 'No Management' stamped across the top page asterisked by the BehaviorNorm logo."

"BehaviorNorm?" Stahl sat back in his chair and rocked with his hands behind his head in amusement. "Those idiots? Nobody pays attention to that quack outfit. I don't think they're even in business anymore. Lost their license or incurred too many lawsuits or something. Nobody buys psycho tests anyway. They went out with drug testing. If you can't tell who's good for what, you need to get out of the human resources line."

The boy that had previously summoned Shoalie stepped into the doorway. Shoalie could just see him out of the corner of her eye. Stahl looked up as the kid tapped a timepiece hanging on his chest. Instantly, he jumped up, saying "Look, McHandler, we'd like you to join the team. I'm sure you were expecting it. Why don't you go home and mull it over. Take tomorrow off--full pay--and send in a buzz and let me know what you think. I'll work up a contract over the weekend and we can iron out the details on Monday. I know it's not a plum and you get no OT so the take home's going to be lower, but you'll move up quick and pretty soon we'll be playing golf over on the moon some lunchtime."

He ushered her out of the office and shook her hand at the same time, practically pushing her because her legs seemed incapable of moving fast enough--or at all. Her eyes kept staring at him and her mouth dangling and her hand receiving his handshake long after he'd let go.

"Uh," she finally managed.

"Great!" he said, ecstatic. "We'll see you on Monday. Don't forget to buzz me tomorrow."

With a final shove, he turned and grabbed his briefpad and raced out himself. Later, as she was boarding the air bus for town, she saw him entering the executive cab over in the parking tube.

She didn't know if she should be happy that she didn't get fired or that she was getting a day off. The fact that life had just tossed her a break didn't enter her mind. And why should it? Boss of the equipment grubs was not so much "not a plum" as it was a downright scum assignment. Didn't matter, she didn't have to take the crappy job. There were a lot of assignments, a lot of mines, a lot of planets. Her horizons just got wider and a pile of questions just got answered.

A strange view of her future confronted her. It didn't necessarily concern a number of years pushing people and papers in a salt-drenched cracker of a planet either. She wasn't sure what it entailed. But that was okay, she had tomorrow to think everything through. Tonight she'd stop over at the Green Door for a martini and fat plate of smashers and boing with extra butter, before heading home.

Tomorrow she'd take her time. Spend the day in deep contemplation. Weigh the pros and cons. Compare the bird in the hand with the nothing ventured, nothing gained. A promotion today or the world tomorrow. Tough decision but she had a whole day to think about it.

Next day, 7:30 a.m.

As usual Shoalie McHandler skipped breakfast. Not because she had no appetite, though. She was simply too busy retrieving a certain yellow overvacuum packet containing forms to be filled out immediately.

Sue Lange graduated with a degree in chemistry and biology from Western Michigan University. She worked for a time in the nuclear industry and is currently employed in the publications section of IEEE. She's an assistant editor for Broadsheet, the newsletter for BroadUniverse. Her writing has been published in RockRGrl, Astounding Tales, Nth Degree, Apex Digest of Science Fiction and Horror, Contemporary Songwriter, and Delta Snake. Her first novel of sf satire, Tritcheon Hash, was published by Metropolis Ink in 2003. Visit her website at www.tritcheonhash.com and check out her scusteister blog at LiveJournal.

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, written by Steve Kloves from the novel by J.K. Rowling, directed by Mike Newell, 145 min, 2005

Science fiction and fantasy movies have dominated the top-spending slots in the movie ecology for so long that we hardly think about it any more. These are the types of movies that cost big bucks, mainly because of the special effects, and they have been, generally speaking, the movies that cause a spectacular splash at the box office. But the vast amount of money involved warps the creative process in a number of ways.

Any smart business person wants a return on investment, and there are a number of strategies in the movie world to recoup money spent. One of them is to base your movie on proven property, and this means a proliferation of sequels. As the most cursory glance at this logic indicates, sequels are rarely great, even if--perhaps especially if--the original is a compelling work. Another common bastardization of this logic is to remake the original itself, which is probably an even worse strategy than creating a sequel. More on remakes once I get to King Kong.

Another common strategy in the movie business is to find a bestselling book and adapt it for the big screen. Writing is a field that can take risks, at least relatively; say a novel takes a year for one person to write, while the movie version would take 100+ people a year to make. Books outnumber movies by a few orders of magnitude, which makes it easy for the suits to grab up the books that stick and ignore the rest.

This process isn't a guaranteed winner either, since it's not easy to adapt a book to the big screen with any level of excellence. Honestly, I'm glad there isn't a guaranteed strategy because Hollywood (along with everyone else) would be beating it to death.

Into this situation came two fantasy movies, both adaptations of blockbuster novels: The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I've written about each Tolkien movie on the Challenging Destiny web site, and made brief comments about the Harry Potter series. Even if I didn't care that much for the last two Tolkien movies or the first two Harry Potter movies, the fact remains that they were surprisingly solid. Against all odds, here were some fantasy movies, adapted from books, that didn't, well, suck.

It may be hard to remember now but Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone came after a long drought in fantasy movies, if indeed there ever were any good ones. While science fiction movies were not consistently stellar, there were at least a couple of examples of great ones. Not so fantasy. To counter the SF examples of 2001 and Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, fantasy could claim ... what? The mind shudders to think of Conan, a pair of movies that matched their star's intelligence, or Dragonheart, some smelly faux-medieval dragon-as-My-Little-Pony cheese, or even the much-beloved Labyrinth, a treat for younger viewers but not the fantasy that grown-ups (or readers of written fantasy) might have been hoping for.

By 2005, the situation was almost completely reversed. Science fiction blockbusters, long the staple of the summer movie season, busted no blocks this year. The failure in big budget SF was a long time coming and probably a deserved fate--the lesson I would draw is that you ignore quality at your peril. One qualification: I'm not talking about written science fiction, which has been humming along in all kinds of glory and diversity, but rather science fiction in the movies and in the particular form known as the big budget blockbuster which is the one most associated with science fiction in the public mind. I will be writing more about this in the future, because the onscreen SF spectacular was always a bit problematic. But the artistic depths plumbed by Star Wars Episode III can serve as the exemplar of what happened.

So ... science fiction movies are dead, for the moment, and fantasy movies are the next hope for the genre fan? Not so fast. The success of the Rowling and Tolkien movies have brought their own imitators and sequels. Are these new ones solid adaptations and not typical franchise crap? We will proceed with fingers crossed.

Harry Potter is a young orphan who discovers that he is from a family of wizards, that he can go to the magical Hogwarts boarding school each year, and that an evil sorcerer named Voldemort killed his parents and desperately wants to kill Harry too. The series will finish with the seventh book, each book representing a year at Hogwarts.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has Harry back at Hogwarts for the 4th year of his magical education. He and his friends Hermione and Ron are growing older, growing up. As the movie begins, the three friends go to the Quidditch World Cup, which is interrupted by the Death Eaters (in the first of a few confusing sequences in the movie). Harry and his friends survive but an evil omen has been set.

Back at Hogwarts, there is a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Madeye Moody, fated not to last out the school year, of course. The big news is the Tri-Wizard tournament: two other wizard schools have arrived, and a champion from each is selected by the titular goblet of fire to compete for fame and glory. And somehow Harry gets his name in the cup, even though he's not supposed to.

The bulk of the story is made up of the three tournament-related tasks. Goblet of Fire is about as episodic as the other stories, in either Rowling's book versions or the trimmed down movie versions. Dumbledore, the head of Hogwarts, warns the competitors that the tournament is dangerous, and I see this warning as symptomatic of the entire series and the typically episodic and demented plot structure. I would say that a Harry Potter story is more like the Darwin Awards than an understandable plot; as others have commented, there is some inherent sadism in the way that the dangers of wizardry are magnified and reflected in the boarding school setting. What kind of lousy wizard/upperclassman are you if you don't risk life and limb in a strangely useless tournament? Group pressure to do insane stunts makes Hogwarts like a years-long frat initiation.

Just like the last movie, there are moments here that feel disconnected--the previous movie concentrated its confusion in the climax, while this one spreads it out (the ending itself is deadly clear). The kids have a Yule Ball that contributes greatly to this disjointed aspect--the ball had some character moments that were trying too hard, and nothing seemed to follow except by non sequitur.

Harry Potter is clearly growing up. I like how the shock of seeing these child actors as gawky adolescents makes this more obvious than in the book. Ron in particular is turning into a surly git. This contributes more to Rowling's stated theme of Harry's passage through adolescence than some of Rowling's plotting. Apart from a rite of passage, what does the Harry Potter series mean? Rowling doesn't seem to go in for the big statements, which can be a relief. The point is something like stay true to yourself and to your friends, be loyal and bold; none of this is new, but and Rowling doesn't stint on the bad situations for Harry, thankfully. I've complained too much about the need for a well-told adventure stories to not give Rowling kudos for what she's done, and what the makers of the movies have accomplished.

The special effects continue to be used in a heartfelt, integrated way. I'm feeling hopeful that movie makers are finally figuring out what to do with the CGI effects. But perhaps it's harder to integrate them into live action? I would point out the example of Pixar (and the excellent The Incredibles), but now that I think about it there have been plenty of pure CGI movies that haven't been that great either. No surprise: it comes down to the power of your story.

So the fourth iteration of the Harry Potter series in movie form is not as inspired as the third, but it's at least better than the first two. I would attribute this partly to the direction and partly the growing skill of the main actors (only partly, otherwise this one would be the best of the quartet). I'm glad to see a series like this defying the general rule that sequels get progressively less interesting--and, more pertinently for the studio, less financially rewarding.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire clocks in at about two and a half hours. The running time is between that of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and King Kong, and it feels long--in fact all three do. I'll be grumping about this more in relation to King Kong (see below).

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, written by Ann Peacock, Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely from the novel by C.S. Lewis, directed by Andrew Adamson, 2005, 130 min.

I read the books of C.S. Lewis obsessively when I was younger, especially the seven books in the Narnia series. When I revisit the Narnia books as an adult, I remember all the bits and pieces, right down to the illustrations by Pauline Baynes (which still show up in most modern editions). As a child, I didn't worry about the allegory, or get upset about Lewis' kitchen-sink approach to creating a fantasy world. The books are written with undeniable skill ... for a specific age group.

As I grew up, I didn't care as much about the Narnia series, partly due to overfamiliarity, but also due to the fact that I found books that suited my age more closely. The truism that children's and young adult fiction should have a protagonist just a few years older than the reader doesn't quite fit here; Lewis presents a wide range of ages in his protagonists in this series, but overall the series keeps its focus on a young reading age. This is his goal, and he fulfills it. All the same, rereading the books now, I don't have the same fondness for the stories and situations, probably because I can see some of the machinery clanking away behind the scenes. I see this as a big part of Tolkien's objection to the Narnia series; the books function well enough, but from a writer's point of view, a certain elegance is missing.

The movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe captures this sense that it is a vehicle for a clunky message directed at children. It's a faithful adaptation, which is more than we could perhaps have hoped for, and the counter-argument is that Lewis, a skilled writer, knew what he was doing. Fine, but I prefer works of art that have less of a gap in their focus of attention. To compare apples and oranges, I think King Kong would be fine for older kids but it doesn't feel child-directed in the same way (as mentioned, this is related to the fact that the main characters are grown-ups). But Harry Potter has young adolescents for heroes and heroines, and it still feels more sophisticated.

And do movie adaptations have to have a contentious relationship with the source material? Is it really a criticism to say that the writing and directing team here didn't recognize all of Lewis' faults and correct them in the process? A book or a movie is a weird bit of alchemy, and taking out one ingredient or replacing it could fatally affect the recipe that produced the magic in the first place. True, and again I'm glad that this is a faithful adaptation that doesn't mess things up too much. Neither does it risk much. An adaptation can go wrong for many reasons, and one of them is a misjudged sense of what to change. I've come to see that application of judgment is key to making a stellar adaptation, with Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings as the clearest example. Jackson and his team made some bad calls in those three movies, but other changes elevated them far above expectations. I'll return to this issue when I discuss King Kong, because I see it as an example of some notably erroneous judgment calls. With The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there doesn't seem to be any of these higher-level judgment calls at all, and that makes it a lesser film as I see it.

The story follows the template of a visit to a magical realm: first establish our mundane reality, then take the protagonists through a portal of some kind. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe starts with the mundane but terrifying: it's World War II, and the Blitz is striking London. One night, four children barely make it to the bomb shelter in time, and their mother ships them out to the countryside for their own safety. The children are Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy; Peter and Susan are a few years into teenaged life, Edmund is the middle child, and Lucy is about six. They arrive at the estate of an elderly Professor, whose housekeeper has the serious mission of making sure the kids don't disturb the great man. They are immediately bored. One advantage of the film is the relationship between the kids; it is convincingly strained and petulant when it needs to be, and charmed and touching when required.

Lucy discovers the wardrobe of the title while they are playing hide-and-seek. Being magical, it sometimes leads to the otherworldly realm of Narnia; Lucy meets a faun named Tumnus, while Edmund meets the evil White Witch. All four kids go through at the half hour point in the movie, which feels about right in terms of pacing. They soon discover that Tumnus has been arrested and they are next on the Witch's list. The kids are sheltered by a pair of friendly beavers, but Edmund betrays them.

Edmund's betrayal is the heart of the movie. It's serious stuff, since it has life and death consequences for all of them. In the logic of the book and movie, Edmund throws away his family ties because of his treatment by his siblings and because the Witch offers him some Turkish Delight. When things are patched up later, at great cost, an unspoken part of the dynamic is that the siblings choose to treat him better than they did in the past. But he also did fall for the wiles of the Witch without much thought.

Two major threads run through the rest of the movie: a battle between the good creatures and the bad, and the redemption of Edmund. The central good character is a lion named Aslan; Aslan gives his life as sacrifice to reclaim Edmund, and then comes back to life in time for the climactic battle. The children are prophesied to lead the forces of good, and they duly do so. It's a bookend for the war scenes that begin the film--the kids are no longer cowering in a bomb shelter, they now have the ruthlessness of adults and can stab and shoot people without much in the way of compunction. The schematic division between good and evil changes the lesson away from a warning about war towards a more problematic triumphing of raw power. Sure, they have to fix up the relationships on their own side, but upon his apparent cleansing Edmund becomes just another cog in the machine of war.

I liked the previews for this movie a lot better before the animals started talking--this is not something the film-making team can leave out, considering the source material, but it does feel more fake than it needs to. The special effects are notably patchy, with some very obvious bluescreen in the middle segments. The character of Aslan also feels wrong, not having half of the believability of King Kong, effects-wise.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made a fair amount of money at the box office, and so we can expect to see at least a few more entries in the series. I will likely go see subsequent movies, due to my childhood attachment to the books. However, my expectations will be low.

King Kong, written by Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson from the story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace, directed by Peter Jackson, 2005, 185 min.

What is the artistic fate of a remake? Almost without exception, the movie remake can be considered as a soul-crushing exercise in money-grubbing, the creativity of movie making transmogrified into bar-coding a new batch of product. Well, how does this differ from the normal process of the film industry, you ask? I would say that a remake is far more constrained, by its nature a straitjacket that doesn't attract the type of person who could create something original and appealing out of the situation.

So my comments about King Kong will need to be taken with a grain of salt, because Peter Jackson has clearly tried to do the impossible: retain some of the shape and texture of the original 1933 version of this movie, while injecting some of his own personality and style. His ambition is enormous, and this is to be commended.

Unfortunately, ambition is not the same as execution. In the pursuit of making King Kong all things, Jackson has made it next to nothing. The pieces don't fit together, and this situation is made all the more obvious because of the movie's running time. At over 3 hours, there's too much time to ponder what the heck is going on--going wrong--even with all of the action setpieces.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had a disjointed feel to its narrative, but that movie at least had an excuse, based as it was on 750-page book. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came from a considerably shorter book, but suffered from other problems. There's no comparable length excuse for King Kong--the original movie is only 100 minutes long.

I can see how Peter Jackson's King Kong happened, though. It's the impulse to go big, to light off the fireworks, to provide a splendid show. I would call it spectacle vs. showcraft (for lack of a better word). By which I mean to say: it's relatively easy to throw ever more grand spectacles around, but to make them memorable or interesting or worth the audience's time, there has to be some craft involved. Peter Jackson has proved he can do it, particularly with The Fellowship of the Ring, but the pressures involved in outdoing the seminal 1933 version seem to be too much for him.

Basically, this movie is at least an hour too long. Jackson had the power to release a long movie, but I would argue that some strictures are almost always artistically helpful. See lean and mean Terminator vs. the flabby and self-indulgent Terminator 2. All art is self-indulgent in one way or another, of course, but the key is to have a balance, to earn the right to indulge from the audience. Jackson tries hard, but he's flinging his efforts in all directions.

Let's examine the structure of the movie to see what happened. King Kong divvies up roughly into thirds. The long first section takes place in Depression-era New York City, introducing the down-on-her-luck vaudeville girl Ann Darrow, the scheming director Carl Denham, and the playwright and sometime screenwriter Jack Driscoll. Carl has a mysterious map, and he wants to shoot his new picture on this map's Skull Island. The voyage happens next, and we don't get to the ominous island until 1 hour and 10 minutes in. In the middle section of the movie, the natives of Skull Island sacrifice the beautiful blonde to Kong, and the men determine to get her back, led by Jack who has fallen for Ann on the trip. It's a pretty high body count in this section, with plenty of chases, spills and close calls, involving dinosaurs, giant slugs, scary bugs, even three t. rexes. Ann and Kong form a relationship of sorts; he protects her from the plenitude of dinosaurs and she amuses him with her vaudeville routines. Another hour and 10 minutes go by (which means we are now at the 2 hour and 20 minute point), and Kong is captured. The narrative skips ahead to a Broadway show with Kong as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Needless to say the chromed steel chains can't hold the mighty King Kong and he soon rampages through New York looking for Ann. The famous climax happens atop the Empire State Building, just like in the original.

Jackson really seems to be ignoring the fact that, yes, character development is important, but more is not necessarily more. A certain amount of stockness is ok in a genre piece, and all of the leisurely character moments in the world won't necessarily make King Kong anything other than a genre piece. Strictures are important, and a good genre movie will take what it can get, or slip things in a sly manner, or, in rarer cases, turn expectations completely upside down and focus on characters entirely. With this in mind, it's clear that the situation is made worse by how intense and frightening the monster segments are. A giant ape fighting a t. rex would not really be appropriate in a character piece like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--in fact it would unbalance the movie and make the character moments a source of restlessness. If Jackson wants it both ways, he has to take a different approach than the one has taken here.

I'm not arguing that every movie has to be internally consistent to the nth degree, or that every movie has to be the same. But these liberties on the part of the audience's attention have to be earned, and not taken for granted by the creators, as I've mentioned.

I think that Jackson knows all this, because later in the movie we cut from Skull Island to the Broadway show without the same painstaking setup of every single bloody element. The ship is pulling away from the dock, the ship is sailing, the ship is caught in the fog, the ship is on the rocks, and so forth. The return voyage happens later in the film when there's some dramatic momentum to prop up, but that doesn't seem to stop Jackson earlier, when some initial momentum would be nice.

We buy the transition from the island to the Broadway show--why not use this technique earlier on? Cut some flab, and we'll never even notice it was gone. The team that adapted Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tried this approach, but it backfired, since we have to know a lot about the characters and their histories and their motivations to make heads or tales of the storyline. King Kong strikes me as having a different type of plot than Harry Potter. In King Kong, as much as the writers protest, it's more like this: movie director's megalomania = excuse to move the action to a "deserted" island. Some schematic qualities to the characters would not have gone amiss in this situation.

What does King Kong mean? I don't know, actually. I'm not convinced by critics of the movie who say that it's a vision of racism or colonialism, although there are some disturbing moments in the depiction of the natives of Skull Island. I actually see these things as empty signifiers, rather parched of meaning at this point, like a kind of postmodern adventure story taking old fears and symbols out of context. At one point, the big hairy primate threatening the glowing blonde white woman would have had more impact than it does now. And sure enough, the original King Kong from 1933 was a horror movie and this time around it's ostensibly a love story. Symbols out of context indeed.

On a slightly different note, I'm happy that we are finally at a point when special effects are entirely merged into the story. And what a character portrait of Kong! While the human characters were often given too much time and attention, I was always fascinated by Kong. I think it was a mistake to go the Jaws route and not show the main monster/creature until so late in the story. Kong is indeed king, and he has emotions as much as he has mightiness. The special effect work here blows anything else I've seen out of the running; never mind Gollum or anything from Star Wars, Kong is entirely convincing, and it's a fabulous performance by Andy Serkis and the animators who transformed him from human to giant ape.

I think this movie has many problems, but appropriate use of special effects is not the issue here. King Kong cost a whopping pile of money, which dictates, to a certain extent, that it be an overblown spectacle. I'll be more interested to see what happens once the cost comes down and freedom of imagination can correspond to freedom of moviemaking. Although I bet that a low budget piece, like Primer for example, would be totally destroyed by any special effects of this scale.

I'm also curious to see what Jackson will be doing next. I think he did a heroic job with The Lord of the Rings, even if it spun a bit out of control by the end of the third movie. That extended ending was perhaps a portent of unbalanced storylines to come in King Kong.

James Schellenberg lives and writes in Ottawa.

Seed saving among farmers ... is the basis of global food security and ensures that biological diversity is maintained through the continuous evolution of plants in diverse environments. By contrast, when genetically-engineered seeds are purchased, costs are increased and their use is tied to the signing of a contract that states that the farmer will not save seeds for reuse. Ultimately this results in the concentration and privatization of the most basic of all human endeavors--the production of food.

--"Sustaining Agriculture: Voices from the South" in Inter Pares Bulletin (Jun 2005, Vol 27 No 2)

[Back to Table of Contents]

WannaBeAnaBe: I was thinking that since u and I have the same goal, we could join forces. If you really want to avoid eating, make sure you flick your ashes from your cigarette onto your plate after the first bite, if you are still taking the first bite. From your trigger, I'm guessing you are still eating some food. Check out mine at www.life-diet.com to see what I mean...

"Hey Jake, take a look at this."

Jacob kept on ratting the hair of the Anabe Agency model sitting placidly before him into a gauzy puff-ball of processed-down-to-colorless brittle strands which hovered over her (if you could still call what sat on the chair in front of Jacob a her) taut-skinned skull like a tumbleweed which had lost its central core of thicker dried branches, until Shane repeated, "Jacob, take-a-look-at-this."

Knowing that whichever of the Anabe Girls sitting there (was she Odella or Letje, Radella or Paola?) wasn't about to wander off in search of a cup of coffee, or a fresh pack of cigarettes, Jacob put down his ratting comb on the table of hair grooming products positioned near his work area, and turned to his fellow hairdresser.

"What now?"

Shane was looking at the exposed nape of his Anabe Agency model's neck, pushing aside his girl's forward-and-upward ratted mane of crispy-processed hair with one hand, as he probed a small patch of stretched-tight-neck-flesh with the forefinger of his free hand. For her part, the model (Coretta, Vibeke, perhaps Carling?) didn't seem to notice that she was staring not at the rush and bustle of the pre-showing backstage chaos surrounding her, but instead at her own baseball-bat thin legs, and bas-relief patella jutting up sharply under the smooth, hard skin of her knees. A singular trait of the Anabe Agency girls--no bitching, no wiggling around, no constant chomping and cud-chewing of gum ... just blessed stillness, and deep focus.

"The damn bitch does brand them ... like freaking range-roaming cattle."

Jacob didn't need to ask who "the damn bitch" was--in the last five years, ever since she'd started agenting her astonishing girls, and inundating every major casting with dozens of her "finds" the latest wunderkind of the modeling world's name was known by both constant exposure and earned reputation to anyone and everyone in the fashion world. Ms. Stephanie Steele, also known and loathed as Miss Steal by all the modeling agencies whose girls routinely lost runway slots at major designer casting sessions to her impossibly skinny-emaciated-skeletal walking spaghetti-girls. Not that the other agents, the other agencies, didn't try to get their girls to diet down to that gold standard of thinness, down past a size 2 into Zero-land, a place far more magical and lucrative than Fairyland or even Never-Never Land could ever hope to be. But little petty nuisances like fainting spells during five mile runs, heart failure and even the occasional actual death just kept getting in the way of any agency acquiring the perfect stable of übermodels ... until Miss Steal came along, with a cadre of ultimate anorexics whose willpower and accompanying success manifested itself in their perverse thinness.

No, Jacob corrected himself, Anabe Girls went beyond thin ... all you had to do was add a "g" and you had what they really were--things, devoid of physical sexual markers like protruding breasts, or rounded buns. Tall, compressed Slim-Jim women, who somehow found the energy to move up and down a runway, blink on occasion, and not fidget in the hair and make-up chairs even as they eschewed all manner of food or non-food like bottles of ice water, sticks of celery, or wads of gum.

These ... girls were so calorie-deprived, they didn't even need two names (a joke already considered old in modeling circles after the Anabe Girls had been on the scene less than a year). So Jacob wasn't totally sure if Shane was staring at the neck of Luryna or Lenmana as he quitted his station, and walked the five feet across the dressing area to where Shane continued to peer at One-Name's exposed nape.

Even through the loose tee-shirt the model wore, Jacob could easily see her spinal column, twin rows of protruding rounded knobs creating small rounded shadows down her back as she leaned forward on the horizontal. Stabbing his forefinger at her long neck, Shane glanced up at Jacob, and whispered, "Now this is sick."

All Jacob could do was nod dumbly, as he leaned over to peer at the Anabe Girl's papery-fine flesh, which sported a slightly depressed pair of brown-branded initials--"SS"--just under the bottom of her hairline.

"Goes to show you how seriously Miss Steal takes her position as CEO over there ... the agency initials aren't good enough for Miss Thingie," Shane said as he gently pushed the ever-obedient model's hair back down over her neck, then grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her body back into an upright position. Glancing over at her face, Jacob noticed that her expression never changed, nor did her eyes move. And despite the surrounding rumble of hairdressers, make-up people and dressers in the packed room, and the swish and snick of clothes being moved on racks, and shucked off hangers, Jacob was certain that he'd heard Miss One-Name's joints creak and ratchet in their sockets as Shane changed her position in that chair...

PerFectLeeThin: My family doesn't understand what I'm doing--they don't get how important it is for me to keep shaving another 100 calories off the daily total. It's like an equation, 105 (weight) minus 100 (daily calorie deduction) equals PERFECTION (excuse my flame). You keep going until there's nothing on either side of the minus sign. If they knew about the diet pills, and the laxatives, and the reason why I only drink ice water, they'd freak. Which is why I am so glad I found this site. Looking at the triggers from all the others who have logged on and downloaded their photos inspires me. Even though I'm not thin enough to leave my own trigger just yet. But I am working toward that day. Who knows, maybe once I lose another ten pounds, I might be ready to leave my own trigger here. After that, I might get noticed by an agency...

"Go on, man, take a look at yours ... it isn't like she's gotten up out of her chair when you walked away."

Jacob didn't need to take a look over his shoulder to look at his Anabe Girl, still sitting in Zen-like calm on that uncomfortable chair behind him, to know that Shane was right. None of the Anabe Agency models were wont to cause any sort of pre-show problems during their assignments, which only added to their employability. No more supermodel-diva-rants, no threats that the latest Miss Thing wouldn't dream of getting out bed for less than $25,000 a day, no more haze of cigarette smoke as you tried to work on their hair or make-up prior to the start of the runway show.

Perhaps it was their quietude, their sheer complacent willingness to affect any bizarre look, any out-there cosmetics the designers were wont to request prior to getting the girls dressed and shoved out on the runway proper, that made them so appealing. Nah, Jacob sadly realized, it wasn't their meekness that made them so irresistible during runway casting calls. It was their lack of flesh on the damn bones. Said lack which meant that anything draped on their pitiful excuses for bodies would hang and drape and flutter when they walked, in ways those same garments never could--never would--on any other woman with even one percent body fat.

Never mind that anyone who bought those clothes could never, never look that good in them--as long as those clothes hung just so while being propelled down the runway under the popping glare of the fashion photogs come that all-so-important Spring or Fall showing, the designers could sell bu-ku numbers of each garment to the retailers and the couture buyers sitting out there on those uncomfortable little folding chairs surrounding both sides of the runway. To achieve that all-important bottom line, you needed models thinner than a paper-cut.

And once said girls materialized at the castings, you hired them. No questions asked about how or why they managed to become that mind-blowingly thin.

"I wonder if they flinch when she does that to them?"

"Does what--starve them, or brand them?" Shane began back-combing his girl's hair, grabbing one fist-ful of hair hard enough to pull the underlying flesh away from her skull, while furiously ratting the brittle strands with his comb. Jacob moved around to look at the model's face--like all of her fellow Anabe Agency models, Annot or Pavla or who the hell ever she was just kept on half-smiling, lips pulled up at the corners into a sort-of half-moon crescent of thin lips leeching out into a mere wrinkle in her cheeks. And her eyes--they didn't track, as Jacob discovered when he moved his own forefinger back and forth before her face. All she did was quasi-smile and stare. In the time he stood before her, she did blink, a couple of times in well over two minutes. But that was about all...

OOSizeOO: Pill diuretics only go so far, you have to supplement them with foods that do it naturally. Plus you can never get too far from a bottle of really icy water--put it in the freezer for half an hour before you go anywhere, so it's a little bit crunchy when you sip it. Chewing on ice works too, but it's noisy, and sometimes you can crack a molar. But what I wanted to tell you about was something I saw on cable TV, a show about these Buddhist monks, over in Japan a few centuries ago--they achieved something beyond anorexia, something so totally perfect I can barely type this, I'm so excited.

They were living mummies. Like no body fat, anywhere on their bodies. The thought of it is so exciting, I know my body is devouring calories by me just thinking about it. Of course they did die eventually, but before that, they were flesh, muscle and bone, and that's about it. Perfection ... wasted on guys, of course, but still ... And what is coolest of all is, they did it by eating, yet not really eating-eating. Like eating food. For seven years prior to them digging a hole in the ground then going down to sit in it, they ate nothing but things like bark off certain trees, pine needles, and not much else. And they stood under icy waterfalls ... we all know how useful shivering is, don't we? ;-)

So, once they'd melted off all that body fat, their bodies were virtually mummified, so that when they'd go sit in their holes, once they were covered up by another monk, all they had to do was wait for two weeks or so, and then, if they were lucky, they were perfectly preserved for like forever after that. If they were slack, and snuck something to eat-eat, they didn't mummify properly. And they rotted. What a tribute to them, to stay perfect after death. No wonder the other monks worshipped them...

"Everybody, ten minutes until curtain--"

Jacob walked back to his waiting model and, despite the time warning, took a few precious seconds to lift up his girl's hair, and bend down to study the nape of her taut-fleshed neck. He'd been hoping against hope that those initials wouldn't be there, that Shane's model was merely into body art ... but they were there, a little lighter in color, not so recessed into the skin. Like something from a bad Nazi movie ... those two repeated letters indented in the skin. Jacob wondered what sort of metal they used to make the brand--Steele, perhaps?

"Jake, bring your girl over here, ok? She still needs her make-up--" Across the room, Marcia's voice cut through Jacob's reverie like scissors lopping off split ends.

Helping his girl to her feet, Jacob turned her bodily in Marcia's direction and told her, "Go over there," before giving her an asexual swat on her nonexistent ass and pushing her toward the waiting make-up artist. He'd never really noticed before, but this model--like all the Anabe Agency girls--had this shuffling gait, not quite lifting her feet up, but lurching forward, like something from a very bad indy horror movie. Something not even as good as the early George Romero pictures. And as he continued to watch the model (someone had mentioned her name to him--Zelinka? Kaoline? Mora?--one of the strange names like that written on those sheets of paper attached to their hangers on the racks, names Jacob never saw listed in the birth announcements in any newspaper he'd ever read in all his life) he wondered, did Miss Steal pick the names out for the girls, or did they?

Judging from the way all the models in the room more-than-meekly sat there, or stood there, letting people tease their hair into static-random puffs of fragile follicles sprayed and ratted into a quasi-lifeform squatting on their scalps, surmounting lipstick smears extending from their natural lips to their concave cheekbones and still onward, to touch their barely-fleshed earlobes, and all of that unnaturalness resting on necks so thin, so sinewy, that they resembled the damned Watts Towers, rather than anything still human, Jacob allowed the truth to finally sink in--these things had no free will, no ability to name themselves, or choose what they wanted to do. Didn't they all come in a van, and leave in the same vehicle once the show was over? Did he--did anyone working in the fashion industry, let alone those reporters from those cable fashion and entertainment channels who were virtually interchangeable, save for the different logos on their mike flags, did any of them ever try to talk to an Anabe Girl, attempt to interview her? Hear her say anything?

The people who bought the clothes they wore on the runway may have been fashion slaves, but these ... things, what were they? Fashion zombies?

Once thought of, the word blossomed in his mind, each petal taking on the image of George Romeo extras nibbling bugs off trees in stark grainy chiaroscuro, or Haitian sugar cane workers lurching off platforms into vats of steaming processed cane in that grade Z Bela Lugosi film from the 1930's ... Something-or-other Zombie. But it made no sense--real zombies (if there was such a thing as a real zombie, aside from the living-dead things created down in Haiti which weren't really dead-dead, only enslaved and salt-deprived) ate, couldn't get enough to eat, as long as it was available for the ripping and gnawing with the teeth.

He'd never seen these girls open their mouths, not to protest whatever weird-ass thing the hair and make-up people did to them, not to complain about the asymmetrical nightmares they had to have pinned and all but glued onto their bodies just so they'd stay on for the duration of the runway appearance before the dressers back stage would rip them off and throw something else on their bodies ... not even if someone stuck them with a pin, as he'd seen countless dressers do in those panicky seconds before clothing changes.

"Maybe if you offered one of them a french fry, she'd come back to life."

Shane's voice so close to his ear startled Jacob for a second; jerking inside the confines of his Henley shirt, he recovered quickly enough to snap, "I doubt any of these girls would've allowed themselves to drink a zombie potion in the first place ... it might have more than a calorie in it."

"And I don't think you can drink one of those portions on ice ... does something to the blowfish poison in the mixture." Shane laughed, only his eyes didn't crinkle around the corners as they usually did when he was joking. They watched as the dressers began shoving the first of the girls past the curtain, and out into the glare of the runway proper--it didn't matter how high their heels were, none of them walked fast enough or lifted their feet high enough to have to worry about falling off their heels ... if anything like worry could seep into their calorie-deprived brains.

While Jacob stared at the last girl he'd done take her place in line near the curtain, all he could see was that burned-on "SS" on the back of her neck, in the same spot where a fashion doll might carry the incised name of her maker, or her country of origin ... not placed anywhere where even an upswept hairdo would reveal it, but still there, like a brand name, or a bar code. Or a mark of ownership.

"Don't look, but you should see who's standing in back of us," Shane whispered, while bumping up against Jacob's right shoulder with his own narrower left shoulder.

Still staring after that last model he'd worked on, Jacob murmured, "So ... who aren't I supposed to look at?"

"The Steel-Woman herself ... come to oversee the slaves, I guess."

"She packing the branding iron?"

"Nope ... just a pissed look on her puss. Didn't I say don't look back there?"

Jacob didn't care if he'd be turned into a pillar of salt for taking a look at Miss Steal, if that's what the All Mighty still did to those who dared look in the face of pure corruption. He just had to stare the mistress of starvation in the eye...

Not2ThinYet: I saw that special on TV, too ... did you notice the gorgeous robes those monks wore? Like frozen fashion models. Now if those guys had been born now, and they'd been girls, they would've been models. Not just models, the best, most perfect models. Never eat, never drink, just be perfect. And wear even more perfect clothes. Everything hanging, so people know that you've made it past size 0, down to Thin. Just pure body, nothing getting in the way, no fat, no excess water, just the essence of a person. I suppose it's like thin goes beyond a diet, beyond a way of life, into a religion. The same dedication, the same faith that as long as you believe, you'll make it. Total thinness. Better than a model thin. Of course, I'd even settle for model thin right now...

Gaunt cheekbones jutted out on either side of Stephanie Steele's almost lipless mouth, the coating of lipstick turning her lower face into a bloody papercut rather than anything like a smile or a frown, as she stared at her lined-up Girls from the back of the dressing area. Jacob was vaguely reminded of that magazine editor, Helen something-or-other Last-Name's-a-Color, who was practically self-embalmed when she finally died a couple of years back ... same anorexic body type, same concave lack of a gut under her barely-there bustline. Wearing one of those totally non-styled quasi-Vera Wang sort of shifts with a stark lack of ornamentation, curves or anything else which made a woman look female. Super-pointy toes on her spike heeled shoes, which matched her jutting beak of a fleshless nose. Malnourished moussed hair, the kind that is held on the head by the layers of hairspray alone. Like someone who came in fifth on Survivor before the rest of the people on the island voted her off for fear they'd wake up the next morning to find her dead of starvation. Only, Jacob could sense just from looking at the self-satisfied glitter in those slightly bulging eyes of hers that this woman liked herself skeletal ... no, make that loved herself that way.

But, even as Jacob saw that Miss Steal had achieved calorie-deprivation-Nirvana years ago, there was one thing starvation couldn't give her ... height. Four inch spike heels couldn't bring her up to five-five, if that. Even Kate Moss was five-seven barefoot, and at her skinniest. Jacob could smell a WannaBe across a roomful of models' cigarette smoke, and today, the room was wholly free of nicotine--openly staring at her now, Jacob mouthed the words Whoremaster bitch ... white slaver (Oh that was it ... that Lugosi film was called White Zombie) in her direction, turning only when he was sure she'd seen him.

Beside him, Shane whispered, "I wonder where she finds them ... let alone how she gets them that skinny--"

Before Jacob could come up with an answer, he heard a staccato slap-tap sound behind him, which quickly became louder and sharper, until it stopped altogether, about a foot or so away from him.

"They get themselves that skinny ... before they die," came a voice gone raspy from frequent bouts of puking and grazing her throat with the tips of her fingernails. Shane and Jacob exchanged brief wide-eyed stares before turning around to face the Wraith Mistress in Vera Wang silk. That lipsticked slit opened to reveal teeth permanently striated from within from vomit-rot, as Miss Steal continued, "They seek each other out, over the Internet ... help is just a search engine away. They trade web addresses the way the fleshies trade recipes for smoothies. Only way to find sisters in a world of flab ... always seeking out means to achieve their ends. Perfect is a mouse click away, if you know where to look. Then they diet until the last "t" is gone ... but don't you see how much better I've made things? Look at this room ... no choking on second-hand smoke, no tripping over ice-water bottles, no listening to diva rants. The other models, they'd cause so much grief before they backslid and got fat, or up and died from overdoses. I've made things so much better, for everyone. And everyone is happy ... the designers have their elusive drape and the buyers have the illusion that those clothes will make them look thin, too. No tantrums behind the curtain, either.

"My girls are past all that foolishness ... they've stayed the course, stuck to their plans, and achieved--"

"A state of perfect cliché?"

Miss Steal wrinkled her lips into an ass-tight moue at Shane, before saying to Jacob, "You can call me a white slaver, but you don't know squat ... I just find them right before they've consumed that last calorie, and I--I complete them. This is what they all want, you know. To have people gape in amazement at their impossibly perfect bodies, to make people envy them, even as they claim to be repulsed. Not everyone can starve themselves just so ... it takes dedication. Like modeling. Besides, do you really want to go back to the old way, of dealing with whiny hungry models coked up on blow who snap your head off if you look at them cross-eyed? Do you really want to work in all that cigarette haze? Or listen to them popping their gum--"

"Nobody can live on air, lady, I mean, you move the car, you gotta gas it up first. Simple law of I think physics--energy needs fuel. If it don't eat, it don't breathe--"

"Breathing only makes you look fat--makes the rib-cage stick out," Miss Steal answered serenely, before crossing her bony arms over her non-existent breasts, and going on, "And besides, since when did the dead need air?"

"This is too freaky for moi." Shane dismissed them with a two-handed pushing away motion, and headed for his workstation, tossing his combs and cans of styling products into a zippered bag.

Jacob continued to watch him as Miss Steal kept on whispering in that vomit-roughened voice of hers, "If you really, really want to be thin, to stay thin, are you going to let something like death stand in your way? Desire can be a powerful nutrient ... once you're tough enough, physically hard, you won't rot. Not at all ... did you realize, it's far easier to cremate someone fat" (she spat out the word as if it were a curse) "than to cremate a lean person? People like us, we don't go easily. We endure ... we go on. Look at Vibeke, over there in the yellow--" Jacob saw the last model he'd been working on, returning from her latest march down the walk, as one of the dressers shucked off her yellow dress to reveal a naked body of such skeletal fleshlessness it transcended any hint of raw sexuality despite her nudity, to become a mere construct of parchment flesh stretched drum-head taut over a framework of symmetrical bone rebar--"Would you believe, before she started on the path to perfection, she weighed close to one-twenty-five? On a five-foot-nine frame? Obscene ... just disgusting. When she was surfing the pro-ana sites, she called herself 'Not2ThinYet' which was so, so true. Her first trigger was horrible ... convex belly, pockets of flab on her upper hips ... just obscene--"

"'Trigger'? Are we talking Lone Ranger or that other cowboy guy?"

"Photos, posted on the websites. Of women approaching perfection. Inspirational pictures, if you will. Encouragement for the flabby. Proof that dedication will pay off, if you don't succumb to food--"

GoddessAnaRex: I hate to spam everyone, but there's this drink you simply must try--I got it from someone on another site, and it isn't easy to make, but believe me, it will work. You'll need to find a store that sells real Asian food, specifically raw fish, to make it, but if you follow the directions below precisely, it's worth the effort (and effort equals calories spent!). They might give you a hard time over the blowfish, but just show them the $$ and you'll get it. Some of the other ingredients might be harder to find, but I've included related websites where you can order them. Once you drink it, you'll experience a backsliding effect--you'll swell up for a short time--but after that ... Calorie Free Zone. Trust me, this is it.

"--used to post my own triggers, before I found a way to help more women in a lasting way. A lucrative way, especially since they'll never waste a penny of earnings on food. Of course, my method is still out there, floating on the Internet--I tried to limit where I sent it originally, but a few of the girls who would become my girls passed it along to who knows whose mailing lists. But I found that marking my original girls, just so I can keep track of the authentic Anabe Girls, works well ... I know that impostors, wanna-bes, try to pass themselves off as real Anabe models at castings. But I've clued the people doing the casting in on my ... secret, so they can check out anyone suspicious. And those girls, in turn, are told to apply for jobs with me ... they get my card, the whole scouting treatment. Then I get the wanna-bes, before they can continue to go around ruining my agency's reputation. And as I said before, everyone is happy--the designers, the buyers--"

"Whoa, Trigger-lady ... didn't you like leave out a step? As in, the faux Anabe Girls are sent back to you, and then ... something, then the problem is solved. But what happens to the girls sent to you? Do you starve them unto death, then hire them--"

"I have plenty of girls in my agency. More than I can get casted, actually. Enough to fill two or three runway shows at one time. So I have no need of more girls--"

Beyond them, the runway show was winding down, and the designer was getting ready to take the stage, his arms around the T-square perfect bodies of two of the Anabe Girls, Vibeka included. The other girls were already in line, heading out past the curtain in twos, each barely aware of the other as their long, long legs scissored in unison.

"So ... you send the wanna-be models away. Send them packing--"

Laughter forced through a rusted pipe of a throat is not a pretty sound. Next to Jacob, Miss Steal said between grating chortles, "Send them away? What a waste ... weren't you the one who said 'energy needs fuel'? Meat walks on all fours. Upright, it's just fuel. Gas for the engine, I suppose you could call it. People eat ... zombies, they feed. Eating makes you fat ... feeding just keeps you going."

"And ... eating is for enjoyment, right?"

"True, true ... feeding is a painful necessity. The more painful, the less frequent, which means guilt, which means there's no temptation to actually eat."

"Aren't you afraid I'll--"

"Tell someone? And risk making everyone go back to not being happy with the models? Do you miss the tantrums and the nicotine miasma that much? Honestly, now?"

The designer and his attendant undead models moved past the curtain, and onto the runway where, even at this distance, the rumble of applause was like a huge hungering stomach, growling and roaring with need.

"Besides," Miss Steal hissed through those stained teeth, "I'm not abusing my girls, not putting them in any danger--you couldn't get me on corpse abuse in any state, in any country. Not like those people in Hollywood, with the stunt-men ... oh, do you really think they do all the dangerous stunts with CGI? Are you aware of what computer generated imaging still costs, long after the beta stage has passed? Women have the need to be thin, men have the need for experiencing danger in its most extreme forms ... and once you're dead, nothing is too extreme."

Feeling light-headed, as if he hadn't eaten in ages, instead of mere hours, Jacob couldn't resist asking, "So if the girls find you, or you find them, or whatever, on the Internet, where do they find the stuntmen for the movies?"

"Do you think everyone who tries out for those daredevil shows on cable actually makes it through the audition process? They have something of an obligation to recycle the ones who die trying..."

A. R. Morlan's work has either appeared in or is scheduled to appear in over 117 different magazines, anthologies and webzines, under her own name and three pen names, since 1986. In addition to her novels The Amulet and Dark Journey, and her co-edited anthology Zodiac Fantastic (NAL), her short story collection Smothered Dolls should be out from Overlook Connection soon. This is her sixth appearance in Challenging Destiny, following "Ridin' the De Novo Shinkansen" in Number 20.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Turning on to S.E. Belmont Street, I ran into Shark.

Literally.

He was a Ukrainian kid originally, but that was even before I met him. After a few too many swims in the retro vat, some wicked surgery and a whole lot of transposons Mother Nature never intended, he was ... well ... something else.

Shark wasn't much over one meter forty but he had to mass two hundred kilos. His head was bullet-shaped and it melted into his shoulders without benefit of neck or throat. I'd heard he had carbon fiber mesh woven into his muscles for scaffolding--true or not, he had arms bigger around than my fat head. Legs to match.

The weirdest thing, what got him on virteo every now and then on some extreme mod program, was his skin. Shark was armored head to toe with a mosaic of enamel fragments growing straight out of his epidermis. He was covered in human teeth, basically, on every part of his body except his jaws. There he had pointy freaking shark teeth, about four rows' worth.

And I do mean everywhere on that tooth skin thing, if you know what I mean.

The only thing human besides his general shape was his eyes. They were a pale, watery blue, like you expect on a librarian or a tax accountant. Which was weird because even a natural guy like me pops custom Eyes every chance I get--I was wearing gray market StarEyes that day, supposed to help pick up chicks and charm the world--while Shark's peepers were original equipment.

Of course, he got groupies, which was more than anyone else I knew. They didn't last long, but they partied hearty until E.R. time.

Still and all, I wouldn't want to get up every morning and scour my happy ass from stem to stern with a toothbrush. The guy must buy Colgate by the case lot. I could only imagine what his hemorrhoids were like.

He was also perfectly capable of ripping my arms off by way of friendly greeting. Shark demonstrated this character trait by peeling back the hood of my Skoda Hybrid.

I hit the emergency flashers and fumbled open the gull wing door. "Hey, cut that shit out!"

Shark sort of patted the hood back down. The sheet metal looked like tinfoil after the baked potato has gone to its reward. "I lookin'k for ch'ou."

He didn't talk so good either. But that had been true years ago too, back when he still had lips.

"You finding'k ch'me," I said, ignoring the honking horns behind me. Shark would take care of them if they didn't quiet down quick. "What d'you want, Shark? I ain't done nothing to nobody."

Not true, strictly speaking, but I certainly hadn't done anything that should interest the sort of people who kept Shark in toothpaste money.

"Ch'ou got what belong'k to Big Ch'akov. He got respec'k for ch'ou, so ch'ou got til midnight to bring'k it in. Mary's on Broadway."

That was a long speech for Shark.

"Shark, I wouldn't know Big Yakov if he bit my ankle. He wouldn't know me either. What the hell are you talking about?"

"Don' ch'ou play dum'k." Shark gave my hood a punch that slammed the Skoda's front end to the pavement, then waddled off.

"Okay, I won't," I said as I got back in. Miracle of miracles, the damned car still ran.

The Natural Ink on Belmont, just past 33rd, is a pretty good place to meet girls wearing tie-dyed tank tops, cut-off shorts and no underwear of any kind. On the down side they usually haven't shaved or bathed in a while and are waiting for their dope-dealing boyfriends. It's a place to start. Besides, getting a carrot-gazpacho smoothie dumped on my lap would be a change of pace. It's all part of Oregon's natural beauty.

My StarEyes glittered at the counter girl as I ordered a bowl of vegan chili and a big pot of chamomile tea. Once I had my food, I sat down at a little table decoupaged with pages out of old luxury car brochures and issues of Architectural Digest and wondered what the hell was I going to do about Shark and Big Yakov.

Despite my misgivings and his close resemblance to a natural disaster in progress, Shark I could handle. Sort of. He and I had been in junior high together for a while, before his phenotype got too weird for the school board. Plus that bit about ripping the arms off two Cambodian guys who had been giving him shit for three or four years.

Back then he'd been nubby and weird. I was pretty sure he remembered I was halfway nice to him while everyone else was beating the crap out of him. Ever since, we'd moved in different circles.

As for Big Yakov, he ran lots of action in the northwest industrial district. Got his picture in the paper every time he endowed a park or came to the mayor's swearing in. Last time a cop tried to collar him, one of the desk sergeants had thrown the flatfoot punk off a bridge after Big Yakov made a few phone calls.

Law and order type, Big Yakov. I was a small time clerical worker. No more interesting to him than the rivets on the Steel Bridge. And I had no more influence over him than I did over Mount Hood.

I thought about messaging my friend Melli the cab dispatcher through the comm hack in my StarEyes, but I couldn't see how much help she'd be. She could always send me a cab.

"Hey."

The woman in front of me was just my type. Or at least just Natural Ink's type. Frizzy blonde dreadlocks, one of those small faces like you see on daughters of old New England money, a purple macramé shirt that left nothing whatsoever to the imagination and a pair of faded European hiking shorts that had been patched a dozen times with denim and old bandanas. Big knobby-ass boots too, with rolled down socks the color of the red peppers in my chili.

To hell with Melli.

"Hey yourself," I said. I looked at her with my StarEyes thinking happy sexy thoughts:

Pheromones, baby.

The rhythm of your pulse.

I look like Freedom Barrymore in Hawaii Helldive.

Damned things were supposed to guarantee seduction, but they blew chunks. What did I expect for fifteen cents on the dollar, gray market? At least I still had my CargoEyes for work.

"You're sitting on my jacket."

So much for StarEyes. I pushed the chair back, stood up and looked. Nothing there.

"I don't think so," I said, but when I met her eyes again the gun in her hand interfered with my full attention. Some sort of sleek, black pistol I couldn't identify, but then I'd never paid much attention to firearms before.

"We really have to talk," she said in a breathy voice.

I stood up slowly as the pistol slipped back into the cargo pocket of her shorts. "I don't think this relationship is working out so well."

"You'll love it." She smiled. Perfect teeth, like little pearls. "Trust me."

There were a lot of things about her I could love, for a few hours at least. That pistol was not one of them.

To add insult to injury, somehow even though I was the hostage I had to drive.

I'm a non-union dock clerk. Guns don't scare me much. I see drunk union apes with thirty-inch drop-forged wrenches going at it almost every day. One time Mike the Mouse chased me out of my little portable office by driving a forklift through the wall. I figured if nature girl was going to hurt me, she would have done it already.

All the same, I'm not in Shark's line of work. I'd been looking for cheap sex, not cheap violence. Hell, I wasn't even wearing the right Eyes for this.

My Skoda pulled up next to an old railroad car near the Ross Island cement plant, the one under the 99E viaduct. No one around, not even a delivery truck. The railroad car was a metal boxcar of the last century, dry docked on an old siding with a cement skirt around its base. Sort of the ultimate in mobile homes. I hadn't remembered seeing it down here before, but that didn't mean much.

My Portland hippie chick made me get out first. She came around the car behind me and set one hand on the small of my back. "The other side," she said. "There's a door."

There was, facing a blank warehouse wall. It looked like the storm door off my grandma's house when I was a kid. Someone had torched a rectangular cut in the side of the boxcar and welded this thing in. It was weird, like seeing a dorsal fin on a cat.

I tugged it open. The thing even squeaked like a screen door, with that faint scent of aluminum and vinyl. Behind it was a cheap office-type door. I pushed that one open too.

There was a little office inside, paneled with cork and whiteboard, which in turn was covered with scribbled notes, sheets of paper, photo printouts, maps, and probably half the deep dark secrets of the past couple of decades for all I could tell. A metal desk straight out of an old private eye movie dominated one corner, while fluorescent lights flickered in a drop ceiling overhead. A hat rack in the corner held a couple of light rain jackets. The only modern thing in the room was the monomer-pane data display on the jumbled desk, sticking up like a sheet of glass with a zoning variance from the law of gravity.

It was mighty cool for a boxcar. The air moved slightly, underlain with a stale smell.

"How come it's not hotter than July Fourth in here?" I asked.

Then the room lurched a little bit, my stomach dropped, and I thought, uh-oh.

I was wrong. There was no cheesy knockout gas or some such stupid crap. The office was an elevator, dropping downward.

After about forty-five seconds a tone sounded.

"Out," she said. She wasn't bothering to hide the gun any more.

The door seemed to be the only choice, so out I went.

The office had come down an i-beam shaft like a big old freight elevator, which was basically what it was. In front of me was a tunnel perhaps fifteen or twenty meters to the far well extending to darkness in either direction. An array of desks, cabinets, twen-cen cube walls and so forth spread out from the elevator like a stain from a spilled box of offices. Bare long-life bulbs dangled from the ceiling high above.

Two more women and a man waited for me. They were all dressed in puffy boots, bag-suits, loose breath masks and goggles around their necks. Ordinary office clothes, nothing to make them stand out, unlike my lovely captor.

"Mr. Daley Lorenz," said one of the women, a short brunette with a pinched face. She reached out a hand. "Welcome."

"No thanks," I said. "Can I go home now?" I knew a few dockworkers I could sic on these people. Hell, Shark might even do it, once I got past the Big Yakov problem. Whatever that was. Doubtless my captors knew about it too.

I hoped someone would tell me soon.

"Adele, did you brief him?" she asked, looking over my shoulder.

"He's a prick," said Adele. "Didn't stop staring at my breasts the whole time."

"Hey!" I said.

The brunette shook her head. "I am sorry, Mr. Lorenz, for the theatrics and for the lack of information. Time is short. You have a rendezvous with Mr. Yakov tonight, am I not correct?"

"I have no idea what this is about." I stepped over to the nearest desk chair, sat down, put my feet on the desk, right over the papers. "I don't know what Big Yakov wants, I don't know what you want, and I don't really care. I just want to get out of your way."

"You wish me to believe that you are a simple dupe in these proceedings, Mr. Lorenz?"

"Yes! That's me. Dupe, simple dupe." I leaned over, rummaged around on the desk until I came up with a half-full bottle of water. "Happy to stay that way, too. Why don't you meet Big Yakov tonight and work it out amongst yourselves?"

"We are on..." She glanced at her companions. "Opposite sides of certain questions from Mr. Yakov."

I chugged water, then wiped my lips with a satisfied gasp. "I'm on no side of Mr. Yakov, nor you."

"Your Eyes, Mr. Lorenz. The StarEyes you recently acquired sub rosa."

Oops. "What about them?"

"There was a mistake. They were--"

"Wait," I interrupted. "I've seen this movie. They were stolen, there was a mix-up, the fence sold me the wrong set, you want them back, blah blah blah. And let me guess, Big Yakov wants them too."

"In a manner of speaking."

"Fine. You can have them back. Have Adele run me home, I'll swap them for my CargoEyes, we're done. Hell, I don't even need a refund."

"It's too late for that."

Double oops. "Too late for what?"

"By now they've ... adapted to you."

"Adapted how?"

"You are their host. They will work for no one else."

That wasn't how it was supposed to be with Eyes. Interchangeable parts, hotswap technology. Blah blah blah. "Look, they don't work for me."

"Oh, yes they do," she said. She turned to the other woman to her left, a thin Chinese gal. "Doff your clothing, Mei-Wan. All of it."

Mei-Wan stepped out of her bag-suit and puffy boots to reveal tight, lacy bra and panty set in cobalt blue. Well, this was getting interesting. Or so I thought, as the bra and panties came off.

Until Mei-Wan unfastened the skin of her neck. Then it just got nasty. There were a lot of little whipping tentacles inside Mei-Wan, and a lot of them had tiny eyeballs, and a lot of them were looking at me.

Now was a real good time to panic. After a couple of minutes, Adele's gun to my temple brought me back from an extended hissy fit.

"Most people would have seen an attractive young woman Mr. Lorenz, rubbing her skin. You saw an attractive young woman removing her skin."

"The Eyes." Never again, I promised myself. "Is it ... she ... it ... real?"

"Ah, ah, that would be telling."

Oh, shit. "Now what?"

"We deliver the Eyes to Big Yakov. As originally promised. You are simply the carrier."

"For God's sake, I could have delivered myself myself."

The brunette smiled. "We desire the credit, Mr. Lorenz."

As she walked off into the darkness, I turned to Adele. Her perky pink aureoles were certainly convincing under that macramé top. "You too?"

Her tongue flicked out, licked her nose and lower eyelashes and went back way too fast for any normal girl. She just grinned before pulling up a chair to block to the door to the elevator-office.

I spent the rest of the day and evening making up scurrilous limericks about my captors and wondering what the hell I was going to do. Not to mention who the hell these horrible tentacle people really were.

Big Yakov would cut the Eyes out of my head as soon as look at me. I knew his rep. Shark could pop them out for the fun of hearing me squeal. I was a human Eye box to these ... people.

And who were these people? Some ancient evil species from the cracks beneath the earth. Or the universe's lowest-budget alien invasion. I was losing my mind, pure and simple. The Eyes were taking me over. That's all there was to it.

I considered just popping the Eyes out, dropping them on the desk, and walking out of there blind. There were serious drawbacks to that plan. So instead I slammed my hand in a drawer twice, to see if I would wake up. That didn't help. I tried one of my limericks on Adele:

"There once was a snake named Adele

"Riding the express train to He

"She held up a guy

"Who did nothing but sigh

"And complain about how she did smell."

She pointed the gun at me and told me to shut the hell up or they'd deliver the Eyes in a body bag.

Were they real? Were the Eyes a scam? How could I tell the difference?

All Eyes were visual preprocessors, by definition. They managed images before sending them to the brain's visual cortex. The military used SniperEyes, with enormously extended focal ranges and multiple grades of monatomic lasers to assess wind speed, air density and so forth. Firemen used SmokeEyes. Hell, I used CargoEyes at work, that let me read bar codes on containers and manifests without screwing around with a handheld.

So anyone could spoof an Eye, if they could hack into it. Normally Eyes were shielded, raw data flowing in from outside, processed neural signal flowing back. It wasn't like they had an IP address.

But the Eye could be prehacked. Could be built with some kind of access channel.

Or some dope like me could open an auxiliary channel to my presence server via my bonefone, and give a hacker access.

Melli. My friend the taxi dispatcher. She knew everyone, everything that was going on. I set about subvocalizing a message for her, hoping like hell Adele was too bored to realize what I was doing. I used the crawler squirt via my StarEyes--low bandwidth text, more likelihood of getting out from down here underground.

:::MEL:::NEED SOMEONE ASAP 2 HACK MY EYES:::LIFE OR DEATH:::D::::

After a few minutes, her words came into my field of view.

:::SHARK GOT YR TONGUE?:::

So she didn't know everything.

:::I WISH:::CANT XPLAIN:::NEED 2 KNOW IF EYES ARE CLEAN:::

:::W8:::WILL DO:::L8R:::

Later? The direction my evening was headed in, I wasn't going to have a later.

We went back up the office elevator around 11:30 that night. No word from Melli. No sign of Mei-Wan the snake woman since her little magic act with the skin. Just me, Adele, brunette and her boyfriend.

Or snakefriend.

Whatever.

At least there was no talk of using my Skoda. The snakefriend went off in the dark, returned a few minutes later with a safety orange Hummer H6--four axles of pure road-crumbling power on the rubber hoof. He got in to drive, Adele and I sat in the distant back seat, while brunette took a jump seat that could have hosted a family of starving Belgians. Adele's pistol came along for the ride too, out on her lap in her little right hand.

My message crawler jerked to life as the Hummer rumbled into the night.

:::DALEY:::WHERE U BEEN?:::BAD CARRIER:::MEL:::

So the snake people had started jamming me after my first round of messaging. I couldn't very well subvocalize now with Adele and her pistol sitting next to me. How was I going to do this?

"I need help knowing where we're going," I said to brunette.

:::EYE NEEDLE KELP:::

Shit. The parser wasn't going to cut me any slack.

"Shut up," Adele suggested.

:::D, RU DRUNK?:::ALEXI SAYS YR CARRIER IS STRANGE:::

"I'm not drunk," I said. "I'm worried."

:::KNOTTED RANK:::

"Shut up." This time she jammed the pistol into the soft skin of my lower jaw. I swear she bruised my tongue from the outside.

:::UR N TROUBLE ARNT U DALEY?:::

All right, Melli. I wasn't getting anything more out to her right now, though.

After a minute or two, as we rumbled across the New Morrison Bridge--New, New, New Morrison Bridge actually, but who counted that sort of thing anymore?--Melli came back on.

:::ALEXI SAYS YR EYES HAVE BN HACKED:::B CAREFUL:::

You're a freaking genius, Melli.

"Mr. Lorenz," said brunette, "I suggest you stop whatever it is you are doing before I change my mind about needing a live host for the Eyes."

"Yes, ma'am. Sometimes I can't help myself. I'll try to help."

:::HELP:::HELP:::

Adele jammed the gun into my jaw so hard she bruised my sinuses that time. So I shut up to finish out the ride and watch Melli's last message on my crawler. Somehow she'd looped it.

:::TAXI COMING:::TAXI COMING:::TAXI COMING:::TAXI COMING:::TAXI COMING:::TAXI COMING:::TAXI COMING:::

Great. A freaking taxi. I sure hoped that was good news. I'd had enough bad news for one day.

The H6 idled into a warehouse, the overhead door rolling shut behind us. Given that we were ten miles or so from the airport the contents of the warehouse were a bit odd. There were huge tapered cylinders of jet engines on their rollaway stands, all piping and exhaust. Wings, tails, fuselages in various states of disassembly loomed in shadows surrounding a single pool of bright light where we had parked.

Me, I would have stopped near the door and avoided the light. These people were amateurs.

As if my captors were people.

Brunette shook her head at Adele then got out, leaving the two of us alone. A whole bunch of guys stepped from the shadows, guys in various stages of bulkiness. Big Yakov and Shark were at the head of the little army. At least I assumed it was Big Yakov. He didn't look much like his pictures in the paper.

If Shark had an opposite, Big Yakov was it. He wasn't even as tall as Shark, and his face was smooth like a baby's--no lines, almost slack. Puffy lips pursed around a lit cigar like it was a nipple or something. Just owning tobacco products was good for hard time downstate, let alone smoking them. His arms and legs were pudgy and bowed, something even the swanky twen-cen suit he was wearing couldn't cover up.

I would have sworn from the photos Big Yakov was a meter taller, but this little guy was smoking and leading Shark around. It had to be him.

Brunette and Big Yakov talked for a few minutes before she nodded at the H6. Adele opened the door, got out, and waved me out with the pistol.

:::GET READY:::

Word from Melli. Nice to hear from her before I died. Ready? For what?

"Mr. Lorenz," said Big Yakov. His voice was as squeaky as I might have guessed from his body. "Welcome."

Shark shifted a little. His toothed skin gleamed in the warehouse lights, the thousands of little crowns giving him a stippling of shadow. His blue eyes narrowed as Big Yakov looked me over.

That's right, Shark, I thought. Remember when I used to be nice to you. When you were a kid, Shark.

"Hello, Mr. Yakov sir," I said. "Sorry about the mix up."

"And have you seen the stars in your Eyes, Mr. Lorenz?"

Adele's pistol thumped into my kidneys. What the hell? All I'd seen so far was snakes. "Yes. They're beautiful."

"Tell me. Where is Cassiopeia right now?"

Having a drink down at the White Horse? How the hell should I know? "Who's Cass--"

The pistol thumped me again. Brunette glared at me. "Enough, Mr. Yakov. Here are your Eyes. I suggest you make the payment, try them on, and then we shall go."

Big Yakov held out his pudgy little hand. "My StarEyes, Mr. Lorenz."

Shark stirred again. There was something here he didn't like, something beyond all the obvious stuff I didn't like. Such as me going home blind, if I ever went home at all. Brunette had said the Eyes wouldn't work for anyone else. She hadn't said I couldn't take them out. Common sense suggested that.

Unfortunately I didn't have a bargaining position. My pinkie touched my right Eye, as if I were ready to dig in and pop it loose. I put on my best nonunion-goober-talking-to-angry-longshoreman smile. "All right, sir, but I'm going to have to trus--"

Then all hell broke loose.

A taxi smashed through the rollup door. It was one of the red zone duty cabs with armor and slit windows. There were several more behind the first cab, all sliding to a stop inside the warehouse. Big Yakov's footsoldiers had guns and tasers out like the pros that they were, ready for a little merry murder.

My buddies from the dock came out of those cabs like water from a bilge. The same union pricks who rattled my teeth every day of my working life were here to save me. And they were impressive. These boys started out big and got bigger. They came equipped with pipes, chains, wrenches, zip guns, tasers. I even saw Mike the Mouse with a cutting torch in his hand, tanks strapped to his back.

"Jesus H. and the baker's dozen," I whispered.

Adele must have been impressed too, because she forgot to bruise more of my internal organs with the muzzle of her pistol.

For three or four seconds, everything was balanced. Like watching one of those buildings they blow up--the explosives crackle, some dust shoots out, all the concrete and steel thinks about it for a just a moment, and you're wondering if maybe everything will just hang there unsupported for a while, before gravity body-checks the whole business.

The gravity of testosterone kicked in amid a roar of bullets, tasers and very angry men.

I dropped to the floor and tried to help out by tangling Adele's ankles. Pistol or not, I'd have rather duked it out with her than one of Big Yakov's trolls. She was already moving, though, her skin rippling like a cheap special effect.

Holy fright! For one minute I'd actually forgotten about the eyeball-tipped snakes inside these people.

Shark had Big Yakov over one shoulder and was making a dash through his friendlies to the shadows beyond. I sort of assumed he'd be back. Me, I was getting the hell away from the gunplay. The underside of the H6 looked good, so I scooted between the tires to find snakefriend there shooting out from under the back bumper.

I didn't have anything to fight with. Instead I reached up, slipped my hand under his belt and gave him a magnum wedgie. He yelped and dropped his pistol. I dragged him back a little, away from the weapon, and we wrestled. Which isn't easy to do under a car. Not even a big SUV.

I did manage to bang his head against the suspension a few times. That made him woozy. I snagged the pistol and slid out the other side.

A lot fewer bullets there, so I scuttled for the shadows. I tossed the gun as soon as I was safe--I didn't know how to shoot it, I just hadn't wanted snakefriend coming to his senses and shooting me.

The firing was dying down, replaced by shouting and screaming and promising meaty thumps. I had no more interest in returning to the fight than I did in performing major surgery on myself. Hanging back was just, well ... the right thing to do.

I looked around anyway. There was a tractor parked nearby, a little thing like one of those airport luggage tugs. It had a roll cage and a front attachment with a big rotary brush. Maybe something for cleaning pavement.

Okay, I thought.

I wrestled a metal fuselage skin segment onto the front of the roll cage, got in the driver's seat, and studied the controls. It had obviously been designed for operation by trained monkeys like my union buddies out on the warehouse floor.

Start the engine, a compressed hydrogen rig that was eerily quiet. Engage the auxiliary power. The brush was plenty noisy to make up for the engine. Put it in gear, roll out of the shadows peering around my shield and look for some trouble. "Party time!" I shouted, then whooped.

Snakefriend was in full tentacle mode now, duking it out with two of my boys just on my side of the H6. His back was to me. I rolled forward, rammed the brush into him as the boys stepped aside. I kept going until the brush was throwing off bits of orange H6 paint along with snakefriend goo.

"Good job, Dolty!" shouted Majid, one of the longshoremen. He was bleeding from cuts that looked as if they'd been laid down with a wire whip, but grinning like a fool at the same time. Then Majid and his buddy scuttled around the back of the car.

I reversed and drove around the front. The hiss of the brush on pavement sounded different now, lubricated with snakefriend.

Here was the main action. Most of Big Yakov's guys were down. Longshoremen were sitting on some of them. I didn't see little big man himself anywhere, but Shark was back in it, tangling with two of the snake people--had to be brunette and Adele. There wasn't anyone else.

They were all over him, crawling and twisting, but something about his tooth enamel defeated their grip. All they could do was chip away. Shark was snapping with his mouth teeth, spitting out purpley brown bits. It was a fight of attrition.

My boys were obviously happy to stand aside and let it happen. They weren't rooting for anyone in this fight, and probably figured on rumbling the winner. I should have felt the same way.

But this was Shark. He was a freak, but he was our freak. Or at least my freak. Not like those snake things.

I could still remember that scared little Ukrainian kid in school, whimpering through black eyes and a busted lip. I mean, I also remembered him yanking Billy Preap's arm off at the shoulder and beating Billy over the head with it, but that was after three years of Billy slapping Shark on the back of neck every time they passed in the hall.

Everybody has a limit.

Brush at the ready, I moved in to clean some teeth. Adele and brunette never saw me coming. Shark did.

He just smiled.

Turned out Melli had been driving the first cab. She'd stayed within the armored cockpit, waiting for the fight to finish one way or the other. Now we stood in the moonlight as the longshoremen loaded up their wounded and took care of business inside. The three snake people were history, but none of our guys were dead. A couple of Big Yakov's people had bought it.

There were going to be a lot of folks in the hospital on Pill Hill for a while.

Shark had stopped fighting as soon as I'd cleaned up the snake women, just stood there staring at the longshoremen. Nobody had felt terribly motivated to take him on.

"How'd you do it?" I asked Melli. "Those longshoremen don't like me any more than they like broccoli. They think I'm a punk."

"Yeah, but you're their punk." She smiled. "That's how Mike the Mouse put it. Plus Big Yakov's been smuggling aircraft parts out of the country. They're not getting any of that action. They were happy to show him the value of good union labor."

"What about the Eyes?" Nobody else had seen what I had seen, I knew that already. Majid had thought he was fighting a guy in a suit, a guy with real good training but no more. Same for brunette and Adele. I wasn't sure what Shark thought he'd seen, but everyone else saw me mow down two women who were giving Shark holy hell.

"Alexi's not sure, except that they've been well and truly hacked. What do you think?"

"I didn't see what anyone else saw." Except maybe Shark, but I wasn't willing to say that even to Melli. "I saw ... something terrible."

"You want to get rid of them? Alexi would love to have those Eyes."

I thought about that. Would I rather see snake people around me? Or just know they were there, and never be able to tell? Besides, I had decided that I believed brunette when she said the Eyes wouldn't work for anyone else.

"No," I said. "Not right now."

"Want a ride home?"

"No thanks. I'll take the Hummer."

When I went back inside the warehouse, Shark was still standing there, covered in Adele and brunette goop, watching the longshoreman trash the place and spatter kerosene around. The tractor's brush had scarred him up pretty good.

"Big Ch'akov no' happy," Shark said. "But I t'ink he forgive."

"Next time, have the dock boys smuggle it for you," I suggested. "You always get quality with union labor." Then, in an unaccustomed bloom of fellow feeling, "You want a ride somewhere?"

"Nyet. I walk." Shark looked at me for while, his watery eyes almost blank in the warehouse lights. "T'ank ch'ou."

I nodded at the floor, at the goop covering his enamel. "Did you ... see them?"

He didn't answer that. We stared each other down for a minute and then I got in the Hummer and backed out carefully, weaving around the cabs.

By the time I got over the New Morrison Bridge there was a column of smoke visible in the morning twilight over northwest Portland. I went by the railroad car, just to see, but it was gone. No big surprise there. Scuffing around on the siding where it had been, I couldn't find any sign of the elevator shaft, either.

I left the Hummer there with the keys in it and went home. My CargoEyes were there, but I thought I'd stick with the StarEyes for a while.

Maybe I'd see Cassiopeia one of these days. Besides, I had to keep an eye out for snakes.

Jay Lake is the author of over one hundred short stories, a chapbook, three collections, and a novel. Jay is also the co-editor with Deborah Layne of the critically acclaimed Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has also been a Hugo nominee for his short fiction and a two-time World Fantasy Award nominee for his editing. Jay lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be reached via his Web site at www.jlake.com. This is his third story for Challenging Destiny, following "Benedice Te" in Number 18 and "To Live Forever" in Number 21.

One can form habits in one's heart as easily as in one's day-to-day existence. Cha at dawn, a walk alone at sunset, meditation on the full moon ... nostalgia, loss, bitterness, comfort. All of these habits shield us from the other parts of life. The journey to a new place, encountering people, considering new ideas, different landscapes, risks, excitement, joy ... disappointment ... grief.

--Sean Russell, Gatherer of Clouds

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Her Watcher On interstellar ships, new crew members always try to commit suicide at some point. Of course, it wasn't something you talked about. But then Collin was called into Lynette's office and offered a job: act as watcher for the new crew member coming aboard. He accepted. There were four simple rules...

Service With a Smile Whoever said you couldn't buy happiness has never been rich. Or hungry. Even after the Collapse, the rich get by. But working the cash register at the grocery store is tough--you have to smile, and mean it, and there are rules about what you can say to the customers. One awkward comment and it's back to the camps...

Bread Harper's mother and father were the Master Bakers of Golden Valley, and she was finally learning some baking herself. Her mother told her, "If everyone knew our secrets they would take away our magic, and we wouldn't be Master Bakers; only regular folk, like anyone else." Harper promised never to tell the secrets to anyone...

The Vampire Who Doted On His Chicken A feller parted the batwing doors of the Lucky Nickel Saloon, letting in a bucketful of snow and a cold gust off Second Ave, Laramie, Wyoming Territory, U S of A, holding a chicken in his hand, and he looked bewildered. The feller, I mean, looked bewildered. The chicken looked dead...

The Message Charlie was in Sleep when he received a message--there was a crossover. He checked his instruments and discovered it was an Apollo-class spacecraft, circa 1970. The ship was damaged, but its communication system seemed to be functional. Although they'd never contacted a Ghost before, this was a manned spacecraft and Charlie couldn't just leave them out here alone...

Sunset Manor Ebner was 112 years old. Some days he did well to remember his wife's name: Kori. On a particularly good day, he remembered that he had a data block with his wife stored on it. Kori had contracted a terminal disease 80 years ago, but now there was a cure...

Suck of Clay, Whir of Wheel Meg had sold her cottage, moved to America, and bought a potworks. She had boasted that in five years she'd be selling twice what the Clews' Pottery did, where she worked back in England. But right now things weren't going so well. And then a man came along whom she had a hard time getting rid of...

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Number 1

+ Stories by Tim Reid, Timothy Dyck, Terry Thwaites, Douglas M. Grant, Charles Conrad, and Gord Zajac

+ Reviews of the Blade Runner books and movie

Number 2

+ Stories by Michael Mirolla, D. Sandy Nielsen, Paul Benza, Greg Bechtel, James Schellenberg, and Stefano Donati

+ Reviews of Isaac Asimov's books and movies

Number 3

+ Stories by Bonnie Blake, Erik Allen Elness, Tom Olbert, Hans Albanese, and Robert Arthur Vanderwoude

+ Reviews of Stanislaw Lem's books and movie

+ Interview with James Alan Gardner

Number 4

+ Stories by Timothy Carter, Bonnie Mercure, Carl Mills, Nicholas Pollotta & Phil Foglio, and Erik Allen Elness

+ Reviews of Frank Herbert's Dune books and movie

+ Interview with Tanya Huff

Number 5

+ Stories by D. Sandy Nielsen, Anne Louise Johnson, B. R. Bearden, Mark Leslie, Carol W. Berman, and Hugh Cook

+ Reviews of Arthur C. Clarke's books and movies

+ Interview with Robert J. Sawyer

Number 6

+ Stories by Leah Silverman, Nicholas Pollotta, K. G. McAbee, Hugh Cook, Stacey Berg, and Daniel Pearlman

+ Reviews of books by and about Philip K. Dick

+ Interview with Julie E. Czerneda

Number 7

+ Stories by D. K. Latta, Hugh Cook, Kate Tompkins, Stefano Donati, K. G. McAbee, and Michael Mirolla

+ Reviews of feminist science fiction books and movie

+ Interview with Robert Charles Wilson

Number 8

+ Stories by James A. Hartley, Ken Rand, A. R. Morlan, Vincent Sakowski, Kelly Howard, and James Viscosi

+ Reviews of feminist science fiction books and movie

+ Interview with Phyllis Gotlieb

Number 9

+ Stories by J. S. Lyster, Kate Burgauer, D. K. Latta, Shelley Moore, Joe Mahoney, and Chris Reuter

+ Reviews of The War of the Worlds books and movie

+ Interview with Charles de Lint

Number 10

+ Stories by Hugh Cook, David Chato, Nye Marnach, Matthew J. Reynolds, Chris Webb, and Karina Sumner-Smith

+ Reviews of New Wave SF books and movie

+ Interview with Candas Jane Dorsey

Number 11

+ Stories by Peter S. Drang, Mark Anthony Brennan, Karl El-Koura, Hugh Cook, Harrison Howe, and Diane Turnshek

+ Reviews of books that Judith Merril wrote and edited

+ Interview with Guy Gavriel Kay

Number 12

+ Stories by Carl Sieber, D. K. Latta, A. R. Morlan, Justin E. A. Busch, Rudy Kremberg, and Hugh Cook

+ Reviews of books and movie about Mars

+ Interview with Nalo Hopkinson

Number 13

+ Stories by Ilsa J. Bick, Christopher East, Hugh Cook, Erol Engin, Nye Marnach, and Donna Farley

+ Reviews of Alice in Wonderland book and movies

+ Interview with Jim Munroe

Number 16

+ Stories by Uncle River, Vincent W. Sakowski, A. R. Morlan, Ken Rand, and Michael R. Martin

+ Reviews of time travel books

+ Interview with Alison Baird

+ A Survey of SF & Fantasy Art (Part 3 of 3)

Back issues are available online at www.projectpulp.com or through the mail. If you're ordering through the mail please make your cheque out to Crystalline Sphere Publishing and send it to:

Challenging Destiny

R. R. #6

St. Marys, Ontario

Canada N4X 1C8

Back issues are $7.50 Canadian, $6.50 U.S., and $7.00 International (in U.S. funds).

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Number 21

+ Stories by Jay Lake, Steven Mohan, Jr., Kenneth Mark Hoover, Suzanne Church, Jason Offutt, and Hayden Trenholm

+ Review of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun

+ Interview with Sean Russell

Issue 21 is available exclusively at www.fictionwise.com for a limited time. The cost is $4.98 U.S.

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On the Challenging Destiny web site you'll find previews of upcoming magazines, as well as guidelines for authors & artists.

You'll also find lots of reviews from James Schellenberg that aren't in the magazine--reviews of books, movies, soundtracks & games.

The web site is here:

challengingdestiny.com