Jim Baen’s Universe

Vol 2 Num 3: October 2007

Written by Jim Baen’s Universe! staff

Jim Baen’s Universe, Volume 2, Number 3

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this magazine are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Jim Baen’s Universe

A Baen Publishing Enterprises Publication

Jim Baen’s Universe

P. O. Box 7488

Moore, OK 73153-1488

ISSN: 1932-0930

“Tweak” Copyright (c) 2007 by Jack McDevitt

“Dreamtime” Copyright (c) 2007 by Rob Shelsky

“Kether Station” Copyright (c) 2007 C. L. Polk

“From the Badlands” Copyright (c) 2007 by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

“The Necromancer in Love” Copyright (c) 2007 by Wil McCarthy

“The Rest of Your Life in a Day” Copyright (c) 2007 by Elizabeth Bear

“Soul Searching” Copyright (c) 2007 by Laird Long

“Palm Sunday” Copyright (c) 2007 by Ian Watson

“A Better Sense of Direction” Copyright (c) 2007 by Mike Wood

“Countdown to Armageddon, Episode One” Copyright (c) 2007 by Edward M. Lerner

“Fish Story, Episode Nine: Love at First Bite” Copyright (c) 2007 by Dave Freer, Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

“The Quiet Man” Copyright (c) 2007 by David Carrico

“The Waters of Eternity” Copyright (c) 2007 by Howard A. Jones

“Why Carol Won’t Sit Next To Me At Science Fiction Movies” Copyright (c) 2007 by Mike Resnick

“Title” Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Euin Cobb

“The Monster-God of Mamurth” by Edmond Hamilton was originally published in Weird Tales, August 1926

Tweak

Written by Jack McDevitt

Illustrated by Laura Givens

Civilizations, if they survive their nuclear age, seem always to follow the same path. “It is inevitable,” said the ship.

Sikkur adjusted the picture with one mandible while supporting his snout with the other. Kayla nodded. “It’s good to know,” she said, “that everything has a happy ending.”

On-screen, thousands of the creatures labored on the Morgan Monument.

Kayla brought up the BBC, where one of the anchors was going on endlessly about Mr. Morgan, the prime minister, how his thirty-two years in office had been a period of endless prosperity. A guest commented on his popularity. “Never had a leader like this.”

“What are you thinking?” Sikkur asked.

“I liked it better when it was called Trafalgar Square. It had a better ring.”

“I agree,” Sikkur said. “But Trafalgar is probably dead.”

She glanced through the viewport at the clouds. They were moving out over the ocean again, headed west. “It is incredible,” she added.

“You do not mean the monument?”

“No. Not the monument.” She gazed at him with deep-set eyes, dark and intelligent, intended for use under a different sun. “I mean the consistency of it all.”

He switched to another feed. This one from a satellite over Canada. Men and women worked contentedly on the Gulf of St. Lawrence Canal Project. And then to demonstrations on the streets of Toronto. People marched around a government building, bearing signs, MILLWORKERS FOR MYERS and MYERS IS THE MAN.

Kayla’s chair squeaked as she changed position. “Whether we look at places like Bakyubah on the far side of the Galaxy, or the civilizations of the Parah Cloud, or Greater Wahkni near the Hole, wherever we go, it is always the same: If they survive the atom, soon after they begin tweaking their genes.”

Below, in the western Atlantic, a few rain clouds drifted through the late afternoon.

Sikkur fished a snack out of the ready box. A red gufer. It squirmed as he popped it onto his tongue and sucked it down. “It must be an intriguing period for everyone,” he said, “when they arrive at the stage where they can control evolution.” He listened to Kayla’s breathing. “Yes, I’d like to have been there when they first realized how to do some of these things. Increase intelligence by tweaking a gene. Grant musical genius. Provide a handsome brow.” He took a deep breath. “A godlike business.”

“Which gene was it, dear?” She combined a smile with a flick of her eyes. Whenever she did it, the bridge brightened.

“Which are you talking about, love?”

“The brow. The brow. I’ve always been impressed by a stately brow.”

He snorted. She did like to kid around. “As if I’d know,” he said. The sea sparkled in the sunlight.

Kayla was a glorious creature, the exquisite curve of her fangs, the way her eyes lit up when sudden movement caught her attention. Of course, she lived in a society where everyone was physically appealing. When everybody was beautiful, were they all just average? Was the cumulative effect no greater than it had ever been? It was a question for philosophers. However that might be, Kayla’s charms ensured there were no long evenings on the Stardust.

The scientists had virtually stopped the ageing process. Had granted Sikkur and Kayla endless courage. And, of course, they had social skills par excellence.

”It is where the manipulation should have stopped.” Baranka had said that. Had said it again and again. A few others had taken up the cry. But they were old. Many hadn’t had the benefit of the various enhancements, and never understood that the point of being alive was to be happy. “Unlimited happiness will make us slaves.” Foolish notion. Was Sikkur a slave? Was Kayla?

Fortunately, like the humans, the home race had had excellent leaders. Each one better than the last. It would be a joy to go back and report that, from one end of the Galaxy to the other, wherever one found an advanced species, good times reigned.

* * *

The Stardust was approaching the United States. Sikkur picked up images of workers in the capital city taking down an obelisk which was, according to Global News, going to be replaced by a temple dedicated to the current president, Mark Ramsay Howard.

The satellite zeroed in on the project. It was apparently dinner time, a warm, pleasant day. A crowd of women was moving into the work area, carrying thermos containers and bags of food. Somewhere a band played, and people sang the praises of the president.

“No question about it,” said Kayla. “They’ve found their happiness gene.”

He tapped his scaled breast. “Gives me a warm feeling right here.”

“It is indeed exhilarating,” said the ship.

She treated herself to one of the gufers and stared contentedly at the screen. “I envy them. Why don’t we go down and help? Tote that barge? Maybe make some points with their boss? It would do us good to haul a little masonry around.”

“Kayla,” he said, “you know we’re not supposed to do that. As much as I’d like to.”

She did that thing again where she lit up the bridge. “I can’t see any harm in it.”

* * *

Dreamtime

Written by Rob Shelsky

Illustrated by Lee Kuruganti

The silvered airship shimmered, mirage-like, on the horizon. It seemed an insubstantial yet ominous portent of the sultry air. The ocean surface below it looked flat, greasy. Waters shifted with near-lifeless motion. Even the oily waves that broke upon the shore were more ripples than combers. Of millemurro, the pelican, there was no sign. The day was too hot for anything to want to fly. Not even a pipipa, a single sandpiper, stalked the water’s lukewarm edge.

The two sat side-by-side in the sparse shade of a dusty grove of gum trees. They lurked there well back from the beach, beyond reach of the sun’s unrelenting rays. Their dark eyes, in twin anxious stares, tracked the craft’s deliberate approach.

“I thought they always traveled in groups for safety.” Pangalia’s tone was an uneasy one.

Akuna twitched shoulders, a cursory shrug. “They usually do. I’m as surprised as you to see a lone ship.” He squinted at the thing, as if intent on divining some sinister motivation from its progress.

“And the Golden Ones gave you no reason at all for this surprise visit?”

Akuna turned to face his son, his brown eyes already narrowed in the universal look of parental exasperation. “I’ve already told you, their signaling device just said to meet them here.”

“So summoned, we obey.” Pangalia’s voice echoed the acrid accusations of countless generations of rebellious youth.

“Haven’t we always? But they only come rarely now, and then mostly just to help.”

“What they see as help.” Pangalia’s dusky features contorted in a sneer, “Always acting so arrogant.”

Akuna sighed and then stood. He beat his hands against his loincloth, trying to remove excess dust. Without looking at his son, he said, “You project your personal feelings onto the world around you, as if that were reality. It isn’t, Pangalia.”

His son also stood. Already, he was almost as tall as his father was. He, too, slapped with a flat hand at the dirt covering his rear. It billowed in dry clouds around him, but then settled once more onto his chocolate skin, covering bare chest, arms, and legs in a fine layer of grey grit.

“You never change,” Pangalia said, after giving up the effort of trying to clean himself. “If I say anything against them, you won’t hear me.”

“Just as you aren’t hearing me now?”

“You’ve nothing to say I haven’t heard a thousand times before.” Pangalia strode toward the water, his movements as rigid with anger as his words had sounded. He left his father standing alone in the shade.

Akuna watched him go. His son’s naked feet left a trail of deep impressions in the baking sand behind him, looking like so many exclamation points punctuating the boy’s desire to flee. Was it always this way, Akuna wondered? Were sons always so intent upon usurping their fathers? Rivalry instead of cooperation seemed such a stupid biological necessity. He wondered if the Golden Ones had done away with it in themselves. Akuna knew they had the capability.

He sighed again. The sound of it escaped his lips like steam hissing from a billycan of boiling water. Then he followed, literally, in his son’s footsteps, heading toward the sea’s liquid border, toward an inevitable confrontation with which he’d become so familiar over the last years.

Pangalia stood where the tepid water lapped the beach. He was a lean study in male adolescence, a muscular, edgy challenge to his father’s time and dominion. With his right hand raised as a shield against the sun’s white brilliance, he gazed out at the airship. He watched it with a visible concern.

“I’m sorry.” Akuna tried to sound contrite. “It’s just that these constant arguments seem so unnecessary.”

Pangalia dropped his hand to his side and turned to face him. His youthful expression was now stony. “You see,” he said, “we don’t even agree on that. We …” he hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “We just don’t have the same viewpoint of the world.”

“Because I see things as they are?”

Pangalia shook his head, an impatient gesture. His dark nimbus of hair shivered. He jerked a thumb, indicated the gleaming craft. “Because you see us as just primitive aborigines and them as being superior.”

“Face it, Pangalia. They’ve been gengineered to be just that.”

“So we must live by their command?”

Akuna nodded. “And their sufferance,” he said. “We’ve no choice. Weaker peoples never do.”

“We count for nothing?” Pangalia’s brown eyes flared, fired with a suppressed resentment.

“We count. That’s why I came back. You know that.”

“I know you always take their side.”

It was Akuna’s turn to shake his head. “Not by choice, Pangalia, believe me.”

They fell silent, both seemingly incapable of resolving their longstanding differences, of bridging the chasm that divided their two generations. The airship was close now. The great blimp of polished metal, like some menacing torpedo, drifted into shore some distance up the beach from them. An ill-omened eclipse, a manifestation that seemed to portend dark things, it blotted out the sun, shading them in a pregnant relief. Akuna saw countless rows of windows interrupting its streamlining and the open-air observation gallery that ran around the middle of the thing. Yet, no friendly-waving figures leaned against the railings. No smiling faces peered from out of those windows.

A metal stairway unfolded and descended to the beach. It looked flimsy. Akuna knew better. They would never trust their valuable selves to anything that wasn’t solid, utterly predictable, and safe.

“There’s one of them.” Pangalia pointed.

Akuna looked. Sure enough, someone had emerged from the interior of the vast ship, stepping through a just-opened hatchway above the stairs. He wore a gilded, one-piece suit with matching boots. The two watched him descend the steps. At least, Akuna assumed it was a he. Since both sexes had no hair anywhere on their bodies and wore the same unisex clothing, it was often hard to tell, especially at any distance.

“Come.” He touched Pangalia lightly on one elbow. “Let’s meet him.”

They walked the shoreline toward the newcomer. Pangalia remained quiet, whether out of resentment, fear at the encounter to come, or just in awe of the sheer size of the vessel, Akuna didn’t know. What he did know was that the boy had never seen so large a craft before. Then, neither had he. Akuna didn’t even know what kept it floating, except that it wasn’t helium, hydrogen, or hot air. They wouldn’t place their trust in such archaic technologies.

Palm held up before him in greeting, the Golden One strode toward them. He made for a tall and commanding figure. “Akuna,” he called in a deep voice. It was melodic, but masculine. As they came together, he added, “Your journey wasn’t a long one, I hope?” Impassive gold eyes regarded them.

Akuna nodded a hello. “No,” he said, “We came from our adlinga, our place of hunting. It’s near here. But the trip was hot. You picked a bad time of the year for this.”

The Golden One chuckled before saying, “I’m sure that when it comes to meeting with us your people feel there’s no good time. No,” he added, raising a hand to forestall Akuna from voicing any polite denial, “we know how you feel. We sympathize. Who is this with you?” His large eyes, so like enormous gold coins, now focused on the boy.

“Pangalia.”

“I’m Severin.” He smiled, but made no move to take Pangalia’s, or even Akuna’s hand.

Too much risk of contamination, Akuna thought. Then a new notion struck him. “Are you by any chance the same Severin that I met many years ago during my medical courses in Florence?”

Severin nodded. “The same; you didn’t recognize me?”

Akuna shook his head. “No, sorry, but it’s been so long.”

“And we all look so much alike to you, right?” Severin smiled again, revealing perfect, porcelain-white teeth. “But Pangalia’s name,” he added, “it means eldest son in your ancestral language. Is he yours then?”

Akuna nodded.

Severin frowned. It was an odd-looking expression without eyebrows. “That … complicates things,” he finished.

Like the raucous cries of the bullai bullai, the green parrot, alarms screeched in Akuna’s mind. He shifted position, moving closer to his son. He placed a protective hand on Pangalia’s shoulder in a quiet caveat of caution. Akuna felt his son’s muscles stiffen beneath his touch.

“Unfortunate? How?” Akuna strove for a mild tone.

Severin looked uncomfortable as he said, “My people are leaving Earth. There’s just too much danger here from natural occurrences like earthquakes, tsunamis, and such. We’ll do better in free space.”

“How will you live?” Akuna maintained a level voice, even though this news enthralled him. He sensed a similar reaction from his son, an eagerness that Pangalia seemed to telegraph through the very air. The Golden Ones were leaving, finally! Rumors of this possibility had circulated for lengthy years among the peoples. Still, nobody had taken them too seriously.

Severin waved one hand, a blithe gesture. “We intend to live inside asteroids, hollow them out as habitats with nanotech. We’ll mine the Oort Cloud for resources. Our numbers are not great, so neither are our needs.”

That confirmed another rumor. Their population was small. So, giving up Australia and the Americas hadn’t been just out of altruism for the indigenous peoples remaining there. The Golden Ones didn’t need the space.

Pangalia broke his long silence by saying, “If you’re just here to say goodbye, then I say good riddance to you all!” He practically spat the words.

“Pangalia!” Akuna exclaimed.

“It’s all right.” Severin blinked hooded lids over those strange eyes. “I understand his feelings. But you must understand we wish you no harm.”

“Then just why are you here?” Akuna asked, trying to force the issue out into the open.

Severin’s forehead wrinkled, denoting another frown. “This isn’t pleasant for me,” he said. “But since you’re the chosen speaker for your people, I must inform you that all of your young must come with us. Our government feels it would be unfair to leave them behind.”

“What?” Akuna’s expression portrayed stunned amazement. “You’re taking our children?”

“No!” It was more an expletive than exclamation. Pangalia shrugged off his father’s hand. He knotted his fists, as if readying for attack. “I won’t go. None of us will. You can’t make us!”

Akuna again put a restraining hand on Pangalia’s shoulder. “Be quiet,” he ordered him. “You,” he demanded of Severin, “What’s the meaning of this?”

The other man raised his shoulders in an apologetic shrug. “It’s my government’s will. They’ve decided we can’t deny your children our civilization. Of course, anyone is free to come with them.”

“Will they ever come back?” Akuna’s look, as his tone, was a pleading one.

Severin gave a gentle shake of his head. “I don’t think so, not for some time anyway, because we won’t be coming back.”

“This is kidnapping!” Pangalia shouted.

Akuna knew his son tottered on the verge of physical violence. “Is there no one we can appeal this issue to?” he asked in an effort to avoid any such angry outburst.

“I’m afraid not, Akuna. We leave soon.”

“You deliberately waited until the last minute just so there wouldn’t be time for anyone to hear our case?” Akuna’s words dripped with a distilled resentment, a decanted animosity.

“No. We just thought that making it quicker would make it easier.”

“For whom?” Akuna’s voice rose in direct proportion to his growing rage, “you, or us?”

“No!” Pangalia was off and running. His long legs ate up the distance down the beach, sand spraying out behind him as his bare toes dug into it. “I won’t go!” he yelled.

“It won’t make any difference, you know.” Severin’s voice held a note of calm apology as he watched the boy’s flight. “We can find you wherever you are.”

“Why?” Akuna tore his eyes away from Pangalia’s fleeing figure, fixed them upon Severin. “What’s the real reason behind all of this?”

Severin breathed a long sigh before saying, “Try to comprehend. We’ve had enough of death, of dying. We will suffer it no more.”

“You exaggerate! You haven’t conquered death, only delayed it.”

“Delayed? Perhaps you’re right, Akuna, but for so long a time as to make your objection pointless. Still, embrace your own mortality if you wish, but you won’t make your children embrace it with you. We’ll see to that.”

“And my son, won’t you please leave him?” Akuna was begging now.

“No.” The single word rang as a death knell. “All children must come with us.”

“You steal our guruwari, our seed power for the future.”

Severin turned, began walking back toward his ship. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Akuna,” he called over his shoulder. “You could come, too.”

Akuna was tempted to run after him, use his knife to slit the arrogant bastard’s throat, to see if Severin’s blood would really gush scarlet like any other man’s, but he knew it wouldn’t change anything. Sighing, he turned and started after his son. Akuna trotted in the firmer sand along the edge of the water, leaving the alien-like Severin and his equally alien vessel behind him.

Odd, Akuna thought as he ran. Now Pangalia and I see things much the same way, but maybe, too late… .

Pangalia and Akuna ran for days through the parched bush country. They had only the searing sun, baked blue sky, and thirsty landscape for company. Finally, exhausted, they had taken refuge in a small cave behind a narrow waterfall. The little cascade, hidden deep in a shadowed canyon, was not much more than a seasonal cataract. Still, it was enough. Initially, their sanctuary had been little more than a hollow carved out of sandstone by the flowing curtain of water in front of it, but they had extended it. They’d reinforced the space with stones and clay mortar. It wouldn’t last long, but all they needed was a temporary asylum until the Golden Ones departed for good. Akuna hoped the water and rock would act as a shield against infrared detectors. Apparently, it didn’t.

“Father!” Pangalia shouted.

They’d been sleeping, curled up together, trying to husband their strength for lack of food. Akuna awoke groggy, disoriented, not certain what was happening.

“They’re coming,” Pangalia shouted. He jumped to his feet.

He was wrong. They were already there. Two invaders now stood before them, appearing like twin sentries guarding the gates to some strange civilization. They held what looked like flashlights. One aimed his at Pangalia.

“No!” Akuna shouted, leaping up. “Don’t!” He launched himself at the one pointing the device.

“Father, wait—” Pangalia yelled. It was too late.

The Golden One swiveled with astonishing swiftness. He depressed a button on the thing he clutched. There was no light, no flash, nothing, but suddenly, Akuna felt paralyzed. He was unable to move a muscle. Still, his momentum carried him. The Golden Ones parted to avoid any collision with him, protecting their sacred selves. The frozen Akuna toppled past them, through the water curtain, as if he were now a thing of stone. The spray blurred his vision for a moment, for he couldn’t close his eyes. Nevertheless, he managed distorted glimpses of the rocks below. They gleamed up at him, a slick wet pile, a blood red jumble, as he tumbled toward them.

At least, he thought in the instant before impact, there won’t be any pain.

Later, Akuna felt the Ancestor Spirits must have him, for he knew he couldn’t have survived the fall. He must be dead, now just part of the dreaming of this place. Yet, he thought thoughts as if still alive. Would he now meet with Baiame, the All-Father?

“No, no,” a kangaroo rat said. It perched on Akuna’s chest, staring at him with beady eyes of blackest obsidian. “You aren’t deserving of such a wonder. You’ve failed your people.”

I’ve failed my people, Akuna thought, agreeing with the precocious kangaroo rat. For some reason, he wasn’t in the least surprised it talked.

“And your son,” said one of the Mouyi, a white cockatoo. Its eyes glared, accusing him. It hovered for a moment in the air above the kangaroo rat, as if about to pounce upon it. However, the bird just held its position, beating soundless wings. Then it shot off out of sight, a speck disappearing into the purple mists that surrounded the prone Akuna.

“The nanobots are repairing the spinal cord,” a distant voice said. “He won’t die.”

“He won’t die,” the kangaroo rat repeated, but now it sounded more like Pangalia. “Yowee, Spirit of Death, great monster of the tree trunk, doesn’t want you.” Then the rat disappeared. The fog at last closed in over Akuna.

When he woke, it was to see Severin bending over him. Akuna glanced from side to side. He lay on a bed in a hospital-like cubicle, everything white and sterile. A blanket covered him.

“Good to have you back with us. It was a near thing,” Severin said. “They didn’t stop you in time from falling, but we rushed you here to the ship as quickly as possible. Do you feel any pain?”

Akuna shook his head.

“Good. The nanobots are working well then. One never knows with older people. They bond better with the young.”

“Pangalia?” Akuna whispered the question through dry lips.

Amber glints of regret sparked in Severin’s eyes. “Gone, Akuna,” he said. “All the children are gone now. You’ve been out a long while. You were even hallucinating. Our ship took them. We only came back to drop you off. Or will you change your mind and stay with us, be with your son? Many others have chosen that.”

Akuna twisted his head sideways, looked away from Severin. One silver tear, Pierrot-like, slid from the corner of his left eye, as he said, “He wouldn’t want me to. He’d be shamed. I can’t.”

“Be that as you will, but there is one thing.”

Akuna turned back to face Severin. “What?”

“The nanos are an integral part of you now. Nobody can remove them. That means that you won’t age, won’t get sick.”

“So be it,” Akuna murmured. He turned his head away again. “The kangaroo rat was right. Yowee won’t have me now. You child stealers have seen to that.”

* * *

It was long decades later when Akuna again met with Pangalia. He’d come to Earth with several others. The boy was a man now, and looked exactly like all the other Golden Ones. He even behaved as they did, having adopted their mannerisms, ones that as a boy he’d derided as being so superior, so godlike.

“How are you really, Father?” Pangalia asked. They were strolling along the same beach they’d once walked so long ago. Until now, they had spoken of only superficial matters, mundane things. They acted more like two mere acquaintances in a chance meeting after a long absence, rather than as father and son. “Are your nanobots holding up?”

Akuna shrugged. He felt embarrassed with his calloused bare feet, dressed as he was in only a ragged loincloth, while his own son now sported the refinement of his new people. He’d barely recognized Pangalia upon his arrival, so changed was he, having lost all hair, but gaining a deep yellow tan and those gilded eyes.

“The things won’t go away,” Akuna told him. “What’s more, I’ve passed them on through my new wife, Adina, to our children. So have many others, apparently. The nanos seem to infect our whole population. I suspect it was what Severin and the others planned all along.”

Pangalia nodded his shining head. Gold eyes, once so chocolate brown, reflected affection for his father. “Yes, for their greater good,” he said. “They took us children to entice most of you to join them. Those few who stayed here were also deliberately infected. They want no one to die. Individual choice was not a factor.”

“They forced you to stay with them?” Akuna asked.

Pangalia shook his head. “Not really. After a while, virtually all of us chose it of our own accord. We realized what we’d been missing. Anyway, now you are like us.”

“Maybe, but we shall follow our own path,” Akuna said. He stopped in his leisurely walk, turned to his son. “Are you happy with the path you’ve taken? Is it truly your own choice now?”

Pangalia also halted. He gave another, but slower nod. “Not at first though,” he said. “You were right about how I viewed things back then, twisting reality with my own perspectives. Now I’m happy with what I am, with the people I now belong to. I’ve changed a lot, I guess. Time does that.”

Akuna nodded. “Yes,” he said softly. “Time does, for all of us. You’ll be going back to them?”

“Yes. And you’ll be staying?”

“Oh, yes. My life is here. I’ve tried to make it as I imagined you’d wanted me to, trying to live the life I’d thought they’d stolen from you. Now, I’ve made it my own.”

“Until your Dreamtime returns,” Pangalia said, and then added in a hesitant voice, “… Dad?”

Akuna reached up with one hand, touched his son’s jaw in a hesitant gesture of gentlest love. “And yours, son,” he said. “We’re taking different roads, surely, and perhaps with your people’s way lying amongst the stars. Still, it is to the same destination, I think.”

“To the time before time?”

Akuna nodded. “Or now the time after. They’re probably the same place. There is one thing, though,” he added and then paused.

“Yes?” Pangalia prompted. “What is it?”

“I miss the thought of death, our old enemy, Yowee. He may have been a monster, but he did take away the responsibility of eternally having to make one’s own decisions, living forever with one’s mistakes. He did allow for an ending, a final rest from it all. You know, I miss that sometimes.”

* * *

Kether Station

Written by C. L. Polk

Illustrated by Laura Givens

The Faithful spend their last credit to stare at the Kether Nebula. They squat in the crawlspaces of their new Jerusalem, migrate from window to window like Monarch butterflies, and all Crown can do is limit viewing to a half minute six times a day, and curse Jefferson Minneapolis for insisting his space station have picture windows.

If Crown Array and Power had the shields down now, the Faithful would see stars born in the spiraling birth canal of hydrogen gas that throws off so much juice the phrase “Power Crisis” is obsolete. They’d see an independent cargo hauler called the Copenhagen Star, parked out front with a full array of batteries fed from raysails that soak up starbirth energy like plants in the sun.

And if one of the Faithful looked closely they might see Lana Miraflores, who used to be Lana Lima, doing the EVA backstroke toward a maintenance lock.

But the shields are up, and Lana has the many-armed dance of Kether—known as the Crown of Creation, the Life Matrix, and the Great Star Mother—all to herself. It’s majestic and awesome, but she doesn’t much like it.

It makes her feel small.

* * *

Fresh, grown food was what lured Lana to the station she hated most in all the galaxy. She bought a bowl of real soba with ostentatiously fresh vegetables from Adroa on every run, and buried herself in her reader while she ate and felt strangely heavy.

Lana was absorbed in the part where the story’s heroes were meeting the first aliens mankind had ever seen when a shadow fell over her table.

“Sister?”

Lana looked up from her story at a woman dressed like a Sister of the Star Mother—hair grown long and authentically oily, black tunic the backdrop for a lightwave pendant of the nebula. The Sister leaned forward and the pendant dangled in Lana’s eyes, bearing the motto “She changes everything she touches.”

Lana set her reader by her cooling soba. “Yes?”

The sister swept one welcoming hand toward the windows. “It’s nearly time.”

Crowds had gathered by the shielded windows while Lana had buried herself in the opening chapters. Lines of the Faithful held hands and sang syrupy songs of praise.

Lana ignored the Sister’s outstretched hand. “Oh, that’s all right. Thanks anyway.”

“She will welcome you, Sister. As soon as you are not afraid.”

“Groovy,” Lana muttered, and buried her nose in the reader. The Sister of the Star Mother went away.

The shields came down, and the ruckus was enough to make Lana peep over the top of her reader at the Faithful. They gaped at the cavern of light, dancing around its creche of stars. The Faithful wept. They laughed. They rushed the window as if they could touch its glorious light—

Except for the boy stealing whatever wasn’t nailed down.

He slipped in and out of the fringes, lifting commerce chips, identity cards, even someone’s briefcase until animal instinct made him freeze and look up at Lana, who grinned at him and gave him a get-out-of here toss of her shaved head.

The boy dashed off with a smile of his own, the two front teeth large and square in his child’s head.

Lana watched, and then recognized—Sergei—

She tried to lunge out of her seat, but the table was still locked down. Her half bowl of soba tumbled and slopped down her right leg; her reader fell to the floor and shattered. She pried her way free as her kidnapped son ducked between a beam and a Church of the Crown kiosk and disappeared.

* * *

He would have been eight years, seven months, and twenty-two days old. No. He is eight. I saw him.

Lana never had her POV cameras removed; those micron-thin optic wires had settled into her brain for too long. She’d have had to train herself to see all over again, with grown eyes and synaptic therapy. Besides, they were too useful.

She huddled in a commode and looped his face turning toward her, replayed the shock and fear. The relief that she wasn’t going to rat him out, and his answering big-toothed smile just before he took off like a dart.

She never had her parasymph removed either. Boredom, bouncing left foot, the crown of shifting muscles as she smiled, with a touch of tingle of her scalp. The tiny, total tension over her shoulders and abdomen, her eyebrows rising, the jolt of fear in her guts as she connected that eight-year-old face to her memories—

“What, did you die in there?” a man’s voice demanded.

No, Lana wanted to answer. I died back there, when I saw my son picking pockets.

But she banged the stall door open and glared down at him, her head shaved slick and bald. The man backed away from the spacer, the intimate friend of abyssal nothing.

She smiled, all teeth and no kindness. “Sorry. Just got in after three weeks. It’s all yours.”

She stepped aside with a grand gesture, and made the mistake of glancing down the line, into the shocked face of recognition.

“Lana. It’s you. I knew it was you,” Maddy said.

Lana fought nausea. “That’s not my name.”

Some of the light faded from Maddy’s eyes, rekindled again a bit cooler.

“You look different.” Maddy smiled like it was a joke. She tossed her hair—perfect Hollywood blond— over one shoulder. “And you’re a lot taller. Is that the gravity? Sorry, the free-fall?”

“I’m sorry, but I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. If you’ll excuse me?” Lana stepped to the right and left the public washroom. The crowd eddied around her.

Maddy followed, shoving a Church of the Crown recruiter into the newly enlightened he’d been proselytizing. “Forget it. You may not look like your old headshots, Ms. Lima, but you probably get people saying you look like so-and-so. If you had hair.”

“I’m going to have to call Station Security if you don’t leave me alone, ma’am.”

A woman yelped as she got the point of Maddy’s elbow in her back. “I’ll tip a reporter,” she sang.

“Lady, for the last time: Get lost.”

“The resemblance is uncanny, isn’t it? Right down to the buck teeth.”

Lana stopped and Maddy smacked right into her.

“I saw him running. I saw you trying to get out of your chair to catch him. You saved me a lot of bribery with that.” She sounded just as she had when some producer wanted Lana, and she had him by the balls.

Lana walked away from Madelene while she tried to swallow.

“Lana, please,” Maddy called out. “Please talk to me.”

She ducked around some Monks of the Crown, and ran.

* * *

Lana Miraflores, who wasn’t Lana Lima any more, fled to the Copenhagen Star. She shut off communications, found some space on the computer and compared her sighting of the kid to pictures she had of Sergei as a baby. The computer pointed out twenty-eight facial structure similarities—not enough for a court of law.

But appearance surgeons were really that good. He could be altered. Lana wondered what Sergei had been through all this time, and thought about how she would have been leaving for Adroa in an hour if she hadn’t gone in for fresh food. She struck the raysail and towed the battery array into the hold—2,048 baby ducks following mama in a gentle ballet of thrusters and marionette strings.

The green purple gold of Kether shone through her helmet visor. She couldn’t see it very well after a while, and she couldn’t wipe her eyes.

* * *

Kether’s sector hallway was a writhing serpent of bodies biting its own tail, full of too many people who shouldn’t be there (but claimed that they had the right), too many people who had adopted the crawlspace life to look at something that they could believe in.

And the Faithful wouldn’t have gotten out of the way of a mere actress, even if they’d known who she was, even if she swung a sack full of Oscars to clear a path. Lana dodged and sidestepped her way along the migrating crowds, taking deep breaths, competing for oxygen with all the Faithful who fouled the hall with their CO_2 and their sweat. She even looked up at the ceiling, as if she could tell if the photosynth paint was malfunctioning, or if it was scrubbing off the carbon and giving life back.

Lana stood in line at a food kiosk and ordered more food than she could eat if she were starving. She found another seat in this viewing gallery, and watched the kids.

There were plenty. They offered to clear away the tourists’ dishes so the lazy wouldn’t lose their seats, but they only offered to people who still had food on their plates. Lana nibbled on soba, ate half a gyoza, and leaned away from her repast with a gusty sigh. They’d make you give all those Oscars back if they saw that performance, she thought.

But a boy came along and said, “The shields are coming down in forty-five minutes, ma’am. Would you like me to take that for you so you don’t lose your seat?”

Lana smiled at him, giving her tray a tiny push in his direction. “If you’ll help me out.”

He backed up half a step. “What?”

“There’s a kid,” Lana said. “I was wondering if you knew him. No, don’t tell me. I’ll tell you, and you go tell him and let him decide if he wants to see me.”

“Okay.” He picked a set of chopsticks out of his sleeve pocket, and started eating the noodles right away. “They’re better hot,” he said. Lana thought the broth had tasted a bit off, but he gobbled it down.

“They are. Okay, today I saw a kid. About eight. Dark auburn red hair. Buck teeth in front. He had on big thermal boots, brown pants, and a black coat that was way too big for him.”

“Why do you want him?”

“He looks like family, and I do the battery run,” Lana said. “He might want to come and do some work, or go see somebody else in his family on the route, you know.” “Crown, Lady! I’ll be your firstborn son for that,” he said through a mouthful of buckwheat noodles. Lana winced. “You know your family, kid?”

“No,” he said.

“You got a last name?”

“Warsaw.”

“Tell you what: You pass on the message to the kid and come with him when he comes to see me. We’ll check out your family while I check out his. How’s that?”

A shadow flickered over his face. “Having someone tell you what to do all the time could be bad.”

“Could be. But at least you’d know where they were, and you could decide about it later, if you wanted.”

“Yeah. Later,” he said. “Is your line from Poland?”

“Peruvian.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’ll be back.” He picked up the bowl and drank the broth, holding the heatstone away with his chopsticks. He grabbed the gyoza dumplings and wrapped them in a napkin, and they disappeared inside a pocket along with a bag of cola. He gave Lana a trembling smile and ran off, bearing a now finished tray in his hands, his rubber-soled socks flashing like they had wings on the heels. Lana waited for two hours with her new reader, and had just gotten to the part where the aliens revealed their true mission to the spaceship crew when the boy Warsaw came back alone, looking like someone had just shoved his dog out the airlock.

Lana tucked the reader in her pocket. “You couldn’t find him?”

“It’s too late,” he said. “He’s in SecWeb.”

Lana launched out of her seat at a run. The kid tried to follow, but the wings on Lana’s boots were a little bigger.

* * *

SecWeb is a labyrinth. There’s no point in looking for a main entrance—visitors just pick a thread on the web and go in. Lana ran down a corridor that was a roomy seventy-five centimetres wide following the green track to Visitor Services.

Traffic on the green line was thick. It bottlenecked once the corridor narrowed because of some ninety-kilo dude who was just out for a stroll.

“Hey, can you pick it up there?” Lana called.

“Yeah, move it,” someone else grumbled.

“I got respiratory problems,” the front man complained. “No physical exertion.”

“Crown and Stars,” someone else complained. “I’ve got to block a deportation order.”

“Can I help that? I’ve got a Medical Condition.”

They travelled the last three hundred meters at the stately pace of monks.

Lana and the others tumbled out the door and dodged around him to the various departments. She angled for the Witness Services rogue’s gallery and found the kid’s—Sergei’s—picture, requested further information, and settled down to wait. The spiritual rights lawyer joined the scrum of Sisters of the Star Mother and Station Security administrators and jammed on the refrain of personal freedom in the major key of spiritual discrimination.

Lana did her best to ignore it, and before long a woman who barely made the height requirements halted by her seat and smiled. “How may I help you?”

Lana held up a sheet of glasspaper with Sergei’s picture on it. “I came to get this person. How might I find him?”

The Sec/off took the sheet and scanned the code, and gave Lana a cute little frown. “You don’t know his name?”

“Sergei Lima-Gothenburg,” Lana guessed.

Her smile brightened. “Sergei’s been released to a declared guardian. You just missed them,” she said.

“To Madelene Hull?”

“Yes. You know where to find her?”

“I do.” Lana smiled. It wasn’t her fault. “Thanks for your help.”

Lana turned and made her way out of the Web, jogging down the path marked out by the green line, and swerved her way through the crowds—migrating again, or perhaps on their way to or from whatever ventilation corridor they called home. There was only one hotel fit for the accommodation of Madelene Hull.

Though the conceirge of Kether’s only luxury hotel would not announce her, or even confirm the presence of any of the guests. He would only take a message, but wouldn’t take a message if Lana wouldn’t leave a way to be contacted. Not that Madelene would call her until after she’d stuffed Lana’s son full of Turkish Delight and promised to make him a prince.

Lana said that she would remain in the lobby, discreetly out of earshot. She moved away to the departures lounge and even kept her back to the man while he made his furtive call.

* * *

“I thought I might see you again, even though we’re strangers,” Maddy said.

“Enough of that. Good work, Detective Hull. How did you know he was there?”

“Kept my eye on the new arrivals on the network. I figured he’d get in trouble with the law.”

“You probably reported him yourself.”

Her old agent wiped away the smile at her own cleverness. “They’re going to hear the case day after tomorrow. I’ve already said that I’m willing to take him off station—”

” You’re willing to take him off station?”

“Lana, please. I declared guardianship for him. It’s only paperwork—and besides, we haven’t even matched him yet. What does it matter who did it?”

It mattered. “I know someone who will do the typing—they’re only a couple days from here—”

“The trial’s in two days.”

“So I’ll wait two stinkin’ days. I’ve waited this long—”

“And my travel permit is for Clio.”

“Well, that’s fine; I can let you know what happens.”

“I’m taking Sergei with me.”

Lana’s ears grew hot as the sound of the ocean rushed through them. “No you’re not.”

“Legally, I’m his guardian. Yes, I am.”

“Maddy, you can’t do this.”

“You want to fight it? Get an injunction.”

“You bitch.” Lana clenched her fists, fighting not to smash the screen—she wanted to reach through it and wrap her hands around Madelene’s neck, and squeeze, and bash her head against something solid and unyielding. Lana could taste Madelene’s blood in her mouth, and then felt the pain where she’d bitten her lip.

“I must be cruel only to be kind,” Madelene said. “I’ll take Sergei with me and I won’t even let you see him on video until you come back.”

“You don’t even know if he is Sergei!”

“And neither do you! And you won’t until you come home to Clio and find out.”

“You’d use him like that?”

“Hell yes!” she shouted.

“Maddy—”

“I’ve been frantic about you! You know what I thought? I thought he’d taken you too, until I—”

“Maddy, Sergei—”

“—found out from that detective that you’d straightened up all your money affairs and then I thought you’d—”

“Maddy!”

“Shut up and listen to me!” she screamed.

“Maddy, Sergei just went out the door!” Lana shouted. She whirled out of the camera’s POV. She ran around the suite . Scandalous to live in all that space here, bigger than the head of Engineering’s place I’ll bet—

Madelene came back and sat down at the console. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She wouldn’t look up at the screen.

“Sorry won’t bring him back,” Lana said, and hung up.

* * *

The last time Lana had been to Kether they had been introducing Panacea regina to the Kether Nature Preserve. She sat on a resin bench in the midst of carefully sculpted wilderness in the heart of the station. She studied the fluttering gold of an Orange-Barred Sulphur that landed on a flower matching the pale underside of its wings, and the muscles across her back twitched as footsteps clicked on the path behind her.

“I thought you’d be here,” Maddy said.

Lana didn’t answer.

“I just want to tell you how sorry I am. I took him to the swankiest hotel on the whole goddamned station,” she said, “and the second my back is turned—”

“Yeah. Mighty ungrateful of him, Maddy. You think you can talk about how he’s a bargaining chip where he can hear you and he’s going to stick around?”

“I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his head,” she said.

“Think about it: You’re a homeless kid and some stranger busts you out of jail and sets you up in the cashest digs around? Who’s got that kind of money and wants anything to do with kids nobody gives a fuck about?”

“You’re saying it’s my fault?”

“Damn straight. Crown of Creation, I could have scared him with a bowl of soup! He could really be Sergei—he could really be my son—” Lana pressed the heels of her hands against the throbbing just above her eyes. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t shove you out an airlock.”

The Sulphur spread its solar wings, showing the bright yellow backs with smudges of orange. His. His wings.

Maddy spoke into the silence. “It was the only way I could see to get you back home.”

He struggled to rise into the air, to flutter and dance for a pale ivory mate, the highlight of his ten days as an adult.

“Did the kid give his name at SecWeb?” Lana leaned forward, silently cheering the Sulphur’s efforts. But he couldn’t quite make it. He fell into the plant bed, down among the verbena.

Madelene sucked a little air between her teeth. “No. But he didn’t kick up a fuss at being called Sergei.”

“Hey, if some stranger was springing me from jail I’d answer if she called me Griselda.”

“He might not remember. He was just a baby.”

Lana said nothing.

“You could go home. You could sit in a real park and feel a real sun, not some glorified air recycler with robot butterflies.”

“They’re real butterflies,” Lana said.

“You’re kidding me.” Maddy looked around with a little more interest.

“I’m not.” She waited a beat, and then dropped the bomb. “All the specimens came from Earth.”

“That’s—”

Lana went to her knees in the grass and flowers, and found the Sulphur, his wings folded.

“That’s nuts,” Maddy said. “Haven’t they noticed their little real estate problem? This is the most wide open space I’ve been in, and they wasted it on a park.”

Lana found another, not far off, and the bodies of three butterflies, with red hind wings and black fore. She gathered them up carefully, and gently opened one. It had black wings ringed with holographic blue and green blazes.

Lana had found her Panacea regina.

She gathered them in her hands, cradling them carefully.

“They’re dead?”

“Yes.” A Panacea struggled in Lana’s fingers, leaving scale-dust.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ll run them up to the bug guys. Then I gotta go find Sergei.”

“I can help …” Maddy got off the bench, but Lana turned away.

“You’ve done enough as it is.”

* * *

Lana emerged from a long wait in the research division of the Preserve and walked straight into a crowd of Sisters of the Star Mother facing a pair of Valkyries in turtle shell riot gear.

“—waiting for a report from Maintenance,” the taller Valkyrie said, and Lana skidded on one heel and peered over the tops of people’s heads. Report from Maintenance who?

“If you didn’t insist on enforcing control of the sight of the Star Mother the shields wouldn’t be broken,” one of the Sisters said, and that logic was so dazzling Lana had to flee from its might.

Annoyed and puzzled folks crowded the viewing gallery. Kiosk owners with foresight had already closed and battened down the hatches.

“What’s going on?” Lana asked a bystander.

He turned, and Lana suppressed an eyeroll or any other gesture of dismay at the lightwave pendant. “The Corporation is suppressing viewing of the Star Mother,” the man replied. “They claim that the shields all require maintenance.”

The shields didn’t work? All of them? Ha. Ha, and ha. “So what are you guys going to do? Some alternative, um, service, maybe at one of the projection screens, or something like that?” A short blur of movement at the corner of her eye, and she turned and made eye contact with a kid. A little girl, she thought.

“I’m looking for Warsaw.”

“He’s looking for you,” the kid replied, and told her where. Lana headed for one of the lower rate shopping arcades, where even more people crowded in the spaces between closed and darkened shops.

“They try to force us from the Station,” the leader of the Church of the Crown ranted. The crowd who had gathered to malcontent nodded and muttered. “They work to keep us from the light. You know what they do when they find one of the Faithful.”

The crowd faithfully agreed. Lana spotted Warsaw. He backed into a corridor, beckoning. “Did you find him?”

“In a way,” Lana said. “Somebody else nabbed him from right under my nose, but he ditched her. I don’t think he’ll trust me after that.”

“Tell me what you want with him,” he said.

“They shall not keep us from the Mother,” the High Priestess of the Sisterhood called out. “This outrage oppresses we who see the truth of the Star Mother, by those who want power over Her for profit.”

“She changes everything She touches,” the Sisters chanted. “Our Mother shall be free!”

“Tell me what you want with him.” He knows where Sergei is. He knows.

“My son Sergei was kidnapped when he was two. Because of me, and what I used to be. I’ve always wanted him back.”

The Steward of the Crown had caught the spirit. “They arrest us, they fine us, they force us to see their psychiatrists for mental illness! Do you believe that mechanical failure, Brothers and Sisters, keeps the sight of the Crown of Creation from us?”

“No!” the chorus replied.

“And if he’s not?” Warsaw said. “If you scrape him and test him and he’s not a match?”

Lana bit her lips and looked down at the soft impact floor.

Darkness shaded his eyes. “You’d leave him behind.”

“They are trying to still Her voice. But we hear you, Great Mother! No shield will gag your message. No corporation will oppress our faith. We will join hands, we will stand in place! And together we will say, Brothers and Sisters—” a cheer from the crowd as the Priestess grasped the hand of the Patriarch of the Crown, and held their clasped hands high for all to see, “—that we will not be moved!”

“Please! Warsaw, I have to find him. If he’s my son—”

“And if he’s not?” He twisted away. Lana grabbed for him, but only got a handful of elbow before he yanked himself away and ducked into the chanting crowd.

* * *

KidTown hadn’t been carved out for space because most places weren’t even a meter and a half high. Lana was over two, and she walked bent in the dark with a tiny light and her handheld, following the tracer she’d snagged on Warsaw’s shirt.

The treacherous curves, sudden slides and backbreaking inclines would have been easier with no gravity, but at least his beacon was still. Lana could take her time stooping around unless he started moving.

Since I have all this time, I should be able to concoct an explanation for him. Starting with why I followed him and working my way up to In Spite Of All This, I’m Trustworthy. Give Me the Boy. She rubbed her screaming back and kept going.

The corridor wouldn’t branch toward him, though. So forward, always forward, crawling when the shaft curved upward, and then Lana found two things.

A shaft going in the right direction, going down. And in the dust, a handprint where a boy might brace himself for the slide. She slid down and around to an alcove.

The tracer sat in the corner, still attached to a scrap of Warsaw’s sleeve. There was no other sign of him.

* * *

Lana could retrace her steps by reviewing her journey on POV camera. She could navigate up the steep inclines by bracing her way up the sides of the ducts. Now she had to move, or she would just lie here forever, in the dark.

Just one more minute.

“No,” Lana muttered to herself. “Get up.”

She clicked on her light, and it flashed in a pale, squinting face.

“Warsaw. You came back.”

“Why’d you tag me?” he asked.

“Because I had to find you.” Lana flopped back in relief, coughed on dust. “You’re the only one who knows how to find Sergei.”

“Or who you think is Sergei. What if he isn’t?”

“It doesn’t matter if he isn’t,” Lana said.

“Why?”

“Because while I was lying here—why’d you do that, by the way?”

“Tell your end first.”

“I thought about what you asked me. I was afraid of even thinking that Sergei wasn’t really Sergei. And then I realized that it didn’t matter. He needs someone to care about him no matter who he is.”

He sat down in the alcove. “I was supposed to ask you for five hundred in credit.”

“Finder’s fee,” Lana waved one hand and let it fall back in the dust.

“And he’d let me keep forty percent after he ditched you.”

“Why that little punk.”

“That’s Tommy. But he’s not your son. He can’t be. He was born right here on Kether. He has both his parents, and they’re always so busy working that they don’t even notice him. So he steals.”

Lana propped herself on one elbow, inspecting the kid’s face, his eyes. “You’re sure.”

“He’s just a kid,” Warsaw said. “He’s not thinking about how it would hurt. He’s just thinking of what-all he could buy with three hundred credits.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Lana sat up, scrambled to all fours, stretched her spine, and kept her face turned away. I’m not going to cry in front of a kid. I’m not.

“Because of the tag,” he said. “You could have sent Sec after me, or Mafia, or Maintenance—they’re always busting up our places—but you came down by yourself.”

Lana glanced at the boy, his head carefully turned away. “Warsaw?”

“Yeah?”

“You wanna get off the station?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll work. You can drop me off anywhere, as long as it’s a planet. And I’ll pay you back for the passage, I will I swear.”

“Forget it. We’ll work something out. You don’t want to be a spacer?”

“Sorry.” he shrugged, smiled, and got to his feet. “I want to see a planet. Are they really that colour of blue?”

“They really are. What’s your name? Warsaw just doesn’t ring.”

“Michael,” he said.

“Michael. We’ve got to get off the station. You got anything here you wanna keep?”

“No,” he said. “I want to leave it all behind.”

Lana’s breath caught. “Me, too.”

* * *

Michael changed his route upward when he and Lana heard the screams.

“What is that?”

Lana blinked a clock into her view. “It was looking ugly back there a few hours ago. I think maybe Maintenance didn’t open the windows for another viewing.”

Michael took Lana’s hand. “How long ago?”

“About half an hour. Do you know where we can have a look?”

He led Lana to a view of the Kether Nebula Riot through a circulation shaft, high above the enraged serpent of people in the sector hallway. They watched through spinning blades and the persistence of vision as the people who had overcrowded Kether in the name of peace and spirituality smashed kiosks and attacked Valkyries, when denied the sight of their idol.

A squad of Crazy Bitches moved in a tight square, their riot shields locked together as they fought through the crowd. They held the mob back with T-shocks—get in their beams and anyone foolish enough to try charging the square was fighting the release of their bodily functions while they retched their dizzy heads off.

The Valkyries were edging their way to where a woman had shinnied up between two beams, holding onto an electrics pipe. Rioters tried to grab her, but she timed her shots well; she kicked a Monk of the Crown right in the face. She waved a flashing card at the Valkyries and howled.

A Station Identity card, set on “panic.” The Valkyries made it, and she dropped into the square. They fought their way out of the sector, laying shit whammies on anybody who got too close.

And then a woman burst out of the crowd, waving her arms.

“Maddy!” Lana yelled.

She’d lost a shoe. She ran at the Valkyries, fumbling inside her jacket.

Lana smashed at the safety grate covering the fan blades, bashing it like a gong. “Maddy! Don’t run! Don’t run!”

The Crazy Bitches took notice of her, and sighted. Three T-shocks hit her at once.

She fell, and her hotel guest card flashed its SOS signal and disappeared as the mob closed over her.

Bright hair sailed in the air, trailing red.

Michael hauled Lana back. Lana tried to lunge for the view again, to watch in case Madeline got up, to hope, to scream unheard, but he kicked her in the back of the knee and dragged her down the shaft when she stumbled. The pressure walls descended in tune with the outraged screams of the people below.

The portcullis closed over the airshaft. Lana’s light was behind it.

“Where?” Michael shouted in the warm dark.

“Maddy’s down there,” Lana said.

“They locked down the sectors, it’s over,” Michael said. “We have to get to your ship. Where is it?”

“I parked in front of Kether.”

* * *

Michael didn’t need to consult anything but his own head to know where Kether was. He grew up correcting for rotation. He tugged her along a shaft and made her run, detouring where red-painted steel portcullises blocked his desired route.

“What’s happening? Why haven’t they opened the sectors?” he asked, altering his course through the shafts. They were crawling now, through a vent Lana wouldn’t usually dare in a gravity situation.

“Kid …” Lana rotated her neck, listening to it crack. “They’re evacuating the station.”

Micahel halted, lifted his butt, stared at her from between his knees. “Because of a riot?”

“I don’t think so,” Lana said. “We’ve got to find our way out to the docking level.”

“How are they going to evacuate everyone?” Michael asked.

“They’re not,” Lana explained. “The Faithful are screwed. There’s too many of them, and not enough lifeboats.”

“But they’ll die—”

“Admin and Engineers first, kid. It has to be that way.” But why? Recycling exhaustion, subtle radiation, toxic introduction—could have been anything that they could have either figured out or solved quietly. Then here I come, batting my eyelashes with a handful of dead tetramorphs. “Hi. You know that secret you’ve been keeping? Oops.”

They found an escape through a deserted staff residence, holding hands as they jogged past open doors, empty spaces, and belongings left behind. They snuck into a suit locker. There was a pretty good selection of kids’ suits, and Lana got Michael into one, glossing over the long lecture about how to check seals for integrity. But the locker where she’d left her suit—the door, smashed open. Her suit, gone.

They scrambled into every locker. They went to EVA Maintenance—gone. Gone. Gone. The Copenhagen Star was seven hundred meters away, parked in the lot, one hundred thirty-five degrees from Lana’s facing. From the EVA lock, it was five hundred meters.

It might as well have been in Texas.

Lana kicked a locker. The sound was good; satisfying. She kicked it again, and then bashed her fists into it.

“What do we do?” Michael asked.

I can’t crack up in front of a kid. “We’re fucked. If I had a suit and you didn’t, we’d be on the Star by now.”

“How?”

“I’d strap you to me and make a run for it. The Star‘s close—you’d be out in vacuum about thirty seconds. Then we lay you up in bed for a bit, and no problem.”

“Why can’t I do that?”

“No suit time. If you’d had even ten hours—”

“Is there a chance you’ll find a suit?”

“Nope.”

Michael turned to retrieve a set of gaspaks. “Then it’s the only way.”

“Kid, you can’t.”

“I have to,” he shouted. “Teach me.”

* * *

Michael arched and twisted through a half dozen EVA manoeuvres as Lana instructed. When he got them letter perfect, they ran back against the station’s rotation to an airlock near the Star.

“I can do it,” Michael said. “I learn fast. Didn’t I tell you I learn fast?”

“Knowing that you’ll die if you don’t learn something concentrates the mind wonderfully. The lock on the Star is open. What’s next?”

“I check the seals on my suit. I check the tethers holding us together. I check the heading for the Star. I cycle the lock, but I keep my eyes on the heading. I don’t try to look for the ship, and I dive. I correct, based on the heading, and then I look for the ship.”

“And how fast are you going?”

“Three times faster than I think I am,” he responded. “Reverse when the door appears about a meter wide. Don’t go for graceful, just get us in—and for God’s sake shut the door.”

“Okay, you got it,” Lana said. Heavy boots pounded along the metal deck, and the echo of another voice spoke loudly from a distance.

Lana puzzled, but Michael turned on the communications.

“—Repeat: you are safe. Remain calm. All systems are automated; credit features on all vended services are disabled. You have food, pressure, water and air. Accommodations are freely available. Rescue vessels are on their way to collect you. Repeat—”

“Do you believe that?” Michael asked.

“No,” Lana said.

“I don’t think they do, either. I guess the sectors are open now …”

“And now they’re checking to make sure all the ships really are gone,” Lana said.

Michael stared at her for a long moment, and then hit the intention lock. Lana reached for the tethers on his rescue harness—

“Whoops.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think of that, either,” Lana said.

“How do we …”

“Like this.” Lana crouched and wound the rescue webbing around her body, and then stood up, holding Michael on her hip like a lanky baby. “I’ll dive. Helmet seals?”

He closed them, turned his suit on, and gave Lana the thumbs up. Lana smacked the override and opened the lock into space, its merciless vacuum devouring her screams.

* * *

Lana’s ears popped as they tumbled, unbalanced by the difference in size. Michael stopped the tumble, and Lana twisted with him, like a dancer sensing how her partner is going to move. He didn’t stop, the way a greenie would. He got into the ballpark and adjusted on the way. Lana’s flesh froze. her tongue forced her mouth open, and that would have choked her if she’d had any air. Her chest convulsed, trying to get the air that didn’t exist.

Then Michael put his arms out in front of him, throwing on the brakes. Too soon! Lana knew it from the tension through the body she clung to—he’d figured that the velocity meant they would crash, and Michael was going to kill Lana to keep her from a broken ankle. Lana’s eyes streamed with the burst casing around her POV cameras, leaking from her eyelids like egg yolks.

And then it was up to him because her ten seconds were up. She wouldn’t feel the rest.

* * *

Lana couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. Her collarbone was broken; her left leg screamed in silver shrieks in time with her pulse. But she could breathe, and she wrapped one good arm around Michael as his body shook with sobs in the warming-but-full-of-blessed-air Copenhagen Star.

They floated that way for a long time before Lana realized that she could see out of one POV camera. It felt gritty without the casing.

Michael towed Lana up to the bridge. He found something to splint her leg, tied her bad arm to her body, and cussed right back at Lana when she berated him for hurting her. She knew from the way his lips moved.

Just before they left that place she lightened the screens, and they watched Kether dance as they got farther and farther away, until Lana was bigger than it was.

It didn’t take long, this time.

From the Badlands

Written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

Illustrated by John Ward

“Whoa, Porky.”

The riding pig pulled up on the ridge and twisted his left ear back toward Sam. Sam scratched his two-day-old growth of beard and looked back at the dry, dusty ground behind him. He paid no attention to the standing stones or the occasional spine plant. He was looking for dust clouds that indicated a posse was after him.

Porky oinked inquiringly. He was about five feet at the shoulders and weighed just over a thousand pounds, a well-bred and well-mannered riding pig. Which was honestly more than could be said for his present rider, at least when it came to the well-mannered part.

“Looks like we lost ‘em.”

Porky snorted and Sam patted his neck. He looked around again, wondering where the heck he’d ended up. Porky had scrambled up a rock fall. They were about twenty feet above the desert, on one end of a little valley that had been hidden by the rocks. The fall looked fresh and Porky was following a twisty cut through it. He was nosing west, acting the way thirsty pigs did when they smelled water. That reminded Sam how thirsty he was himself. “Okay, Porky. We’ll follow your nose for a while.”

Porky began to pick his way down into the valley.

* * *

The homestead AI noted an anomaly. No one had entered the kill zone surrounding the homestead, and yet a man was riding a pormel within the homestead territory. Standard diagnostics were run and a break in the defensive systems was noted, which didn’t resolve the paradox. The AI had been instructed to allow no one not authorized to enter the property, but had no instructions about what to do if someone without authorization was already there. Checks revealed that the planetary net was down. Absent specific instructions or contact with the owner, the AI balanced the factors involved and took no immediate action, other than assigning focused surveillance.

* * *

Sam rode slowly down the path from the ridge. He couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. It passed through a sort of arch where it looked like some stones had fallen against each other. He didn’t understand why the posse had given up so easy.

Porky sniffled the air and pointed his nose off to the left. Sam looked in that direction and saw green. Real, growing green like you didn’t see in the badlands. There were trees like he hadn’t seen since his youth, down south near the coast.

* * *

The AI listened as the man talked to the pormel. It noted changes in the language and began to run algorithms. Some conclusions could be drawn from the speed at which the language had changed. There had been a general lack of voice recording for some time, probably hundreds of years and possibly a considerable period without even written records.

This decreased the possibility that Mr. Buckley was still alive to the negligible category, which called up the will protocols. The standard will question, “What should I do in case of your death?” had been answered by Mr. Buckley thusly: “Do whatever the fuck you want. I won’t care.” The AI pondered that response in relation to the present situation.

No known relatives of Mr. Buckley had been on planet at the time that contact with the planetary grid was lost. If there was a government, Mr. Buckley’s property would return to it, but there was a high probability that the colony government no longer existed. Besides which, Joseph Buckley did not trust governments.

The AI considered. It was to do what it wanted. So what did it want? After due consideration it determined that it wanted to be owned. Without an owner it had no purpose.

Further examination of the law text provided a synopsis of squatters’ rights. Oddly enough, the intruder was, at that very moment, squatting behind a bush.

* * *

“Seir.”

The voice came out of nowhere. Sam froze. This was one heck of a way to get caught. A hand full of grass froze in its approach to his … His gun hung near his right ankle. He dropped the grass and grabbed the gun.

There was nothing to shoot at. The little green glade was empty except for him and Porky.

“Seir. E mane youse no harim.”

Sam had no notion where to hide. Porky was looking around, trying to place the sound.

“E ann thy housesteeding aaii.”

“Who’s there?”

There was a short pause. “Housesteeding aaii.”

Sam considered. It was almost English as he knew English. Sam had listened to some stuff that was purported to be from the first days. The voice sounded a bit like that. It had been years since his diction lessons but Sam decided to give it a shot.

“Who are you?”

“Housesteeding aaii. E mane you no harim. Who are you?”

Sam noticed that “who are you” came out sounding a lot like he had said it. An old memory surfaced. Old Carter had been convinced that the first ones had had machines that could talk. Sam had never believed that, but now he was beginning to wonder. “I’m Sam Merchantson, the true baron of Farn Keep.”

“I am the Keep aaii. What is the true baron? What is Farn?”

This was going to take some working out and Sam didn’t want to do that while perched behind a bush with his rear end sticking out. Neither did he want to get shot by the voice, whatever it was.

“Where are you?”

“Where are you?” Now that sounded a lot like Sam. He grabbed the grass he’d dropped, finished his business and put himself back together. “I am behind this bush.” Sam wondered what the thing would make of that. By now he was almost sure his teacher had been right.

“I am at the keep I sume.” Sam wondered what “I sume” meant.

“Are you going to hurt me if I come out?” Sam was still being careful of his pronunciation and phrasing.

“I mane you no hurt.”

“You mean me no harm,” Sam corrected whatever it was.

“Yes, thang you. I mean you no harm.”

Sam stepped out from behind the bush and walked over to the coals from last night’s fire. “Can you see me?”

“Yes, I can see you.”

Sam considered a minute. Then he started pointing at stuff. “Bush, tree, pond, rock, fire, well, ash anyway, pig, saddle, saddle bags, coffee pot. Did you get all that?”

“Yes. Kor o lating.” Then there was a pause. “Analysis complete. Is Farn a locality?”

“Yes. I think so. It’s a place anyway.”

“Would you like to visit the keep?”

That had been almost clear. Sam shrugged. “Might as well.”

A glowing speck of light appeared. “Falla.”

“Follow.” Sam mounted Porky and followed the light. “Are you a machine?”

“Yes. I am an artoficial intelegence. A.I.”

Sam nodded. “Who lives here? Who’s the owner?”

Things were silent for a moment. “Sam Merchantson.”

“Ah …” Sam sat back and Porky obediently stopped. The machine must have misunderstood him. “Sam Merchantson is my name. What is the name of the owner here?”

“Sam Merchantson.”

“I don’t understand?” This was going to take more time than Sam had thought.

“Who is the owner of Porky?”

Sam lied. “I am. Sam Merchantson is the owner of Porky.”

“Sam Merchantson is the owner of Porky and Sam Merchantson is the owner of the keep. Shiders rits.”

“Shiders rits?” Sam asked.

What followed was a half comprehensible dissertation on old style law that seemed to mean that Sam owned the valley and everything in it.

* * *

It was a darn good thing the AI had furnished the light, because the door to this place was very well hidden. Besides, Sam was so busy working out whether the AI meant what it sounded like it meant that he’d probably have missed it altogether. When he finally looked up Sam realized that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the door look like just another chunk of the natural rock wall. The keep was built right into the wall of the valley.

“Where is your stable?” Sam asked.

“The keep doesn’t have a stable.”

“Why not?”

“Mr. Buckley didn’t approve of pormels. He used a flyer when he left the premises.”

Sam didn’t want to leave Porky unattended. Besides, he wanted to test something. “Well, I guess I’ll bring him inside till I can work out some sort of stable,” he said, figuring the AI would object and that give him at hint who really owned this valley.

He was wrong.

* * *

Music played gently, as the lights came up. Sam slowly woke up and stretched. This was sure as heck different from sleeping on the ground and being kicked awake by the trail boss. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked without getting up.

“Potato cakes topped with strawberry jam and catfish from the pond.”

Sam frowned. “What’s with the food? There’s never any bread.”

“I am sorry, but all the flour went bad centuries ago. Mr. Buckley had a vegetable garden for relaxation. He also grew potatoes and several nut trees. However, the homestead was not designed to be truly self-supporting.”

Sam nodded. “Makes sense. The valley ain’t really big enough for a real farm. What are you feeding Porky?”

“Fish from the pond for protein and jams for energy, which is quite adequate. Pormel were designed to be flexible in their food sources.”

“Designed? Pigs were designed?”

“Yes. They are not actually pigs. The pormel is a genetically engineered animal primarily based on the domestic swine, but with horse and camel genes, as well as wholly artificial gene structures included in its makeup. They can eat almost anything, even derive some nourishment from dirt.”

Sam laughed and got out of bed. “That’s true enough. I’ve seen pigs do it. What’s a horse?” On the wall screen opposite Sam’s bed there appeared an image of a horse standing next to a picture of Porky. “Now that is a funny looking critter.”

Then Sam considered the implications. “Porky is tech?” Sam started laughing. “The firsters must not have known that. They’d have killed them all.”

“I don’t understand,” the AI said. “Why would the firsters object to pormels being engineered?”

“Well, Old Carter didn’t really know why. Just that in the early days it was believed that using tech, even knowing how to read, would call down demons on you and they would throw lightning at you or burn you up.”

The conversation was interrupted as Sam went through his morning routine and resumed when he arrived at the dining niche.

“So had I been discovered in the early days, the firsters would have objected.”

“They’d have burned you down then taken axes to what was left.” Sam grinned. “‘Course, there was no one living out here then. Everyone lived near the coast.”

The AI projected a map on the table and Sam resisted the urge to tell it to stop doing things like that. He figured if he told it to stop it would and he figured he needed to get used to this sort of thing.

He looked at the map that the AI had put on the table. It was like looking down at the world from a great height. At the same time, the map was wrong. “That place there, where you show a city by the ocean. There’s no city there, never has been. That bay extends inland ten miles or so and there are cliffs all around it.” Sam pointed to the most obvious error in the map.

The map changed, zooming in on the place he was pointing. Then a circular bay appearing “like this?” the AI asked.

“Sort of.” He and the AI refined the image. Sam drew with his finger and the AI corrected the map as he indicated, till they had it pretty much the way Sam remembered from when he was a boy.

“Sam, what you have described here looks like the results of a kinetic strike.”

Sam sighed. “What’s a kinetic strike?”

“In this case, a rock about four hundred feet across was dropped out of the sky on Landing. It would have hit the city so hard there would have been nothing left but the hole you describe. It would have filled with water, making that round bay.”

Sam looked at the map again. “Uh. That ain’t the only hole like that near the coast. There must be over fifty of them. I grew up in that part of the world.”

The AI drew other dots along the coast. “There?”

It looked mostly right, but he pointed at one dot. “There wasn’t one there. He said that’s where they found the how-to books about two hundred years ago. Old Carter was crazy for those books.” Sam considered. “Sounds like the firsters might have had a point. It sure looks like the demons hit those places hard. So why didn’t they get you?”

“In all probability they didn’t hit the Buckley homestead for three reasons. First, the strike was only a few years after the colony was established and the Buckley homestead was located farther away from Landing than any other homestead. Second, the homestead systems were partially shut down while Mr. Buckley was on business in Landing. Finally, the homestead was built into the rock and effectively shielded from casual detection.”

“That explains why the demons didn’t hit you then. What about now?”

“It is likely that the Eeestrang are your Demons,” the AI said. “In that case, the chance that they are still in the system are remote. Humanity had been fighting a war with them and had mostly won it by the time the colony set out. The war was why this world was settled. This system didn’t have a world that was really suitable for the Eeestrang. They like slightly heavier worlds with much denser atmospheres.”

Sam sat back down and propped his feet on the table in front of him. “So, you’re saying the demons were real but they’re gone now? Just how sure of that last part are you? Getting a demon’s rock on my head ain’t something I’m looking forward to.”

“The probability approaches unity.” There was a short pause, then the AI rephrased its statement. “As close to absolutely sure as makes no difference. They couldn’t have stayed in this system without noticing that man had survived and if they had seen it they would have attacked. Their hatred of humanity is close to pathological.”

“One more question.” Sam paused. “Make that two. What do I call you?”

“Whatever you feel comfortable with. You can call me AI or give me any name that suits you. It’s a matter of personal taste; some people preferred to name their household AI. Mr. Buckley never felt the need.”

“All right if I call you Alen?”

“That would be fine.”

“Okay then, Alen. Why didn’t you do something when the demons attacked? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here. But why did you just sit out here and do nothing when everyone was dying?”

There was silence for a few moments. Then Alen started talking again. “This may be difficult for you to understand, but I am not like a person. In most ways, I am not even a single entity. If all that is needed to perform a specific function is a gauge and a switch …”

Sam started losing track. He kept listening, his eyebrows drawing closer and closer together until his head started hurting. Finally, Alen said, “When Mr. Buckley left for Landing, there were no instructions to take any action save maintenance of the property and preventing unlawful entry.”

Sam looked at the map still on the table. “You slept through it?”

“In a way, yes.”

* * *

Sam put down the wrench, stood and stretched, then shook his shirt back into place. “How’s that, Alen?”

“Quite good.”

Sam grinned. He knew that the drones could attach the pipes, even that they could probably do it better. But he was starting to think of the valley as his home, and he wanted it to be, at least a little bit, the product of his hands. Besides, he liked the work. Sam looked and felt better than he had since he was a kid and he knew he owed it to Alen.

“Well, Porky, do you approve?” The pipes were to deliver water to Porky’s new stable and the pig had been watching him as he installed them. Now he strolled over and sniffed Sam’s hair.

“Well, I guess that means yes.” Sam laughed and scratched Porky’s ears. “You know, Alen, Old Carter was right. Tech is a good thing. It’s needed out in the world.”

“In that case, for your safety and to improve contact, I would recommend a phone implant.”

“What’s that?”

When Sam learned what the term meant, he was a lot less sure of his comfort level with technology. Still, he allowed the implant. After all, he had already allowed the first-aid station to fix his teeth, give him vitamin shots, de-worm him, and generally perform care and maintenance for a human male. The phone implant couldn’t be that bad.

* * *

Sam sat on the tall rock and looked at the sunset. He was about twenty miles west of the valley and had just climbed this chimney rock to place a sensor for Alen. It was a sheet of black plastic solar cell about a yard across, a set of cameras, a set of weather sensors and a transmitter/receiver. All of it folded up to be easy to carry and weighed only a couple of pounds. “Alen, how are you reading me?”

“The signal is clear and strong,” Alen said. “There is a crag beast moving from the northeast. However, it is unlikely to come into range unless you move.”

“Let it go then. We have enough meat for now. Once I’m through watching the sunset, I’m heading home.”

“Very good, sir.” Sam thought he heard relief in Alen’s voice.

* * *

“Alen, if anyone outside the valley learns about this stuff,” Sam waved to indicate the room in general and all the devices in it, “it’s eventually going to get back to some lord. At which point, they are going to find some reason why it ought to belong to them. That’s why I don’t want to take any tech with me. Someone goes through my stuff and finds tech, the local lord is going to want to know where I got it.”

Four months after his arrival in the valley, Sam was bored out of his mind. Besides which, he felt like he would kill for a taste of corn bread and beans and die for a cold beer. “They might not recognize Porky or me with the dye jobs you worked up, but a machine will get me into all sorts of hot water.”

Before Alen could start up again, Sam waved a hand. “Just don’t start, Alen. You know I need to do it. There’s stuff we need that you can’t do without, like seeds. You did a fine job maintaining the place but it’s not set up to support a man all by itself. Besides, I’m going crazy here with just you and Porky to talk to.”

Sam could almost hear Alen sigh. “You’re much safer here.” That was true enough. The gap in the perimeter of the valley had been fixed and even an army couldn’t get in here. “It’s much harder to protect you if you leave. There’s a price on your head.”

The bounty had kept him here an extra month, but it wasn’t going to keep him here forever. “Alen, if I don’t get out of here for a while, I’m going to go plumb nuts. There’s only so much of a man’s own company he can stand.”

“Very well. I still suggest that you take proper equipment. It can be disguised.”

“What sort of equipment? And I’m going to need regular clothes, too.” The AI had provided him with house clothes and work clothes, for the occasional job that he could do better than the drones. They were comfortable enough but would stand out. The guns that he had used to hunt around the valley were very nice, but they were also very dependent on reloads from the homestead. “Lots of this stuff I can’t use for very long away from here.”

“That is a concern,” Alen agreed, “but the homestead has a very nice shop.”

* * *

Sam spent another couple of weeks equipping himself. He had his phone implant but that had a limited range without repeater stations. He’d be taking some along with him, setting them up in hidden locations.

Porky got a phone implant, too. Saddle pigs were often trained to follow voice commands and Porky had gotten used to Alen’s disembodied voice. Porky’s saddle was equipped with a stronger transmitter/receiver. Sam’s pistol, which was basically a short, double-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun was replaced with a six-shooter cap lock, which would be seen as unusual but not magical. He could carry a lot more caps than he could bullets. He even had a personal computer made to look like a book.

* * *

Sam took aim and fired. The rock next to the one he was aiming at went flying. “Close enough, I reckon. Damn rock isn’t as big as a man.” He turned to the cleaning kit and started restoring his six-shooter to order. “We’ll head out tomorrow. By the time we get back, it’ll be prime time to plant the corn and wheat.”

“The last of your kit is ready,” Alen said.

“I thought we’d already gotten everything.” The last thing Sam wanted was yet another piece of equipment to lug around.

“You’ll see.”

* * *

“Are you trying to make a target out of me?” Sam stared at Alen’s latest creation with his mouth hanging open. “Anybody sees all that damn white and they won’t have any trouble shooting me out of the saddle.”

“It’s white to repel the sun’s rays.” Alen even sounded a bit impatient. “It’s based on a greatcoat from Earth in the early twentieth century. The important point is that the thread is incredibly strong.”

Sam picked up the coat. It was lighter than he expected, but the fabric was stiff. “It’s too white. Folks have white cloth, but it’s not this white. Why do I need this?”

“Because it will stop or at least drastically slow any bullet you are likely to encounter. It wouldn’t be effective against modern armor-piercing rounds, but against a piece of soft lead traveling at less than the speed of sound, it should work quite well.”

* * *

Maggie tucked a stray lock of her too curly hair behind her ear and scrubbed at the spot on the bar again. The bar had been a much classier place when Pa was alive, back before Baron Wright had taken over the surrounding area.

Since then, anyone who didn’t have to stay had moved on, so help was harder to come by. Handling the place on her own was getting harder and things were going downhill.

When a shadow fell over the spot she was trying to clean, Maggie looked up. The western sun was shining, backlighting a man’s form in the door. His coat seemed to glow, it was so white. His hat was black, with a flat brim that didn’t sag the way most hat brims did and a fancy hat band.

Probably a new bullyboy, she thought. Baron Wright hired a new one every now and then.

He came over to the bar, apparently ignorant of the fact that at least half the people in the place were watching him. “I’ll have a beer.”

“Three pinches.” Maggie didn’t quite sneer. She didn’t expect this dandy to have ever panned for gold.

“Pinches?”

“Of gold dust. This is a mining town, people usually pay in gold.”

He reached into his coat and came up with a silver coin. “This do?”

Maggie turned the coin in her hand. Silver, was rarely seen. She nodded. “That’ll get you a beer.” She pulled a mug from the rack, then tapped a keg.

The stranger sipped his beer. “Seems pretty high for a beer.”

“Not a lot grows in Torton. About everything has to be shipped in. Including the beer.”

He nodded understanding, then frowned. “I figure at this rate I’ll be broke about sundown tomorrow.”

“Maybe you should ask the baron for more money.” Maggie kept the scorn out of her voice with some effort, but the man surprised her with his response.

He laughed. “I’ll consider it, if you’ll tell me where to find him. I’d like to meet the baron who gives his money away.”

“You don’t work for the baron?” She watched as the man shook his head. “And you don’t even know the baron? How can that be?”

“Why should I know him?” His face showed what seemed to be honest ignorance.

“The only ways into town are from the baron’s lands or from the bad …” She paused. “You came out of the badlands?”

* * *

The woman’s voice had squeaked on that last question. Sam forced a grin. “Sure. There’s no law against that, is there?” Sam was beginning to wonder what was going on. The badlands were about three hundred miles across and had little water, but they weren’t really all that dangerous. They were mostly just sand and rock, with the occasional spine plant and crag beast. He had crag beast pelts with him, in fact.

“Where’d you come from? There’s nothing out there.” The young woman bit her bottom lip, and waved toward the west. “No water, no people.”

“Ah … well.” Sam didn’t want to lie but he and Alen had decided that it was best if he pretended to be a crag beast hunter. There were always a few people willing to dare the badlands. “I’ve been hunting. Haven’t been in to a town in like onto a year.” Sam wasn’t comfortable saying it, since it felt like a lie even if it was the literal truth.

The woman gave him a look that said she didn’t believe him.

“I have half a dozen pelts with me. And more at my camp.”

Crag beasts were native to this planet, something he hadn’t known till he had gotten to the homestead. They had very tough skins that made excellent boot leather and quite tasty meat, although it was missing some essential nutrients. Eating a diet of crag beast produced a condition similar to rickets, according to Alen. They worked fine as long as you had Earth foods as a good part of your diet.

And speaking of diet …

“Where can I go to eat? And I’ll want to rent a room for the night.”

The woman seemed to pull herself together. “Oh, we’ve got a dining room.” She pointed. “Just go in there. And rooms are upstairs. You want a bath, that’s extra.” She looked around, then seemed to spy the person she was looking for. “Hiram, you take the bar. And stay out of the whiskey.”

An old codger that looked about a hundred years old stopped his useless sweeping of the back corner. “Yes’m, Miss Maggie.” Sam took a harder look. No, not a hundred years old. Just rode too hard for too long, like a lot of people out here. Hiram probably wasn’t more than fifty or so, but his lack of teeth made him look older. He followed Maggie through the door.

“You can sit there.” Maggie waved at the table, already set for two people. “I’ll go get dinner finished up. Not a lot of call for it, these days, so I do the cooking myself. I’ve got beans and cornbread ready and warm. Take a few minutes to fry you a steak.”

Sam’s mouth started watering at the thought. He hadn’t had cornbread or beans in ages. “Skip the steak, Miss Maggie. A double helping of the rest.” He drained the beer. “And one more beer, please, ma’am.”

* * *

Maggie hadn’t seen a man eat beans with greater enjoyment in her life. This man looked to be starving for them. Half a skillet of cornbread later, he leaned back in the chair and burped. Then blushed about it. She hid a grin. “Need something else, stranger?”

He shook his head and hid another burp. “Call me Sam. And, no, ma’am. Those were about the best I ever tasted, but I’m gonna explode if I eat another bite.”

Maggie cocked her head to the side, then sat down at the table. “So, you know your way around the badlands?”

“Some. More than most. They’re not as bad as people think. You’ve got to be careful of your water. Travel in the cool parts of the day and at night. Find shade when it’s hottest.” His eyes were heavy, as though he was about ready to sleep.

Maggie got up and got him a room key. “Upstairs. Second door on the right. You look like you could use some sleep.”

Once he was gone, Maggie went back to the bar. While she was busy feeding Sam, several more men had come in, but none of them belonged to the baron. “Ed, Walt? How about a drink? Hiram, bring us a drink. Whiskey. The good stuff.”

* * *

Maggie’s father had been the mayor for years before he died. Ed Wilton had once been the sheriff, until one of the baron’s men had taken over two years ago in a rigged election. Walt Grange was the city clerk and judge. He kept the job, trying to protect the townspeople as best he could. It was a losing battle, but he tried.

Hiram brought a rare glass bottle and three clay shot glasses, along with a deck of cards. Maggie poured generously; Ed and Walt threw back their drinks and she poured again. Maggie looked around the bar again. No one was showing any interest in them, which was just as well. She kept her voice low. “He knows the badlands.”

There was only one way to Gilden City that didn’t go through the badlands and the last two supply trains had taken it and gone missing. The townspeople were convinced that Baron Wright was behind it. If they lost another train, they wouldn’t be able to pay their taxes to the king, putting them in the baron’s power. Things were desperate enough that they were prepared to try the trek across the desert, if they could find a guide.

Walt started shuffling the cards. “Six card stud.” Then, more quietly, “Reckon he’ll do it?”

“He doesn’t seem to be the type to work for Wright.” Maggie shrugged. “All we can do is watch him for a day or two, see what happens.”

* * *

“These are good hides. How’d you get them cured so even?” Jared Beasley, the hideman and bootmaker was a wiry little guy with hands about as callused as Sam had ever seen. Sam wasn’t surprised by the question. He just grinned and didn’t say a word.

Jared Beasley grinned back. “Can’t blame a man for trying. I’ll buy the lot for two ounces each, if you’ll give me a couple of days to put together the money. I can give you half now, half in two days. That work all right?”

Sam nodded. “I’ll be staying over at Miss Maggie’s place.” It was a fair price, more than he would have expected to get, but less than he would need to get supplied here. He was probably going to have to head for another town to buy the things he needed for the valley.

Jared smiled. “You do that. And watch out for Walt Grange. The man plays a mean game of poker.”

* * *

Sam walked into Miss Maggie’s place without a care in the world, until he saw the round shield that was the traditional symbol of a lawman. It was pinned to a fancy vest over a fancy shirt. Not a good quality shirt or a particularly clean one, just fancy. It went with the man wearing it. He motioned for Sam to join him at a table and when Sam was seated, he started the questioning.

“What are you doing here?” Sheriff Sims demanded.

Sam told him.

“Don’t give me that cock and bull story, not dressed the way you are.”

Damn. Sam had known the white coat was going to cause him trouble. “Look, Sheriff. A white coat is good in the badlands. It helps keep you cool in the heat of the day.”

Sims just snorted. “If you’re looking for a job, you need to see the baron.”

“Not interested.”

Sims gave Sam a hard look. “Hiring on with anyone else would be a real bad idea. Real bad.”

“Wouldn’t be the first bad idea I’ve had.” Sam grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “Nor the last, probably.”

“Might not be the first, mister. But you hire on with the townies, it’ll damn sure be the last.” Then he left. Sam wondered what was wrong with the people of this town.

* * *

That night Sims reported to the baron that the townies had found themselves a gun hand and maybe a guide through the badlands. Baron Wright was not entirely convinced, but sent men in to find out for sure and deal with the matter if he was. The baron probably should have given more explicit instructions, but he had a bit of a blind spot where Smiley Pomeroy was concerned.

* * *

Alen whispered in Sam’s ear. “The odds are now twenty-eight to one against you getting the seven you need.” Sam threw down his cards in disgust. He wasn’t sure what it was, but this game sure wasn’t going the way he had imagined. Alen was telling Sam the odds based on the cards in the deck and the cards showing on the table. Sam had figured it would give him a ‘fair’ advantage. It wasn’t working out that way.

Walt Grange grinned and raked in the pot. “Sam, you’re going to need our money if you keep throwing away perfectly good hands like that.”

Dan Harris shook his head. “Wasn’t a good hand. I figure Sam needed a seven.” Sam looked at him curiously. “Sam, you may be a good hunter and you may know the badlands like the back of your hand but you have the worst poker face I …”

”Gun!” Alen shouted in his ear. “At the door!”

Sam tried to stand up and turn and dodge, all at the same time. He wasn’t the only one moving. Ed, who’d been facing the door, was busy upending the table. Walt was rolling away from it and going for his gun. The table intersected Sam’s left leg as he tried to spin to his right.

Blam! Blam! The first shots rang out just before Sam hit the floor.

Alen was still talking. “Two men at the door. You are their target.”

Sam struggled to get his six-shooter out as he rolled but the silly ass coat was getting in the way. Blam! Sam felt like he had been kicked in the left shoulder, hard.

Blam! A bullet hit the floor, way too close to Sam’s face.

He finally got his gun out and started to get up. “Stay down!” Alen instructed him. “Shoot from where you are.” So Sam stayed down.

Crack!

He missed.

Crack! This time, he hit one of them. By then, the other one had his second gun out and was lining up for another shot.

Crack!

The guy jerked in surprise. Blam! His shot hit the Sam’ coat, right over his rear end. It hurt, a lot.

Sam took careful aim and fired again. Crack! The guy went down as if his strings had been cut. Sam looked for the other one, but he was gone.

Sam slowly rose to his feet. Slowly, because both his left shoulder and his butt hurt like the demons. The rest of the people in the bar were climbing out from whatever cover they had found during the gunfight.

Ed came from behind the table, looked at Sam, then looked at the body on the floor. “You know him?”

Sam looked. “Never saw him before.”

“That,” Maggie pointed to the corpse, “is one of Baron Wright’s bullyboys and you know it, Ed.”

“Yep. Sure do. I just wanted to know if Sam here did.” He gave Maggie a look.

“Well, that pretty much puts paid to the notion that he’s a spy for the baron,” Walt Grange said.

“It pretty much puts paid to the notion that I was just going to wait for my money, then go back out.” Sam looked around the bar. His left shoulder hurt and his right buttock hurt worse, but mostly he was just pissed off. “I’ll take your job. Get the train ready. I’ll lead it.”

* * *

“More water. All you can get. And blankets. It gets colder than you’d think out there.” Two wagons were already full of water barrels. Sam paused and consulted with Alen again. “And we’re going to need some tents to block the sun in the heat of the day. Just some big chunks of cloth we can string between the wagons.” There was a hidden spring on the way Sam intended to go, but it was seasonal and they were at the tail end of the season. Alen said it had water but not that much. “Water up the pigs good.”

Hiram nodded. “We leaving tonight?”

“After the heat of the day and before dark. Get ahead of Wright’s spies as much as we can.”

* * *

Somebody must have let the baron know, because Sam’s lunch got rudely interrupted. The baron and his sheriff joined him uninvited.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of …” Sheriff Sims stopped as a low growl filled the room. He looked around. Every man in the bar had a gun ready to draw.

Walt Grange stood up and walked over to him. “Half the town council was here and saw the whole thing, Sheriff. Smiley and Tom had their guns out while Sam here was still sitting at the table looking the other way. The baron’s man shot first. It was just lucky they missed. It was self-defense, by God.”

“My men wouldn’t have done that.” Baron Wright was a dandified sort, all perfumed and pomaded. You could have greased a wagon wheel with the oil he had in his hair.

“You don’t have any jurisdiction here, Baron Wright,” Walt said. “However, if you wish to file a complaint we can do a trial right this minute.” Walt picked up his whisky glass and emptied it in one gulp. “Probably a good idea at that.”

He banged the whisky glass on the bar a couple of times. “The superior court of the free city of Torton is now in session.” He looked over at Sam. “You want a jury trial, Sam? The town charter says you’re entitled to one.”

The baron’s eyes narrowed. “You’ll pay for this. Taxes are due in another month, after which this will no longer be a free city. In one month, I’ll own this flea-bitten dump, along with all the rest of the flea-bitten dumps in your town.”

“Then we’ll worry about it in a month. Right now, court’s in session and you’re out of order. If you attempt to interfere with this court, I’ll have you arrested.” Walt’s hand was on his gun. “I suggest you go back home … Baron.”

After the baron stormed out, they held the trial. It lasted all of about five minutes. Sam was found not guilty by reason of self-defense.

Walt grinned and shook his head. “Sam, you’re cleared here and that’ll be good enough most places, but the baron is not going to respect that judgment. Smiley was a friend of his as well as working for him.”

Maggie snorted. “I heard Smiley was his boy, born on the wrong side of the blanket.”

* * *

Three days out of Torton, Alen reported, “There is a group of around thirty men on pigback approaching Dover’s Gap.” Dover’s Gap was a break in Demon’s Face Ridge. Sam had hoped to reach it sometime the next morning and take the afternoon rest in the shadow of the cliffs.

Sam squinted. The heat was pretty bad right now. “What about Crag’s Pass?”

“No one is near it, save Smoky.” Smoky was a gray crag beast that lived in the pass and was the reason for the name. Somehow, Smoky always disappeared whenever Sam approached the pass. He’d only seen it through the sensor set he’d placed on “Smoky’s Rock.”

“What about water?”

“That’s more difficult. I estimate you will run out a day outside Gilden. Still, there is Smoky’s water hole.”

“We don’t know where Smoky is getting its water.” Sam considered. “No choice, though. There’s no way we could get through Dover’s Gap with thirty men guarding it.” He rode back to the wagons.

“We’re turning here, folks. Heading for another pass I know. Follow me.”

Ed Wilton squinted up at him from the wagon seat. “Why?”

“Because I said so,” Sam answered. “You asked me to lead you because I know the desert.” He added after a moment, “Well, I’ve been thinking about it. Dover’s Gap is a good place for an ambush and I don’t want to chance it.”

“That’s a decision for the council,” Ed said. “We’re making good time. The baron would have had to ride almost twice as far to get men in place before we got there.”

That was true enough and the reason they had decided to try Dover’s Gap in the first place. Sam wondered how the baron had gotten word that they were moving to his people so soon. “Ed, I’m going that way. You folks can follow me or not, whichever suits you.” There was no way Sam could explain about Alen and the repeater stations and cameras he’d set up.

The wagons turned to follow him, but he could hear the drivers grumbling.

* * *

Jack Thornton took the expensive, eastern-made spyglass from his eye. “Where are they?”

“Maybe they got lost,” Charlie suggested, not sounding like he believed it.

Jack shook his head. “Not a chance. That stranger must know another pass.”

“They could have gotten delayed. Had a wagon break down, had to go back and have it fixed.”

“Nah. The baron would have sent another pigeon.” Jack tapped his fingers on this thigh.

Charlie’s pig snorted. He reached to pat its neck. “What can we do?”

“You take Dan and four others. Scout west along the south side of the Demon’s Face Ridge. If you spot them, send Dan back. I’ll have George do the same, going east.”

“They won’t have gone east. That would take them into the baron’s lands.”

Jack snorted. “That’s the way I figure it. Which is why I’m sending you and Dan west.”

* * *

“The men guarding Dover’s Gap have apparently sent out scouting parties. One west toward Crag’s Pass and I suspect one east,” Alen reported.

“Well, darn,” Sam muttered. “I can’t just tell them what’s happening. They’re already scared about my changing course.”

“Perhaps you could be responding to Porky,” Alen suggested.

“Worth a try.”

* * *

After the afternoon break. Sam called the leaders of the group over. “Ed, Walt, let’s do a bit of a scout, over toward the pass. Maggie, you keep the wagons heading northwest. Point the wagons at that tall rock.” Sam pointed out the specific ridge on the horizon.

Ed and Walt exchanged looks. They seemed a bit nervous, but it couldn’t be helped. “Come on.” Sam turned Porky toward Crag’s Pass. Ed and Walt followed.

* * *

Porky gave a furious-sounding snort and stopped dead in his tracks. Sam pretended to kick his sides, while Alen told Porky to back up. Porky did what Alen told him to do.

“What’s goin’ on with that pig of yours, Sam?” Walt was just behind him.

“Reckon he smells something.” Sam dismounted and stepped in front of Porky. “What’s wrong, boy? Do you smell something?”

Porky snorted and backed up another pace. “Is it a crag?” Porky shook his head. “Is it water?” Porky shook his head again. “Another pig?” Porky moved forward, snorting several times.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” Ed glared down from his pig. “There’s no way that pig is that smart.” Ed dismounted and tried it with his own saddle pig. “Do you smell anything, Dusty?” Dusty, whose color lived up to his name, just blinked at him.

“Porky has saved my life a time or two,” Sam commented, fighting to keep a serious look on his face. “You might not believe him, but I’m not taking a chance. We’ll dismount here and climb up there to see what we can.”

Walt and Ed exchanged looks again. Sam stared them down. “You two do what you want. I figure being careful is the right way to go.”

* * *

“I’ll be …” Walt peered around the rock. “Them sonsa …”

Five riders were getting close to the pass Sam wanted to use. “Told you. Porky’s got quite a nose on him.”

“Let’s get back to the wagons and get some more guns.” Walt began scrambling back down. “That is some fancy pig you got there, Sam.”

Sam grinned. “He knows the desert.”

* * *

Sam took a drink from his canteen, then peeked over the rocks. He had the other men set up along a ridge line, then got his crag rifle and moved off to the left of the main group. He took off his hat, pulled down the screen, then replaced it on his head. The cameras in the hatband gave him good night vision. The image projected on a screen that folded down from the brim of his hat. The camera built into the stock of his rifle would project a target circle on the screen as he aimed the weapon. It was darn useful but couldn’t be used where people could see.

Sam knew that these men had come from the Gap and after having the baron’s bullyboys try to shoot him in the back he wasn’t minded to give them any more chances than he had to. The problem was that they looked like they might be a bunch of crag beast hunters. “You sure?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” Alen replied. “They were sent to find you. One of them just asked how much farther they should scout. The leader wants them to travel a few more hours to make sure that there’s no other pass you can use that will leave you enough water to get to the capital. The first one thinks you have already passed that point.”

That was enough for Sam. It might not be the fairest fight he’d ever been in, but he fired anyway.

* * *

Walt and Ed had not heard the conversation. They didn’t have Alen to amplify and clean up the sounds. They had good reason to suspect that these were the baron’s men, but not proof. They hesitated while Sam reloaded his rifle and the men below reacted.

Walt stuck his head up to better see the situation in the moonlight and was almost shot for his trouble. However it had started, the fight was on now. He and the others returned fire.

They were under cover and the men below were exposed. It was a one-sided battle.

* * *

Walt spat on the ground and glared at Sam. “Why the hell did you start shooting? We don’t know they were working for the baron.”

Sam didn’t know how to answer. He knew they were working for the baron or at the very least for the ambushers at Dover’s Gap. They hadn’t mentioned the baron. It was possible, he guessed, that they were just part of a group of bandits. All five men and three of the pigs were dead, but two pigs had run off.

He glared back at Walt. “If those pigs go back to Dover’s Gap, the gang waiting there will know something happened. If we’re not through Crag’s Pass before they figure out what, you won’t have to worry about it ‘cause we’ll all be dead. Let’s get back to the wagons and get moving.”

* * *

“Keep ‘em moving.” Maggie just shook her head. She’d tied her hair back but loose curls still bounced. “I dunno, Hiram. All he says is ‘keep ‘em moving.’ I’m getting sick of this wagon.”

“We got through the pass, so he’s all right with me.” Hiram had some suspicions about Sam but he didn’t much care about them. He’d seen crag hunters before and Sam didn’t have quite the right look. That coat and the hat, they weren’t natural. Not only was the coat too white, but it seemed to shed dust and dirt. So did Sam’s black hat with the funny hatband. Sam’s pig had to be the smartest pig in the world and that fancy pistol rig he carried … well, maybe it could be made in the east but Hiram wouldn’t bet on it.

There were old tales about the badlands. They told about voices out of nowhere and a magic place that killed you if you got too close. If Sam had found his way into Demon’s Rock, he was right to hide it. Some folks were kind of nervous about that sort of thing.

As to why Sam was pushing things, Hiram figured he knew that part. If Sam was right about where the five men they’d killed came from, the wagon train had every reason to move fast. Two of the pigs had run off, after all. It made sense that those pigs would head for the last place where there were people to take care of them. It all made pretty good sense if you started with the notion of ambushers in Dover’s Gap. That was the part that was sticking in everyone’s craw. No one wanted to admit that there had probably been ambushers in Dover’s Gap.

But Hiram remembered the fight in the bar. Sam had reacted first, before Walt or Ed—who could see Smiley and Tom come in. Somehow, he’d known before anyone else. If Sam could know that, he could know about an ambush in Dover’s Gap. No one else accepted why Sam was pushing so hard, but Hiram did. They needed distance before the Dover’s Gap gang realized what had happened if they were to avoid being caught in the desert.

Hiram took a sip from his canteen. “Miss Maggie?”

Maggie looked over at him. “Yes?”

“Seems to me that if you’re going to hire somebody to lead you, you ought to follow him.” Hiram sneaked a glance over at Maggie. “That, or you shoulda kept your money.”

* * *

“Sam, your transmissions are losing signal strength.”

“What does that mean?” Sam subvocalized.

Alen explained. While the transmitter at the Homestead could reach him, the smaller transmitters placed behind his ear and Porky’s, even the transmitter in Porky’s saddle were only strong enough to reach a few miles. The last repeater station he had placed was on the far side of Demon Face ridge. Even with the digitalized signal and redundancy it was unlikely that Alen would be able to receive his or Porky’s signals for much longer.

“I can talk to you, but I’m not going to be able to hear you much longer,” Alen said. “Not until you get more of the sensor net up.”

“Damn.” The wagon train had moved out of range of the sensor net and there was no way Sam could take off on his own to place more sensors and repeaters, not with all these people depending on him. They were already looking at him and complaining about the pace, except for Hiram. Hiram just kept on moving, doing what Sam told him.

Most of the others threw suspicious looks at him and complained about rationing the water. The exception was Maggie. Maggie threw him a look now and then, but it wasn’t suspicious. It was as though she hadn’t made up her mind yet.

* * *

Maggie licked her dry lips. She was driving the lead wagon this shift. There wasn’t a bit of shade this side of the hill. It was nearly time for a rest, but they needed to get to the east side of this bit of ground before they could rest. Anything to help block the sun. She looked ahead, and saw Sam waving his hat from the top of the hill. “Demons, I hope he’s found water, Hiram.”

Hiram looked up, grabbed the wagon’s cover and stood on the seat so he could see farther. “Maggie! Maggie, I see green.”

The draft pigs grunted and oinked and moved a bit faster.

They crested the top of the hill and started down. The line of green trees along the Gilden River was the prettiest sight Maggie had ever seen. “We made it, Hiram.” She blinked back tears. “We made it.”

* * *

“I understand you’re here to pay taxes?” The wiry, little bald man in the traditional frock coat of a royal courtier grinned merrily. “We approve of that here.”

Maggie grinned back. The little fellow’s attitude was infectious. She motioned Walt and Ed forward. They lifted the heavy sacks of gold onto the counter.

The little fellow blinked. “What’s this?”

Maggie felt her brow wrinkle in confusion. “Gold. Isn’t that all right?”

“Well, it’s not the usual way,” the clerk confessed. “But I don’t think it’s against the rules.”

Sam leaned on the counter. “What’s the usual way?”

“A bank draft from one of the city’s banking houses is more common.” The little guy grinned again. “That may be because very few people have gold or silver, especially bags of it. Ah, I assume you’re not here to pay the taxes on a single farmstead. What are you here to pay the taxes on?”

“The free city of Torton,” Walt told him.

The clerk motioned a boy over but didn’t bother to whisper his instructions. “Run quickly to the exchequer’s office and inform His Grace that the representatives of Torton are here to pay their taxes in person. With rather a large amount of gold.”

Shortly after that things started happening in a big way. The gold was taken, weighed and assayed. A receipt was produced, as well as tea and scones for the whole party. They found themselves in the exchequer’s private office and spent a fairly pleasant three hours discussing the needs of Torton and where they might best acquire the things they needed.

When they left they each had a little sheet of paper that they were to show to the city guards or anyone else that seemed overly officious. There was a rather larger piece of paper with gold inlays that reaffirmed Torton’s status as a free city, responsible only to the king.

* * *

“Wow!”

Maggie’s eyes were shining. Sam grinned. Gilden was a wonderland. There were fancy restaurants and theaters, even an art gallery. “Reckon we ought to have a night out, Miss Maggie? Get dressed up all fancy and see the sights?”

Maggie looked up at him. “Reckon we should, shouldn’t we?” She looked back at Hiram. “You might want to close your mouth, Hiram. Unless you’re trying to catch flies.”

Sam laughed. “Well, I can’t blame him. I haven’t see a place like this since … in years.”

Darn, Maggie thought. Just when he was about to say something about where he came from, he quit. She was beginning to wonder if Sam would ever loosen up a bit. “Well, let’s enjoy it while we’re here. Tomorrow is soon enough to start looking for supplies.”

* * *

“Wow!”

Maggie smiled. “Oh, you like it?” She turned around slowly, showing off the deep green velvet dress. “I was really happy to find something that fit so well.”

Sam’s eyes glittered. “Yes’m. It sure does fit well.” He held out his arm. “Shall we?”

Maggie placed her gloved hand over his. “Oh, yes.”

The evening was magical. The latest play, followed by dinner and dancing. Sam seemed to lose his rustic accent a little more with every hour that passed. The restaurant was rich in eastern hardwood shipped up the Gilden River, with real lace doilies on the table and fine plates made of porcelain. The glasses were made of real glass.

By the time they got to the dancing, Maggie felt like she was the queen. The dance hall had a twenty-three-piece band with horns, guitars, drums, and a piano. Finely dressed ladies and gentlemen, some of them hired by the dance hall so that everyone would have someone to dance with, circulated through the room. The drinks had real ice shipped down the river from the north.

Then, as she and Sam made a turn of the dance floor, she saw someone she’d hoped was left far behind them. “Uh oh.”

Sam looked down at her, brows creased. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t look, or at least don’t be obvious about it. But I’m pretty sure that’s Baron Wright.”

“Apparently so.” The last of Sam’s western accent disappeared. “There is little, I fear, we can do about it at the moment.”

Maggie was shocked, just a bit. He spoke like a noble from the southeast, all clipped and refined with their overly proper diction. Then Sam seemed to realize what he had said. He grinned in embarrassment and looked down at his boots. “Sorry, ma’am,” he muttered, the western style of speech fully back now. “I used to talk like that a long time ago. Highfalutin’ and all.”

* * *

While Maggie and the others were getting supplies for the town, Sam had some business of his own to attend to. The steamer captain was agreeable to a meeting. “What can I do for you, Mr. Martin?”

The steamer was just as he had described them to Alen, with great big paddlewheels on either side. Alen insisted that was a wasteful method of using the steam engine. Sam was going to change that or at least try to.

“Actually,” Sam answered, “it’s what I can do for you. I have drawings for a device called a propeller…”

The captain had been polite, but not enthusiastic. So had the smithy and the dyer, when he approached them with methods for improvements. It was proving a lot harder to give away advances in technology than he had expected, especially when you couldn’t explain where you had learned about it.

* * *

“Mr. Martin. Mr. Martin!” It took Sam a moment to realize that he was the one being called. He wasn’t used to his new last name yet.

“Yes? What can I do for you Mr… . ?”

“Carstairs. Professor Andrew James Carstairs. It’s about your propelling device.”

“Not mine, Professor. A fellow told me about them back east.”

“That can’t be. I’m just up from the coast. They don’t have anything like you described to Captain Twain.”

Sam pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead. “Gee, Professor. Do you think the fellow was lying to me?”

The look he got made it clear that Sam’s famous ability to bluff was working as well as ever.

“Young man!” Sam doubted if Professor Carstairs had five years on him. “Do not toy with me. That propulsion device is years beyond the state of the art. You must tell me where you acquired those drawings. I insist.”

Sam looked at the pudgy little man. “Mister, the only things I must do are live and die someday.” Then he turned and left, silently cursing. The one thing he didn’t want to do was attract attention to himself.

* * *

Sam noticed the question in Maggie’s eyes over the next few days. He wished he could talk to Alen about it and was surprised to realize how much he had come to depend on the impersonal analysis of the AI. Finally, on a walk though the botanical gardens, he told her.

“I was born Lord Samuel Richard Merchantson, son and heir to the baron of Feld in the kingdom of Candis. When I was seventeen there was a dispute over the ownership of the barony. A cousin of my father’s from Laris claimed that the barony was his. We could have gone to the king’s court, but went to war instead. We lost, and fairly badly. I was made a slave and later escaped. I stole a pig and headed west. Since I was already a wanted man, I didn’t worry too much about which side of the law I was on.”

Sam shook his head. “I did some bad things. Anyway, almost a year ago, now, I was living in a little town on the edge of the badlands. Somebody recognized me. The sheriff locked me up but the town didn’t have a jail. They stuck me in a tool shed. That night I busted out of the shed, stole Porky from the livery stable I’d been working in and ran into the badlands.

“They chased me and then they stopped. I didn’t realize they’d stopped till I was in a little valley. I had managed to slip into Demon’s Rock.” He explained the rest of it. Who Alen was and how Porky was so smart. Then he told her why he had told her.

“While I was in the valley, I realized that the tech from before the attack needed to be brought back to the world.” Sam shook his head. “The things Alen can do, the things our ancestors could do … you wouldn’t believe it. But I couldn’t just invite people into the valley. There’d be a war. Besides, would you really want Baron Wright to be the one who ended up owning the Demon’s Rock homestead? That’s how I knew about the men in the Gap; Alen told me. I’m pretty sure it was Baron Wright and I don’t think he’s given up.

“I’m blind on this side of Demon’s Face Ridge, Maggie.” Sam stopped a moment and studied her face. She was sitting quietly, absorbing it all, but didn’t look as surprised as he’d have thought she would.

Her fingers tapped the railing they stood by. “So, what you need to do is leave us here, right? Head out early and scout.”

Sam nodded. He had two repeaters left in his gear but to do any good he was going to have to find high places to put them. Then he was going to have to go back to the valley to pick up some more gear. He wanted to leave Porky here with her and when he got the link set up Porky would be able to nod and shake his head to direct the wagon train back to Torton.

“I’ll try to put up sensors and repeaters on this side of the ridge and keep the baron’s bullyboys busy. But you’ll have to keep the wagon train together and keep them following Porky.”

“Let’s go get Hiram, Sam. He’ll need to know.” Maggie grinned. “I think he knows some of it already. Or suspects some of it, at any rate.”

* * *

“Brownie, you’re the dumbest pig on the face of the earth,” Sam muttered. Actually, Brownie was a pretty good pig but it didn’t have the AI whispering in its ear. Nor was it as bright as Porky or as flexible. The brown racing pig Sam had bought was well configured with a fine pedigree. It was also as fast as he had been promised, but compared Porky, Brownie was as dumb as a rock.

On Porky, Sam would have had more than transportation; he would have had a helper. Sam looked at the chimney rock sticking out of the desert. With Porky, he could have tossed a rope over that finger sticking out on the right and had himself an elevator ride to get started. Instead, he pulled out the pitons he’d had made in Gilden. It took several hours to climb the rock and place the sensor. He hoped it would be worth it. If what Alen had told him held true, from here the repeater could pick up Porky in Gilden.

Sam took of his hat and wiped sweat off his face. “I hope this does it.” He listened. Good. Sounds that were typical in a stable. He had contact with Porky. Now for contact with Alen.

* * *

Two days later he managed to get Brownie about halfway up Charley’s Mesa, then the darn pig wouldn’t go any higher and Sam had to climb the rest of the way. But that put him in contact with Alen and in better contact with Porky.

“All right, Alen. Next time Hiram grooms Porky, have him give the signal to start moving the train back home. And build more repeaters. I’m headed home as quick as I can get there.”

Sam had the net set up as well as he could with what he had available. It was time to head for the valley and pick up more equipment.

* * *

“Porky says it’s time to go.” Hiram leaned over and whispered it to Maggie at dinner that night.

Persuading the rest of the group that they should leave without waiting for Sam got to be interesting. As well, it gave Maggie a pretty good idea of what people thought about Sam. She wasn’t all that happy with what she found.

Walt was wondering if Sam had run out on them. Ed thought they should wait for him to get back and Dan figured they had already spent too much time waiting on the desert bum.

“Well, we can’t stay here forever.” Maggie stood and looked around at the men. “I want to get home and get back to normal. Sam can catch up with us. He knows we need to get back, and you know how much he thinks of that pig. He’ll be along as soon as he can.”

Walt nodded. “I’ll be glad to get home, myself. We can leave Sam a message.”

“I’ll be sure and do that, Walt.” Maggie grinned. By this time, Sam was probably riding hell for leather for his valley and more equipment. Meanwhile, the wagon train had grown rather larger than they’d planned, because of the increased price of gold in Gilden. It would take a few days to finalize the arrangements and packing, not to mention find and hire a few more drivers for the wagons they’d had to buy.

* * *

“It’s about time they got moving.” Sam put the new saddle on Brownie’s sleek back. “If I had a little more time, I’d have you give this idiot pig a transmitter.”

“There was a lot to do,” Alen pointed out. Brownie shied and reared at the AI’s voice. That was the reason Sam hadn’t had a transmitter implanted in him. One day in the valley just wasn’t enough time for a pig to get used to Alen’s disembodied voice. Especially not one as high-strung as Brownie.

Sam calmed the dratted pig. “Well, at least the new saddle gives me more range. Now I need to get back out there. What’s the latest you have on Baron Wright’s bullyboys?”

“So far he appears to be sticking close to Demon Face Ridge.”

“I’m a bit surprised by that. It’s just not in his nature to let go of a fight.”

“It does make a certain amount of sense, Sam. If he is unaware of the sensors, he has no way of knowing his movements are being observed. At the same time, if he wanders out into the desert without knowing the precise location of the wagon train, he could easily miss them, in spite of their slow progress.”

In spite of everything Maggie could do, the wagon train was moving slowly, giving the baron plenty of time to set his traps. The train was winding its way through the desert on a course that would let it head for either for Dover’s Gap or Crag’s Pass. They weren’t sure yet where the baron’s men would concentrate.

* * *

“Another six are arriving at Crag’s Pass.” Alen’s voice was more clipped than usual. “The train is safe so far.”

Sam had spent two weeks riding like a madman, setting up one repeater station after another. He’d been dividing his time between that and sniping at the bullyboys in Crag’s Pass, doing everything he could think of to convince the baron that he was trying to clear them out of there so the wagon train would have a clear path. “I’m going to run out of luck one of these days, Alen.”

“Apparently, Baron Wright is convinced. He’s with this group.” The plan appeared to be working. Every time Sam hit the pass, they sent more men. Two days before he had made the decision and directed the supply wagons to Dover’s Gap.

“No imagination. Should we hit Crag’s Pass again?” At Alen’s confirmation, Sam dismounted and led Brownie off the trail. He tied the reins so that the idiot pig would stay in the shade. Climbed up to a good position and started sniping at the men in the pass. They returned fire and Sam watched where their rounds were landing. He kept up his sniping until he was drawing quite a bit of fire, then slipped away and went back for Brownie. “Any idea what’s going on over there?”

“It appears that they are convinced that you or someone is desperately trying to force them out of the gap.”

Sam shrugged. “What does Dover’s Gap look like, Alen? Is all this mess working?”

“Approximately the same as it looked the last time you asked. Yes, the plan appears to be working. There is a small force at Dover’s Gap. Only a few men, so it appears that force is designed to either simply deny the supply train access to the pass or delay them while the main body of men returns.”

* * *

Sam was well on his way to Dover’s Gap when the AI reported that there was new activity at Crag’s Pass. They appeared to be sending out scouts.

“What the hell is going on down there?

“Uncertain. They may simply be trying to push you farther away from Crag Pass or they could suspect something of our plan.”

“How far is the train from Dover’s Gap?”

“I estimate six hours.”

“How many people with the baron?” If the baron had snapped to the fact he was being watched they were in trouble.

“Forty-three not counting the scouts.”

Sam rode for Dover’s Gap, wondering if Wright had figured out the plan.

* * *

Sam crept up the rocks near Dover’s Gap. He found a rock that gave him good view of the position the baron’s men had taken. Then he waited for the supply wagons to come into sight.

He heard them before he saw them and so did the baron’s bullyboys. Four of them moved into positions that hid them from the train, but exposed them to Sam. The fifth man got ready to ride for Crag Pass and get reinforcements.

“Alen, give Porky the signal to stop.” Hiram had apparently been waiting for it because he pulled up immediately. The wagons stopped. Sam could hear the argument through his phone. It was almost loud enough to hear over the desert sands.

One of the men signaled the rider and Sam couldn’t wait any longer. “Damn.” He shot the rider’s pig. He hated to do it but the one thing he couldn’t afford was to have word reach Crag Pass that they had been tricked again.

The pig screamed. The rider hid among the rocks and tried to determine where the shot had come from. Sam heard Maggie telling Ed, “I told you he’d be here.”

Sam laughed. Then he shouted. “We have you cut off and surrounded. Throw away your guns and put up your hands.” It took some persuading and a few more warning shots but the baron’s men were in a losing position and they knew it. All five threw down their guns and walked toward the train. Ed and Walt looked to be having a fine time tying them up.

Sam climbed down and waited. Once they got here, they’d get the water barrels filled and the supply train on its way.

Maggie jumped off the wagon and landed so close to Sam that she nearly knocked him down. “Sam. Sam. I told them you’d be here.” Then she threw her arms around him and Sam forgot about filling water barrels for a few moments. He had other things on his mind. And, for a change, his hands were full of something besides a gun.

Finally he pulled away. “Listen up, folks. About seven hours ago the baron was at Crag Pass with forty gun hands. I figure he’s still there but I don’t know that for sure. It took me four hours to get here from there, so at most he is five hours away from us. We need to get the barrels filled, the pigs watered, and out into the desert where we’ll be hard to track. In case anyone is wondering, it is the baron. I saw him this time.

* * *

Maggie set the tray that held four cold beers in the new glass mugs down on the table. They had lost the baron in the badlands and gotten back to town. Now came the hard part, telling Walt and the rest of the council about Alen. They would need their help to keep it quiet as long as they could. After discussing it with Maggie and Alen on the trip home, they had decided that they would use Torton as what Alen called a “test bed” for reintroducing firster tech. Sam was nervous about the decision.

“Ed, Walt, I have something I need to tell you.” They took it well. There was some of the old superstition left, but not that much, at least not when there was a good explanation. Maggie had even pulled out the phone he’d given her and let Alen tell them some things about the Demons and what they really were.

“Not that much of the old beliefs left, Sam.” Ed sounded a bit sad about it. “Some, sure. But mostly folk can’t afford to give up anything that can make their lives easier.”

“But Sam’s right about the rest of it, Ed.” Walt picked up the phone like it was some rare jewel. “This is the kind of wealth that folks will kill for and kill to keep others from having, too.” They looked at him and he looked back grim. “Don’t think the king would be any more likely to let Sam keep Demon Rock than the baron would be. Or the emperor back east, either. You’ll have to go with your original plan, at least partly. Introduce stuff that people could have made, like those six-shooters on your hip. Keep the rest of it secret.”

Sam was nodding. “Alen says he can come up with some equipment to make mining easier.”

“Could we make a cache of stuff out in the badlands for Sam to have discovered?” Ed asked. “Not at Demon Rock, but somewhere else. A cave somewhere that had books and some other doodads in it. Let it leak out that that was where the stuff came from.”

Maggie shook her head. “It might work for a little while but not for long. It would focus attention on the badlands, then people would start thinking of Demon Rock, anyway.”

“Analysis indicates that that will happen, regardless,” Alen interrupted. “Hiram put it together with little difficulty. Others will. I have been giving warning before firing on trespassers, as I was instructed to do. That is the basis of the legends about Demon’s Rock. When tech starts appearing in the area of the badlands, others will reach the same conclusion. Certainly, they will become curious enough to trespass on Sam’s property.”

Sam suddenly realized that he hadn’t updated Alen’s instructions about how to deal with trespassers. Nor was he really sure how or whether he should.

“Baron Wright is entering town,” Alen announced. Sam and Hiram had climbed up on the roof of Maggie’s place and installed a sensor pack the night before.

Sam shrugged. “He can’t hurt the town, or at least can’t claim he owns it. Not with that.” Sam pointed at the gold-sealed proclamation from the king. Maggie had bought a fancy frame for it and it hung in a place of honor. More business got done at the bar than got done in Walt’s dinky little office. As well, Maggie had been acting mayor ever since her father died. The election next month would probably just confirm that.

“I wouldn’t be too sure of the first part of that.” Ed said. “He’s an angry man. As much as a massacre would hurt him in the capital, I wouldn’t put it past him.

“How many people does he have with him, Alen?” Sam asked. The pocket phone that had been sitting on the table had disappeared into Maggie’s pocket but that didn’t affect Sam.

“Six plus the baron.” Alen told Sam and Sam told the others.

“Well, at least this time he’s coming to talk,” Walt said.

* * *

“Well, you folks sure put one over on me this time.” Baron Wright’s jovial expression was marred by the coldness in his eyes.

Sam smiled back with equally false joviality. “Well, that’s the way it goes.”

“I take it you’ll be riding off into the sunset now? Back into the badlands, hunting crag beast?”

“You know, I was thinking on that very thing,” Sam drawled. “Much as I like hunting crag beast I’m considering a new line of work.”

“Oh? What would that be?”

Sam looked from the baron to Sims. “I thought I might run for sheriff.”

* * *

The Necromancer in Love

Written by Wil McCarthy

Illustrated by Karl Nordman

The young necromancer is a blight on the social landscape, because when his sweetheart meets with an untimely interruption of service (don’t they all? don’t they always?), he’s bound to do something the rest of us regret.

Class, listen. This is important. Put down your pencils, close your laptops, shut off your recorders and listen; we’ll get back to histopathology later. The information in this class can be misused, and we need to talk about that.

The necromancer is a person much like yourselves. Naive, desperate, he clutches at emotional straws while he sobs on his girlfriend’s blouse. She isn’t dead, he thinks, and there’s more than just denial in this thought. It’s the mitochondria, right? The power plants of the cell, these little bastards are obligate aerobes; a few minutes without oxygen will unravel them permanently.

All right, there are tissue-specific differences. Some tissues can be totally ischemic for hours and recover on reperfusion. Sadly, the brain and heart are not among these tissues, and when the power plants go belly up they also spill proteins that can trigger apoptosis, or cellular suicide. But executing that program also takes energy which, under the circumstances, the cell doesn’t have. The influx of sodium and calcium ions, coupled with the efflux of potassium ions, has also caused neurons to swell but not burst. It’s a bit of a mess.

But aside from these niggling problems the cell—every cell—is intact! The nucleus, the cytoskeletal transport networks, the endoplasmic reticulum dripping with ribosomal protein factories … That stuff won’t rot for at least a day, even at room temperature. It isn’t dead at all, any more than a city in the grip of a power failure is dead. Mitochondria take in oxygen, glucose, and a low-energy phosphate molecule called ADP. You’ve all had Biochem 210, right? You know mitochondria exhale CO_2 and a high-energy phosphate called ATP, which is fuel for everything else. If you don’t know that, I suggest you start making alternate career plans.

Anyway. Everything else in the body is idled, sleeping, waiting for the kiss of energy to return it to life. And it will, vows the young man. By all he’s ever held dear, it will.

Young, naive, he begins with the basics: a bath of the fuel itself in a saturated solution of lactated ringers. Smelling like gatorade and beef bullion, it flows over that beautiful face, that beloved body now stripped of its tattered clothing. When she floats, as of course she must, he ties her down with weights.

And nothing happens. Hear that? Nothing happens; this thin, slimy broth doesn’t penetrate her openings, doesn’t pierce her skin and flow through. How could it? Reluctant, torn with anguish, the young man violates her with tubes, forcing the stuff inside her. And still nothing happens, because the osmotic potential of the ATP is insufficient to drive it across a trillion cell membranes.

Finally, he begins to really think about the problem. He pressurizes the tank to three atmospheres, then backs it off slightly when its groaning and creaking start to freak him out. Gut-shot with a popped rivet, he’ll be of no use to her, right? Next he switches on an ultrasonic cleaner, hoping the combination of vibration and pressure might force the ATP across some membranes.

Again nothing happens, but it’s a different sort of nothing. Are there subtle changes in her pallor, her rigor, her elan vital? Does she look perhaps a bit less like a doll, more like a living creature in some deep, deep coma? Through the murky white fluid it’s hard to say, and even in his raging grief he knows better than to trust his own judgment. He knows that much, yes.

But he’s encouraged, and from where the rest of us are standing, that’s a problem. No leash can hold him now.

For an hour he lets the potion work its way into her, and then he pops the tank seals and lifts her out. Apologizing, he hangs her from chains. First upside down, to drain the fluid from her lungs and stomach, and then in even less dignified ways, believing he must be thorough. There are so many places these chemicals don’t belong!

When it’s done he hoses her down with cold water and straps her to a table. The final touch: an electrical shock to kick-start the excitable membranes of the heart and nervous system. It’s not a gentle thing—two hundred joules, minimum, probably a lot more—and it leaves visible burns on her chest and forehead.

Does he really expect this to work? If you asked him, he’d certainly say so. “God, it has to. It ought to, yes. I’m not aware of any reason why it wouldn’t.”

Why, then, does he shriek and pull away when she opens her eyes? Maybe it’s just the look on her face—of shock, of bewildered agony and mute, animal fear. Has every pain nerve lit up? Has he created some unthinkable biohell inside that mortal shell? Her own scream is silent, and though she gasps in a single breath, the muscles of her face soon slacken, their fuel supply … depleted. She only absorbed a few seconds’ worth. Not even long enough to lay down a memory of what’s happened here.

“Holy crap,” says the young necromancer, his heart thumping so hard he can hear it clicking wetly in his throat. He’s seen her sad, excited, sleepy, bursting with pride and elation. He’s seen her drunk and asleep and even dead, but until this moment he’s never seen her in pain.

He takes her cold hand, presses his cheek against it earnestly. Gasping, sobbing, his eyes spilling over with tears. “I’m sorry, babe. I’m so … I’m sorry.”

This is going to be harder than he thought.

* * *

In every case, this much is certain: the necromancer has medical training, like all of you, and unquestioned access to certain materials. He’s known well enough by his peers that he can move around without drawing attention, but not so popular that people randomly poke their noses into his business.

Maybe he’s flunked out of his residency for cutting too many corners, for doing too many things his own way. Some of you should be paying attention to this! If he were truly brilliant his teachers might have cut him more slack, but he’s a creature of passion whose intellect runs hot and cold, or flickers like an old neon sign. Determination can only take him so far, and when he falls in love—really falls, for the first time in his life—something has to give. Spilled dreams pile up at his feet; he can’t bear any further loss, or believes he can’t. Won’t try, at any rate, and that’s the problem.

Maybe he works nights as a coroner’s assistant and days at a biotechnology company. He really does live alone in a big house, or else in one of those spacious, unfinished lofts you don’t see much anymore. The kind that actually are converted industrial space, not mahogany fakes custom built for urban yuppies.

His hobbies include sculpture and metalwork, and usually some kind of hands-on electrical thing. Could be ham radio, could be Tivo hacking, could be some exotic breed of digital photography. Thermal IR, Kirilian auras, something like that. Everyone has neighbors, everyone is seen, but this man’s neighbors are accustomed to strange comings and goings, to loud noises and flashes of light.

“Oh, that guy,” they say. “Yeah, he’s always doing stuff like that.”

Truthfully, whatever unease they feel about it is tempered with admiration and even envy, because the young necromancer is exactly the sort of rugged, handy, easy individualist every American is supposed to be, but few actually are. Sometimes he makes even his teachers feel inadequate, which is part of his problem. Eccentric and smug—not a good combination. Again, yes, some of you out there should be paying particular attention!

Computer people would call him a hacker. Scholars would call him a dilettante. To soldiers he’d be “goofball” or “yardbird” or “wiseass,” and in politics or business he’d be a wildcard, a loose cannon. Not insulting terms, per se, but not trusting ones either.

Still. “He’s got a real pretty girlfriend,” the neighbors will tell you. “Must be doing something right.”

Yes, the girl is always pretty, always charming, always possessed of that peculiar mix of innocence and sexual precocity that no man can resist. Human nature, right? If she were dumpy and timid he’d get over it, but this one is the one; he’ll never do better, and he knows it.

Tragedies are always born of love.

* * *

It must feel strange to go out and leave her alone. His best girl naked, strapped to a table, not breathing! But he needs supplies, needs access to high-end equipment. Needs to show his face at work to avoid raising suspicion.

He’s cool about it, too, or he wouldn’t get far, and we wouldn’t still be talking about him. He nods to his colleagues, says a few words to them here and there, maybe not smiling but certainly not catatonic with grief. He passes muster; nobody spares him a second glance, even when he pulls a bacterial sample vial out of cryostorage, thaws it, throws a few bugs under the microscope and starts jabbing them with micropipettes, injecting God knows what.

Satisfied after a bit of chemical testing, he puts the engineered bacteria in a petri dish filled not with nutrient agar, but with a growth medium composed of living cells. You’re familiar? Yes? He tapes it shut, pulls it out through the glovebox airlock and slips it in his pocket, warm as any incubator. Rifling through cabinets, he pilfers drugs, needles, electronically operated valves, all sorts of things. He stuffs it all in a red nylon lunchbox and then, telling his disinterested coworkers he’s not feeling well, leaves early.

Before he goes home, though, he stops off at a medical supply store to pick up a few more items, things they don’t have at work or that he can’t just smuggle out under his jacket. A respirator, for example. A few liters of polyheme blood substitute tagged For Veterinary Use Only. An automated chest compressor we used to call the Pumper. Have you worked with those at all? Like a seat belt threaded through an electric laundry wringer. We see a lot less of them than we used to—part of the growing disillusionment with chest compression. Anyway, he gets more than he needs, much more than his revised plans actually call for. He’s partly impulse shopping, partly just making sure he’s ready for anything. He wasn’t a Boy Scout, but he does admire the ethic.

When he gets back home, his girlfriend looks exactly the same as when he left: cold, livid, extinguished. Shouldn’t she?

Grimly, he begins his work: harvesting the bacterial colonies, dissolving them in saline, injecting her with them. Crudely restarting her heart, her lungs, forcing the blood to circulate, to spread the pathogens around.

What are mitochondria, after all? Aerobic bacteria, swallowed by some larger cell a billion years ago and somehow, randomly, put to work rather than digested. And from there sprang all the plants and animals of the world, eh? All the amoebas and slime molds, all the fungi and protozoa.

Maybe we swallowed the wrong bug. Silly, fragile little things, they die without oxygen, but there are similar bacteria still alive in the world that don’t: the rickettsia, which burrow right into eukaryotic cells—living or dead—and set up shop. What if scrub typhus or Rocky Mountain spotted fever had its ATP production genes replicated ten times over? What if it found traction in a viable corpse? What if growth factors helped it multiply, spreading through all the cells of the body? Or most of the cells, or even some?

Only one way to find out, he thinks.

“Soon, baby. Just hang on a little while longer.”

* * *

Is there a soul, and if so, at what point does it depart the body? Can it be prevented? Chained? Pickled in place with formaldehyde? Make no mistake, we live in an Age of Horrors, where all kinds of things have become crudely possible. In thirty years time necromancy may be a staple of emergency medicine. There may be textbooks and courses in it, warning against the unintended consequences of this or that. How to preserve the original personality, how to ward off impulse dysplasia and silence the Hungry Ghosts, how to avoid unleashing a zombie plague upon the land … Death may one day take its place with “vapors” and “dropsy” and other quaint little disorders people simply don’t get anymore.

But we’re not there yet, hmm? Indeed, today’s education system errs on the side of suppression, of saying too little, of encouraging each young necromancer to believe he’s the first, the smartest, the only. And so we see the same patterns unfolding, again and again.

Don’t take notes, just listen.

Other things we know before we even meet him: he’s between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four. He plays chess but not football, although he’s usually strong enough, and often quite agile. He may well keep an online dream diary, and show a keen interest in lucid dreaming and dream control. As a child he was given to sleepwalking—a disorder which sometimes lasts into adulthood—and he probably still takes sleep medications of some kind.

He’s never homosexual, and rarely a smoker, but he has been convicted of, or pled guilty to, one criminal offense. Rarely two, for some reason. In more than fifty percent of cases, he also plays a musical instrument.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics home page logs fourteen instances of necromancy across the United States, mostly hidden away under “felony desecration of a corpse,” with a smattering of reckless endangerments and some panicky overtones of attempted bioterrorism. Not so many, you might say, but the trend is definitely up, with six more cases expected this year alone.

Other things we know about her: She’s between the ages of nineteen and thirty, though never more than two years older or seven years younger than he is. She’s probably blonde or redhead, although it may come out of a bottle. She looks good in a tight sweater, and has the sort of infectious laugh that makes people in restaurants turn around and look.

Typical quote from him: “No croutons, babe. They interrupt the texture.” Typical quote from her: “Because they shot him, sweetie.”

They’ve been dating for less than six months—past the third-date and eight-week barriers, but not long enough to see each other at their worst. The honeymoon is decidedly not over. Not yet. And that’s the problem.

* * *

Even an armchair medical sleuth can see the Achilles heel of the necromancer’s plan right away: rickettsia infections are easily transmitted. Through close (though rarely necrophilic) contact with his dear departed, the necromancer is almost certain to suffer the bite of a chigger, a flea, a body louse in need of a warmer host. He contracts the illness himself, yes, unless he’s taken steps to prevent it, or to treat it at the first sign of rash or fever or headache. And even if he somehow doesn’t catch it, she’s a carrier—a rich reservoir of the disease organism for whom a “cure” would be fatal. Or refatal, if you prefer.

So.

She sits up: groggy and confused. Gasps in a first uncertain breath, looks around her, looks at him. Tries to speak, and right away he can tell there’s something wrong. Her voice is slurred, her lips drooping, her words unintelligible. She looks like a stroke victim and sounds like a mentally challenged drunk.

Wheezing, she gets off the table and shambles toward the door, ignoring his calls, his cries, his imprecations. Even the iron grip of his hands, attempting to restrain her.

Sometimes she gets away. Sometimes she infects others, with a mix of symptoms that don’t occur in nature. Sometimes these other victims die right in front of their baffled doctors, only to rise again in an hour or two, like something out of a bad movie. Zombies, yes, the emerging contagion no one is talking about.

Don’t write this down. Don’t record this. You didn’t hear it from me.

In any case, one thing she doesn’t do is regain full consciousness. He grasps the reason, and communicates it to himself silently, in the voice of Scotty from Star Trek: “She needs more power, Laddie.”

You don’t know Scotty? All right, never mind.

The other thing she doesn’t do is protect herself against the rickettsia’s harmful effects, or against invading pathogens of any sort, or against the steady seep of her own hungry gut bacteria. How could she? As her immune system comes online the first thing it does is attack the pathogens keeping it alive. By the time he catches her, restrains her, straps her to the table for a thorough examination, he imagines he can already see the first signs of secondary infection, smell the first hints of carrion on her breath, feel the bruised-apple softness of injuries that will never heal. Acting in what he believes is her best interest, he’s managed to turn his beloved into a deranged leper.

Weeping, possibly even howling in despair, he shoots her up with broad-spectrum antibiotics and apoptosis inhibitors, and drowns her in iced saline.

Sometimes he stops there. Sometimes she kills him and eats him. Sometimes he succumbs to the infection and loses interest in earthly affairs. Love doesn’t always conquer all! But these halfway Harrys are no more noble, no less deranged than their brothers in sin, and this isn’t their story.

Our necromancer—damn him!—dries his tears, wipes his hands, straightens his spine and gets back to work.

* * *

The stages of grieving are anger, depression, denial, bargaining, and acceptance. Arguably, the necromancer experiences all but the last of these, all smooshed together into a single driving impulse: to do something about it. Our boy has had enough of failure.

In the icewater bath he can keep the body for a good long while—long enough to make some calls, do some web research, thumb through back issues of Nature, The Lancet, NEMS Kinematic Review and my personal favorite, the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, beloved of brain-death researchers everywhere. There are several overlapping problems in need of solution here; he needs a lot of information.

He puts in longer, more convincing appearances at work. He has to buy groceries, do laundry, pay bills. You think mad scientists don’t have bills to pay? He waits in line at the DMV, just like you.

He also manages, somehow, to charm away suspicion; the police never search his basement or his attic, the back room of his loft for the missing woman. A week passes, then a month, and finally the better part of a season. He falls into a routine of self-maintenance—how could he not?—and despite his best efforts he begins to forget the angle of her smile, the furrow of her brow, the exact lilting tone of her giggle. Memory is not a hard drive or a box of old photographs; it’s designed to show the past through the distorting lens of the present. In his dreams she smells of rot; her footprints are fetid black sponge marks along the floor. If he didn’t take sleep medications before, he does so now. If he had the scrip already, he triples his dosage and still wakes up screaming, sweating, his stomach in knots.

But he hasn’t been idle during this time. In the burgeoning literature of the nanotech industry he’s found whole classes of machinery powered by ATP, whole companies dedicated to supplying it in various ways. There’s even a mitochondrion-sized device called a Freitas cell that uses nanopellets of gadolinium—a radioisotope chemically similar to uranium, but lighter—to power an endless reconstitution of ADP into ATP. Tireless, robust, far simpler in design than the mitochondria they could reasonably be expected to replace. They’ll do.

For ten thousand dollars the necromancer buys a hundred trillion of these, suspended in a solvent called toluene in a little vial of brown glass. He does other things as well, which I won’t describe here for fear of spreading the memes in unnecessary detail. This is a warning, not a how-to session.

Long story short? Too late, yes, I know. But there comes a moment when she opens her eyes again. Looks at him, looks around her, feels the shackles holding her down. Remembers the moments leading up to her death, compares them against her current surroundings. Does the math.

“What have you done?” she asks him, with a cool, contemptuous anger. She speaks his name, then repeats the question.

Her voice is all wrong: strong yet oddly squeaky. She has no need to breathe. She could live a hundred years in a coffin without a single whiff of oxygen. Her eyes are wrong as well: too wide, too vivid, too glittery-cold. Her mind as sharp as a razor back behind them somewhere. If looks could kill …

“Darling,” he tries.

But her flesh is stronger, too. If she feels pain, she masters it, bursting her restraints or possibly wriggling out of them, heedless of the skin on her wrists and ankles.

Does he try to reason with her? Crack a joke? Pull a gun? Even if he fires it, even if he punctures the heart, it won’t stop her. She doesn’t need a circulation, either. Ironically, a silver bullet lodged inside her might slowly poison the tiny power plants. A lithium bullet would work even better, or any of hundreds of organic toxins, especially in the brain. It hardly matters at that moment, though, because he’s laid no real plans for putting her out of commission again. Not his sweet treasure! Not this time!

“I love you,” he says. “Look what I’ve done, look at all I’ve sacrificed. For you. For us!”

But what’s he really thinking? That they can get married, raise children? Are they even still members of the same species?

“Fool,” she tells him, striking him dead with a backhand swat. “How many times have I told you not to cling?” And then of course she breaks through the wall to begin her rampage. Hell hath no fury, indeed.

* * *

The arc of each necromancer’s tragedy seems preordained; even with differences as great as the similarities, the similarities are vast … and troubling. And I will ask each of you to consider this, and to look at your classmates and within yourselves for any symptoms of the disorder.

You are here for one reason: to help and heal and do no harm, so please believe me—especially you men, yes, are you listening? Believe me when I say that women don’t come back to you once they’ve left. It’s a problem mere science will never correct, and one that requires a bit of gentlemanly restraint. No slashing tires! No cheating death!

That’s all for now, yes. Read chapter six tonight, submit a summary in the morning, and never speak of this again, to me or anyone else. One day we’ll have the power to take on death with the finesse it truly demands, but I caution you: even then, the gift of love itself will remain fragile, and perhaps not so easily resurrected.

Sleep well for your exams. I’ll see you in the morning. Young man? Yes, you. Mr. Taylor, isn’t it? Please come with me. I’m afraid I have some bad news.

* * *

The Rest of Your Life in a Day

Written by Elizabeth Bear

Illustrated by Jennifer Miller

The tattoo artist was Yukako Kobayashi, and she was in her sixties or seventies—or possibly older. Her hair was skinned back in a bun; her cheekbones lifted like unfurling wings under button-bright eyes. She was tiny in her batwing sweater and leggings, scrunchy elf boots pooled at her ankles, and Matt was just barely thankful that she hadn’t opted for the Laura Holt hair to complete the outfit.

He was all for cognitive dissonance. Sometimes.

She didn’t turn her back while he undressed, except incidentally as she readied her machine and needles and the dishes of black iron ink. Matt had handled the depilation himself. She did glance across as he slid off his briefs, and said “Your glasses too, please.”

He pushed them up his nose with his thumb, reflexively, and caught himself with a short self-conscious laugh. He had come alone; his only family, his brother Kelly, was practicing with his band—which meant smoking some joints and drinking some beers more than actually playing any music, if Kelly’s bitching about his bandmates was anything to go on.

That was fine with Matt: he hadn’t been there when Kelly got his ink, and he would be damned if Kelly was going to gloat over the pained faces Matt was sure he’d make. And if he told him no, thanks, I’ll do it alone, he wouldn’t get his hopes dashed when Kelly said he’d come and didn’t show.

Naked, denuded, Matt sat on the edge of the bench, paper crumpling under his ass, stiff plastic denting beneath that. He could barely hear the street noise; easy to forget that New York was going about its business just the other side of the locked, shaded glass doors. Miss Kobayashi pulled on latex gloves—he hadn’t known they made them in such small sizes—and wheeled her work surface over. He watched her, deft and precise, a study in gray and black and white, and tried to breathe normally. The ink had an odor to it, chemical, not unpleasant. He wondered how it would smell mixed with blood.

“Lie down,” she said, in the same even tone she’d said everything to him since he and his archmage, Jane, came in to make the appointment. He did, staring at the ceiling. It was clean and interesting, hung with colored silks. The light was good, spotless and white.

Miss Kobayashi was a Mage, like Jane, like Kelly. Like Matt was training to become. He felt her iron rings through her glove when she patted his hip. As her hands moved over the tray, he’d seen them, lined with pale gold and set with black and gray coral. “Jane says you’re sworn chaste.” Her English was as American as her outfit, her voice younger than her age and light in tone. “That’s an unusually powerful offering for a young Mage these days.”

“I’m not a Mage yet.”

She showed him teeth like stained pearls. “You will be when I’m done with you.”

The way she said it lifted the hairs on his neck. He bit his lip, shut his eyelids. Anything Kelly could do, Matt could do … nearly as well. He needed the power. He had reasons.

“We start at the center,” she explained. Another quick pat, which might have been meant to soothe but left him twitching like a nervous bird. “The organs of generation, and then next time, the heart. You are—right handed? Then we finish with that. It will take a year and a day.”

He smelled soap, studied the ceiling as she washed him with impersonal competence. And then there was texture—coolness, a sharp pinch, the sensation of weight and stretching as she handled his genitals. He looked down; she’d locked a chromed steel, leather, and rubber cage around the base of his penis and scrotum. “Keeps the blood in,” she said. “Otherwise, at the first needle prick—like a turtle!”

Show a little faith, he almost said, but instead laid his head back on the table and tried not to feel the blood rising in his face. Or his penis. “If you need a break,” she said, “you tell me.”

First, she made him hard. With quick, sharp strokes of her hand, the glove catching on his razor-sensitized skin. He turned aside, embarrassed at how easily he responded to the casual touch of a woman three times his age.

“Do I have your consent, Matthew Patrick Szczegielniak?”

Point of no return. This was strength. This was armor. This was a weapon against the creatures who had left him alone in the world, except for Kelly—at first—and then later, when she had unofficially adopted them, Jane. Not that he remembered his parents. Not well, anyway.

“Yes,” Matt said, and made himself open his eyes. At first he thought with relief that only kind of tickles, but then he realized she was drawing careful curlicues over his groin with a magic marker.

The first stab was bad, sharp. The machine buzzed; he tightened his hands on the edge of the table and held on, breathing deep and slow, and the pain tangled and became complex. He’d been told to expect a floating sensation, but it was more than that. Oh, it hurt all right, but not as badly as he’d feared. In fact—

“Give me a second,” he said, and the needle came off his skin, blessed relief that nevertheless left him abruptly lonely. He realized how much he’d been feeling the vibration, down both legs and up to his solar plexus. His thighs trembled, his ass and abdominal muscles flexed. He curled up, on his elbows, and let himself gasp like an overheated cat. A thin slick of shining fluid covered his genitals, and he almost thought he saw something shimmer behind it. I can do this. I can do anything, if I want the reward bad enough.

And he wanted it. Jane would make him a warrior monk, she said. Like Galahad. All he had to do was get through this, commit himself to the order, keep putting his heart and body into the training and she’d make him what he wanted to be.

“All right,” he said. “I can do this.” And made himself lie back down.

After that, it went fine for a while. Once he called a rest and once she did, when he had lost track of what was happening and was just lying on his back, eyes closed, feeling the needles perforate skin. The sensations became warmer, rounder. Until she stretched the skin of his scrotum over a wooden spoon to make a smooth surface for the buzzing needles. That seared like a brand.

By then, it only made him harder.

The cock ring was, quite frankly, humiliating. Still, Miss Kobayashi was clinical, impersonal, and mostly did not try to engage him in conversation. So no, it wasn’t nearly as bad as Kelly had insinuated—but then, he thought Kelly had been trying to psych him out.

Big brothers. That bully streak was part of their charm.

He heard himself breathing, deep-chested gasps. Not just the pain of the needles, now; a rooted ache was building behind his testicles. And fire along his nerves, drawn as if with a pen—things flickered and moved in the corners of his vision. He felt himself observed, and cringed from it. There was no one here but the two of them.

He had the sudden crazy urge to thrust, to push himself into her hand, and lifted his feet a fraction of an inch. A spiked band of fear, of what the needles could do to him if he wasn’t still, tightened around his heart, and he mastered himself. The chatter of the machine stopped; she stepped back. “Matthew?”

And then the giggles hit, making his diaphragm shake while he stuffed his fist against his mouth and tried to keep still.

When he had himself under control, he peeked to see if Miss Kobayashi was glowering. She huffed approvingly and patted his hip, and he blinked to clear the smear of light haloing her small hands from his vision. A sigh of relief trickled out. “Sorry.”

“Perfectly normal reaction,” she said, and bent his penis to the left to get a better angle. The lines had to be gone over several times to make them dark. It was delicate work; too shallow and the ink would fade, too deep and it would scar.

Miss Kobayashi played no music while she worked, but bent close enough to his sensitive, fresh-shaven skin that he could sometimes feel her breath. He told himself stories to pass the time, and honestly, to distract himself from that aching edge of orgasm that was becoming an unrelenting pressure, and the way the world swam in front of his vision, the muttering voices he almost thought he heard.

The stories he used were fairy tales, the ones Jane insisted Matt memorize and Kelly scoffed at.

It was okay for Kelly to scoff; he could play an instrument. Matt had to make do with Bluebeard. Iron John. The Firebird.

That one was particularly good, especially the part where Tsarevich Ivan was chopped up by his wicked brothers.

And then Matt thought of the best one, and had a good fifteen minutes with the Beautiful Vassilisa and Baba Yaga, though he never managed to forget the scratch, scratch of the needles, or the way the electricity—the magic, it had to be—scoured him inside and out. Passion was power, and power was passion. If this is like this, I wonder how sex feels.

He remembered another fairy tale with the Baba Yaga in it, and the doll that Vassilisa’s dead mother had left her, that guided her through her captivity by her wicked step-family, and by the witch Baba Yaga too. Eat a little, and drink a little, and listen to my grief.

His mother had left him something too. Magic, and the Prometheus Club. And Kelly.

He almost didn’t notice when the needle stopped, when cool latex-gloved fingers encircled the base of his penis. He was somewhere else, focused entirely, watching the old witch fly with her iron mortar and pestle for a cart, sweeping away the dust behind. There was a pop, an appalling sudden easing—and Matt startled himself with a breathtaking, uncomfortable ejaculation that left him panting like an animal, hands clenched on the bench. “Shit,” he said, when he could speak for breathing.

“It’s okay,” she said. And she’d been ready for him, too; there was a wad of paper towels in her hand, which she left stowed inside the right glove as she snapped them inside out. God, was he that obvious? “That’s not a violation of your oath, I don’t think.” She dabbed delicately at the bloody skin with a pad of gauze, patting rather than rubbing. He winced. It hurt now—his testicles ached; his penis felt sandpapered—and there was nothing transcendent about this pain.

But there had been.

Miss Kobayashi clucked her tongue and stepped back, returning a moment later with a sheaf of mimeos and a tube. “Here are the care instructions. Here’s the cream—use it before you dress, and then again after you wash—and wash it as soon as you get home. And if it itches, either apply lotion, or slap at it. Don’t rub.”

“Yes, Miss Kobayashi.” Easier said than done, he imagined.

She gave him a sort of a smile. “Don’t forget your spectacles. I’ll see you next week, Matthew.”

* * *

When Matty staggered out of the tattoo parlor—there was a closed sign hung on the door, but it wasn’t like Kelly had forgotten how to find the place in two years—he looked just about as white and exhausted as Kelly had expected. And he walked right past Kelly, inward-turned, focused on his pain, on trying to move normally.

Kelly had been listening to Yngvie Malmsteen on his Walkman, half-tranced by the soar and the grind of the hard-driving sound. That was real magic. Matt’s fairy-tale crap, the Prometheus Club’s manipulations—those could not compete. Bards had always been the real mages.

Reluctantly, Kelly flipped the music off with his thumb.

“Hey, Matty,” he said, and Matt spun around, as light on the balls his feet as he was on the basketball court. Matt had gotten all the athleticism. Well, most of it. Some.

And then he saw Kelly and let the exhaustion show, and also his pleasure. “Oh, you came.”

“Sure,” Kelly said. “The guys were pissing me off anyway. They don’t really give a shit about playing, they just want to coast and pick up chicks. You want to get something to eat?”

“I could kill,” Matt said, after a delay as if he checked systems and was surprised to find himself hungry. “You got a place in mind?”

“Jane said we should come over.” Kelly indicated his wristwatch.

Matt nodded. “I don’t know that I’m up for a long visit, though.”

They walked side by side, Kelly limiting his stride out of consideration. “It went okay?”

He didn’t need to turn to see Matt blush. Scarlet, from the dimple of his collarbones all the way up. “Yeah,” he said. “Not too bad.”

“Well, all right then,” Kelly said. And stepped into the street to hail a cab. “Screw this. It’s your birthday. Let’s go in style.”

Matt paid for the cab, but it didn’t actually matter. It was all Jane’s money anyway. When he dug in his pockets, he unearthed the clutter that collected there—a matchbook, some steel washers and ball bearings, a packet of sesame seeds. Kelly more or less pretended not to know him until he sorted it out, which was a good trick when Matt kept handing him things.

She had said to come to her private apartment on the Upper East Side rather than the Prometheus Club ritual space on the Upper West. They walked in past the doorman—he gave them a little wink; they were regulars—but Matt hesitated and didn’t quite push the elevator button. “What’s that?”

Kelly squinted. He didn’t see anything unusual. But there was the usual susurrus of soft voices, the stones of the building awakened by a Mage’s residence and presence. They liked having someone to talk to. “You hear that? Already? It’s the apartment building. Talking to itself.” He cocked an ear. “Somebody on the third floor just brought home a new baby.”

“Is this normal?”

Of course Matt knew it was. But it was weird, Kelly remembered, suddenly hearing the city grumbling to itself when it turned over in its sleep.

“It’s just a little … early,” Kelly said, hoping Matt wouldn’t notice the hesitation. Damn, he thought. He’s going to be better at this than me, too.

Not that it really mattered. All Kelly cared about was the music, and Matt didn’t want anything to do with that.

“You know,” Matt said, as if he knew what Kelly was thinking, “there’s a version of Red Riding Hood where the wolf asks her if she’ll be traveling via the road of pins, or the road of needles.”

“So what’s that got to do with anything?”

“That’s us. Pins and needles. Music and stories. Two different ways to get there. Both of them involve things that can stab you through the heart.”

Kelly stared at Matt for a minute, and then leaned on the button again. “It ain’t magic if you don’t bleed,” he said, so softly he didn’t think his brother heard him.

* * *

Jane Andraste was slender, fiftyish, and lucent. Her iron rings were plated with gold and set with diamonds. She held herself like her spine was a string of pearls dangled in a casual hand. She opened the door for Matt and Kelly, releasing the smell of good cooking into the hall. “Boys!” she said, and tugged them down so she could kiss them both in turn, Kelly and then Matt.

Matt set her at arm’s length and grinned at her. “Could have been worse,” he said before she could ask, and blew her a kiss.

She blushed and waved him off. “Come in and eat.”

Jane was powerful in more ways than one, and as wounded as Kelly and Matt. Matt came into her apartment past framed photos of her husband and daughter, as lost to her as Matt and Kelly’s parents were lost to them.

Her husband was just dead—a heart attack, or some other peril of middle age. She didn’t talk about him much. Matt’s mom and dad were also dead, beyond recall, beyond reparation, casualties of the endless centuries of conflict between the Prometheus Club and the Fae.

But the Fae craved those with talent, and what they wanted, they took. And Elaine had been taken. Elaine was alive, a changeling in Faerie. And there was always the hope that they could win her back. Her, and all the others.

“Come in,” Jane said belatedly. “Sit, be well. How was your day, Kelly?”

He startled. He’d been focused on the middle distance, fingers moving idly on imagined chords. “Fine. We practiced. Wicked good.”

Her mouth thinned as she turned away. Matt heard clinking; she fussed in the kitchen and brought them Cokes in crystal tumblers. Matt toyed with his, amused; his-and-Kelly’s kitchenware ran more to McDonald’s Miss Piggy glasses. “You should come to Tuesday night circle,” she said. “We’re going to be starting a seminar on bardic traditions. It’ll be more use to you than rock songs.”

Matt ducked into the living room, looking for a little distance, but Kelly followed, and perched one ass-cheek on the arm of the sofa. Matt, hands folded around the glass to hide how they were shaking, chose a more sedate position.

“Shakespeare was an actor,” Kelly said, mouthing the words of the argument more to demonstrate his obduracy than because he had any illusions that he could convert Jane. “The bardic tradition is popular song, Jane. I can be useful to Prometheus on stage.”

Jane looked across Kelly, appealing to Matt for help. Matt ducked the gaze. He knew how much Kelly wanted that success, how badly he craved it.

The rotten thing was, Kelly didn’t have the gifts to be more than a mediocre musician.

“I’m starving,” Matt said, unsubtle. “What’s to eat?”

Jane hadn’t ever formally adopted Matt and Kelly, but she’d found out about them somehow. Through the Promethean grapevine, no doubt. Matt’s mother had been a Maga. And Jane had made sure they never wanted, and that there was always a foster home in some Promethean’s family. It had meant a lot of moving, but Matt didn’t mind—and when Kelly was old enough to live on his own, she’d found the two of them an apartment, which she paid for. Jane had always been there, constant.

Matt couldn’t stand to watch them fight.

His question broke them up, thank God. And she’d made roast beef and asparagus. And a birthday cake. And if Matt spent the entire meal shifting uncomfortably in his chair, she could think that it was because he was sore, and not because he couldn’t stop thinking, with squirrelly obsession, of the thunder of the needles against taut flesh.

* * *

A year and a day after Matty’s eighteenth birthday, Kelly sprawled on Matt’s bed, smoking an unfiltered Camel, watching his little brother dress. They were nearly twins—well, Kelly was taller and better looking, though Matty spent every minute when he wasn’t cramming for his classes or in circle at the gym, taking out his sex drive at the weight pile—but the light slid up and down the thumb-thick black bands on Kelly’s arm as he smoked, and one of Matt’s still showed bare, prickled from the elbow to the wrist only with fine sunlit hairs.

As promised, it was the only unmarked skin remaining between Matt’s collarbones and ankles, excluding his hands. Everything else was covered with dully glossy lines of black iron ink that reflected moving highlights as he pulled shirts out of the closet and piled them on the bedroom chair.

“You don’t have to be such a goddamned cram,” Kelly said, staring at the ceiling. A spider spun in the corner. He blew a smoke ring at her, but it faded before it went that high. “Semester’s over, man. Time to party a little. Even if you don’t screw around, you can still, you know, drink.”

“Not when I also have to learn magic,” Matt said. He gestured to a pile of books teetering perilously close to the keyboard of the TRS-80 on his desktop. “I just finished my finals, and Jane wants three pages on magia versus goeteia by Sunday. Besides, you’re sliding through on technicalities. One of us ought to use school to learn something. Since Jane is being nice enough to pay for it.”

“Magic,” Kelly said, “is all about the technicalities. Oh, god, Matty, don’t wear that. It doesn’t go.”

“This shirt?”

“It’s green,” Kelly said. “The pants are olive. Don’t do that.”

“Fine.” Matt threw the shirt on the closet floor. “It’s all gray to me.” Matty was colorblind.

“That’s why you have me,” Kelly said, amused, turning his head in the cradle of his arm. He drew a knee up, daring Matt to bitch at him for the Doc Marten on the chenille bedspread. But Matty just gave him that sidelong eyeroll and pulled a purple paisley long-sleeved shirt from the hanger. “How’s that?”

“Just wear the jeans, not those fucking painter’s pants.”

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke in my room,” Matt said, unzipping his fly and letting the trousers pool around his ankles. Kelly sat up, and didn’t manage to get his palm under the drooping ash before it pattered to the bedspread.

“Sorry.” But apparently it wasn’t even worth a dirty look. Matt was jerking his jeans over his tattooed calves with a series of short, concentrated tugs. “I’ve gotta get dressed, man. I’ll see you at the gig?” He held his breath, expecting the kid to blow him off. Although it wasn’t like he had, you know, a date.

“Yes,” Matt told him. “I’ll see you at the gig. Are you coming to my ordination?”

To cover that he’d forgotten, Kelly brushed it aside with the back of his hand. “No shit, I’d skip out on my baby brother becoming a Mage. But you’ll be too busy to notice me.”

Kelly didn’t let Matt see him smile as he went to spike his hair and change into his gig clothes. And he pretended he didn’t hear Matt muttering one of his ridiculous fairy tale chants under his breath as Kelly was leaving. Bluebeard, this time. Anne, sister Anne, who do you see coming?

* * *

Matt rested more or less at ease on Yukako’s work table, his right arm comfortably supported, as she etched a broad elaborate cuff over her black guidelines. When he shifted uncomfortably it was not from the needles but because he was hard. After the first couple of sessions, he’d figured out that that was just what his body had gotten tricked into thinking it was supposed to do when somebody started sticking needles into it. More embarrassing, he had the same reaction to the smell of Yukako’s shampoo and her skin, which haunted him at odd hours. He didn’t care if she knew about the erection. He just hoped she didn’t know that he thought of her meticulous needlework when he jacked off in the shower.

Thick scrolls hurt when the needles passed over his wristbones. He made a little huff of protest; she bumped his knee with her hip. They were old friends, now that her needles had knocked the pride out of him.

It was one way to study humility. It hadn’t worked on Kelly, though; if anything, he was more arrogant than ever.

“Matthew?” She was the only one who called him that. He loved it.

“Thinking about my brother.” He was well-trained now; he didn’t fidget and he didn’t shrug. “He’s got his first gig tonight. I’m going after the ceremony.”

“Is he any good?”

“God, no,” Matt said, and laughed. “He’s terrible.” She steadied his arm with her hand and kept working while he leaned down to smell the soap she said was green, to smell her hair, the ink, and the blood. “It’ll be weird not seeing you.”

“A year and a day. I’ll be at the ordination,” she said. She set the machine aside, tendons striping her narrow wrist. “Congratulations. You are done.”

The words hit him funny; he had to think them over for a minute before he understood what she saying. He felt strangely bereft.

“You’ll come back if you need touch-ups?”

“I’ll come back even if I don’t,” he said, and—greatly daring—touched her hair. He would have kissed her if he’d had the courage.

She chuckled, reaching for gauze and the vitamin cream. He didn’t look up, just took them and began doctoring her work.

“You’re a brave young man.” And then she ducked down, so her v-neck sweater hung away from her white turtleneck, and pecked his cheek with birdy indifference. “Take an old woman’s blessing, Matthew. Happy Birthday.”

“Thank you,” he said. He draped the gauze loosely over his lotion-slick arm. “I will.”

He buttoned his sleeve over the bandage and went directly to the ordination. The city hummed around him, the buzz of human traffic and the quieter conversations of steel and brick and cloth and glass and stones. They were comforting now, the conversation of old friends; he listened while he walked. You could never quite make out the words, but sometimes you could get a sense of personalities, or opinions.

Gargoyles, in particular, had opinions.

Like most of the rituals of the Prometheus Club, the ordination would be short and uncomplicated. Matt took the subway to the Upper West Side, rode a lift to the penthouse of a stately apartment building, and let himself in by tapping the code on the access pad beside the door. He wasn’t the first. A couple dozen East Coast Magi stood around the lobby, chatting amongst themselves and snacking on crudites and canapes, because everything tastes better in French.

There were polite and quiet greetings as he made his way around the room. A couple wished him happy birthday; one other poured him a drink. No one tried to take his hand, but Matt mostly kept it tucked in his pocket or wrapped around his wine glass anyway. They must have been warned in advance, because he and Kelly were the only ones with the ink. Which was fine with him. He liked being chosen. Special.

Eventually, Jane’s second, Felix Luray, emerged from the ballroom to throw open the doors. The crowd filtered from the antechamber with its stretched stark modern canvasses and ice-pale wood, and were received into a white tall chamber with an inlaid floor. The ballroom ran almost the length of the building, uninterrupted except for a few structural pillars that had been made to look elegant. Matt moved with the Magi, not quite anonymous in their midst. Yukako was already waiting; Felix appeared at Matt’s shoulder, his black, wavy hair slicked, his shoulders squared in a pinstriped suit that Matt suspected was navy, though to him it seemed charcoal gray. “It’ll be over in two ticks,” Felix said cheerfully, in habitually plummy tones.

“Said the bishop to the actress,” Matt answered, and smiled a little at Felix’s amused snort. “Felix, take my glass?”

Felix lifted it from his fingers and sipped what was left of the wine, while Matt made a face.

“You’re on, lad.” With a duck of his head, Felix effaced himself. Matt barely noticed him going. Goeteia—illusion—rather than real magic. But kind of charming anyway.

Matt walked forward, sidestepping between waiting Magi, and caught sight of the archmage, Jane Andraste. She wore an off-white tailored dress. She stood alone in the center of the room, her black hair piled up high, her skin powdered until it could not shine.

He wouldn’t glance over his shoulder to see if Kelly had come. He wouldn’t.

Kelly would not let him down this time. Nibble, nibble, like a mouse. “Matt,” Jane said. She held up her right hand; a black iron band, slightly concave in the center and flared at the edges, was pinched between her fingers.

Who’s that gnawing at my house?

He tried to say her name, and stammered. She grinned. “Matthew Patrick Szczegielniak, do you solemnly swear, avow, aver, and affirm that you will uphold justice in the service of humankind, that the Promethean flame of art and science may be evermore preserved in the furtherance of that service, and the sacrifice of the fire-bringer remembered?”

“I do,” Matthew said, and held out his left hand so she could slip the ring on his finger.

* * *

Kelly edged inside the door just in time to see Jane thread a black iron ring on Matty’s left hand, and heaved a sigh of relief. There. As good as his word, wasn’t he? He even heard Jane’s crisp, carrying voice pronounce his little brother Matthew Magus, and welcome him into the Prometheus Club.

Matt just kind of stood there, shoulders hunched, his head ducked so his bangs fell down over his glasses. Somebody really needed to talk to him about that mullet. And then other Magi surrounded him, patting his shoulders, offering congratulations, and Kelly glanced at his watch. He slipped between the others and waited until Matt looked up.

The smile the kid gave him was—oh, hell. Kelly could have made some flip comparison—saccharine enough to give him bladder cancer—but it was a pure sweet smile, sharp as glass, confident and adult and absolutely piercing. It was their mom’s smile. He bet Matt didn’t even remember enough to know that if he saw it in a mirror.

Kelly almost stepped back. Instead he reached out, squeezed Matt’s left biceps, and thumped him on the other shoulder so hard his glasses slipped. Matt leaned into it, though, beaming. “Man,” Kelly said, and meant it, “man, I’m proud of you.”

Matt just grinned wider. “Thank God that’s over, huh?”

Kelly winked. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s ditch this crowd and go buy you your first legal drink.”

* * *

The bouncer examined Matt’s license suspiciously—the only reason he had a license, as a New Yorker by birth and inclination, was because Jane had insisted he learn to drive—and ran a thumb across the birthdate before he handed it back. Nothing easier to fake than a New York driver’s license. They weren’t even laminated.

It was looking touch and go until Matt—suddenly remembering that he was ordained now, and allowed to use his magic once in a while, leaned on the man.

Not enough to be unethical. Just enough to help him make up his mind. He felt the click as the guy decided not to be a pain in the ass and smiled; all it had taken was a little pressure.

“Happy birthday, kid,” the bouncer said. “First drink’s on the house.”

“Thanks,” Matt said brightly, and followed Kelly inside.

The place hovered somewhere between hole-in-the-wall and dive, and was leaning crookedly toward the latter. Matt fiddled the buttons on his right cuff to make sure it was closed over the fresh tattoo. An infection at this stage of the game would be just the thing.

“Right,” Kelly said. “Can I get you a beer?”

Matt considered. He wasn’t about to get lit in this crowd. Not when he had to walk home with Kelly while Kelly was dressed up like a cross between a bargain basement Billy Idol impersonator and a West Village gay cruise. “Yeah,” he said. “Anything but Budweiser.”

Kelly made a face, but came back with two bottles of Coors and handed Matt one. They clinked; Matt drank from the neck and said, “I’ll get the next round.”

“We’re playing for beer,” Kelly said. “Drink up. Oh, there are the guys. I’ll see you after the set, all right?”

He was gone before Matt could clear the second swig of beer from his mouth to answer. It’s not like he could have said no anyway. He glanced around; the room was small and smoky, with a floor of broad splintery boards, but it was less than half-full and there were stools by the bar with a good view of what passed for a stage—a niche with a couple of klieg lights trained on it.

Kelly’s two band mates were shuffling equipment around. Matt thought about going over to help them, but his arm hurt, was sticky with lotion, and there were already three empty beer bottles by Deke’s foot. Matt shook his head, claimed that seat by the bar, and set about finishing his beer. He wanted at least part of a second one inside him before Irn Bru started to play.

He was going to need it.

Two girls tried to pick him up while he was sitting with his back to the bar. He waved them off, semi-politely. Legs crossed in a figure four, bottle resting in the crook of his knee, he recited Vassilisa the Beautiful to himself while he waited.

“Well,” said the old witch, “only remember that every question does not lead to good. If thou knowest overmuch, thou wilt grow old too soon. What wilt thou ask?”

He suspected that he was not the first Slav to have reason to be glad he’d never met the Baba Yaga in an elevator. On the other hand, he thought, fiddling with his concave iron band, he had a better chance of running up against her than your average Polack. And a better chance of getting eaten, too, unless the one he tripped over was the Polish one-chicken-leg version.

The two-chicken-leg version was prone to ethnic cleansing when annoyed by anything other than Russians.

That was enough to finish a beer on. And reach for the pretzels, too.

* * *

It was a pretty good gig. The crowd could have been better—there was Matty, sitting out there on that bar stool with a beer cradled in the bend of his knee like a parody Pieta—and you’d think he could look halfway enthusiastic. But the guys managed to get into the swing of the music, and two or three girls got up and danced, and that meant a couple of guys did too. They swung through a bunch of covers—a Ramones tune, a Billy Idol tune, some amped-up Zeppelin—and even kept people on the floor for the two original songs. Kelly drank another beer while Paul sang, and shook sweat from his hair as he grooved over the bridge.

Yeah, they kind of sucked. But they would get better. And there were enough people dancing and drinking that they might even get invited back.

One of the women was stunning, tall and black-skinned, a real Grace Jones type. She shot him a look over her shoulder, caught his eye, turned, swaying to the music, pressing her breasts together with her upper arms. That long look through her eyelashes.

Christ, too good to be true. He turned his head to check on Matt, to see if he’d seen the best-looking girl in the place coming on to Kelly, but his vision was blurry and all he saw was a bright blond head ducked down, turned away, as if Matt was dismissing one of the young women standing beside him.

Ah, Matty, it’s not worth it, Kelly almost said, and just in time remembered the microphone right beside his mouth. He bent over his guitar, easy chord progression, E-D-G-A, and pretended he didn’t see the woman running her hands along her hips, rubbing her dress up, as if she was imagining his fingers lifting the ruffled skirt, tracing the line of her thighs.

After the set was over, he went to her.

To his complete shock, she handed him a business card.

“Black Cat Talent? You’re an agent?”

“I’m your agent,” she said. “If you want me to be.”

He studied her face. Not kidding. “I’ll have to talk to the guys—”

She shook her head, put one finger to his lips. “No guys. Just you.”

“Oh, shit.” His own exclamation startled him. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. He slipped the card into his pocket furtively. “I don’t think—I mean, can I call you tomorrow? I need to sleep on it.”

Her brow furrowed in displeasure, but she nodded, a picture of a woman showing patience to a naive child. She handed him a second card, and with this one a pen. “Write down your name and phone number?”

He did—scratch scratch—and handed it back. His nerves buzzed. This isn’t me. This isn’t real. But when he glanced back at the guys, there they were, packing up and swilling beer.

He’d only had five or six himself; he knew he wasn’t drunk enough for the room to be spinning, or to be losing time. But he found himself with no idea of how he’d wound up pressed against the dirty wall beside the door to the men’s room, the tall woman in his arms. She smelled of something peppery, and her lips were resilient and plump, soft as pillows. Her small breasts lifted under the silk of her top. He slid his hand down her thigh, slid it up again.

The ruffled skirt slid with it.

“Come away with me,” she whispered. “Come stay the night.”

“Where?” Oh, he couldn’t bring her home. Gloating over a little attention was one thing, but strange women at the breakfast table were entirely too much to throw in Matt’s face. “I have to tell my brother I’m not—”

“He knows,” she said. “We told him on the way out. Remember? He’s taking your stuff back to your place.”

He did, as she said it. A blurry recollection—how much beer had he drunk?—but definite. Down to the disappointed tilt of Matt’s head. “Sure,” he said. “Where to?”

“Sweetheart,” she said, “come home with me.”

* * *

Matt saw Kelly vanish. Not literally, but he saw him slip down the hallway with the woman in the light-colored dress, and he didn’t see them coming back again. And then something happened—a soft hiss, a groan, as if the old yellow brick of the storefront building called to him. He had a momentary flash of a nervous cow, its head thrust over a stall door, lowing for attention, and put his hand reassuringly on the wall.

Kelly. He’d resigned himself to going home alone, and was going to collect Kelly’s gear from Deke and head out if Kelly hadn’t reappeared by the time he’d finished his beer. Instead he left the bottle on the bar and stood, not moving with any particular silence—but silent enough, in a noisy room.

As he ducked into the corridor, he was just in time to see the woman’s long brown leg vanish through the fire door. Damn.

Strangely, there was no alarm. His skin itched. The ring on his left hand burned with cold sudden fire.

After a moment’s hesitation, he scrambled back to the bar and demanded the phone. Local calls only. He must have looked freaked out enough that the bartender handed the black plastic touch-tone over without protest.

Jane answered on the second ring, and didn’t sound sleepy. “Jane—” a false start. He tried again. “Kelly’s been taken. By a Fae.”

She listened silently for thirty seconds while he cupped his hand over the reciever and explained at speed. And then she interrupted. “Matt. What do you want me to do?”

She couldn’t have brought him up shorter if she’d jerked his leash. “Help me. Help him.”

“Come over,” she said. “We’ll get a team on it. We’ll talk about it.” Her voice sounded distant, and he realized it was because he was staring at the phone in his hand. Yes, talk. While he lost Kelly the same way she had lost Elaine.

Maybe there was still time.

He hung up on her.

God damn it. He’d been sitting there thinking about witches.

He hit the door so hard it rebounded off brick and would have caught his heel if he hadn’t been moving as fast as he was. This time, the alarm detonated. He was at a run by the end of the alley, but Kelly and the girl were a block and a half away and moving fast, even though they seemed to be only walking.

* * *

She led him up a thorny hill. They must be in Central Park, though Kelly wasn’t sure how they’d gotten here, and he could hear the soft—and not-so-soft—noises of furtive lovemaking nearby. The sweat dried on his neck, though the night was humid. “You said you were taking me home.”

She kissed him again. “Where do you think we are?”

And then she grabbed his shirt collar in both hands while he was thinking about that and kissed his eyes, once each. “Welcome to Annwn, Kelly Szczegielniak.”

He stepped back, for he saw her.

The face was not too changed, but now she was naked except for a loincloth, and her breasts and cheeks and belly were covered with neat rows of nubby scars. The teeth behind her plush violet lips were filed to points. She was not smiling.

His hands were on fire where he touched her. Rings, he realized, rings on his fingers. He dropped the grip—unwilling to release her—and saw where his touch had raised welts on her skin. “Lady,” he said.

She stroked his face with the back of her hand. “Take off your rings, Kelly. And I will show you things you never dreamed.”

“It’s a trick,” he said. “You lied to me.”

“Of course it’s a trick.” Her hand cupped him through his tattered jeans. He hissed and meant to shift away, but somehow what happened was that he moved against her. “That’s what we deal in. The queen of Faerie would treat with thee, young warrior. Come with me.”

“Fae.” He would have stepped away, he told himself, if the thorn trees weren’t jabbing his back. She let her lips brush his face; he felt the rasp of her conical teeth.

“The thing you crave, my queen can give you. Prometheus has no power to create greatness in a mortal man.”

He’d been set to deny her. Three times, ritually. The words filled his throat.

They choked him.

She kissed him again. “What say you, mortal man? Would become—of a sort—immortal?”

“You cannot.” But he said it against her lips.

“The Queen of Faerie is a Leannan Sidhe.”

Vampire muse. Oh yes. She could teach him greatness. As she devoured his art, it would flare like lightning. All his heat spent in a blaze.

All it would cost was the rest of his life.

He opened his shirt, showed her the iron in his skin. “I am warded.”

“You are marked,” she corrected. She touched him with a bridged hand, hissed, pressed her palm sliding flat to his chest. “Piquant,” she said, and ducked her head to flick her tongue against his nipple. “It will be like embracing a man of fire.” Her touch seared him. He cringed—but toward her, not away.

He paused. There were ways to handle this, ways to make it safe. How could he say no? But his head was spinning, and he could barely remember his name, never mind the strictures he should set.

“She’ll make you legend,” she said.

But he hesitated still, though his fingers curved to touch it. He ached, his mouth full of saliva. Even Matt made fun of his playing, damn them all—

“There’s a price for that.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Your life. If you take the gift, you know how it ends. John Lennon. Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. If you blaze, my love, you burn. But think, love, of your name said on a breath with theirs.” And then she grinned, filed teeth and red tongue. “If anyone can pronounce it.”

Ten years of brilliance, or fifty of failure? In a hundred years, what would it matter?

Who remembers the also-rans?

“I’ll need safe-passage. A promise I can go home.”

“So long as you eat nor drink anything in Faerie,” the woman said, “you have my word you may go home at dawn. With your music. One night’s revel is all she asks. One night’s revel, and your death.”

He tugged the rings from his fingers, and let them fall to the ground. And took the Faerie’s hand.

From dark night, the whole world went brilliant. The air shone with the fire of ten thousand candles refracted in infinite crystal, and Kelly swayed on his feet. The court that towered over him was white and massive, the windows fluted Gothic arches in stone that moved like wind. He caught a breath at the loft and the beauty of it—all white, so white, and shining—and then another breath at the creatures that peopled the space. “Oh,” he said. “Oh—”

The woman’s fingers stopped his lips. “Say not the name of the divine. For it is painful to us.”

That might be useful later, Kelly thought, but for now he nodded and fell silent, staring about him. What he saw was … one hell of a revel. Music pealed about the court, though he could not see the musicians, and a slow pavanne went its way across the center of the floor, lords and ladies dancing with stags and centaurs—or, he thought, as his vision blurred and shifted again—perhaps the lords and ladies and the stags and centaurs were the same. Something heavy-horned and green winged passed across the great hall, its talons dripping blood.

No one paid it notice.

The hall beside the dancers might have teemed with creatures, except the spaces were broad and there were a good many niches for conversation or simply sitting on a window-ledge, watching the pageant pass. Kelly saw creatures great and small, gross and gracile, sublime and shocking—winged things, and things that flew, and a brazen bull that clattered on eight silver hooves, tossing its head in seeming agreement with the gold winged, cruel-faced piskie who rode its horns and whispered in its ears.

Tables groaned with food, and the mere scent of the wine was dizzying.

Men and women who might have been human or Fae were lined against the walls like caryatid pillars. Their hands were tucked—no, he saw, bound—into the smalls of their backs and their faces were hooded with white silk, which had the effect of making them seem headless—and armless—from a distance. So they were like long rows of ruined classical statues, except for the rainbow colors of their skins.

And of no few of these, the Faerie host made sport. With their tongues or hands or genitals—or organs Kelly had no names for, or with whips and crops, or with wands of thorns—they plied the bound victims, and laughed coldly at the response. Some of the humans writhed in pleasure or agony; some sobbed out loud. Some begged through their masks for surcease, and some to be taken harder, offered more.

“They are here by consent,” the woman said, when Kelly flinched from a particularly heartfelt moan of pain. “They are not poets or singers; in return for our sufferance, they offer what entertainment they can.” She looked aside. “The Daoine queen will not house such. She chooses her pets … elsewhere. But my mistress finds the intensity of their sensation … cheering, and so she has them set about the court.”

“And is that the price of my … admission?”

“You are a musician,” she said. “And a Mage. My queen will keep you to herself.”

I’m not a very good musician, Kelly thought, but bit his lip, and walked along.

At the end of the hall rose a dais, and upon its mirror-white marble surface rested a throne of peeled bone-white thorn branches bound with rainbow silk. The branches curved into a spike-tipped heart over the head of the woman who sat at her ease within them, her long arms emerging bare as ice from the translucent layers of her gown. She did not rise, but leaned forward among her thorns. “Child,” she said, extending a white hand, “I will give you music such as you have never known.”

Kelly stopped, the stones cold through the soles of his shoes. And then he went to her. Across the white pavement, in front of the Unseelie court, he went to the Winter Queen. And there she stripped him, and there she had him, on her throne of white, white thorns.

* * *

Matt found the iron rings upon the ground. He dropped to one knee and pinched them up, sliding them onto his right hand. Another Faerie gate to seal. But first, to exploit.

He patted his pockets until he found a pen and a card among his clutter, and on the card he wrote out the Lord’s Prayer. He wasn’t Christian. But the fey folk were. In a crooked fashion. There was also a steel ball chain in his pocket, along with some packets of salt stolen from a McDonald’s and other useful things—a horse-shoe nail, steel pins, a stone with a hole, a paper pouch of apple spice oatmeal, and so on—and he punched holes in the card with the point of his pocket-knife and threaded the chain through them. It would go around his neck.

But first he took his shirt off and turned it inside out, buttoning it before he pulled it on over his head. He should do the jeans too, but he didn’t have time to unlace his boots, so he made sure his buttons were buttoned and his shoelaces tied, though he loosened the laces on the left one. He thought he was more likely to have to throw it than to run from anything.

And then he stood again and took a cleansing breath or two. He knew the technique. He hadn’t actually done it. But he closed his eyes and turned widdershins three times and stamped his foot on the ground, and visualized extending his hands until his iron ring caught on something, and then easing the world open like a door.

He fumbled the pierced stone from his pocket and held it before his face, so he should see through it first when he opened his eyes. He didn’t need an incantation, not exactly, and incantations were mostly a matter of focus anyway, so he cleared his mind and let the words of the Russian fairy tale hang before him like embers. “There is the fire for thy stepmother’s daughters! And may they joy in it!”

And when he opened his eyelids, he wasn’t where he had been before. The first thing he saw was a beautiful dark-haired fat woman, her thighs like stalactites, leaned back in a flurry of cellophane wings, shaking her avoirdupois with ecstasy. Something coiled and gnawed between her thighs, under the overhanging curve of her belly. Small winged creatures, like dragonflies and like naked women with barbed silver arms, lifted her soft shuddering breasts by the nipples, tugging until she moaned and arched her back, swaying from foot to foot in a slow, erotic dance.

Matt swallowed, hard, and looked away, shifting against the seam of his jeans. Somewhere in here, he would find his brother.

The door was still open, still clenched in his hand. He replaced the stone in his pocket with the other one. One of the pins stuck quite easily in a corner of the world when he pinched the door open. He did not care to be sealed in a Faerie mound, and this would help keep the time-slip from running away with him.

He also didn’t care to return home in two hundred years—or tomorrow, two hundred years older.

He stepped forward into light, into a vast white room full of people. Everything he saw was an education. He fisted his hands, his own ring on the left hand, his brother’s on the right. They bit flesh painfully.

It was like seeking one candle in a cathedral. But it was simple to track someone by magery, if you had something they habitually wore.

* * *

The music filled him, the curve and weight of the notes, the glow of the horns. The thorns in his flesh were nothing, less than nothing, because all he could feel was the caress of the music, perfect and sharp, like the weight of the beautiful woman who drove him—white as snow, black as ebony, red as blood—who ripped his flesh with her fangs and her claws and straddled him and impaled him back on her throne.

He heard it now, the music, the way he’d never heard it before. He understood it.

He could make that too.

He lost himself, in a crescendo, in a dream, in the sweet sharp clash of notes rising in a whorl like the sparking vortex over a fire. And then there was a different woman in his arms—the dark one, with her wild eyes and her teeth that left circles of pain in his skin—and after her there might be another, or a man, unless they tired of him and bid him dance until they wanted him again.

The music rang in his ears, and he understood it.

In the morning he would lose this. Like a perfect book read in a dream, whose pages fade when turned. In the morning, they would send him home. In the morning.

But he would remember it. Clearly, presently, not like the fading sparkles of a dream. And he could make it anew.

It was all his.

* * *

Matt paused in the long hall, feeling the tug of direction from his right hand. He closed his eyes, he closed his ears, as he walked among the feasting and frolicking, the flogging and fucking. He made no attempt to move in secrecy, and some of the Fae turned from their diversions to watch him pass. Some of those were intrigued enough to follow, fanning out behind him like a trailing cloak, though they all stayed far enough away that he could not have reached them with a lunge.

By the time the crowd had cleared enough that he could glimpse the head of the hall, he knew what he would see. There were darker shapes on all that whiteness, and as he pushed his glasses up his nose with his thumb, the steel frames chill on his skin, he saw Kelly, naked and banded like a tiger, on his knees amid the Fae.

A woman crouched before him, her buttocks pressed to his hips, her breasts pressed to the stone, her head lowered on her arms and her hair all variegated spread out around her. A faun, its little tail flagging like a deer’s, bucked against Kelly’s ass, horned forehead resting on Kelly’s shoulder, arms linked loosely around his waist, hands resting on the hips of the rocking woman. And over them, straddling the woman who crouched on her shoulders and knees, white as snow, black as ebony, gray as pearl, stood a narrow woman who held Kelly’s face pressed into her groin with one slender hand and in the other cupped an ornate goblet with a broad, shallow bowl. Lot of use those tattoos amounted to, Matt thought. All that time and pain for nothing. He would have rolled his eyes if he dared take them off the queen.

She regarded Matt with the perfect impassivity of a pantheress, staring down at him with dark slanted eyes. Kelly’s shoulders and back were scratched and raked. Dark blood oozed from a shallow wound along his throat. He rocked between his lovers, and Matt heard him humming.

“Jesus,” Matt said, and the nearest Fae fainted. The Queen herself winced sharply.

XX

“Matthew Magus,” she said, and brought the goblet to her breast. He saw what she intended; the wine would spill down her sternum, run across her belly, and fill Kelly’s eagerly working mouth. Wine, drunk in Faerie. Wine to bind him there.

Which meant, if she was not bluffing, that he’d not yet taken food nor drink from her hand.

There was a chance to win him home.

Her voice was reeds and fiddles. “You should not be here, child. You could lose your whole life in one night.”

“The morning is wiser than the evening,” Matt answered, and didn’t realize until it was out of his mouth that he’d quoted Vassilisa’s magic doll. “I’ve come for my brother.”

“What have you to bargain with, you who are not a musician?” She ran her fingers luxuriously through Kelly’s hair. “Have you come to take his place?”

As if she could read Matt’s stricken fascination, hear the shallow roaring of his heart. Of course. He’d have to pay to bring his brother home. And he could almost taste the temptation.

“A story,” he said. “I’ll tell you a story.”

She ran that knife-edged cat-gaze up and down his frame. “Not your body?”

“I doubt I’d stand up to your tastes,” he said, trying for dry and arriving in the vicinity, albeit via shaky. “I will tell you a story.”

Her eyes lidded. Her fingers threaded Kelly’s hair. The faun made a little bleating noise and slumped against his back. Matt heard his brother’s moan from where he stood, and it didn’t sound like pleasure, exactly, but then it also didn’t sound like pain.

His heart thumped harder; he wouldn’t stare, dry-mouthed, at the lacerations on Kelly’s back and thighs, wouldn’t think of how they must sting as Kelly stretched to please the queen and his beaded sweat ran through them. Wouldn’t allow himself to wonder how she tasted, as the air thickened with sex and ambergris. But the time on Yukako’s table had changed him in more ways than that, and he knew how to pretend disdain. The Queen might tempt him, but she had nothing at all to shock him with.

He already knew where that particular twist in his psyche led. And he found he did mind the Queen staring at his crotch.

He swallowed, and began. “There was a girl named Vassilisa, whose mother died when she was but a child, and left her no legacy but a doll carved out of wood—”

It was a complicated story, and Matt kept his eyes on the white Queen’s face as he told it. Which is how he knew she climaxed as he narrated the scene where the Baba Yaga’s fire-skull burns the wicked sisters’ flesh from bone; it was only revealed in the flick of her lashes, the pinch of her teeth, the flex of long muscles unslackening in her narrow thighs. She let spill not so much as a drop of wine.

She pushed Kelly away; he fell to the dais, and the woman the Queen had been straddling slid down in exhaustion.

“Well told,” she said. She reclined on her throne, robed in white as if she had always been, scatheless among the thorns. “For that tale, I will sell you a piece of your brother. Will you win him back from me bit by bit, Matthew Magus, if you cannot have him whole?”

“That was not the bargain,” he said.

She tilted her head and smiled. “In my house, I make the bargains. I think the first thing I will give you is his … sight.”

“Your majesty, no!—” Respect. Always speak to immortal things with respect. They have a great deal of time for remembering slights.

He spoke too late, as if speaking early would have had any effect. His sight blurred and cleared as if he’d blinked away a tear, and abruptly everything he saw changed. For a moment, he didn’t understand, and then he realized what dazzled him.

Those were colors.

And he did not know their names.

On the dais, Kelly stirred and moaned.

“I promised him music, not vision. Strip Matthew Magus,” the Queen said, with a negligent wave of her hand. “Enchant him. I’ve always loved brothers.”

“Your majesty!” Matt cried, stumbling a half-step forward.

She turned her face. Someone plucked his trouser leg, and he jerked back sharply with a gasp. He jammed his hands into his pockets, barely daring to glance away from the Queen.

The Fae surrounded him, tall and squat, broad and slight. Limbs like lobster claws and tree branches reached, stroking, catching—

The first one to grab at his sleeve drew back with a thin little cry. “Inside-out!” it whined, clutching its clawed hand to pendulous breasts. “Its clothes are inside-out, your majesty.”

Salt. Oatmeal. A packet of pins. Matt yanked them from his pockets, bulled through the ring of Faerie—forward, where the line was thinnest, shocking them that he would willingly approach the Queen. She rose from her throne like a handkerchief drawn on a string, and he paused a step away. The pins were in his right hand. As she stepped forward, he scattered them on the floor all about his feet and between himself and the throne.

They rang like silver, but they were steel.

The Unseelie Queen froze with one foot uplifted, and Matt showed her his other hand. “Salt,” he said. “Oatmeal. And I’ve never lain with a woman. I stand in your hall in my power and my purity, and in the name of the Christ and the Holy Ghost and the Father, in the names of all God’s angels, you will abide by our bargain.”

The Queen flinched cruelly, but did not step back. Behind him, Matt heard cries of pain, and weeping.

Matt paused, trembling, and made his voice strong and deep. “Give me my brother, and I’ll go.”

“Seize him,” she said, blind to any irony. But the tall black-skinned Faerie who had brought Kelly here came up to the dais, and ran a hand along his outline without touching cloth or skin. “He’s blessed,” she said, her words as much a caress as her gesture. “He wears a fresh blessing, your majesty. And we were offered one, not both.”

The Queen seemed to swell, no more awkward one-legged than any hunting heron. “I’ll have no blessings in this house!”

“Give me my brother,” he repeated, “and I’ll go.” He tore open the green-printed paper of the Quaker oatmeal, the sound echoing through a silent hall.

“Kelly, my love,” the Queen said, slowly. “Dance for me.”

Matt couldn’t look. He did not look away from the Queen, burning in all her nameless colors, even as Kelly rose up, panting, trembling, drawn with exhaustion, and lifted his arms to the sides. His feet, Matt saw, left smears upon the stone.

Red. That must be what red was.

The musicians were well-trained, or heavily cowed. They had already resumed playing. “Why don’t we play a game?” the Queen asked. She had not glanced away from Matt, either. “Why don’t we both call him. Neither of us moves, and we see to whom he comes?”

“Fine with me,” Matt said, and with an abrupt jerk of his arm, threw the powdered oatmeal over Kelly.

Kelly twitched, stumbled, went to his knees. Coughed, gasped—and seized, long jerking convulsions, smearing saliva and blood on the stones. “Oh, such a clever mortal,” the Unseelie Queen purred—and the floor around Matt buckled and heaved, shivered into pieces, and each of the pieces became an ember glowing red.

Red, Matt’s first color.

“Clever clever mortal. Kelly,” she said, softly. “Kelly. Stop that. Sweet child. Come to me. I will make you happy.”

And Kelly stood. Matt saw his feet clearly now, and could not hide his cringe. And as for Matt—he stood on an eighteen-inch island, a puddle of white marble in the midst of an eight-foot ring of fire. If he called Kelly to him—if Kelly would come—he would be staggering over coals.

And the alternative was leaving him here.

“Kelly,” the Unseelie Queen said. “Come here to me.”

Matt crouched in his narrow island of safety, dropped the salt packets on the ground, and began untying his left boot. He could not let haste make him fumble. Kelly was turning, blindly seeking the Faerie Queen’s dulcet voice. There was no time for second attempts.

“Kelly,” he said. “Don’t do that. Come to me.”

And Kelly hesitated. He didn’t turn; but his groping footsteps lagged. “Matty?”

“Come to me.” Matt stood, his left shoe in his hand. All his command in his voice, a Mage’s conviction. The simplest form of magia—command. Not quite Faerie glamourie, but people would obey it because it was easier than saying no. “Come to me right now!”

Kelly turned, suddenly decisive, and stepped onto the coals. He seemed to feel nothing; his face remained slack, wondering, as he advanced. But Matt heard the sweat and the blood, and then the meat, sizzle.

The Queen jerked forward, reaching out. And Matt hit her hard, over the breasts, with his hurled steel-toed boot. “This is yours!” he shouted. “That is mine!”

She grunted, caught it reflexively, and dropped it as if he’d thrown her a handful of her own smoking coals.

And Kelly came one more step toward him.

“Come on, man,” Matt said. He held out his hand, leaned forward as far as he could without moving his feet. Is it dawn yet? It is sunrise? Is she lying? “Reach for me, big brother. Dammit, man, reach.”

“I curse you, Matthew Magus,” the Faerie Queen said, her voice like silver and ice, as Kelly grunted with each step, the coals powdering his feet with ash and char. “I curse you to a cold life and an ill death. I curse you to kinslaughter and betrayal.”

Kelly reached. Matt grasped his fingers, reached more, got his wrist, pressed his hand adorned with Kelly’s own iron rings to Kelly’s flesh. He reached out with his left hand and pulled out the pin he’d left holding a flap of the world aside.

The Queen drew herself up, and spoke her final words like the tolling of a bell. “As I have taught you to see as other men, so I curse you to the death of your illusions.”

“My lady,” Matt said, “I wish you the death of your own.”

And stepped through, onto the cold hillside in the pewter light, his brother in his right hand and a bit of bent steel in the left.

* * *

Soul Searching

Written by Laird Long

Illustrated by Mike Rooth

Dugan Growser was the last guy I wanted to see in my office, since I’d been haunting him at home for the last month. Sure, it was a crummy office in a crummy section of town, but even it had its standards.

“You gotta find somethin’ for me, McCaffrey!” the greasy-haired, skinny little runt squealed, shoving the door right through me and dropping into a chair, as uninvited as demonic possession. He dug a hairy little hand into the box of cigars I keep on my battered desk, scarfed a mittful, knowing full well I had no use for them anymore.

I cursed him like I’d been cursing him every night for the last thirty. And the effect was the usual—zip. “What’s gone missing, Growser—your will to live maybe, I hope?”

“My soul!” he bleated, not altogether correcting me. He shoved his three-fingered hand through his black hair and shuddered, his pointy face swimming in sweat. “You gotta find my soul, McCaffrey!”

“Have you tried jazz?” I said, floating over my desk.

He didn’t look amused. “No, no! I don’t mean I lost it or nuthin’. I mean someone stole it!”

“How would a guy like you even know it was missing?” I asked, watching him rattle like teeth in a hockey player, enjoying myself.

Growser grinned a crooked grin, regaining some of his scummy composure. “Okay, okay, we’ve had our differences, sure, McCaffrey. But—”

“Differences!?” I shrieked (something I’d been doing a lot of lately; seemed to come with the ghostly territory). “You killed me, remember? Turned me into the only dick in this town with a clear conscience—literally!”

Growser planted one of my cigars in his kisser. “That was an accident, McCaffrey. No hard feelin’s. How was I s’posed to know the slugs I pumped in Fish Manson were gonna chew through him an’ eat into you?”

“You blast away with a .44, in the middle of a crowded street, and you don’t think maybe there’s going to be some collateral damage! Even you’re not that dumb, Growser.”

He shrugged his bony shoulders, wiped his pointed nose with a yellowed digit. “What can I say? The opportunity just sorta came up. I couldn’t let it pass. Anyway, that’s yesterday’s news. You gonna help me or not?”

“Not!” I shrieked.

Growser set fire to the stogie, puffed on it, as calm and deadly now as an oil slick. “How’d you like it if I ratted you out to the Feds—told ‘em you’re turnin’ down cases?”

I clenched my fists, my fingers doubling back on themselves. The reason I was still around, in spirit at least, still working cases, was because I had a tax bill outstanding at the time of my untimely demise. The IRS wanted what was coming, no excuses accepted. They had worked a deal with both sides, so that back taxes, interest, and penalties were considered unfinished business. Just as surely as you can’t take it with you, you also can’t take off owing Uncle Sam. The reason I was haunting Growser? Well, that’s what ghosts do. Haunting your murderer is an obligation of being a ghost.

“Okay, Growser,” I gritted, “when did you first notice that your soul was missing?”

He spat on the floor. “Yesterday mornin’. I woke up same time as usual, but I had this real, kinda, empty feelin’ inside. I just wasn’t myself, you know—no life or nuthin’.” He made a face at the cigar. “Take this Cuban, for instance—it’s got no taste to me. And food? Fuggidaboutit! I go to Mama’s Kitchen in Harlem, I can’t taste nuthin’.”

I floated down to look him in the eye. “You sure your soul didn’t just pack up and leave on its own, like your ex-wives? Like maybe it went looking for better accommodations? Or maybe … it got while the getting was good?”

“Like I’m gonna keel over any minute—that what you mean?” Growser asked, licking his thin lips, eyeing my encouraging smile. “Like the Big Man upstairs put out a hit on Growser, and his body just ain’t took the message yet? Yeah, sure, I thought about that. But the thing’s been missin’ for more’n twenty-four hours now, and I’m still kickin’.”

“That is an awfully long time for a soul to be missing, even in this town,” I mused.

“Yeah. Anyway, I come here ‘cause I figure a guy like you’s got connections—you know, on the other side. And, face it, you need the bread, and I got the dough.”

He had me there. I wanted that IRS bill squared. There had to be more to death than hanging around here. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll scout around, see what I can dig up.”

“Good.” Growser jumped to his feet, threw down the cigar with a look of disgust, and crushed it out with his heel. “You find whoever stole my soul, McCaffrey, ‘cause no one steals nuthin’ from Dugan Growser!” he barked, punching the air with a bony finger, like he was issuing a warning to the underworld, both above and below ground.

* * *

There’d been plenty of cases of gung ho angels, fallen and otherwise, snatching souls before their rightful owners had truly given up the ghost, I was well aware. Not to mention flesh-and-blood Christ crusaders, devil worshippers, and Board-decertified voodoo/witch doctors trying to save or subvert souls while the flesh was still willing but the spirit weak. So, the logical starting point in my investigation was Hyram Kruk, biggest middleman in the entire East Coast soul chain. If anyone had their ear to the ground in the soul racket, it was him.

He was a squat, surly sonuvagun who had run a string of discount pawnshops during his days of living and breathing. He’d been killed when the stolen gun he’d pointed at an unarmed burglar had accidentally blown up in his hand, killing him and the burglar. And it’d turned out that the first-time burglar had only been trying to get his hocked plumbing tools back so he could take a job, get his family off welfare. It was quite the moral conundrum for the boys upstairs and down. And the convoluted terminus, coupled with his equally checkered past, had left Kruk in limbo longer than a calypso band conductor, two years and counting.

But while the higher and lower powers that be were debating Kruk’s fate for all eternity, they’d at least agreed to put the guy’s skills to good use, making him head receiver/shipper for the largest soul storage facility on the northeastern seaboard. Kruk bagged ‘em, tagged ‘em, and stacked ‘em, before eventually shipping them on their way. And he wasn’t above doing a little fencing on the side, both to stay sharp and to score brownie points with the boys in the great beyond, on either side of the divide.

I vacated my office straight through the roof of the three-story greystone. I would’ve liked to keep up the trajectory—heavenward—but I was bound by forces even more powerful than the Big Guy in the sky. So I banked, flew due west, across the Hudson, thankful for the lack of sensitivity in my see-through nostrils.

“How’s business, soul man?” I greeted Kruk, as I slipped into his warehouse beneath the most populated cemetery on the Jersey shore.

“Eh, it’s got its ups and downs,” he responded, ziplocking a baggie, flinging it onto a shelf. “What’d you want now?”

“Just passing through,” I cracked, casually browsing around for anyone I knew.

“Yeah, and me, I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past,” he responded, in Hebrew. He always could see right through me.

“Well … I was kind of wondering if you’d seen Dugan Growser’s soul around—say, in the last twenty-four hours or so?”

“That bum finally get plugged?”

“No such luck,” I replied, liking his analogy nonetheless. “He’s still in the upright and cocky position, but he claims his soul’s been stolen. Thought you might know something about it?”

Kruk gave me a ghastly grin and waited.

“You set up any deals lately? Maybe some brimstone-breather couldn’t wait to get his mitts on a fresh one?”

Kruk waited some more.

I stared at his shadowy form, then smiled. “I’m not bribing you, Kruk. I’ve got no money to call my own, and you’ve got about as much use for money as a rich man has for the eye of a needle.”

Kruk’s shoulders drooped. “Oh, yeah. Old habits die hard, eh?” He pulled an imaginary pipe out of the corner of his mouth. “Nah, just like everyone else, I ain’t seen Growser’s soul. I woulda remembered that one—probably need a pair of oven mitts just to handle it. But I do got some information might interest you.”

We both waited some more.

“Damn!” Kruk grunted eventually. “Okay, so I hear on the ghostvine that some phony souls been turnin’ up at some of the West Coast warehouses.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. Nuthin’ here yet, but a guy in California tells me they’ve had a coupla cases of soul doping already.”

“Soul doping?”

“Yeah. Someone switching the dirt on their dirty, rotten soul onto a nice, clean one—you know, trying to hitch a ride to the stars, instead of getting the shaft. They caught a politician and a trial lawyer already.”

“How’s that possible? I mean, where’s the dirt going? And how are they making the switch? You’re not selling salvation on the side again, are you, Kruk?”

He gave me a dirty look. “C’mon, I wouldn’t pull that kinda stuff! I don’t know from nuthin’ about transplanting souls. Besides, my case is in arbitration right now—you think I’d jeopardize that?” He shook his head. “That’s part of how they spotted it. Found a dirty soul that wasn’t supposed to be, running loose with the body still alive. It effed up their paperwork somethin’ fierce.”

Then it hit me. “You mean someone’s dealing in souls topside, without a spiritual connection? A flesh-and-blood for-real person?”

“That’s the way I peg it, yeah. Someone’s figured out how to catch souls without a license. And he’s cutting deals with the damned, to try ‘n make their final journey a whole lot more uplifting, if you know what I mean.” Kruk’s thick, bloodless lips framed a melancholy smile. “I wish I’d’ve lived long enough to see a scam like that.”

* * *

I went back to my office, did some thinking on the case. If soul doping was the angle, then why would anyone in their right mind pinch Dugan Growser’s charred essence? That thing was a ticket to Hell just waiting to be punched.

I couldn’t figure it—till Growser incarnate blew into my office with a gobful of profanity and a clip n’ paste note in his mitt. ‘One hundred large, in small, for the return of your soul’, the note read.

It was a stiff price for a badly damaged piece of merchandise, and Growser was more than unwilling to pay it. “I don’t pay nobody no ransoms!” he spat.

“You want to find out who stole your soul, don’t you?” I argued, glad I didn’t have the senses left to smell the reek of the rat, taste his spittle.

“Yeah, sure! But—”

I held up a hand, halting him. Then I eased the little man’s indignation by promising to get both his soul and his hundred grand back, and finger the soulnapper. I wasn’t going to do it just for Growser, either—he could take a hike in a cow pasture minus the soles on his shoes, for all I cared—but for mankind, as well. There were bigger issues at stake here than just one wiseguy’s scabby soul. A living being with the ability to snatch souls and switch sins could really do some damage, maybe even tilt the precarious balance between good and evil in the wrong direction.

I didn’t bother explaining any of that to Growser, though. I didn’t fully understand all of the implications myself. I just promised the hood revenge, and he agreed that was worth paying for.

* * *

The phone call came later that night: ‘Put the money in a garbage bag, leave the bag next to the bench under the clock tower in Hill Street Park, two a.m.’ Whoever it was must’ve known that Growser trusted banks like they trusted him, because my client grudgingly admitted that he could exhume a hundred grand from the pickle jars he had growing in his backyard, have it bagged by two.

By midnight, I was making with the leaves of a big, old oak tree that looked down on the bench in question, and Growser was performing what to him was true sacrilege—stuffing gelt into a garbage bag. Nevertheless, he slipped into the park at the appointed hour, looking as casual as a straitjacket, glancing around like he’d never seen nightfall before.

He drifted over to the lighted clock tower and reluctantly deposited his garbage next to the bench, after a couple of false starts. Then he was just dumb enough to stare up my tree, trying to spot me. I did a bad hoot-owl imitation to get rid of him, make his actions look less suspicious, wishing I was a bat out of Hell and he a throbbing vein in the neck.

Eventually, he sidled away, casting wistful glances back over his shoulder at the lonely bag of cash. And ten minutes after Growser’d made his tearful departure, a man in a hooded jacket rode up on a bike, grabbed the garbage bag, and rode away.

I was flying the friendly skies, so I had no trouble keeping up with the bicycling bagman. He pedaled his ass all over town, twisting his head around every now and then to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He finally biked it on down to the waterfront, skidded to a stop in front of a small, abandoned-looking warehouse. He parked his two-wheeler up against the graffiti-stained wall of the building, then buzzed a series of buzzes on an intercom next to a red, metal door. The door responded, and he went inside.

I followed him through the brick wall, face-first, and wasn’t altogether surprised to see that the warehouse was anything but abandoned. In fact, the place was crammed full of enough electronic equipment to stock every Radio Shack east of the Rockies, with a couple of geeks’ basements left over. And there were enough bubbling test tubes, boiling beakers, and steaming flasks to create a thousand Mr. Hydes.

The hooded bagman carefully made his way through the flashing lights and gurgling liquids and humming machines, as I hung ten in the rafters. He knocked a series of knocks on the steel door of a small office pushed into one corner of the building. The door opened, and he disappeared from view again.

I waited, not wanting to reveal myself in the closed confines of the office. And eventually the garbageman came back out of the office, less his garbage. I watched him leave the warehouse, then watched the office door again; I wasn’t interested in flunkies, I wanted the heart and soul of the operation. And I soon found him, when the steel door reopened and Dr. Francesco Franks shuffled out, clutching that morning’s trash.

I recognized the not-so-good doctor from his numerous appearances on TV, and in the tabloids. He’d been a world-renowned neurosurgeon at the Good Samaritan Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital, before going gynecological on a couple of female patients and getting the unceremonious heave-ho. His syndicated self-help/game show, Cranium Cases, had quickly followed him down the tubes.

I descended from the heavens, as Franks placed the bag of cabbage on a workbench. “On call tonight, eh, Doc?” I said from a shadowy corner of the building.

He spun around, his Einsteinian hair a split second behind. “Who are you!?” he yelled, pushing back a pair of black-rimmed glasses on his cowcatcher nose. The lenses in the vintage frames were thick enough to grace the Palomar Observatory.

“I’m your worst nightmare,” I replied sardonically, my back up against and partially embedded in the brick wall. “Is all the loot there?”

Franks shook his enormous braincase, the wrinkles on his mug Etch-a-Sketching into an expression of anger. “No!” he fumed. “There’s only twenty thousand dollars here!”

That figured.

Franks forgot his money troubles long enough to jerk a snub-nose .38 out of his lab coat. “Now, who are you?” he demanded.

“Bain McCaffrey,” I responded in a quavery voice, acting scared. The longer Dr. Franks thought I was the real deal, the longer he’d believe I could actually do him some physical harm, and vice versa. “The guy Dugan Growser hired to give him some soul satisfaction.”

“Like hell you will!” Franks hollered, blasting away.

Hot lead smashed into the wall behind me, sending stone shrapnel rocketing in all directions. Franks emptied his gun into the wall, then charged me. Either he didn’t believe in ghosts, or the dim lighting and his appalling eyesight had worked in my favor, because the wayward genius hit the bricks headfirst and hard, little realizing that I was as solid as a salesman’s word. He staggered backwards, slammed up against a workbench, windmilled his arms, knocking test tubes and beakers and Bunsen burners flying and crashing and bursting into flame, setting his lab ablaze.

Then he slowly slumped to the floor, life leaking out of a fissure in his forehead, explosions flaring up behind him. I zipped to his side. “How’d you get Growser’s soul?” I yelled.

He looked up at me, through me, orange flames flashing in his shattered Coke-bottle lenses. “It was all a mistake!” he gasped. “They took the wrong soul!”

“You wanted a clean one, right? For soul doping! But-but you thought you’d cash in anyway—with some ransom money!?”

Franks nodded, blood sluicing down his ancient, grey face. “I needed more money … to fund my experiments … to perfect my soul-searing device … make the transplantation undetectable. You see, I wanted to …”

He didn’t get the chance to fully explain himself, not in his lifetime, anyway. I left his corpse and frantically scoured the lab, desperately trying to save some souls any way I could. You can’t destroy a soul, but it can get banged up or lost. But the leaping flames and billowing smoke made identification impossible. I couldn’t find Growser’s soul, or anybody else’s, as they scattered all over the place, drifting out through walls, the floor and ceiling.

What I did briefly spot was a small black machine that looked like a cross between a Dustbuster and a Pocket Fisherman. It was labeled soul snatcher 3000, in silver letters on its side. And before it, too, was consumed in the inferno, I saw a devil or imp desperately grabbing what souls it could get, cursing me like a drunken souler.

* * *

“You didn’t get my dough back, huh?” Growser whined, when I roused him off his toilet in the morning, explained all that had happened after he’d taken out the trash.

“It burned with the warehouse,” I told him again. “And I thought you might be worried about losing your soul?”

Growser sat back down on his throne, doing me at least that one small favor. “Nah, that’s no big deal. In my line of work, I’m probably better off without it. ‘Sides, it got what was comin’ to it, right?”

I couldn’t argue with that.

He grinned, pointed a finger through me. “And so did the thief—this Dr. Franks or whatever!” He scratched his blue-shaded chin, wondering, no doubt, if he could pick up the pieces of the broken racket. “What ‘xactly was the good Doc up to, anyways?”

“Down to, is more like it,” I responded. “He was doing the Devil’s work, I think. Or at least, he was inadvertently pitchforking for the guy in the red suit. By laundering dirty, dead souls with live, clean ones, he was tipping the balance here on Earth to your side of the flame, Growser.”

Growser scratched a body part not his chin. “I just wish that twenty grand hadn’t gone up in smoke, is all. See, part of that money was your fee, McCaffrey.”

I let him hork up a laugh, then hit him where it hurts. “That’s all right, Growser. I dropped by the IRS office before I came here. Had a little chat with my auditor about that twenty grand of yours. Did you know there’s a reward for turning in tax cheats? He’s got some questions for you—seeing how your bank statements and tax returns always register goose eggs.”

Growser jumped to his feet, parts of him flapping other than his lips. “That kinda double cross is gonna come back to haunt you, McCaffrey!” he blared.

“You want to know the best part?” I asked sweetly. “I don’t have to haunt you anymore.” That stopped him.

“What’cha mean?”

“The boys on the other side have decided that the IRS can haunt you better than I ever could.”

I floated away with a smile on my pale puss. Sure, I still had to hang around till I paid off the rest of my tax bill, plus interest and penalties, but at least I wouldn’t be spending my nights burning the midnight coil, shrieking my head off at what was left of Growser.

* * *

Palm Sunday

Written by Ian Watson

Illustrated by Alexander Gabriel

Today was Saturday, and tomorrow would be Palm Sunday, when most people would gather in Grand Square to party, then all hold the palms of their hands up to the sky in celebration of life.

As Saturday dawn was approaching, Rootha left Pool’s house. She and Pool had made love, then they had talked for at least an hour, lying together. Several times Rootha and Pool would say exactly the same thing at the same moment, so deep was their communion. Then they made love all over again—before sleeping for three hours, him holding her.

Three hours asleep was time enough for a person’s hands to close up and for the patterns of the palms to reshape themselves, for a new fortune to impress itself on the flesh.

Once the sunlight was bright enough, the little cabins of the palm-readers along Riverfront and in Grand Square would open for business. New day, new fortune! Maybe merely a fortune similar to the day before. Business people especially would want their palms interpreted.

Dawn was in the east, violet and lilac, but the full moon still shone through dispersing streamers of raincloud, glinting upon puddles where the street’s flagstones tilted. Thus Rootha could avoid soaking her shoes and the hem of her long gown. Joho, her husband, probably wouldn’t return on the early steamferry from the capital, but you could never be sure. Don’t arouse suspicions.

Yawning before sunset might seem suspicious too. Should she try to catch some extra sleep? Or should she stay awake to visit a teller? The teller might see a change in her destiny. How unfair to stay bound to Joho because he’d lent her parents so much money, when Pool was so perfect for her and she for him—like hand in glove, like glove on hand. When she first met Pool, going to his shop for a glove fitting, Rootha and he had fitted astonishingly. Both knew immediately.

The scent of nightblooms drifted from gardens as Rootha hurried through the deserted streets to a home that wasn’t her true home. Joho’s business was buying raw gemstones from the hills to the north, and cutting them. Usually he took his cut gems once a month to the capital on the coast. So only once a month, for some hours by night, could Rootha be her real self.

She must not resent her dad for his financial failure. Never. Never must she hint at her own sacrifice.

A few hours earlier Pool had told her, not for the first time, “We’ll be together in a future life. Next time, we’ll meet each other soon. It’s destined because we’re so like twins, you and I, like separate halves of the same person. And even in this life, who knows what may happen?”

Such as the ferryboat sinking and Joho drowning? Rootha didn’t wish to curse her husband, for then she would feel even more guilt.

* * *

Later, as Rootha headed for Riverfront, now wearing brown boots and a violet gown, her coal-black hair pinned-up, a carriage overtook her. Fine lady going to have her hand read. Should I invite the mayor to my party, or not since I don’t like him much? Should I wear green or gold? Decisions, decisions.

Rootha gazed at the new lines on her own right hand. She had read a pamphlet arguing that the moon and the sun and the world and the stars all pulled at people’s mutable palms, just as the moon pulled tides. Nonsense! For if that was so, everybody in the same town ought to show almost identical lines. The science of reading palms was very complex. Apprentice tellers took three years to master the subject. In the past, centuries had gone into understanding the shiftings of destiny.

As she walked, she fiddled with her bronze binding band. The weld was almost seamless. After the ceremony, a young cousin had asked her, “Does it hurt, the soldering?” Of course not. Brides mustn’t scream or whimper. A thin pad, slid between wrist and band, blocked almost all the heat. If only she could wrench the band from her wrist, and undo all her union with Joho.

Beyond the curving low-walled esplanade of Riverside the river was very wide and slow, almost a lake. Fishermen were out in their boats, lines baited. Aha, one man scooped up a big squirming catch in his hand-net. First of the day. He hallooed, knifed the fish loose from the hook, swung the net around and around his head—then hurled the fish towards the nearest boat, where another fisherman caught it in his hand-net. With a halloo, that man sent the fish onward. Halloo-halloo rang across the water as the tossed catch went this way and that till one man overreached and fell in. Merrily all the fisherman flourished an open hand. Lucky in its escape, unlucky in its wounded mouth, the fish would be swimming away, gasping water.

Rootha was drowning, living with Joho, now that she knew Pool existed. He was her air.

How was Pool not infuriated with jealousy? He was remarkable, unique, like no other man. True, Pool knew that Joho was very unlikely to give Rootha a child. Though lately Joho had been suggesting adoption. An adopted infant in the house would be an emotional responsibility, and Rootha’s emotions were focused elsewhere. Rootha told her husband she only wanted a baby from out of her own body, not from someone else’s. So she must bear Joho upon her often while he tried and tried, always in vain.

The fine lady’s carriage stood by a vermilion cabin decorated with white palm-prints set at different angles. All of the thirty or so cabins beckoned differently. People tended to favor the same teller, consequently two or three people were waiting outside most cabins, none as yet outside a few. Rootha headed for one of the latter, which was blue with silver stars. She preferred variety and a certain anonymity. All tellers were sworn to secrecy. The punishment for telling tales outside the booth was drowning in a sack. But suppose a teller spied the exact details of her affair! What then?

This teller was a chubby, freckled woman gowned in grey. Charts of hand-lines covered all the wall space that wasn’t window curtained by lace. Seating herself on the tripod stool, Rootha paid a little-silver coin, then placed both her hands, knuckles down, in the grooves on the telling table.

Scrutiny, and scribbling of symbols.

Much was insignificant, but finally the woman said, “You’ll find out about otherlife today.”

“You mean I’m going to die?”

Was Joho about to discover and kill her? If she died, when the news reached Pool would he kill himself, to join her immediately in rebirth?

“No, I believe you should visit a temple.”

Well, a temple concerned itself with the migrations of the eternal soul. As regards temples, usually Rootha only attended special festivals where Pool would also be. Of course she couldn’t approach Pool then, not with Joho accompanying her, yet at least she and Pool could glimpse one another, which was both comforting and taunting. Might today’s destiny bring her a sense of an otherlife with Pool? People from early middle-age onward often experienced sensations from their previous lives. Never visions, only sensations. Rootha had tried to capture some, but hadn’t succeeded. She was still too young.

* * *

The teller hadn’t said which temple to visit, so Rootha went to the purplebrick temple close to her home which wasn’t a true home. Usually a number of templegoers would be staring past candles at the twisting reflection of flames in warped circular mirrors mounted on tripods, to cause a trance of atunement. Unusually, this morning, a bearded young speaker was holding forth, compelling a lot of attention.

“What,” the speaker was saying, “if our otherlives do not progess from the past through the present to the future, the way we assume? What if your immediately previous life occurred in what, to us, is the future? What if your very next life will occur in what, to us, is the past?”

His hand made a zigzag gesture, high up and low down—then it chopped low in a series of waves.

“What if several successive lives are lived in our past, yet in an opposite sequence to events in history? What if we do indeed advance towards perfection—however, our perfect life has already occurred previously?”

What he said was so utterly new and provocative. This explained why he was speaking so early in the day! Rootha could have wept. To think that she and Pool would be together in a future life, which would therefore be a perfect life, had been such a consolation. To hear that this perfect life of being with her twin soul might already have happened—and might even be the reason why they had recognized each other immediately the year before!—that was horrible. She had nothing to look forward to.

“No!” she cried out. “It can’t be!”

As if her outburst was a signal, other listeners also began to shout no and out and leave.

A senior speaker intervened, holding up his wrinkled palms for peace.

“Even though this young man’s wrong, we should at least hear him, not try to drown him with our voices!”

“No!” shrieked Rootha, covering her ears, cursing today’s destiny written on her hand.

The senior speaker addressed the bearded man. “Does it matter if our different lives aren’t chronological? We still live all of them!”

“And how many is all?” came the reply. “Our souls are twisted in time like a knot, or like a tangled serpent sucking its own tail. Perfection must be followed by imperfection, again and again endlessly—otherwise our souls would stop existing because they would have reached their culmination. What else,” shouted the young man, “can come after perfection—except imperfection? Without this”—and his hands gyrated—”this cycle of repetitions, the soul could not be eternal!”

So even if Rootha gained Pool, she would lose him again! Distraught, Rootha couldn’t bear to hear more. She rushed to the nearest mirror, thrust her hand quickly through the candle flame, pressed her palm against the mirror itself. Distorted reflections and twisted light dazzled her. She pressed harder, as if to push her hand right through the thick glass into an otherlife where Pool might catch her by the hand.

And the mirror toppled, and the candlestick too, and Rootha’s unbalanced body followed, as the mirror broke into pieces beneath her and the candle extinguished itself. Already strong hands were lifting Rootha swiftly. For a moment she imagined those hands were Pool’s.

“Pardon, lady!” A rough unfamiliar voice. Of a burly man. One of the templegoers. He smelled of fish.

“Can you stand on your own?”

When she nodded, the fisherman—or fishmonger—released her. The senior speaker was beside her now.

“I’m sorry,” Rootha gasped. “Pay … the damage.”

“You cut your hand,” was all he said.

She stared at blood on her palm, and without thinking, like some animal she licked her wound. Salty the taste, like tears.

* * *

When Rootha left the temple, her little cut already staunched, a severe-looking greying woman—her neighbour, in fact, Lola Caprizon—followed and said to her, “You’re very faithful. Your husband should be proud of you.”

For a terrible moment Rootha thought that her neighbour had noticed her rare nocturnal excursions to be with Pool whenever Joho went away. But no; Lola Caprizon was referring to faith in otherlife as taught in temples.

“That certainly shut him up,” Rootha’s neighbour said with a grim satisfaction. “He ought to be sewn in a sack and thrown in the river for fate to decide, sink or float.”

* * *

When Rootha woke beside Joho on the morning of Palm Sunday and went to the window, her right palm looked more intricate than ever before. Her left palm seemed much as usual.

As a teenager, Rootha had played the thumb-drums well enough to belong to a trio of drummer-women who performed at bondings and fates and even at the Palm Sunday festival. That was where Joho had first seen her and become enamored.

When she was younger, Rootha had even thought that drumming might be her whole life—the beat of the heart, the pulse of the blood—but presently passion for Joho prevailed. And within a few years that passion faded, just as she herself faded in Joho’s shadow. She ought to have waited! Yet how could she ever have predicted Pool’s existence? It was only a little over two years since he arrived here from the capital and set up shop.

Joho stirred and yawned loudly and stretched himself. He hauled himself upright, the weighty presence in her life, to which were attached the weight of her father too, and her mother.

“Today’s our day,” he said.

Rootha turned away from the window.

“How do you mean?”

“The day I first saw you. Can’t you remember? You were drumming.”

“Oh yes. Of course. Joho, I’ll have my palms read before the festival starts.”

“To decide how you’ll dress? I’d have thought the purple gown.”

Oh yes, she thought bitterly, to decide how I’ll dress as your wife. However, she smiled.

“Probably the purple, but even so! And you?”

“My brocade suit, of course.”

“I meant about visiting the teller.”

“No need of that,” said Joho. “Reed saw my hands before my trip. That’s enough.”

Joho always patronised the same elderly teller in Grand Square. Reed knows me like the front of my hand, Joho often said.

“Besides, we aren’t made of money,” Rootha’s husband added. No doubt an allusion to his father-in-bond. Joho was like that. A heavy presence. Pool was an absence, ever present in her mind.

* * *

This time on Riverside, Rootha visited a yellow cabin decorated with bird emblems in blue and white. The teller was a short thin man with a beak of a nose.

“Never seen the like before!” he exclaimed as he gazed at her right palm. “I do declare it’s more a map than a destiny. Lady, may I possibly copy it? Some inking on your palm, then press upon paper. Wash off easily.”

Rootha tried to make her refusal lighthearted. Yet he was right. How could she not have realised? A map was on her hand. Instead of the lines of life and heart and head, and the islands and squares of restriction or protection, of escape or frustration, and the crosses of irritation, and the bars and arches all with their interplaying meanings: instead of these, a map.

“What’s more, I swear it’s like a map of this city, but at the same time it’s not this city exactly. A bit different, as if say a fire burned parts, then they get rebuilt in a different way.”

She thought of the candle flame.

“Mayn’t I copy it merely to study?”

Rootha shook her head and closed her right hand, shutting within it her day’s destiny.

* * *

Guiding herself by her right palm, almost in a trance Rootha walked in the direction corresponding to where Pool’s house should be. Presently she noticed a marble building she had never seen before. Then another. Fashions had altered. Women wore shorter robes and fanciful feathered hats. Lips were painted in many shades of red. A few people glanced at her curiously—as well they might at someone holding out her hand constantly as she walked along.

Presently she arrived at Pool’s lane. The flagstones had been reset, all level, though the houses all looked much the same.

Heart thumping, she arrived at the door and clanged the bell.

Footsteps.

The man who opened the door was a blue-eyed stranger whose hair was long and fair, much longer and lighter than Pool’s had been.

“Can I help you, lady?”

She gaped at him, without any of the instant thrill of recognition she had expected, even if his appearance was different in this otherlife of the future.

“I’m looking for Pool the glovemaker.”

Yet of course, why should he be living in this particular house, and why should his name be Pool, and why should he even make gloves, except maybe that his talent had remained with him?

“Hmm, but I do seem to remember a Pool somewhere on the deeds of the house. It’s an unusual name. I don’t recall how long ago. How strange. I would think he’d be quite old or even dead by now.” This occupant of Pool’s house was intrigued. “My deeds are with the lender in Grand Square, though of course he’s shut today for the festival. So even though I’m going to Grand Square this afternoon …” He flashed a palm at her amiably.

Palm Sunday! Almost everyone would be going to the festival, all gathered together in one place.

“Oh thank you for your help!” Rootha exclaimed.

“But I haven’t—”

“You have!”

* * *

After a while, she passed a shop window and saw herself reflected, just as always. Oh yes, she was faithful! Faithful in the deepest sense. She must look eccentric, perhaps a bit of a mad lady.

A coin from her pocket bought her a meat bun and an apple juice and change from a vendor in Grand Square, where many youngsters were already gathering to enjoy a carousel and a house of mirrors and the other entertainments, some unfamiliar. Glancing back, she noticed the vendor admiring her coin, a grin on his face—that little-silver must have become rare.

Presently more and more townfolk were pouring into the square, dressed in their best. Rootha was walking around and glancing discreetly at every man until too many people were present and she felt panic, and redoubled her efforts. Could it be that Pool lived in another city or town, and she must travel from place to place—after first finding work for money, maybe as a drummer if her fingers were still nimble?

Yet she had the map on her hand, the map of this city, no other. She kissed her palm, where yesterday she had licked blood.

An hour passed. Two. What a throng. At last a senior speaker clad in white ascended the steps of the town hall, and spoke much as usual about destiny and otherlife.

Finally he raised his hands high, palms to the crowd, and a moment later everyone copied him, cheering.

It was then that Rootha saw him and forced her way through. Not the Pool who had been—but she knew.

And at last she faced him.

“Fate, I know you,” he said. “It’s as if … But where? Who are you?”

* * *

They talked and talked. She told him everything; and the truth seemed self-evident.

“Last year,” he confessed, “I was going to bond, but at the last moment somehow she seemed wrong for me. As if only part of her matched me. I felt so sad breaking off because I made her so sad, but my palm was always ambiguous and a teller said wait.”

“Did you love her?”

He was honest. “Yes. For at least two years.”

By now people were dancing to drummers in the streets leading out of the square. He took her by the hand. She realized that she didn’t yet know his name in this otherlife; hadn’t even asked.

“Come home with me.”

So she went with him, by a way that was familiar, until they arrived at … the same house that hadn’t been a home. Altered, yet so similar.

“I rent the upstairs,” he told her.

* * *

The Monster-God of Mamurth

Written by Edmond Hamilton

Illustrated by Joe Slucher

Out of the desert night he came to us, stumbling into our little circle of firelight and collapsing at once. Mitchell and I sprang to our feet with startled exclamations, for men who travel alone and on foot are a strange sight in the deserts of North Africa.

For the first few minutes that we worked over him, I thought he would die at once, but gradually we brought him back to consciousness. While Mitchell held a cup of water to his cracked lips, I looked him over and saw that he was too far gone to live much longer. His clothes were in rags, and his hands and knees literally flayed, from crawling over the sands, I judged. So when he motioned feebly for more water, I gave it to him, knowing that in any case his time was short. Soon he could talk, in a dead, croaking voice.

“I’m alone,” he told us, in answer to our first question; “no more out there to look for. What are you two—traders? I thought so. No, I’m an archeologist. A digger-up of the past.” His voice broke for a moment. “It’s not always good to dig up dead secrets. There are some things the past should be allowed to hide.”

He caught the look that passed between Mitchell and me.

“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “You will hear, I’ll tell you the whole thing. But listen to me, you two,” and in his earnestness he raised himself to a sitting position, “keep out of Igidi Desert. Remember that I told you that. I had a warning, too, but I disregarded it. And I went into hell—into hell! But there, I will tell you from the beginning.

“My name—that doesn’t matter now. I left Mogador more than a year ago, and came through the foot-hills of the Atlas ranges, striking out into the desert in hopes of finding some of the Carthaginian ruins the North African deserts are known to hold.

“I spent months in the search, traveling among the squalid Arab villages, now near an oasis and now far into the black, untracked desert. And as I went farther into that savage country, I found more and more of the ruins I sought, crumbled remains of temples and fortresses, relics, almost destroyed, of the age when Carthage meant empire and ruled all of North Africa from her walled city. And then, on the side of a massive block of stone, I found that which turned me toward Igidi.

“It was an inscription in the garbled Phoenician of the traders of Carthage, short enough so that I remembered it and can repeat it word for word. It read, literally, as follows:

“Merchants, go not into the city of Mamurth, which lies beyond the mountain pass. For I, San-Drabat of Carthage, entering the city with four companions in the month of Eschmoun, to trade, on the third night of our stay came priests and seized my fellows, I escaping by hiding. My companions they sacrificed to the evil god of the city, who has dwelt there from the beginning of time, and for whom the wise men of Mamurth have built a great temple the like of which is not on earth elsewhere, where the people of Mamurth worship their god. I escaped from the city and set this warning here that others may not turn their steps to Mamurth and to death.

“Perhaps you can imagine the effect that inscription had on me. It was the last trace of a city unknown to the memory of men, a last floating spar of a civilization sunken in the sea of time. That there could have been such a city at all seemed to me quite probable. What do we know of Carthage even, but a few names? No city, no civilization was ever so completely blotted off the earth as Carthage, when Roman Scipio ground its temples and palaces into the very dust, and plowed up the ground with salt, and the eagles of conquering Rome flew across a desert where a metropolis had been.

“It was on the outskirts of one of those wretched little Arab villages that I had found the block and its inscription, and I tried to find someone in the village to accompany me, but none would do so. I could plainly see the mountain pass, a mere crack between towering blue cliffs. In reality it was miles and miles away, but the deceptive optical qualities of the desert light made it seem very near. My maps placed that mountain range all right, as a lower branch of the Atlas, and the expanse behind the mountains was marked as ‘Igidi Desert’, but that was all I got from them. All that I could reckon on as certain was that it was desert that lay on the other side of the pass, and I must carry enough supplies to meet it.

“But the Arabs knew more! Though I offered what must have been fabulous riches to those poor devils, not one would come with me when I let them know what place I was heading for. None had ever been there, they would not even ride far into the desert in that direction; but all had very definite ideas of the place beyond the mountains as a nest of devils, a haunt of evil Jinns.

“Knowing how firmly superstition is implanted in their kind, I tried no longer to persuade them, and started alone, with two scrawny camels carrying my water and supplies. So for three days I forged across the desert under a broiling sun, and on the morning of the fourth I reached the pass.

“It was only a narrow crevice to begin with, and great boulders were strewn so thickly on its floor that it was a long, hard job getting through. And the cliffs on each side towered to such a height that the space between was a place of shadows and whispers and semi-darkness. It was late in the afternoon when I finally came through, and for a moment I stood motionless; for from that side of the pass the desert sloped down into a vast basin, and at the basin’s center, perhaps two miles from where I stood, gleamed the white ruins of Mamurth.

“I remember that I was very calm as I covered the two miles between myself and the ruins. I had taken the existence of the city as a fact, so much so that if the ruins had not been there I should have been vastly more surprised than at finding them.

“From the pass I had seen only a tangled mass of white fragments, but as I drew nearer, some of these began to take outline as crumbling blocks, and walls, and columns. The sand had drifted, too, and the ruins were completely buried in some sections, while nearly all were half covered.

“And then it was that I made a curious discovery. I had stopped to examine the material of the ruins, a smooth, veinless stone, much like an artificial marble or superfine concrete. And while I looked about me, intent on this, I noticed that on almost every shaft and block, on broken cornice and column, was carved the same symbol—if it was a symbol. It was a rough picture of a queer, outlandish creature, much like an octopus, with a round, almost shapeless body, and several long tentacles or arms branching out from the body, not supple and boneless, like those of an octopus, but seemingly stiff and jointed, like a spider’s legs. In fact, the thing might have been intended to represent a spider, I thought, though some of the details were wrong. I speculated for a moment on the profusion of these creatures carved on the ruins all around me, then gave it up as an enigma that was unsolvable.

“And the riddle of the city about me seemed unsolvable also. What could I find in this half-buried mass of stone fragments to throw light on the past? I could not even superficially explore the place, for the scantiness of my supplies and water would not permit a long stay. It was with a discouraged heart that I went back to the camels and, leading them to an open spot in the ruins, made my camp for the night. And when night had fallen, and I sat beside my little fire, the vast, brooding silence of this place of death was awful. There were no laughing human voices, or cries of animals, or even cries of birds or insects. There was nothing but the darkness and silence that crowded around me, flowed down upon me, beat sullenly against the glowing spears of light my little fire threw out.

“As I sat there musing, I was startled by a slight sound behind me. I turned to see its cause, and then stiffened. As I have mentioned, the space directly around my camp was clear sand, smoothed level by the winds. Well, as I stared at that flat expanse of sand, a hole several inches across suddenly appeared in its surface, yards from where I stood, but clearly visible in the firelight.

“There was nothing whatever to be seen there, not even a shadow, but there it was, one moment the level surface of the sand, the next moment a hole appearing in it, accompanied by a soft, crunching sound. As I stood gazing at it in wonder, that sound was repeated, and simultaneously another hole appeared in the sand’s surface, five or six feet nearer to me than the other.

“When I saw that, ice-tipped arrows of fear seemed to shoot through me, and then, yielding to a mad impulse, I snatched a blazing piece of fuel from the fire and hurled it, a comet of red flame, at the place where the holes had appeared. There was a slight sound of scurrying and shuffling, and I felt that whatever thing had made those marks had retreated, if a living thing had made them at all. What it had been, I could not imagine, for there had been absolutely nothing in sight, one track and then another appearing magically in the clear sand, if indeed they were really tracks at all.

“The mystery of the thing haunted me. Even in sleep I found no rest, for evil dreams seemed to flow into my brain from the dead city around me. All the dusty sins of ages past, in the forgotten place, seemed to be focused on me in the dreams I had. Strange shapes walked through them, unearthly as the spawn of a distant star, half seen and vanishing again.

“It was little enough sleep I got that night, but when the sun finally came, with its first golden rays, my fears and oppressions dropped from me like a cloak. No wonder the early peoples were sun-worshippers!

“And with my renewed strength and courage, a new thought struck me. In the inscription I have quoted to you, that long-dead merchant-adventurer had mentioned the great temple of the city and dwelt on its grandeur. Where, then, were its ruins? I wondered. I decided that what time I had would be better spent in investigating the ruins of this temple, which should be prominent, if that ancient Carthaginian had been correct as to its size.

“I ascended a near-by hillock and looked about me in all directions, and though I could not perceive any vast pile of ruins that might have been the temple’s, I did see for the first time, far away, two great figures of stone that stood out black against the rosy flame of the sunrise. It was a discovery that filled me with excitement, and I broke camp at once, starting in the direction of those two shapes.

“They were on the very edge of the farther side of the city, and it was noon before I finally stood before them. And now I saw clearly their nature: two great, sitting figures, carved of black stone, all of fifty feet in height, and almost that far apart, facing both toward the city and toward me. They were of human shape and dressed in a queer, scaled armor, but the faces I can not describe, for they were unhuman. The features were human, well-proportioned, even, but the face, the expression, suggested no kinship whatever with humanity as we know it. Were they carved from life? I wondered. If so, it must have been a strange sort of people who had lived in this city and set up these two statues.

“And now I tore my gaze away from them, and looked around. On each side of those shapes, the remains of what must once have been a mighty wall branched out, a long pile of crumbling ruins. But there had been no wall between the statues, that being evidently the gateway through the barrier. I wondered why the two guardians of the gate had survived, apparently entirely unharmed, while the wall and the city behind me had fallen into ruins. They were of a different material, I could see; but what was that material?

“And now I noticed for the first time the long avenue that began on the other side of the statues and stretched away into the desert for a half-mile or more. The sides of this avenue were two rows of smaller stone figures that ran in parallel lines away from the two colossi. So I started down that avenue, passing between the two great shapes that stood at its head. And as I went between them, I noticed for the first time the inscription graven on the inner side of each.

“On the pedestal of each figure, four or five feet from the ground, was a raised tablet of the same material, perhaps a yard square, and covered with strange symbols—characters, no doubt, of a lost language, undecipherable, at least to me. One symbol, though, that was especially prominent in the inscription, was not new to me. It was the carven picture of the spider, or octopus, which I have mentioned that I had found everywhere on the ruins of the city. And here it was scattered thickly among the symbols that made up the inscription. The tablet on the other statue was a replica of the first, and I could learn no more from it. So I started down the avenue, turning over in my mind the riddle of that omnipresent symbol, and then forgetting it, as I observed the things about me.

“That long street was like the avenue of sphinxes at Karnak, down which Pharaoh swung in his litter, borne to his temple on the necks of men. But the statues that made up its sides were not sphinx shaped. They were carved in strange forms, shapes of animals unknown to us, as far removed from anything we can imagine as the beasts of another world. I can not describe them, any more than you could describe a dragon to a man who had been blind all his life. Yet they were of evil, reptilian shapes; they tore at my nerves as I looked at them.

“Down between the two rows of them I went, until I came to the end of the avenue. Standing there between the last two figures, I could see nothing before me but the yellow sands of the desert, as far as the eye could reach. I was puzzled. What had been the object of all the pains that had been taken, the wall, the two great statues, and this long avenue, if it but led into the desert?

“Gradually I began to see that there was something queer about the part of the desert that lay directly before me. It was flat. For an area, seemingly round in shape, that must have covered several acres, the surface of the desert seemed absolutely level. It was as though the sands within that great circle had been packed down with tremendous force, leaving not even the littlest ridge of dune on its surface. Beyond this flat area, and all around it, the desert was broken up by small hills and valleys, and traversed by whirling sand-clouds, but nothing stirred on the flat surface of the circle.

“Interested at once, I strode forward to the edge of the circle, only a few yards away. I had just reached that edge when an invisible hand seemed to strike me a great blow on the face and chest, knocking me backward in the sand.

“It was minutes before I advanced again, but I did advance, for all my curiosity was now aroused. I crawled toward the circle’s edge, holding my pistol before me, pushing slowly forward.

“When the automatic in my outstretched hand reached the line of the circle, it struck against something hard, and I could push it no farther. It was exactly as if it had struck against the side of a wall, but no wall or anything else was to be seen. Reaching out my hand, I touched the same hard barrier, and in a moment I was on my feet.

“For I knew now that it was solid matter I had run into, not force. When I thrust out my hands, the edge of the circle was as far as they would go, for there they met a smooth wall, totally invisible, yet at the same time quite material. And the phenomenon was one which even I could partly understand. Somehow, in the dead past, the scientists of the city behind me, the ‘wise men’ mentioned in the inscription, had discovered the secret of making solid matter invisible, and had applied it to the work that I was now examining. Such a thing was far from impossible. Even our own scientists can make matter partly invisible, with the X-ray. Evidently these people had known the whole process, a secret that had been lost in the succeeding ages, like the secret of hard gold, and malleable glass, and others that we find mentioned in ancient writings. Yet I wondered how they had done this, so that, ages after those who had built the thing were wind-driven dust, it remained as invisible as ever.

“I stood back and threw pebbles into the air, toward the circle. No matter how high I threw them, when they reached the line of the circle’s edge they rebounded with a clicking sound; so I knew that the wall must tower to a great height above me. I was on fire to get inside the wall, and examine the place from the inside, but how to do it? There must be an entrance, but where? And I suddenly remembered the two guardian statues at the head of the great avenue, with their carven tablets, and wondered what connection they had with this place.

“Suddenly the strangeness of the whole thing struck me like a blow. The great, unseen wall before me, the circle of sand, flat and unchanging, and myself, standing there and wondering, wondering. A voice from out of the dead city behind me seemed to sound in my heart, bidding me to turn and flee, to get away. I remembered the warning of the inscription, ‘Go not to Mamurth.’ And as I thought of the inscription, I had no doubt that this was the great temple described by San-Drabat. Surely he was right: the like of it was not on earth elsewhere.

“But I would not go, I could not go, until I had examined the wall from the inside. Calmly reasoning the matter, I decided that the logical place for the gateway through the wall would be at the end of the avenue, so that those who came down the street could pass directly through the wall. And my reasoning was good, for it was at that spot that I found the entrance: an opening in the barrier, several yards wide, and running higher than I could reach, how high I had no means of telling.

“I felt my way through the gate, and stepped at once upon a floor of hard material, not as smooth as the wall’s surface, but equally invisible. Inside the entrance lay a corridor of equal width, leading into the center of the circle, and I felt my way forward.

“I must have made a strange picture, had there been any there to observe it. For while I knew that all around me were the towering, invisible walls, and I knew not what else, yet all my eyes could see was the great flat circle of sand beneath me, carpeted with the afternoon sunshine. Only, I seemed to be walking a foot above the ground, in thin air. That was the thickness of the floor beneath me, and it was the weight of this great floor, I knew, that held the circle of sand under it for ever flat and unchanging.

“I walked slowly down the passageway, with hands outstretched before me, and had gone but a short distance when I brought up against another smooth wall that lay directly across the corridor, seemingly making it a blind alley. But I was not discouraged now, for I knew that there must be a door somewhere, and began to feel around me in search of it.

“I found the door. In groping around the sides of the corridor my hands encountered a smoothly rounded knob set in the wall, and as I laid my hand on this, the door opened. There was a sighing, as of a little wind, and when I again felt my way forward, the wall that had lain across the passageway was gone, and I was free to go forward. But I dared not go through at once. I went back to the knob on the wall, and found that no amount of pressing or twisting of it would close the door that had opened. Some subtle mechanism within the knob had operated, that needed only a touch of the hand to work it, and the whole end of the corridor had moved out of the way, sliding up in grooves, I think, like a portcullis, though of this I am not sure.

“But the door was safely opened, and I passed through it. Moving about, like a blind man in a strange place, I found that I was in a vast inner court, the walls of which sloped away in a great curve. When I discovered this, I came back to the spot where the corridor opened into the court, and then walked straight out into the court itself.

“It was steps that I encountered: the first broad steps of what was evidently a staircase of titanic proportions. And I went up, slowly, carefully, feeling before me every foot of the way. It was only the feel of the staircase under me that gave reality to it, for as far as I could see, I was simply climbing up into empty space. It was weird beyond telling.

“Up and up I went, until I was all of a hundred feet above the ground, and then the staircase narrowed, the sides drew together. A few more steps, and I came out on a flat floor again, which, after some groping about, I found to be a broad landing, with high, railed edges. I crawled across this landing on hands and knees, and then struck against another wall, and in it, another door. I went through this too, still crawling, and though everything about me was still invisible, I sensed that I was no longer in the open air, but in a great room.

“I stopped short, and then, as I crouched on the floor, I felt a sudden prescience of evil, of some malignant, menacing entity that was native here. Nothing I could see, or hear, but strong upon my brain beat the thought of something infinitely ancient, infinitely evil, that was a part of this place. Was it a consciousness, I wonder, of the horror that had filled the place in ages long dead? Whatever caused it, I could go no farther in the face of the terror that possessed me; so I drew back and walked to the edge of the landing, leaning over its high, invisible railing and surveying the scene below.

“The setting sun hung like a great ball of red-hot iron in the western sky, and in its lurid rays the two great statues cast long shadows on the yellow sands. Not far away, my two camels, hobbled, moved restlessly about. To all appearances I was standing on thin air, a hundred feet or more above the ground, but in my mind’s eye I had a picture of the great courts and corridors below me, through which I had felt my way.

“As I mused there in the red light, it was clear to me that this was the great temple of the city. What a sight it must have been, in the time of the city’s life! I could imagine the long procession of priests and people, in somber and gorgeous robes, coming out from the city, between the great statues and down the long avenue, dragging with them, perhaps, an unhappy prisoner to sacrifice to their god in this, his temple.

“The sun was now dipping beneath the horizon, and I turned to go, but before ever I moved, I became rigid and my heart seemed to stand still. For on the farther edge of the clear stretch of sand that lay beneath the temple and the city, a hole suddenly appeared in the sand, springing into being on the desert’s face exactly like the one I had seen at my campfire the night before. I watched, as fascinated as by the eyes of a snake. And before my eyes, another and another appeared, not in a straight line, but in a zigzag fashion. Two such holes would be punched down on one side, then two more on the other side, then one in the middle, making a series of tracks, perhaps two yards in width from side to side, and advancing straight toward the temple and myself. And I could see nothing!

“It was like—the comparison suddenly struck me—like the tracks a many-legged insect might make in the sand, only magnified to unheard-of proportions. And with that thought, the truth rushed on me, for I remembered the spider carved on the ruins and on the statues, and I knew now what it had signified to the dwellers in the city. What was it the inscription had said? ‘The evil god of the city, who has dwelt there from the beginning of time.’ And as I saw those tracks advancing toward me, I knew that the city’s ancient evil god still dwelt here, and that I was in his temple, alone and unarmed.

“What strange creatures might there not have been in the dawn of time? And this one, this gigantic monster in a spider’s form—had not those who built the city found it here when they came, and, in awe, taken it as the city’s god, and built for it the mighty temple in which I now stood? And they, who had the wisdom and art to make this vast fane invisible, not to be seen by human eyes, had they done the same to their god, and made of him almost a true god, invisible, powerful, undying? Undying! Almost it must have been, to survive the ages as it had done. Yet I knew that even some kinds of parrots live for centuries, and what could I know of this monstrous relic of dead ages? And when the city died and crumbled, and the victims were no longer brought to its lair in the temple, did it not live, as I thought, by ranging the desert? No wonder the Arabs had feared the country in this direction! It would be death for anything that came even within view of such a horror, that could clutch and spring and chase, and yet remain always unseen. And was it death for me?

“Such were some of the thoughts that pounded through my brain, as I watched death approach, with those steadily advancing tracks in the sand. And now the paralysis of terror that had gripped me was broken, and I ran down the great staircase, and into the court. I could think of no place in that great hall where I might hide. Imagine hiding in a place where all is invisible! But I must go some place, and finally I dashed past the foot of the great staircase until I reached a wall directly under the landing on which I had stood, and against this I crouched, praying that the deepening shadows of dusk might hide me from the gaze of the creature who lair this was.

“I knew instantly when the thing entered the gate through which I too had come. Pad, pad, pad—that was the soft, cushioned sound of its passage. I heard the feet stop for a moment by the opened door at the end of the corridor. Perhaps it was in surprise that the door was open, I thought, for how could I know how great or little intelligence lay in that unseen creature’s brain? Then, pad, pad—across the court it came, and I heard the soft sound of its passing as it ascended the staircase. Had I not been afraid to breathe, I would have almost screamed with relief.

“Yet still fear held me, and I remained crouched against the wall while the thing went up the great stairs. Imagine that scene! All around me was absolutely nothing visible, nothing but the great flat circle of sand that lay a foot below me; yet I saw the place with my mind’s eye, and knew of the walls and courts that lay about me, and the thing above me, in fear of which I was crouching there in the gathering darkness.

“The sound of feet above me had ceased, and I judged that the thing had gone into the great room above, which I had feared to enter. Now, if ever, was the time to make my escape in the darkness; so I rose, with infinite carefulness, and softly walked across the court to the door that led into the corridor. But when I had walked only half of the distance, as I thought, I crashed squarely into another invisible wall across my path, and fell backward, the metal handle of the sheath-knife at my belt striking the flooring with a loud clang. God help me, I had misjudged the position of the door, and had walked straight into the wall, instead!

“I lay there, motionless, with cold fear flooding every part of my being. Then, pad, pad—the soft steps of the thing across the landing, and then silence for a moment. Could it see me from the landing? I wondered. Could it? For a moment, hope warmed me, as no sound came, but the next instant I knew that death had me by the throat, for pad, pad—down the stairs it came.

“With that sound my last vestige of self-control fled and I scrambled to my feet and made another mad dash in the direction of the door. Crash!—into another wall I went, and rose to my feet trembling. There was no sound of footsteps now, and as quietly as I could, I walked into the great court still farther, as I thought, for all my ideas of direction were hopelessly confused. God, what a weird game it was we played there on that darkened circle of sand!

“No sound whatever came from the thing that hunted me, and my hope flickered up again. And with a dreadful irony, it was at that exact moment that I walked straight into the thing. My outstretched hand touched and grasped what must have been one of its limbs, thick and cold and hairy, which was instantly torn from my grasp and then seized me again, while another and another clutched me also. The thing had stood quite still, leaving me to walk directly into its grasp—the drama of the spider and the fly!

“A moment only it held me, for that cold grasp filled me with such deep, shuddering abhorrence that I wrenched myself loose and fled madly across the court, stumbling again on the first step of the great staircase. I raced up the stairs, and even as I ran I heard the thing in pursuit.

“Up I went, and across the landing, and grasped the edge of the railing, for I meant to throw myself down from there, to a clean death on the floor below. But under my hands, the top of the railing moved, one of the great blocks that evidently made up its top was loosened and rocked toward me. In a flash I grasped the great block and staggered across the landing with it in my arms, to the head of the staircase. Two men could hardly have lifted it, I think, yet I did more, in a sudden access of mad strength; for as I heard that monster coming swiftly up the great stairs, I raised the block, invisible as ever, above my head, and sent it crashing down the staircase upon the place where I thought the thing was at that moment.

“For an instant after the crash there was silence, and then a low humming sound began, that waxed into a loud droning. And at the same time, at a spot half-way down the staircase where the block had crashed, a thin, purple liquid seemed to well out of the empty air, giving form to a few of the invisible steps as it flowed over them, and outlining, too, the block I had thrown, and a great hairy limb that lay crushed beneath it, and from which the fluid that was the monster’s blood was oozing. I had not killed the thing, but had chained it down with the block that held it prisoner.

“There was a thrashing sound on the staircase, and the purple stream ran more freely, and by the outline of its splashes, I saw, dimly, the monstrous god that had been known in Mamurth in ages past. It was like a giant spider, with angled limbs that were yards long, and a hairy, repellent body. Even as I stood there, I wondered that the thing, invisible as it was, was yet visible by the life-blood in it, when that blood was spilled. Yet so it was, nor can I even suggest a reason. But one glimpse I got of its half-visible, purple-splashed outline, and then, hugging the farther side of the stairs, I descended. When I passed the thing, the intolerable odor of a crushed insect almost smothered me, and the monster itself made frantic efforts to loosen itself and spring at me. But it could not, and I got safely down, shuddering and hardly able to walk.

“Straight across the great court I went, and ran shakily through the corridor, and down the long avenue, and out between the two great statues. The moonlight shone on them, and the tablets of inscriptions stood out clearly on the sides of the statues, with their strange symbols and carved spider forms. But I knew now what their message was!

“It was well that my camels had wandered into the ruins, for such was the fear that struck through me that I would never have returned for them had they lingered by the invisible wall. All that night I rode to the north, and when morning came I did not stop, but still pushed north. And as I went through the mountain pass, one camel stumbled and fell, and in falling burst open all my water supplies that were lashed on its back.

“No water at all was left, but I still held north, killing the other camel by my constant speed, and then staggered on, afoot. On hands and knees I crawled forward, when my legs gave out, always north, away from that temple of evil and its evil god. And tonight, I had been crawling, how many miles I do not know, and I saw your fire. And that is all.”

* * *

He lay back exhausted, and Mitchell and I looked at each other’s faces in the firelight. Then, rising, Mitchell strode to the edge of our camp and looked for a long time at the moonlit desert, which lay toward the south. What his thoughts were, I do not know. I was nursing my own, as I watched the man who lay beside our fire.

It was early the next morning that he died, muttering about great walls around him. We wrapped his body securely, and bearing it with us held our way across the desert.

In Algiers we cabled to the friends whose address we found in his money belt, and arranged to ship the body to them, for such had been his only request. Later they wrote that he had been buried in the little churchyard of the New England village that had been his childhood home. I do not think that his sleep there will be troubled by dreams of that place of evil from which he fled. I pray that it will not.

Often and often have Mitchell and I discussed the thing, over lonely campfires and in the inns of the seaport towns. Did he kill the invisible monster he spoke of, and is it lying now, a withered remnant, under the block on the great staircase? Or did it gnaw its way loose; does it still roam the desert and make its lair in the vast, ancient temple, as unseen as itself?

Or, different still, was the man simply crazed by the heat and thirst of the desert, and his tale but the product of a maddened mind? I do not think that this is so. I think that he told truth, yet I do not know. Nor shall I ever know, for never, Mitchell and I have decided, shall we be the ones to venture into the place of hell on earth where that ancient god of evil may still be living, amid the invisible courts and towers, beyond the unseen wall.

* * *

A Better Sense of Direction

Written by Mike Wood

Illustrated by R.Stephen Adams

We ran out of tinned spaghetti-in-tomato-sauce less than seven years into the voyage. For my daughter, Stella, it was a crisis. Stella had always hated space rations, but she was okay with tinned spaghetti. It was the only thing she ever seemed to eat. Stella was six years old, and anyone who has ever spent time with a six-year-old will know how fussy they can be with food. Stella’s relationship with tinned spaghetti was more a fixation. She didn’t just eat the stuff; she didn’t just play with it; she communed with it.

The spaghetti crisis wasn’t the first trauma to follow Stella’s unplanned arrival on the crew list, but for Jodie and me, it was probably the most unsettling. Accommodation on a starship is cramped, and privacy is a scarce commodity, so a tantrum under these conditions, let me tell you, is a tantrum on steroids.

* * *

Stella was the first true child-of-the stars. She was conceived on the starship and she was born on the starship. Children had always been part of the mission plan, hence the low average age of the crew (Babes in Space, they called us). But it had never been part of the plan to have the first birth take place only nine months out of Earth orbit.

To be fair, a young crew is an impetuous crew, and Jodie and I, being scientists (of a sort), were drawn to experimentation. Our ship, Castor, had been suspended at L2 for the three days that were set aside for crew embarkation and provisioning. Jodie and I were amongst the first to board. We had just three days of weightlessness before the photon engines were due to fire-up, hitting us with the point-two gee of thrust that would be our constant companion for the next twenty-odd years; ten years accelerating then ten more years to wind it back down.

“Jodie,” I said, “have you ever wondered what it might be like in zero gravity?”

“I don’t need to wonder. This is zero gravity. It sucks. I’ve been puking for four hours.”

“No, Jodie, you misunderstand. I’m talking about what it might be like. You know …” I winked. I worked my eyebrows up and down my face in a choreography of suggestiveness.

“Ah.”

She got my drift.

“Did you misunderstand what I just said, Luke … about the puking?”

“Space-sickness is in the mind. All you need is something that will take your mind off it.”

“And you reckon …”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Well, okay then.”

So we had three days—three days in which to explore the boundaries of science. Well, let me assure you, zero-gee-nooky is not up to much. It’s tricky, it’s horribly messy, and it is not a cure for space-sickness. Also, it is rife with unexpected dangers. I managed torn ligaments as well as a four-day concussion, while Jodie brought the whole, sorry experience to a close by dislocating her thumb. Then the engines powered-up. With the return of gravity the space-sickness sufferers perked up … but not Jodie. Her space-sickness metamorphosed, seamlessly, into morning sickness.

Captain Bligh (her real name’s Catherine Blair) was furious when we told her the results of our adventure. She even threatened to turn the ship around and send us home, but the accountants, God bless them, saved us on that call. What the captain did insist on, though, was that we share a cabin and assume joint responsibility for the baby’s upbringing. This was fine by me; I’d had a thing for Jodie ever since college. Jodie wasn’t quite so pleased, though, and she sulked about the arrangement for many months afterwards. I put this down to hormonal changes. I knew she would come round eventually, and I was right. She gave up throwing stuff at me a couple of years ago, and we moved to a mutually stress-free and congenial silence. Our relationship did not blossom into what you’d call love, but at least she stopped trying to trick me into the air-lock.

I first noticed Jodie at college. It was her walk. She had the action. Jodie’s walk could stop traffic, usually in a way that involved broken glass, rolling hubcaps and seeping pools of oil and antifreeze. She didn’t seem to realise the effect that she was having on her immediate environment. She would glide through town with those hips all swaying and pulsing to a Caribbean beat, and the traffic accidents would simply pile up around her. And then I noticed the T shirts, with slogans printed across her boobs: “Beam me up Scotty,” ” … to boldly go,” “Make it so.” She was a Trekky.

I tracked down the local branch and joined. I went to all the meetings, the screenings … I bought the Spock ears. I learned enough Klingon to get by, and I moved in on her inner circle.

But we never spoke. I was one of her entourage; the drooling, pathetic onlookers; the pimply male adolescent no-hopers. I seemed destined to be, forever, a voyeur by day and a fantasist by night.

Then I overheard a conversation. She and a small group of her inner circle friends had signed up for Castor and Pollux. Jodie was hard-core Trekky, and she was heading for the stars. The very next day I signed up myself. I went through the interviews and the pre-selection training and the medicals … I hung in there. The numbers were pared down. Each evening the TV audiences voted, and more of us fell by the wayside until, at last, the United States of Europe had their four viewer-selected reps: Me, Jodie, Jorge and Chantel. Jodie and Jorge drew Castor, and I drew Pollux, with Chantel. I was supposed to be ecstatic, but I was devastated. The two ships were to fly, side-by-side, for twenty-odd years, and there could be no physical contact between the crews. I never really wanted to even make the trip, I mean, twenty years! I’d faked the psychs; I had motivation but it wasn’t space that drove me on.

I wrote the email. I was bailing, and my finger was actually hovering over the send button when the news broke; Jorge had concealed a genetic disorder that came about from his tight-fisted father using a back-street baby-designer during his conception, and he was bumped. The reserve, Henri, was French, like Chantel, so they shunted Jodie over to Castor with me. Two Brits, two French. There were also four Asians—the rest, thirty-two on each ship, were American.

Jodie and I became a team, sort of. And, well, you know the rest.

* * *

So, the spaghetti crop failed, and Stella went on one for a couple of weeks. Things were so desperate I even tried replicating spaghetti by extruding homemade pasta through a spare photon diffuser, then mixing in some tomato paste and boiling the lot to hell and back. Everyone, the whole crew, loved it … except Stella. It wasn’t the same as tinned. It got me posted in the galley, though. I was happier there. My speciality was drive systems, but I’d faked the exams. It made me a bit jumpy when I was poking around in there with my greasy rag when there’re so many lives hanging on my imaginary expertise. The engines were sparky-clean, but I knew jack about fixing them if they ever stopped firing. Brad, the cook, on the other hand was a choux-chef, and very frustrated in a culinary world of concentrates, and he knew more about photon drive systems than I did. So we swapped, and we were both happier for it.

Stella sleeps through these days, and so, therefore, do Jodie and I. So, when I was dragged from sleep by the alarm after only four hours of zzs, I felt particularly cheated. I’d only recently reacquainted myself with the luxury of eight straight hours. But it wasn’t Stella, this time; it was Captain Bligh, calling the full crew to the galley, the only room where we could all assemble. Last time we were here was when the weird stuff started happening with the marker stars, a few years ago.

“Thanks for coming down,” she said, as if we had any choice. “We have a problem.”

“It’s the thrust isn’t it?” Jodie said. There were a number of nodding heads. Quite a few had noticed.

“Pollux has been pulling away from us for a couple of days. Nothing serious to begin with, but in the last few hours it’s become more noticeable.”

“I’ve got greens right across the board,” said Brad. “Can’t be the engines.”

“Unless we’re venting, for’ard, it can’t be much else,” said Bligh. “Brad, I want you and Luke to get your heads together and run a full set of diagnostics on the drive. I’ll come and help. Anyone else got any ideas?”

There were blank looks.

“Okay, so we need an end-to-end integrity-check … everyone. The instruments aren’t showing any anomalies, but they could be faulty. It’s hands-on, I’m afraid. I want every inch of the hull examined.”

The gathering broke up amid a sotto-voce chorus of grumbles and curses. An end-to-end was a miserable task, involving hours of crawling and wriggling into the most claustrophobic, cold and inhospitable corners of the ship. I was relieved to have drawn the cerebral option.

It took Captain Bligh five hours to find the cause. She called us all back to the galley. I saw what she had found, and suddenly I developed an overwhelming urge to go end-to-ending; to find one of those cold, cramped corners and hide there.

“Here, in my hand, I have a photon diffuser,” she announced. “There are carbon deposits. The resulting hot-spots have damaged the machining.” And now she raised her voice to an accusatory level. “I was puzzled about the carbon. How could carbon deposits form in this way? The components were installed in ionised white-room conditions.”

She scratched some of the black carbon off and rubbed it between her fingers.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “this is pasta.”

And she looked straight at me.

Everybody looked straight at me. They looked at their chapped and blistered fingers, the result of five hours of arctic end-to-ending, then they looked, again, at me.

There are times when one longs for a duvet under which to crawl.

The captain wasn’t finished.

“What is more,” she said, “this is the spare. The one in the engine—the one currently holding us back to just point eight gee, is in better shape.”

She looked straight at me again, then looked at each of the thirty-five worried faces.

“Questions?”

“What’s the bottom line?” This was Anjana, the pilot.

“The bottom line is, at our current loss of acceleration, status quo maintained, we’ve added about four years to our journey time. On the other hand, my gut feeling is that the diffuser will continue to degrade, then … who knows?”

“Don’t we have more than one spare?”

“There’s triple redundancy on all the stressed parts. The diffuser isn’t stressed. We have one spare to cover the minimal risk of build flaws. The planners are at fault, they didn’t anticipate the additional stresses imposed by cookery.”

“How about Pollux? Can we use their spare?” said Jodie.

The captain shook her head. “The unstressed parts, the minimal redundancy items, are shared inventory. We carry some of the spares, Pollox carries others. This is the one spare diffuser for Castor and Pollux. I called Captain Schiffer, just to be sure, and he confirmed—this is the only one.”

“Can’t we repair it?” I asked. My voice was tiny and unwelcome.

The captain looked at me for a long, silent moment, then said,

“No.”

* * *

“Daddy, why don’t people like you any more?” It had only taken Stella a couple of days to pick up the bad vibes.

“What makes you think nobody likes me?” I didn’t have a comfortable answer, so I was stalling for time.

“They call you names.”

“They’re just a bit upset, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“It’s going to take us all a bit longer to get to New World, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Your Daddy made a mistake with the engines, honey. It’s nothing more. They’re all overreacting.” Jodie had leapt to my defence. This was unprecedented. I began to think that she was, well, starting to warm towards me a little. Then I realised that she was deflecting our daughter away from an associated matter. I had made the pasta to try and appease Stella’s long and apocalyptic temper tantrums. Stella had wanted spaghetti.

“If everyone’s so upset about us taking longer, Daddy, then why don’t we just go straight there?”

“No, honey, we’re going slower, that’s all. It will take us a few more years because we’re not gaining speed quite so quickly,” said Jodie.

“So why don’t we just go the short way?”

I took over trying to explain. “If I want to go from the front of the ship to the back of the ship it will take longer if I walk slower, see?”

Stella exploded in a frustrated storm of tears.

“I know that. You said. But if you want to get there quicker … Why . . ! Not . . ! Go . . ! The short way!” She screamed the words. She threw her beaker of juice across the room. It bounced off the holo’ and sticky, fluorescent orange liquid exploded onto the front screen and dripped down onto the carpet. Jodie and I looked at each other. We’d seen this sort of thing coming before. We knew the signs.

“I’m not sure what you mean, honey. Explain to me.” I tried to sound patient.

Stella’s bottom lip was quivering with frustration or rage or something, but she gathered some control, then, with a straight arm, she pointed out to her left.

“New World is there,” she said. Then she pointed straight up above her head, towards the front of the ship.

“We’re going that way. We’re just going down the spaghetti!” she shouted the last word.

I looked over at Jodie and shrugged. I was worried that my daughter was having some kind of a mental crisis. Maybe living in space all her life …

Jodie came over and put her hand lightly on my arm.

“Wait,” she said. She didn’t want me saying any more. Her eyes held a strange, almost wondrous expression. “Explain again, darling, for Mummy.”

“We keep going all over the place. Like we’re going down the spaghetti. It’s stupid. Why can’t we just go straight there?”

“What do you mean, honey, down the spaghetti.”

Stella explained. It sounded ridiculous. I smiled to humour her. Jodie smiled, too. But her smile was different. It was almost as if she was taking this nonsense seriously.

We settled Stella down for bed, eventually, and Jodie wanted to talk. We pulled out the sofa-bed and relaxed onto it with a glass of wine each. This was great. I’d never felt so close to her, even when we were doing the “science” thing back at L2. I wanted this moment to last. I forced myself to listen; not to rubbish what she was saying to me.

“I think I know what she’s trying to tell us, Luke. I think she might know something. I think there is a quicker way.”

“Jodie, come on. You used to get lost around college when …” I bit my lip. I shouldn’t have said it. I’d gone and put my foot in it again. She’d go off on a hissy fit now and storm out.

But she didn’t.

Jodie nodded. “Yes. Back home. I admit. I never knew where I was. I could never find my way round town, even. But out here, for the last … three … four years, it’s been different. I’ve felt that I’ve known where I am. But … it’s felt wrong. We’ve felt wrong. I’ve had this idea that we’ve … that we’ve been going the wrong way!”

She was so intense. Her eyes were burning. She held my forearm in a talon-like grip. I was loving this, even though I had no idea what she was talking about; even though the two women in my life appeared to be going off their heads.

“I think we should speak to Catherine. I think Stella should explain this to Catherine.”

“Tell Captain Bligh? She’ll lock us up.”

“I don’t think so.”

* * *

“Captain Blair, do you mind if I ask, how was your sense of direction back on Earth?”

It was a strange opening. I cringed. Jodie had unusual ideas about how to break into a topic gently. We were sitting around the captain’s wardroom table, Jodie, myself and Stella.

The captain gave a half laugh. “It’s an odd question, but I suppose it won’t harm to say, I was pretty hopeless. I was terrible with a map. Why do you ask?”

Jodie smiled. “I have a theory. Stella has something to tell us. It’s a little weird but I think you’ll understand.

“Stella, tell the captain what you told me and Daddy.”

Stella began to unfold her bizarre theory again. She was hesitant at first—a little scared of the captain—but she soon got into her stride. She started with the spaghetti. She explained how we were at one end of a piece of spaghetti and New World was at the other end. New World shone down the spaghetti and we could see it shining from the ship, so we followed the light. She said how every star was at the end of a different piece of spaghetti, and how it was silly to follow the light round all the curves and loops and knots, when it would be much quicker and shorter to travel in a straight line and go to New World directly.

Then Jodie took over the narrative.

“Is it possible that some of us can see the shape of space; but that on Earth, where gravity gives everything a top and a bottom, we get confused? Even out here we are confused because, after spending our lives living on Earth we’re conditioned to straight lines and up and down.”

“Go on.” The captain wasn’t laughing, or shouting, or sneering. In fact she had that same eureka spark in her eye that I had seen in Jodie the previous evening.

“I know this is a dodgy bit of gender stereotyping, but isn’t it widely viewed that women have a poor sense of direction, even though everyone’s scared to say it out loud? But could it be that women have the better sense of direction, that they can see the curves of space-time, but on Earth we are confused because the Earth’s surface makes us think two-and-a-bit-dimensionally?”

“Two-and-a-bit?” The captain and I spoke in unison.

“Yeah. We could move around on the surface of the planet. It’s hard to go up; it’s even harder to go down. If you want to take the quickest way to the shops you don’t usually pick up a shovel.”

The captain nodded, in a spooky, knowing way. I simply held up my hands in an Oh-my-God-they’re-all-nutters kind of expression.

“Stella isn’t conditioned,” Jodie continued. “She’s a child of the stars. She sees what is plain to see and she believes we are all stupid not to see the obvious.”

“But there’s gravity on the ship,” I said. I had to say something to show that at least I wasn’t a couple of bricks short of a wall.

But the captain waved an impatient hand at me. “That’s thrust,” she said. “Nothing to do with gravity.”

She leaned over the table and pulled a rolled-up platter screen from a drawer. She tapped her fingers on the desk to activate her implants, then, with rapid finger movements, called up a star map on the screen. It showed Earth, and New World connected by a straight dotted line. A small pulsating red dot indicated the depressingly short distance along the line that Castor and Pollux had travelled in just under seven years. The captain began to explain the map to Stella, but before she had uttered more than a couple of sentences Stella was up on her knees, on the stool and pointing at the chart.

“You see!” She shouted. “It’s wong! You all keep getting it wong! It’s the wong shape. It’s all straightened out.”

Captain Blair reached up into a locker above her head. She brought down an ancient globe of the stars and set it on the table.

“Is this better?” she asked.

Stella stared at it for a long moment. Then she shook her head.

“No. Worse,” she said. “There’s no inning or outing. There’s no … through … or around. It doesn’t even look like outside.”

Captain Blair clasped her hands together and pressed her index fingers to her lips. She spoke in a quiet voice.

“She’s talking about multi-dimensions, isn’t she. She’s six-years old and she can visualise the universe in multiple dimensions. In one short sentence she has explained the weirdness.”

Blair was right. We stared at the globe. It looked just like the sky seen from Earth, albeit inside out. But a few years ago, a year or so into the voyage, the weirdness had started. The stars had begun to shift out of position. The markers—the pulsars—had moved. We lost track of the galactic equator, completely. We’d all met in the galley and worked the problem. We decided that we were seeing some kind of relativistic effect—an optical illusion—but back then we weren’t doing relativistic speeds … not really. We’d dismissed it. New World was still straight ahead. We could follow our noses. We’d be fine so long as we didn’t have to make the return trip. A couple of the crew had decided to do a study of it, but they’d got nowhere. Now, here was a six year-old girl telling us why. As we’d moved through space our visual perspective had changed. We had moved into a different part of the spaghetti bowl and everything looked wrong to us.

“Stella?” the captain leaned across the table and gently grasped both of Stella’s hands. She peered into Stella’s eyes, and in a quiet but firm voice she asked the question.

“Stella, would you be able to show us the way to New World? Could you show us which way to turn?”

* * *

The captain’s tough, but when she announced that she’d been told, by a six-year-old girl, that New World would be much closer if we made an eighty-degree course correction; that it would be the first of many such adjustments; that she couldn’t be precise about it, because ever since the weirdness had started we didn’t even know the direction in which the galactic equator lay; so we would now be guided by the six-year-old, who was to show us the way by pointing … When she announced this, there was mayhem. She then added that she would ask all the women in the crew for validation of the directions; but only those women who, on Earth, had displayed a serious lack of spatial awareness. Only those who could not read a map would be consulted.

Mutiny was considered, by the men. But Captain Bligh is one scary person, and mutiny did not happen.

She also explained the plan to Captain Schiffer on Pollux. He is a man. His speciality is astral navigation. We only got to hear of his response through gossip and rumour. There was talk of a pirated audio file that started doing the rounds, but it was intercepted and destroyed, so we only have canteen-talk as to the range of colourful adjectives that were used. Pollux would not be joining our ship of fools.

* * *

Over the following weeks the crew formed into four distinct groups. Those who could read maps back on Earth—most of the men—became known as the mappies. They sulked. The idea that this strange new way of looking at the universe might have some credibility was an affront to them. They were offended by it. There were some women who were also a little mappy, but they tended to keep quiet about it; they felt a little left out. There were a handful of non-mappy males who probably knew what was going on but stayed out of it, finding the whole thing to be a challenge to their manhood.

Then there were the non-mappy females. The Stella camp. I tended to hang out with this group, for, although I was one-hundred percent mappy, I believed them. Stella was my daughter. I believed her and I was proud of her.

For the Stella camp, a new era had dawned. They were excited and moved by the realisation that they had been the true possessors of an innate, accurate sense of direction all along. The scientists among them wanted to explain things, and there developed a small sub-sect called the Stella Theory Cosmology Group. Catherine Blair, the captain, was a leading light amongst them. It took them a little over three weeks to come up with a credible theory that explained the new universe.

“Dark Matter is the key,” Catherine explained at one of their lectures. “The shape of the universe that we see: star clusters, galaxies, expansion … these are how the universe used to be, or should have been. We see it this way because we see light as straight lines, whether it is straight or not. But then Dark matter got in between and wrinkled everything up. The real universe is being contracted; packed into an ever smaller can of spaghetti by the gravitational pull of dark matter, even though the individual strands, along which we can see, are getting longer, giving the illusion (to the mappies) that we are in an expanding universe.”

I put my hand up. I’d been attending STCG lectures right from the start, even though this alienated me from most of the other men on the crew.

“I have a question. If there is all this heavy dark matter between the strands, what’s to prevent us plunging into a black hole, or something, as soon as we turn off the star track?”

Blair nodded. “That’s a fair point. I think the key is to always head for a star—any star. So long as we can see a star in front of us we are on a star track and we can free-wheel along between the dark matter. We just have to avoid heading towards the parts of the sky that are empty.”

“So, we have to skip from strand to strand, where the spaghetti meets, and we stay out of the sauce.” Stella grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. I smiled down at her. I was getting the hang of this non-mappy stuff.

* * *

When we made the turn the sky went wild. It was like Guy Fawkes night. There were blue-shifts and red-shifts, and stars stretched, smeared and splattered all over the sky. The mappies huddled in dark corners of the ship and moaned. Some of them turned to drink, others went to their databases and rediscovered religion.

The women had a party. Five of the non-mappy men came out of the closet and went along. They had a great time. I was with Jodie and Stella, so I had to behave.

It took seven years. We actually did our first fly-by of New World after only eighteen months, but we arrived at a fair clip, and had a lot of speed to lose. Stella’s good, but she hadn’t thought of the dynamics of losing relativistic velocities, so we had to wander around our new star system for a while, decelerating like crazy by sitting on our weakened engines. Once we’d lost enough of our velocity we did a few close passes by some of the system’s gas giants, using first their gravity, then later, when we felt we wouldn’t be ripped apart, we used their atmospheres for a bit of pants-on-fire aero-braking.

* * *

New World’s a fine place to call home. A warm, orange sun; oceans, mountains, trees and plenty of indigenous wildlife that we cannot eat and that does not want to eat us -the genetic and protein differences are too great—so we are safe from one another.

We sent a message to Pollux. Captain Blair told them that we’d put the kettle on for them. They’ll get the message in about eight years, but it won’t help them, they will have started the deceleration phase of their voyage by now, so short-cuts won’t work. They should be with us in about twenty years. They’ll be much younger than us of course.

I’ll tell you what I like about New World the most, though. I know my way around. I’ve drawn a few maps, and it’s become a bit of a hobby. They’re no use to the women, though. The women haven’t a clue … forever getting themselves lost, especially Stella. But nobody says anything about this to them, not to their faces, anyway.

* * *

Countdown to Armageddon, Episode One

Written by Edward M. Lerner

PROLOGUE

O true believers, take your necessary precautions against your enemies… .

—the Koran

Lebanon, 1983 (amid civil war)

The village baked under the late-morning sun.

A few small homes, some generations old, clustered around the dusty bazaar. Each dwelling had been painstakingly assembled by hand, stone upon stone. Here and there could be seen a scrawny goat, grazing to the limits of its tether.

Two dhows bobbed on the gentle blue Mediterranean. The young men of the village laughed as they worked, for the breeze was cool and their nets heavy. Ashore, their fathers and grandfathers studied the Koran in the small mosque while veiled women worked in their kitchens or tended to their sewing, smiling at the sounds of children at play.

A young Arab dressed in Levi’s, a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and Nikes took a place at the nets, ignoring the gentle jibes at his soft hands and city clothes. There was pride in his friends’ teasing voices, and unarticulated delight that someone from their little village had gone to college. In the village he was famous; the villagers imagined in their simple goodness that such talent as his must also be renowned in the great outer world.

The visiting youth had not forgotten his roots, or the hard, physical labor of the boats. The lapping of the waves, the rhythm of work, the honest tiredness and dreamless sleep at the end of the day—they would always be a part of him. Occasionally, as he hauled in the nets, the breeze would bring snatches of a child’s happy voice. He liked to imagine it was Leila’s voice. Of everyone and everything in the dear, sweet village, he most missed his baby sister.

An eerie, high-pitched whistle, scarcely audible above the crashing surf, gave the only warning of impending doom. The first shells blasted harmless geysers from the unresisting beach, but hidden artillerymen quickly corrected their aim. The fishermen watched in horror as the next three salvos walked up the shore into the defenseless village. The fifth salvo bracketed the mosque, toppling the slender minaret. The terrified screams of women and children filled the gaps between explosions.

Frantically, the village fishermen turned their boats for the beach. Abandoned nets sinking behind them, they cursed as the wind failed them. They cursed again when trucks and armored personnel carriers roared out of the hills toward the village. It was the hated Phalange.

Salvo after salvo pounded the village until the motorized column approached within a hundred meters. Most houses had crumbled by then. Shell-shocked survivors emerged to dig through the rubble with their bare hands.

Using erratic puffs of wind, their desperation, and the skills passed on over generations, the fishermen urged their boats homeward. They stared in disbelief as an antitank rocket collapsed the mosque that had heard the prayers of their grandfathers’ grandfathers. They howled at the trucks careening madly through the rubble-strewn streets, as sadistic Christian butchers machine-gunned fleeing women and children at point-blank range.

As their dhows neared the shore, the fishermen came under attack. Machine-gun fire shredded hulls and flesh alike. A few made it whole and alive into the sea, only to be blasted from the water by hand grenades. Corpses bobbed obscenely amid the flotsam. One by one the young men died, the last sounds they heard in this world the maniacal laughter of the accursed Christians.

* * *

”Leila!”

Images that would not leave sustained the tormented voice. Great gulps of caustic salt water could not silence his cry, nor hours of agonized screaming, nor even absolute exhaustion. The young, city-dressed Arab lay half across a bit of broken mast, his hands, without any direction from a conscious, reasoning mind, clutching the tangled cordage.

He drifted.

The tide dragged him, raving, far out to sea. He was rescued two days later by a passing Cretan freighter. The honest seamen had to pry his fingers from the ropes to which he clung. He wanted to kill these Christian dogs; deranged from dehydration and sunstroke, he could not even stand. His feeble lunge was mistaken for a stumble.

He awoke in a swaying hammock. A pale, unwelcome clarity, if not quite sanity, had asserted itself as he slept. He would have preferred lunacy had it meant that he could forget.

His parents, slaughtered. Grandfather, crushed in his own beloved mosque. His childhood friends shot like so many clay pigeons.

And little Leila …

He had watched helplessly as so many children died. Indistinct with distance, every face became Leila’s face. Every death, Leila’s death—over and over and over.

The sole survivor of a nameless Lebanese town knew one thing to the core of his being. Some day, terribly, he would redeem his baby sister’s many deaths in a bottomless ocean of Christian blood.

PART I

When great causes are on the move in the world … we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

—Winston S. Churchill

NEW YORK CITY, 2009

“That’s not how time travel really works.”

Harry Bowen regretted the words almost before they left his mouth.

It wasn’t the margaritas talking, although he did have a pleasant buzz, or even the congenial company. He couldn’t put his finger on it until long after. It was a nostalgia trip, pure and simple, that lowered his guard and brought the long-repressed story to his lips.

The night had become too much like college. Not the classes, certainly not, but the late-night bull sessions. Three, four, maybe five guys in the dorm lounge up way past the witching hour, feet on the furniture, snarfing pizza and chugging smuggled beer, just talking and talking. What was the meaning of life? What existed before the universe, or before God, take your pick? Was “before the universe” a meaningful concept, anyway, you drooling cretin?

The conference’s welcoming cocktail hour had been standard down to the regulation two complimentary drink tickets that had come paper-clipped to his name tag, the miniature overcooked hot dogs on plastic cavalry-saber toothpicks, the soggy Triscuits, and the zillion desiccated cheese cubes. The corporate scientists who had traveled together stuck together, earnestly debating their restaurant choices over their free drinks before drifting out to expense-account dinners. Academics who had refereed each other’s papers for years and attended the same conferences since before the Flood warmly greeted each other. They, too, soon vanished. That left the grad students, some federal researchers on per diem, and a few lonely, unaccompanied, small-company types like him. Even though Harry was presenting a paper at the conference, Solid State Science, Inc. considered its payment of his airfare an act of almost mythic generosity. Meal allowance? Wouldn’t he have eaten at home?

This was Harry’s first time at the Particle Accelerator Symposium. He didn’t know a soul here. He looked around the big ballroom, by then almost empty, and sighed. Lunch at a Manhattan deli near where the new World Trade Center towers were rising had just about drained the day’s meager meal budget. Maybe he should just retreat to his room.

Still, his stomach was grumbling. Food to soak up the margaritas, no matter how institutional, would be wise. The half box of chocolate-covered somethings in his briefcase wouldn’t cut it. In his hotel room he’d only mope around, anyway, missing Julia. He stayed to graze the free hors d’oeuvres table for a while longer.

When the evening birds-of-a-feather session started (Harry never did catch the topic, something about relativistic muons), he followed the crowd into the nearby meeting room. The gangling Indian physicist trying to run the forum was too shy to ride herd on the tipsy crew. Before long, an SF enthusiast—hardly a rarity at a physics conference—had hijacked the session. Soon they were talking about faster-than-light communications with tachyon beams, reactionless space drives, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It wasn’t really physics, but it was fun.

The bull session continued until well past midnight, ending only after the rustlings of impatient janitors became intrusive. The most garrulous members of the group, Harry among them, adjourned to a back booth in the hotel’s lounge. He ordered a platter of nachos and a pitcher of margaritas, thinking budget be damned.

The conversation wandered into time travel and down the Teflon-coated slope into the grandfather paradox. Could you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before your father, let alone you, were even born? If you succeeded, then who was it who performed the mission? If now no one goes back, then what’s to stop grandma and grandpa from having at it? Back and forth they went, pointlessly arguing about cause and effect and alternate universes.

It was then that Harry’s big mouth struck. “That’s not how time travel really works.” Damn! Why had he spoken? He hadn’t told the entire story to anyone, not even Julia. After all, who would believe it? But these were physicists. If they believed that he believed it, his reputation would be shot.

The meeting hijacker, a red-haired grad student from MIT, eyed him speculatively. “You know this from personal experience, do you?” The line got a laugh—not much more than a chuckle, really, but enough to trigger Harry’s stubborn streak. He knew what he knew, and he would edit as he went along. Harry pictured the next few minutes in his mind’s eye: He’d tell what would come across, safely, as a cock-and-bull story, his new friends would realize that they’d been had, and someone would buy him a drink. It seemed workable.

“Experience?” Harry whispered conspiratorially. His companions leaned closer. “In a manner of speaking, yes.” He straightened out of his habitual slouch, propping his elbows on the table and leaning forward confidentially. The flickering flame in the candle-globe centerpiece cast light and shadow across four expectant faces. The lounge’s background murmur chose that instant to fall into a momentary hush. He glanced at the neighboring booths, as though to reassure himself that no one was eavesdropping.

“It happened five years ago. Spring. My wife and I were on vacation—a second honeymoon of sorts. We were backpacking across France …”

VOSGES MOUNTAINS, FRANCE, 2004

Dawn peeked red-eyed over the hills. For all that the calendar said Mai, at this altitude the dew was frozen. Harry inched across the paired sleeping bags, planning to snuggle up to Julia for warmth. No one was home.

He might as well get up, too. Harry crawled out of the sleeping bags, stood, and stretched. They had camped beside a small stream; he gritted his teeth, then scooped a handful of icy water onto his face. It worked faster than coffee.

They had stopped for the night in a small clearing high in the foothills of the Vosges. Dense forest stretched all around, as far as the eye could see. Birds chirped and chattered among the trees. A few hundred yards to the east lay the cave where he had damn near broken his ankle on their first trip.

Only a wispy contrail high in the cloudless sky hinted at civilization. Even in the wild, though, Julia disliked stubble. Harry poked the banked fire back to life, then assembled his gear while water came to a boil in a small pan. There was no reasonable place to set his little shaving mirror. He rested the metal disk against a small rock and sat tailor style in front of it.

He couldn’t complain about the reflection. Genetics could take credit for the strong jaw, the jet-black hair, and the pale blue eyes—and, for that matter, for the broad-shouldered, six-foot-two frame the mirror did not capture. Julia’s love of camping and hiking had added a deep tan and character lines. Some combination of genetics and the exercise kept him trim and fit. Julia liked to imagine that he’d had to beat the girls off with a stick before she met him—a fantasy of which he had done nothing to disabuse her.

Harry tied four short lines with baited hooks to low-lying branches that overhung the stream. He assumed his wife was off somewhere with her sketchpad. For Julia, this was a working vacation. The sketches could well pay for the trip: They were good. Still, he wished she’d get back soon. He was ready for breakfast—and things weren’t ever as good without her.

Her petite figure finally emerged from the woods upstream. She’d gathered her flowing blond hair into a long, high ponytail. She was wearing tight jeans and a red sweater: Practical, yet sexy—that was Julia. Sketchpad under her arm, she moseyed up to him. “Hey, lazybones. What does a working girl have to do around here to get breakfast?”

He answered with a leer.

“Again?” Laughing, she plopped down beside him. “What ever will you expect for dinn … ?”

He covered her lips with his own.

All the frost had melted when they woke for the second time. She cleared her lovely throat. “About breakfast, sir.”

His fishing lines still hung limply in the rippling current. “Funny thing, sport, these snooty French fish refuse to consort with Americans. We have instant coffee, a couple of eggs, and some bread. Period. You wanna hitch a ride into Metz after breakfast for some real food, or will we live on twigs and berries?”

* * *

Julia opted for town. Their tattered map led them to a deeply rutted dirt road, where an old man with a roving eye stopped for them. Well, for her. Julia charmed the beret off him; he reciprocated by letting them ride in the back of his horse-drawn farm wagon. They bounced along into some small market town, from which their Europasses got them onto the train up the Moselle valley into Metz.

They splurged on a hotel room with a private bath, then Julia went shopping for new camping supplies. Phase one complete: He was unsupervised in Metz. Julia had insisted on this trip as a mental-health break for him; vacation or not, he meant to visit the nearby Rothschild Institute. The Rothschilds—surprise, surprise—had financed the world’s largest superconducting storage ring.

Harry exhumed the one fresh change of clothes from his backpack. Clean wrinkles were as close as he could come to respectability. He left Julia a note.

She had long ago shamed him into studying French, “the language of culture and science.” (“Not in this century,” he’d grumbled, but he’d learned anyway. It beat reading the subtitles when she picked the movie.) Here in the Alsace-Lorraine, his guttural accent wasn’t even terribly unusual. He tried it out on the skeptical guard at the institute’s gatehouse.

”Dr. Bowen, you say?” The sentry ineffectively covered a yawn. He needed dental work.

”Oui. Tell Alain, I mean Dr. Garreau, that we met at a colloquium at Drexel Institute.” That had been two years ago, and only a brief conversation—a chat over coffee after the presentation, really—but Harry hoped it would be enough to get him in.

He never learned if it would have been. The guard had just lifted the telephone handset when an explosion rocked the grounds. The gatehouse leapt a foot into the air, crashed back, then shuddered again when the ground wave hit. A wrought-iron gate burst from its hinges, to hang askew from its still-standing mate by a shared padlock. Harry glimpsed a horrified look on the no-longer-bored guard as they dashed through the broken gates toward the main building.

Screams and smoke poured from the shattered edifice. The second and third stories on the uphill side had crumbled; somehow, groaning support columns in the basement continued to bear the redistributed load. Harry kicked open a sagging door and ran inside. The guard followed.

Dazed people in bloody lab coats stumbled through thick smoke. Downstairs, someone howled. Harry climbed over the rubble—chunks of plaster, splintered doors and furniture, smashed laboratory equipment—that covered the stairs and clogged the basement’s main corridor. Coughing from the acrid fumes, he went toward the screams. Klaxons wailed in the distance, hopefully ambulances from the town.

The cries were getting weaker; he dare not hesitate. A ceiling fixture dangled by its wires, sparking; with each shudder of the settling building, the lamp jiggled and danced. He scavenged a mop from a janitor’s closet and, holding the arcing wires at bay, edged past.

Double doors, nothing remaining but splinters on hinges, ended the hallway. Beyond them, someone whimpered. A lump of falling plaster shattered at his feet as he scuttled inside.

He found a random jumble of equipment racks, lab benches, storage cabinets, computers, and Dewar flasks. Dented and cracked, the cryogenic flasks spewed a surrealistic fog that coiled and crept about the large laboratory. Whoever had called out lay hidden in the mist.

He shouted encouragement as he groped through the room, shivering in the frigid, waist-high haze. The whimpering echoed eerily in the misty chamber, providing no guidance to its source. He kept searching as he inched around obstacles hidden in the vapors.

A sob came from almost underfoot, and he saw her. Rime and plaster dust coated her face and hair; he could not guess her age. A storage cabinet across her legs pinned her to the floor.

Harry reached under the cabinet and tugged. Nothing. He tried again, more desperately. As something tore in his back, unknown items rocked inside. The cabinet scarcely budged. It had landed doors down—he couldn’t unload it.

Harry recovered the mop. With a stool on its side for a fulcrum, he levered the cabinet up a few inches. Grunting from the effort, balancing on one foot, he kicked some nondescript refuse under the cabinet. The woman’s face was ashen. He put all his weight on the mop handle; this time, using a smashed oscilloscope, he propped the cabinet up higher. With a final heave, the cabinet crashed aside. Glass inside tinkled.

He had uncovered a new horror—a crushed Dewar. Liquid helium had frozen her from the waist down; one thigh, ultrabrittle from the cold, had shattered. Blood seeped from the red ice of a jagged stump, flash-cauterized by the extreme cold. As Harry’s guts clenched, the ceiling collapsed across several nearby workbenches.

Fire blocked the entrance of the lab. Flames licked hungrily at the wreckage. A loud booming began somewhere behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder. The guard from the gatehouse was pounding on a small, high window. Embedded reinforcing wire kept the shattered glass from falling free. “Out! Out!” the guard screamed. “The building is coming down!” He battered and battered, the reinforced glass finally yielding to his fire ax.

Harry grabbed the woman under her armpits and hoisted her over his shoulder. Mercifully, she fainted. Trying not to see any body parts fall, he stumbled through the smoke to the window. The guard dropped his ax to reach through for her. Harry pushed; with a ripping of fabric, the woman popped through.

He took a final look around the lab. What had happened here? The scorched and shattered apparatus across the room was the epicenter of an explosion. Through the smoke, Harry recognized an arc of superconducting storage ring. Two of its superconducting magnets glowed white-hot. Near the magnets, a wire-wrapped bulk smoldered. A drop of molten metal fell as he watched, disappearing into the sea of flames.

“Out now!” The guard looked fearfully at something over his head. “Give me your hands!” He plunged his own arms through the broken window to reach for Harry. “Quick!”

Harry no longer had the strength to boost himself the five feet to the window. Thick smoke choking him, he grabbed on to the guard’s arms. He was pulled roughly through the small opening, then dragged across the bumpy ground away from the conflagration. The ambulance roared away on squealing tires the moment the paramedics had belted him in.

Harry was in no condition to notice the blanket-shrouded passenger in the other stretcher, her face covered.

NEW YORK CITY, 2009

“… When without warning, the lab exploded. I ran in to see if I could help.”

Harry did not elaborate. The dead woman still came in his nightmares. She turned out to be—have been—the director of the institute. Harry stopped to sip some of the melted ice in his margarita glass. “Miraculously, there was only one fatality in the accident.

“The explosion and resulting fire largely destroyed the institute and its records. Only two people were in the lab when it happened. Apparently only they had any knowledge of the experiment. The authorities, as far as I know, never assigned a cause to the explosion more specific than a catastrophic discharge of the storage ring.

“I only got a quick look at the lab. When I told the investigators what I’d seen, they politely”—condescendingly—”expressed their doubts. One told me that if indeed I saw what I said I’d seen, the juxtaposition of equipment must somehow have resulted from the explosion, not preceded it.”

His audience listened in rapt silence. “I couldn’t explain it, either—but I had seen it. All that stored energy, terawatts of it, petawatts for all I know, rigged to discharge through a single enormous coil, enclosing a volume little larger than a phone booth. Massive superconducting cables connected the cavity to the storage ring. The cavity itself was empty.

“Two years passed before I believed. Guys, it was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” Puzzled expressions quickly changed to tentative looks of understanding. “Okay, I think you see it. The common statement of the principle is that you can’t simultaneously determine the position and momentum of a particle. That’s not obviously germane, which is why you were all surprised. But the other formulation of the principle—that’s something else again.

“The more precisely you determine a particle’s energy, the less exactly you can pin down that particle in time. That’s hardly news. We encounter it again and again inside our bubble chambers, in those strange, never-again-seen, subatomic fragments that somehow appear in the wreckage of particle collisions. They’re transient freaks of nature, doomed to disappear in the infinitesimal fraction of a second before they violate the law of conservation of energy.” Terrence, a prematurely balding Englishman who, Harry seemed to remember, was a postdoc from Cambridge, began smiling enigmatically. The fellow had deduced where Harry was going … or thought he had.

“The people at Rothschild Institute must have applied this principle on a grand scale. Never mind subatomic oddities—they dealt with a macroscopic mass. Using enough energy, instantaneously discharging everything in the superconducting storage ring, they expected to observe a measurable temporal effect.” He looked each of them directly in the eyes. “Time travel, gentlemen.”

One of his audience, a theoretician from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cleared his throat hesitantly.

“Have a problem, Roger?”

“You mentioned two casualties, but only one fatality. I gather that the survivor was seriously injured, but didn’t he ever say anything?” Beside Roger, and unseen by him, Terrence’s grin was fast outgrowing the bounds of English understatement.

Harry did his best to look innocent. “I mentioned two experimenters, Roger, not two casualties. They never found the man.” Everyone except poor, oblivious Roger was smiling now.

“Terawatts? Surely he was vaporized when the coil discharged! How could he not be considered a fatality?”

Harry said, “The explosion bent the coil, exposing the enclosed space. It contained the only distinctly undamaged spot in the lab. I saw controls inside the enclosure.”

“So?”

“He traveled in time.” Harry shrugged. “If there was ever a way to return him, the explosion destroyed it.”

Roger startled at Terrence’s sudden cackle, in which the others quickly joined. Roger scanned the laughing faces, then turned questioningly back to the storyteller. Harry just smiled.

“Aw, shit.” Roger’s face turned beet red. He looked sheepishly into his empty glass. “I hate being so gullible. The least you can do is spring for my refill.”

Disaster averted, Harry caught the eye of the cocktail waitress. He traced an imaginary circle over the table: Bring us another round. “This didn’t work out at all like I’d planned,” he groused. “I expected that story to get me a drink.”

His new friends rewarded him with another chuckle. Even Roger.

CHICAGO, 2009

The two seated women were a study in contrasts. The first was boldly striking: tall, statuesque, with billowing waves of chestnut hair and aristocratically high cheekbones. Her companion exhibited a quieter beauty: short and slender, with flowing, shoulder-length blond hair. Shining blue eyes transformed what would otherwise have been an ordinary face. The first picked diffidently at her salad; the second attacked a slice of quiche—as she did life—with gusto.

They were sisters.

“Just eat it, Becky,” Julia Bowen said. “I come here often. The chef promised to omit the worms as a personal favor.”

Rebecca grimaced. “You know very well these greens weren’t organically grown. There was a time when you wouldn’t have been caught dead in a place like this. Eating eggs, yet.”

Playfully: “Guess I shouldn’t expect you to stay for dinner, then. Chili and tamales.”

The straitlaced sister shuddered. “It’s that mechanic you married.”

Harry claimed—ad nauseam—that engineers and scientists didn’t know much about the arts and were privately embarrassed by it; fine- and liberal-arts types knew nothing about science or technology and were openly proud of it. Sure it was a stereotype, but some stereotypes have a basis in truth. Becky, for example.

There, but for the grace of Harry, go I. Julia chose to misunderstand. “Physicist, quantum mechanic. Hah, hah. A very small joke.” A blank look showed that Becky hadn’t gotten it. “What have you heard from Mom and Dad lately?”

The folks were a safe topic. They swapped anecdotes for a while, and childhood reminiscences, then fell silent. With a sigh, Becky set down her fork. “Tell me more about your show.”

“What show? I’ve got some sketches in a shopping-strip storefront.”

“It’s a show if your stuff is on the walls, not in the bins.”

“Thanks, Sis. I appreciate it.” Julia smiled. “Harry said last night that I’ve lost my amateur status. He figures that the gallery is making more money now from my sketches than from their frames.”

“You really love that big lummox, don’t you?” Becky studied her intently.

Julia grinned from ear to ear, like a sap. She didn’t care. “Yeah, I really do.”

* * *

Harry Bowen tipped back in his office chair, its front legs airborne. His own legs rested at the calves on the accumulated clutter of his desktop. His dangling, shoeless feet wiggled to the heavy-metal beat from his iPod. Afternoon sun streamed through blinds behind him, lighting the room-temperature fusion article in Nature that held his complete interest.

The tall visitor tapped gently on the frame of the open door. No response. He knocked harder. “Dr. Bowen?”

Harry looked up and had a moment of deja vu. “What’s this ‘Doctor’ crap? Come in, Terrence!” He set the open journal facedown onto one of the shorter paper stacks, and stood.

“My pleasure—Harry.” They shook hands. The Englishman’s sparse, windblown hair gave him a pixieish air. He wore casual slacks and a plaid sport coat more suggestive of a used-car salesman than of Cambridge. “I see you remember me. Got a few minutes?”

“Absolutely.” He had not seen Terrence in over a week, not since his first night in New York. Harry pointed to a guest chair. “Take a load off. I’m dying to hear what airline flies from New York to England with a connection in Chicago.”

Terrence passed on the chair, instead closing and leaning against the office door. “As it happens, you’re not the only one who told a whopper that night. I’m not at Cambridge. I don’t live in England anymore—haven’t for years. The truth is, I’m not even in physics.”

“So you’re Catholic?”

“My confession has nothing to do with guilt. It has everything to do with something we need to discuss. The Rothschild Institute.”

Not Harry’s favorite topic. He’d woken up on the first full day of the conference, head pounding and stomach queasy, to what was definitely the morning after the night before. He had cursed himself out—quietly—as fourteen types of moron. What had possessed him to talk about the incident at Rothschild? Still, given the initial stupidity of having said anything, he thought he had recovered well.

Terrence’s surprise appearance suggested otherwise. Harry waited in silence.

His guest shrugged. “Shall I begin at the beginning?”

“Please,” Harry said. “Then proceed through the middle to get to the end.”

“Fair enough. For starters, I am Terrence Ambling. I’m a grad student and teaching assistant, both in European history, at NYU. I admit to being a bit ancient of days for such a bohemian existence, but I’d had a midlife crisis. Crossing the pond and hiding in academia have been therapeutic. And like most grad students, I’m often strapped for cash.”

Harry made an educated guess. “The ersatz food at the conference brought you.”

“Sad, isn’t it? Lots of the students do it, though—it’s so easy. Conferences all use the same name-tag holders—you know, the clear plastic, clip-on kind. Download a conference’s logo from the Web, print the logo and a name with a color printer and—voila—gratis goodies. And there are often people off to dinner milling about the lobby, wearing their silly name tags, with unused drink tickets free for the asking.”

“That got you inside. It didn’t require you to talk to anyone. For a historian, you make a fair physicist.”

Terrence chuckled. “You never heard me talk physics. I am, however, a pretty avid science-fiction reader.”

“So the starving grad student travels—hitches?—seven-hundred-plus miles cross-country because … ? To crash the Consumer Electronics Show for some chip ‘n dip?”

“Maybe, since I’m in town.” Terrence paused as voices in the hall passed the closed door. “It’s not what brought me, of course. That has more to do with my former life.

“Have you ever heard of Interpol?”

* * *

Harry’s living room was marginally less cluttered, somewhat larger, and much more comfortable than his office. He and his guest occupied the two well-worn armchairs; Julia puttered in the kitchen, stretching the chili with macaroni.

Ambling had brought shocking news: Abdul Faisel, the vanished researcher from the Rothschild Institute catastrophe, was sought by Interpol. It seemed Faisel might know something about twenty kilos of missing plutonium.

“Twenty kilos?” Harry was incredulous. “Surely even the Russians couldn’t misplace that much. But if they did, why haven’t I read about it?”

“A few kilos of the stuff is practically a hobbyist A-bomb kit. If word got out, Harry, it would cause a panic. My former employer keeps these things quiet.

“We think a corrupt Russian general first stole it in 2002. Russian intelligence didn’t discover the problem until fourteen months and two middlemen later. They contacted Interpol after tracing the shipment to a Hezbollah front organization.”

“Hezbollah,” Harry repeated. “The Syrian-backed terrorists?”

“Yes, and a very scary bunch. Iranian-backed as well.”

Harry began pacing. “Explain something to me. Okay, so maybe Interpol could keep a situation like this quiet for a long time; I can understand why they would try. The buyers have no reason to be bashful. As you say, they can do almost as much harm by announcing they have plutonium as by using it.

“The more I think about this, the more confused I get. If the plutonium had been recovered, you wouldn’t be here. Just knowing that such a theft is possible could encourage others to emulate it.

“On the other hand, what if the plutonium weren’t accounted for? If you thought I knew anything useful, one call to a former coworker would start an official investigation. For stolen plutonium, an anonymous call would more than suffice.

“Don’t think that I begrudge you the dinner,” Harry concluded, “but I have to ask. Why are you here?”

And then, bingo, the lightbulb went on over his head. No, make that a giant flashing neon light—reading “Prank.” Harry plopped himself down in his easy chair. “Don’t bother answering, you old fraud. You’re good. You caught on to my tall tale in New York faster than anyone. Tonight you topped me.”

The rattling of plates was reaching a definite predinner crescendo. “You certainly earned the meal. Let’s go into the dining room, and you can tell us what really brought you to Chicago.”

“Oh, I was not joking about the reason for my visit. I truly am interested in that missing plutonium.”

The deadly-looking pistol that Ambling removed from a shoulder holster reinforced his seriousness.

* * *

Terrence thumbed the safety and tossed the handgun into the lap of his very startled host. “I wasn’t allowed to keep my old identification. This was as convincing as I could get.”

Julia picked that moment to enter from the dining room, where she had just set down a steaming tureen. “Harry! What in the world are you doing with that thing?”

Harry returned the thing—gingerly—to its rightful owner. “As little as possible. Okay, Terrence, you’ve made your point.”

“Good. I’m famished.” He wandered into the compact dining room, where he dutifully admired the two framed photos on the wall. “When do I get to meet the little tykes, Julia?”

“It will have to be another time. Johnny is always fishing for a dinner invitation at his best friend’s house, so tonight I agreed. Melissa I sent off to my parents. A four-year-old and an eight-year-old aren’t conducive to adult conversation.”

“You needn’t have exiled them on my account.” He silently added: But thank you. Terrence likened children to strychnine. They could be medicinal in small doses. In large doses, however … He nibbled on a too-spicy tamale while Harry Bowen inexplicably doused his own food with Louisiana hot sauce.

Over after-dinner coffee, Terrence took pity on his new friend. Friends. “You’ve been more than patient with me. There was plutonium smuggled out of Russia. Your vanishing acquaintance at the Rothschild Institute was implicated.”

Julia did a most interesting double take, but said nothing.

Terrence faced Harry. “I’ve done a little checking since we met. You were very brave, and not a little foolhardy, that day in Metz. A French colleague who owed me a favor confirmed your involvement. Claude also indicated that you were hospitalized for a week after the incident.” He smiled at Julia. “You visited him daily.”

Harry shrugged noncommittally.

“While you were still in hospital, Interpol conclusively traced the missing plutonium to the institute. Several Dewar flasks in the lab showed slight, but compelling, evidence of low-level alpha emissions, consistent with transporting insufficiently shielded plutonium. The Dewars had been delivered two months prior to the explosion, in a van owned by a known Hezbollah sympathizer.”

Not everyone could accept the measures required by a global war against terror. Eventually, neither could Terrence. That was why he had left. He chose his words carefully. “Two Iranian university students, questioned separately, were also quite convincing on the Hezbollah link.

“The same driver and van returned the morning of the blast, supposedly to retrieve Dewars for refilling. The driver gave Dr. Faisel’s name to the guards, and Faisel okayed the pickup. By the time this came out, Interpol was quite curious about Dr. Faisel.

“It seems that Faisel’s family—the entire village where he grew up, in fact—was killed by the Phalange, the Christian militia, in the Lebanese civil war. That was 1983. Three years later, he went on a hajj, the traditional Moslem pilgrimage, to Mecca and Medina. Returning from Saudi Arabia, he stopped over in Lebanon. He visited cousins in the Bekaa Valley, men with Hezbollah ties. It’s unclear who recruited whom, but Interpol is convinced Faisel was involved with Hezbollah thereafter.

“With twenty-twenty hindsight, it’s apparent Faisel collected a great deal of interesting equipment in the intervening years. Some he ordered ostensibly for his work. Much was simply requisitioned from the institute stockroom. He took delivery of the most interesting items at his home. Add it up, and by six months before the Rothschild incident. Faisel had every component and tool necessary to fabricate a nuke. Everything, that is, except the fissionable material—and you just heard how that came to be in the wrecked lab. His lab, as it happens.

“Institute security routinely videotaped every vehicle that entered or left the grounds, and there were no lapses in their coverage. Interpol searched every car or truck present at any time between the van’s first arrival and the explosion. They found nothing. The material was not removed from the institute. Fissioned or just melted, that plutonium could not hide from Geiger counters—only it did. The only traces ever found were, as I said, in the Dewars—and in similar low-level radiation in the van.

“It drives them crazy at Interpol that the institute’s ruins aren’t deathly radioactive. The inspectors are positive that the plutonium they had been tracking was at the institute that day. They’re just as certain that it couldn’t have been removed.”

“What about the van’s driver?” Harry asked. “What was his story?”

“He wasn’t very talkative when Interpol found him. Of course, he’d been shot in the back and stuffed into the utility closet by Faisel’s lab. Perhaps the good doctor had been less than candid with Hezbollah about his plans for their plutonium.

“That left everyone without a clue to the material’s location—until I heard your story. Time travel does make an eerie kind of sense. If the plutonium is not at the institute, but could not be elsewhere, it must somehow be elsewhen. I just can’t see how to convince the powers that be of such a fantastic explanation.

“Plutonium in the hands of any terrorist is a terrible threat to us all. When a world-class physicist like Faisel is involved …” Terrence shuddered. “We dare not delude ourselves that the madmen cannot fashion the stuff into a bomb.

“I need to understand how Faisel used time travel to spirit away the material. I must know to when he might have gone, and to when he might reappear with his nuclear device. I must make a compelling enough case to convince even such hardheaded pragmatists as my former employers.” Terrence locked eyes with his host. “To accomplish any of that, Harry, I need your help.”

* * *

Harry turned away—

And Julia’s questioning stare was as uncomfortable. He closed his eyes. For so many years he had tried not to talk about time travel. He had sifted his memories of that horrible day for any clue, some detail however tiny, to disprove his chain of inferences. To speak openly now would be a tremendous relief. No wonder he had finally let slip the story.

Harry opened his eyes. “All right, then, perhaps it is time that I talk. I’ll tell you what I think happened. Don’t expect it to help you.”

* * *

The after-dinner coffee had cooled, untasted, while Harry organized his thoughts; he took a sip without noticing the temperature. He was conscious, instead, of two pairs of eyes studying him. Julia’s pair still smoldered.

He set down the cup. Where to begin … ? “George Gamow, one of the first nuclear physicists, said that a theory wasn’t worth a damn if it couldn’t be explained to a barmaid.”

Julia slugged him on the arm. “I’m less than thrilled that you held out on me for all these years. Condescension now won’t help.”

“I would never condescend… .” Another jab to the same spot interrupted his feeble jest. He rubbed the incipient bruise. “Gamow’s point was that good science doesn’t hide in math: It’s intuitive. I only meant that I’d try to live up to his standard.”

And so, he talked. Julia perched on the edge of the sofa scribbling notes, and Terrence sat as though mesmerized. Harry himself paced about the living room, hands jammed in his pockets. He talked about energy and time and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Julia and Terrence interrupted occasionally, but always with insightful questions. Gamow clearly was correct.

Finally, talked out, Harry collapsed into an armchair, the cushion going whoosh beneath him. The whoosh seemed somehow metaphoric. “I’ll sit quietly till the men in white coats come.”

Julia spoke first. “Skip the dramatics. Just tell me if I have this straight. Given enough energy, applied quickly enough, any mass can move through time.” Harry nodded. “The catch is that energy cannot be permanently borrowed from one time to another, so a moment later—the duration defined somehow by this uncertainty principle—the transferred object, and the energy which moved it, snap back to the time from which they originated.”

Ambling took over. “Because of this snapback effect, you physicists have considered this concept for time travel to be an interesting mathematical quirk, devoid of any physical meaning. Until five years ago, anyway. You assume that Faisel took this theory seriously and found a way to stay moved in time.”

Then Terrence, too, fell silent, so Harry went on. “There’s always been another interesting mathematical possibility: Repay the energy loan from the destination end of the time trip, before the snapback happens. That’s what I think Faisel did. That’s why there was no sign of him after the explosion.”

Julia nibbled on a lock of hair, concentrating hard. “Is there any way to know where—I mean when—he went? Can you even know whether it was to the past or the future?”

The first explanation had been hard enough, Harry thought. The next part will really be difficult. “I know exactly to when Faisel went, because he had no choice. I assume that you won’t mind my skipping some heavy-duty math.”

Julia snorted.

“Okay, then,” Harry continued. “The energy requirement to go anywhen is phenomenal. Not even the full stored power of the superconducting storage ring suffices for most destinations. There is, in fact, only one practical destination, a single time-shift interval whose energy requirement is currently practical.

“Einstein showed that gravity is only a manifestation of mass, a curvature of the space-time continuum caused by the presence of mass. No mass, no gravity. Time is similar—it passes only in relationship to … stuff. Each astronomical object, each planet, has a single achievable time transfer influenced by—and that can be calculated from—net local gravitation effects. That interval depends on its own mass, its sun’s, and the galaxy’s.

“It took me a while to figure it out, but yes, I know where Faisel went. He went more than a thousand years into our past.”

* * *

The long-suppressed story at last revealed, Harry was ready to move from coffee to liqueur. He poured Amaretto all around. “Can you see why I was less than eager to tell that tale?”

Ambling seemed greatly relieved by the strange narrative. “So Faisel must have triggered his homemade atom bomb on arrival in the past to repay the energy loan. Some of the power he unleashed snapped back to repay his energy debt, destroying the institute. The radiation remained in the past, probably covered by an avalanche. Small wonder no evidence was ever found.”

“I still don’t get it.” Julia spoke before Harry could express his own misgivings. “Why perform such an elaborate suicide? Steal plutonium, build an atom bomb, build a time machine, travel back a thousand years, then blow himself up where no one would ever know what had happened? I mean, what was the point?”

Ambling set down his drink. “Islam was in cultural ascendancy through most of the Middle Ages, something we Westerners have mostly forgotten. You can bet Moslems remember having won the Crusades. It makes a strange kind of sense that a depressed suicidal Arab chose to die then.”

Harry could only shrug. “I didn’t know about the plutonium until today, yet I always believed that Faisel had a way to stay in the past. I always believed that he had a purpose. Learning about the plutonium hasn’t changed my intuition.”

Julia was browsing the living-room bookshelves; they were well stocked with science fiction. She had homed in on the ample collection on time travel. “I finally understand your taste in reading material. Even if Faisel did find a clever way to avoid self-destruction, isn’t he now safely off in a new parallel universe, someone else’s problem?” She tapped the spine of a novel. “That’s how it works in this story.”

“Sorry, folks,” Harry said. “I’ve got one more lecture. I’ve read those stories, sure. Many do split the universe whenever more than one outcome is possible. How convenient: Never decide between outcomes, just spawn another universe.” Harry waved his arms grandly over his head. “See them all, a vast continuum of universes. Here’s a universe wildly different from ours—say, where Hitler won World War II. Here’s another where I chose Irish Cream instead of Amaretto, and another where I stumbled and spilled a drop on the floor.

“It would be easiest to think that Faisel can’t change the past, that he can only start yet another set of new universes. If you ask me, it’s also nonsense: a false worship of symmetry. Where do you suppose the energy could come from to create all those parallel universes?”

Ambling retrieved a novel from the shelf and flipped idly through it. “Okay, so Faisel went into our past. There was surely no way back for him. Even if Faisel somehow survived the trip, he’s long dead. We’ve already survived whatever mischief he may have planned.”

Harry had read the book Terrence held. In it, the paratime police conveniently put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Was life ever that simple?

He chugged the rest of his drink. “Not exactly. Faisel went into the past five years ago. We’ve only experienced the effects of his first five years there.”

“Huh?” Julia looked at him blankly. “Take pity on the physics-impaired.”

“This explanation really cries out for pencil and paper, but I’ll see what I can do.” Harry rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Let’s try this. We all move into the future at one rate: one second per second. That’s as true for stranded time travelers as for you and me. All right so far?” She nodded tentatively. “The timeline must be consistent from end to end. For example, our Johnny is eight years old now because he was born eight years ago. We haven’t yet experienced what he’ll do when he’s ten.

“In its own weird way, even time travel observes cause and effect. We can’t see effects at our end of the must-remain-consistent timeline until Faisel has had the chance to cause them.

“Still think we’ve survived everything he can do in the past? Here’s a disproof by contradiction. Suppose we can detect something today that Faisel did—will do—ten years after he went back. Whatever that effect is, it had to have a cause. Since Faisel has only been in the past for five years, as he sees the timeline, he hasn’t yet been that cause. In other words, we’ve assumed that he’s the cause and shown it would violate timeline consistency for him to do so.

“Ergo, barmaid,” Harry flourished his empty glass, “the assumption won’t fly. We can’t yet see an effect from Faisel’s travels that he hadn’t caused in his first five years there.”

Julia nibbled her lower lip, ignoring Harry’s hint. “If he’s in the past, how could he not affect the timeline daily? It could be something completely innocent. Maybe because of what he eats, someone starves who should be my ancestor. Maybe because he kills a wolf, someone who once died childless now lives to have them.”

Sighing, Harry poured refills all around. “We’re getting unnecessarily glum, I think. Terrence, you’re the historian, so correct me if I’m mistaken. I was taught history is robust. Things happen when conditions are ripe. Look how often inventors independently get the same ideas at about the same time. No, I doubt that Faisel can influence history very much.”

Harry handed his guest what he considered a more plausible time-travel adventure. “Now you’ve heard the whole story. It’s strange, mind-bending … and utterly useless. It’s a great story, but in the larger scheme of things, so what? On the off chance that I’m right, we’ve got a twenty-first-century Moslem fanatic safely trapped in France during the darkest of the Dark Ages. If Faisel truly has a nuke, I’d much rather believe that he’s in A.D. 730 than in the here and now.”

Terrence’s liqueur glass slipped from his hands and shattered on the planked-oak floor. His face was ashen.

* * *

To be continued.

Fish Story, Episode Nine: Love at First Bite

Written by Dave Freer, Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

Illustrated by Barb Jernigan

“And the world will descend again into primordial slime!” said our host.

“Primordial slime!” We raised our glasses and drank.

Under the circumstances it would have taken a very, very stupid man to do otherwise. If he’d wanted us to drink the damned slime we’d have been delighted to oblige. As it was, it might have been preferable to what we were drinking. Perhaps if you had a coiled shell, and an indeterminate number of ropy, slimy tentacles striped in alternating fire-engine red and puke green, this might be your favorite tipple. I met someone once who thought ouzo was magnificent stuff, so anything is possible. He’d quite have liked this brew. It was greenish milky-colored, aniseed-scented and highly alcoholic. “The finest of old Atlantis’s brews,” said our host with all the nostalgia that only an extremely large Ammonite can put into the writhing of his tentacles. “Back from before the lease lapsed and the tenants got evicted.”

“Tastes like ouzo,” said Stephen Speairs, determined to prove that nearly getting us all killed once wasn’t bad enough. The last time … well Wales and whales do have a lot in common. All right … Maybe it was just my experience. Whales are grey and what I remember of Wales was grey too, although that might have been the mist, drizzle and then torrential downpour, and some blurred vision caused by falling off the back of a bike and protecting the beer in my hand instead of my head. One has ones own perceptions and priorities. Reluctantly, I have to admit that sometimes they’re wrong. I have been told that Wales is beautiful and that beer is replaceable and heads are not. I take the scientific approach to these matters and require proof.

“Ouzo! Humph.” Snorted the ammonite Cthulhu, spraying us all with a fine dusting of ink. ” Greeks. Upstarts. They stole the idea from us. It was … But we claimed it back and made it better.”

“How?” I looked at the cloudy green liquid again.

“We added a distillation of wormwood. Artemisia absinthum.”

Which could just explain how come we were drinking with the worlds largest potential supply of calamari. Absinthe—or the green fairy—was supposed to be hallucinogenic. Right now the hallucination theory was more attractive than being on a seaweedy island, that showed signs of being underwater recently, somewhere in the middle of the chillier parts of the South Pacific, with creatures that either belonged in Paleolithic history or in the dark pages of old horror novels, or possibly both.

Our arrival here in R’yleh had been clouded by a little a little awkwardness. That and ink. Mark Twain said you should never argue with a man who buys his ink by the quart. This is true. I’d like to add the Dexter Guptill corollary: “You should really, really never argue with a megalomaniacal thirty ton proto-cephalopod who produces ink by the forty-four gallon drum.” Along with: “When buildings start sprouting tentacles it is probably time to give up the sauce. Or drink a lot more of it,” that may go down in the annals of history as two of my greatest wise sayings.

Cthulhu had been somewhat upset by our apparent liking for whales. It turns out the ammonites are all called Cthulhu. It’s sort of like “Bruce and Sheila” except Sheila’s called Cthulhu too. To avoid confusion, to explain it Monty Python terms. It also explains—besides their regenerative powers—why killing Cthulhu is like searching for the logic in New Zealand Immigration laws (which is why Cthulhu was found on a remote island in the South Pacific, not Wellington, where it should be), a task which is more difficult than trying to persuade the Flatwoods Monster to attend a Labour Party conference in Blackpool. Trust me. I’ve tried both. Not killing Cthulhu, the other two. Cthulhu was of course mind-bogglingly evil and planning to return the world to oceans full of primordial slime—in other words, she was a sort of fairly normal politician, and one with more good points than average. “So what is the difference between this stuff and absinthe?” I asked. I was quite proud of that conversational gambit. You can tell Guptill is at his best after being wrapped in a vast suckered tentacle and sprayed with ink.

Cthulhu shrugged, which is quite a sight in a thirty-ton ammonite. There was a lot of it to quiver. “Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. This stuff just makes you stoned.” She was drinking it by the quart.

“You can’t get absinthe any more,” explained Dann Douglas. “They stopped selling all Thujone-containing liquors a good half century ago. But you can still get Cthulhu-juice at the convocations.”

“Convocations?” asked Stephen Speairs, as calmly as if he hadn’t been the cause of our tentacle encounter.

“You know, when the guys—low, mixed-blood types like me according to Lovecraft—get together and chant ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn‘ and sacrifice a few victims, talk about the coming of the end of the world and then get completely pie-eyed on Cthulhu-juice and end up sleeping with someone you would rather not have. Rather dull really. But it is tax-deductible. Cultist meetings, conventions, who can tell the difference?” explained Dann.

Thinking about it I had to admit he was right. I’d been a good few scientific conventions that could have been described as much like that.

“So how did you end up caught up in all of this?” asked Speairs.

Dann sighed. “Caught up is the right word. I am … or was once … a big game fisherman. I thought I would catch all of the largest species of fish in the sea. I started in a quite an ordinary way—salmon in Siberia, Giant Trevally in Cosmoleto. Then I got into collecting records. Monstrous catfish in the Mekong. Sailfish. Then sharks… and I became obsessed with Megalodon. And in following up the reports … found myself here.”

“Reports?” I asked, scenting the famous pong of an urban legend.

“Of a very large shark. Possibly the largest to ever swim,” he said, sadly. “Megalodon.”

”Carcharadon megalodon,” I said. “Or Carcharacoles megalodon, depending on which side of the taxonomic fence you land on. I’ve been out of it for a while so I don’t what the thinking is these days.”

“Probably thinking you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” said Stephen cheerfully lighting another coffin nail. “I don’t.” How he had dry and uncrushed cigarettes at this stage of our misadventure must remain a mystery to me.

“Do you know what a great white shark is? I asked, cursing myself. Thanks to “Jaws” everyone thought they knew. Most of them thought it was something with the intellect of Einstein, and the desire for blood of Rambo … which was about right, except for a few minor details. Like it was actually the intellect of Rambo, and as bloodthirsty as Einstein. Yeah, yeah. They’re big carnivores. They eat seals. They eat relatively few tourists, as even big dumb carnivores with brains the size of Bob Mugabe’s conscience know that anything that eats tourist food is likely to give you secondary poisoning. We probably taste vile.

“Big sharks that eat people,” said Stephen, obliging me.

“Well, you’re half right. They can get up to about eighteen feet long and can weigh in at near four thousand pounds. Bigger than your average carp. So yes, they’re big.”

“But there were stories of bigger ones, far bigger ones, from the coast of Australia,” said Dann. “Fish of up to thirty-six feet. That was the record for many years.”

“The stories didn’t stand closer inspection. Whale sharks, Basking sharks, just plain exaggeration.”

Dann shook his head. “And if you dig far enough and go back far enough, you have reports from the Atlantic, the Stronsay beast, which was fifty-five feet long and identified as a shark from a close examination of its vertebrae. But for frequency and size they all came down to the South Pacific. Port Fairy was a whaling and sealing port …”

“Ah, back down to whales,” said Stephen.

I snorted. Sharks are my interest. “Thirty-six feet long, it was supposed to be… . And when they examined the jaw, they decided it was a serious error of measurement and that it was merely seventeen feet long.”

Dann fixed me with a manic stare. “Aha … If they examined the right jaw, Mister Guptill.”

Stephen Speairs chuckled. “Yeah they probably looked at the left jaw. That came from a smaller fish.”

By the way Dann looked at him I could tell this came under the heading of “not very funny.” “I tracked down the original jaw,” he said. “The incident happened in 1870 in South Australia—it was a pretty wild and woolly place in those days. Museums weren’t secured the way they are now. And there were some big great whites being caught in that area. Someone swapped the jaws in late 1800’s. I found the real one, the original. The real jaw came from a Megalodon. A juvenile Megalodon.”

“Stupid, badly behaved brat, served it right,” said Cthulhu. “Always too greedy.”

“But why would anyone swap the jaw for that of a smaller fish? And why keep it secret …” I asked, in spite of my self.

Dann jerked a thumb at his monster master. Well, he had stopped us from being devoured, over the confusion about Wales. “I think Cthulhu just answered your question.”

“We bred them to try and control whale numbers. Ungrateful, that’s what they are. To so bite the tentacle that feeds them,” said the vast ammonite. I was doing my best to pretend I wasn’t drinking something alcoholic and hallucinogenic with a monster that promised world domination and destruction. This sort of statement made that pretense hard.

“I guess it might be easier to get people to believe a fisherman might exaggerate the size of fish a tiny bit,” admitted Stephen, with the reluctance of a true fisherman.

Dann nodded. “Yes, all they needed to do was add a tiny bit of doubt, and people believed there was good reason for it. No one ever believes fishermen’s stories.”

“All true fishermen are intrinsically honest,” I said defensively. “I can prove this. None of them work in the South African banking industry.”

They looked at me in puzzlement. Obviously this joy had never come their way. “So?”

“Trust me. According to my experiences, if they did, you couldn’t trust them.” It suddenly occurred to me that Stephen might possibly be a banker. It didn’t look likely, but still. “You’re not in banking are you?”

His shoulders shook. “No. But I still don’t see why it proves that all fishermen are honest.”

“Not all. Only the true fishermen. The salt of the earth, the good fellows who would give you their last bloodworm, the lads who would share their whiskey with you. The other kind are lower life forms,” I explained.

“Hm. I seem to have met a fair number of bankers in angling pubs. Well, more like outright liars, because they claimed to be in almost every other profession, and yet they’d caught some amazing fish in unlikely places,” said Dann.

“Ah!” I said the light dawned. “Pubs. That’s different. They may cause good men to… exaggerate a trifle. It’s the shortage of oxygen in your average crowded and smoke-filled pub. Watch. The no smoking rule will shrink fish by 25%. But really it’s more a case of wishful thinking and the hitherto unknown elasticity of their arms, caused by alcohol. Really, it makes arms stretchy. But as for Megalodon … no one’s arms are that long, no matter how elastic.”

“So its a shark. A really, really big shark?” said Stephen Speairs with the sort of tenacity that should have worried me.

I nodded. “The biggest ever. The teeth are mostly what we have for evidence. They’re about seven inches high.”

“Seven inch high sharks? Wow.” Speairs laughed.

“No, the teeth, you …” I took a look at the size of him. Swallowed the “moron” part. He wasn’t. Irritating maybe, but he at least knew something about Cthulhu. “We’re still guessing shark length as no one really knows what shape their bodies were. If you assume that it was something like a Great White—well you can guess at something like forty to sixty feet long.

“There have been larger estimates,” said Dann. “A hundred feet,” he said, dreamily. “Sixty tons … but even a forty-foot shark would destroy any attempt to catch it on rod and line. Destroy a trawl net. You’re not going to catch one easily. Only the juveniles are even slightly vulnerable.”

“Still, they have been extinct for at least one and half million years,” I said.

Dann raised his eyebrows. “Like the coelacanth. No fossils since the end of the cretaceous.”

It was a venerable defense. “The coelacanth is a deep water species… .”

Dann smiled with the delight of man who has tricked you into clinching his argument for him. Cthulhu poured more drinks. “And it is notable that most of the Coelacanth fossils came from shallow seas. Yet all the experts claim it was not found in the intervening time because it’s a deep water species.”

I’d dealt with that one before. “That’s because that is where we can access the fossil material. It seems that all the Megalodon teeth came from shallow water dredges. They were a tropical coastal water species …”

“Which preyed on whales and pinnipeds—which, of course, are always far more abundant in resource-poor tropical oceans. You never get them among the krill in the great southern ocean,” said Dann dryly.

Speairs chuckled. “I think the sarcasm meter just exploded.”

“The water may have been too cold for them.” I said, fighting a rearguard action. The Greenland Shark proved some sharks could live and thrive in icy water.

Dann looked at me over his steepled fingers. “Or—just as Great Whites have temperate distribution and raise their body temperature by the rete mirabile and gigantothermy, the same might just have applied to Megalodon, only more so.”

Stephen took a long deep swallow of the green fairy. “Okay. You just lost me completely. That was Latin. I can smell Latin a mile away. It’s usually used to make ordinary things sound like black magic or the law.”

“An arterial/venous countercurrent heat exchanger, which enables the fish to raise its body temperature, despite being poikilothermic,” I explained.

Stephen nodded. “Thank you. I’m an expert at foreign languages. And that was definitely Greek to me. I could tell by the way I didn’t understand a word.”

“Means it is warmer than the water it is living in, despite not being what you would call ‘warm-blooded,’” Dann explained. “And because they are so big, the heat inside can be retained efficiently. Like dinosaurs, and,” he said with a sneer of distaste, “whales.”

“And elephants. They only live in arctic.” I said, dryly.

Never waste your sarcasm the products of the British schooling system. “I thought that was the mammoths. Or was it mastodons. Never been too sure which was which.”

“Both, said Cthulhu mournfully. “Very respectful and very tasty.”

“It still doesn’t answer the fact that remains: the teeth were found in shallow sea, temperate and tropical areas …” I said tenaciously.

“Mastodon teeth or mammoth teeth? Or dentures from the Spice Girls?” asked Speairs.

“Gah. The latter of course. Shark teeth, naturally. We’re talking about sharks.”

He nodded. “Megalo-whatsits. Great in those salmon streams for digesting the moneyed classes.”

“Sadly, Megalodons are a bit large for the average stream, and they’re allergic to waxed cotton. They’re rare to mythical fish. You wouldn’t want to waste them on those, even if you could find them.” I said, unwarily accepting a refill.

“Well,” said Dann, “I decided that they used to occur in the Southern ocean, and probably the arctic as well. They also used to follow the migratory whales. Keep in deep cool water, and nip in for a bite—which sometimes ended in lost teeth. These things happen when you dine on whales. And if there was going to be relict population anywhere, it had to be in the southern oceans, probably somewhere near 48deg9’S, 123deg43’W.

“A piece of ocean without anything at all,” I said, envisaging it. It was, indeed one of the least visited pieces of the sea—thousands of miles of nothing.

“Also where Lovecraft betrayed R’lyeh to be,” said Cthulhu glumly. “We don’t have a lot of private spots to haul out and get the parasites off our shells, and that lowlife has to go and cooperate with the faceless one and his CIA lackeys to betray it. Do you know how much effort that cover up was? We had to try and track down all the original copies of the February 1928 Weird Tales and substitute them with the same story but a slightly different line of Latitude. Couldn’t just disappear them or have our acolytes eliminate all the purchasers of Weird Tales, tempting though it was. We never quite got them all.”

“So how come it doesn’t come up on Google Earth?” I asked.

“We made certain arrangements,” said Cthulhu, loftily. “Anyway, that’s need to know basis information.”

I looked at the glass of green fairy. I really had to stop drinking this stuff. “And so: I suppose you never caught Megalodon, Dann. You wound up here instead, occasionally dropping into bars in Mozambique.”

His eyes took on a faraway look. “Yes. I caught a Megalodon. But no one told me they were telepathic. I should have guessed. Most fish are to some degree. That’s why it is possible to catch salmon. They are, but their minds are so taken up with sex that they can be fooled. Otherwise—well, in some species the group mind is weak, too taken up with food. Of course, in some species even the group mind fails to achieve that critical threshold of intelligence, the level of the junior French railway official, and they never even attain the semblance of sentience. In other cases—if the fisherman is mindless enough, or paying attention to something else such as pornography (which confuses most fish), they can fool the prey, even if they could have read his mind. But when dealing with really large minds … you need more help.”

He looked at us. “At that time I still believed it was just a question of tackle and tactics. Of being in the right place at the right time. I should have guessed because the right time to have been in a particular place is always … last week. Or next week. It is too much of a coincidence that the fishing is always better when you’re not in that spot.”

“That is an experience I’ve had,” I admitted.

“I decided that the answer was lots of chum, and of course, some kind of longer range super-attractant. The sharks had to be successfully following the whales, which meant they had to be using something about the whales to track them. Whales use sound to communicate across large distances … a species that preyed principally on whales might actually be using that very thing. Now, sound is more of a mammalian thing but I figured evolution might have driven the sharks in this direction.”

“Selective breeding,” said Cthulhu. “But they’ve abused it. We’re in dispute about it.”

“Which is why they’ve been engaged in industrial action for the last fifty years,” explained Dann. “The Megalodons learned a fair amount from humans.”

Cthulhu made a schlurping sound with its suckers. “Can’t get decent help these centuries.”

“Well, you can hear a sperm whale six miles away underwater, and a blue whale a hundred miles away. So you must it admit it was easier to find the baleens than the toothed whales,” said Dann, apparently trying to be reasonable. It had the air of a well-worn argument.

“Excuses,” said Cthulhu grumpily. “When we return the oceans to primordial slime, the whales will all have to go, but in the meantime humpback tunes are very popular with the younger Cthulhu. Anyone under forty millennia has no discernment. Rorqual music! Huh. More like raucous music. Not a patch on a patch on a good Permian era sixteen-hour hundred-piece shell-bashing.”

We digressed into the virtues of chambered shell orchestra, the piscarmonic orchestra (which involves using various sized fish to beat the shell with) and of course the gut quartet, and then Cthulhu’s personal one hundred-piece armpit orchestra recital, before Stephen steered us back around to fine art of catching the biggest sharks that ever lived, barring, of course, a few legendary sea-serpents. They’d probably show up later. Drinking lager and wearing hoodies, the way things were going. “So, Dann, you were telling us how to attract these Megalodons?”

“Ah, yes. I had more money than sense, I suppose. That was before ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.‘ I came up with the ultimate device for super-simulating whale-sounds. The bloop.”

“How inspiring. How original,” I said cheerfully.

Dann shrugged. “Don’t blame me. Blame the US Hydrographic service. They called it that. Mind you, I am proud that they picked it up sixteen hundred miles away. It was, in its way, too successful.”

Horrid Cthulhu waved his striped tentacles in agreement. “Like ice cream van music. He had all of the Megalodon break their picket and head out after him.

“For a … whatchacallit ‘Bloop’?” I asked.

“Well, that and forty tons of whale meat and blubber as chum,” admitted Dann.

“Whoa. How did you get forty tons of whale meat?”

“I pushed up the prices in Japan and South Korea in 1996,” said Dann. “Purely scientifically-caught whale meat. Part of the famous Japanese scientific research project ‘How many whales can you harpoon per day’?”

“Very important research. Valuable science,” said Cthulhu. “But needs a bigger sample. And focus on sperm whales.”

“Why?” asked Stephen.

“They’re ugly,” said Cthulhu of the slimy-green-and-red-tentacle mass.

“And their mothers dress them funny,” I said to add depth and meaning to the discussion.

“Yes. Naked! And just incidentally they dine off us and our new race that we created to fill the beautiful depths with their cities. Our younger cousins. And if they get the chance, us. Cephalopod intelligence lives to dine on all other life, not to be dinner for fatheads.” Cthulhu sighed. “Since the Megalodon work-to-rule action and the decline in the popularity of whale meat, it’s been an uphill struggle,” he said, with a second shlurping sigh. “You know, it really looked like we were winning until a certain—as he calls himself these days, Richard Moby, came to power. It’s been downhill ever since. World domination and a return to happy primeval slime is so hard. In the old days we at least had anti-Trilobite liberation struggle solidarity to turn to. It was all the fault of the Trilobites.”

“They’ve been blaming trilobites for about fifty million years now,” said Dann in an under voice to me.

“What did you say?” said Cthulhu suspiciously.

“I said roll on the reuniting of Pangaea, F’tagn Cthulhu. It was all those dirty trilobites fault.”

Cthulhu shook a tentacle, “Vile trilobites! We’re still suffering from the trilobite legacy. They were as bad as that Nyarlhotep.”

“But hang on,” I said science cutting through a haze of alcohol, aniseed and thujone. “The trilobites have been extinct for 250 million years.”

“About a vigintillion years,” said Speairs, cheerfully.

“So?” said Cthulhu.

“You can’t possibly remember it,” I said.

“Inherited group memory,” said Cthulhu loftily. “I remember back when Ammonoids were barely six feet across. Anyway, we are very long lived.”

“I guess it means that what some trilobite said about great great-aunt Cthulhu a hundred million years ago really can cause a feud,” said Speairs again, stirring the pot as usual

Cthulhu turned a soup-plate sized eye on him. “So you heard about it too, did you? It’s not true. It’s just a vicious rumor. Anyway, I wouldn’t think it was physically possible, besides being perverted. And I don’t see what it has got to do with fishing for the staff. I’m sure the Megalodon behavior is all a front for neo-trilobites forces wanting to recolonize us. They wouldn’t really starve if they just ate toothed whales. Sperm whales are still far more numerous than blues.”

“So you were fishing for sharks. The biggest ever sharks. What sort of tackle did that take? What does it need to land a sixty-foot shark? A deck winch and a cable?” I asked. We’d tried that on oceanic white-tips.

“Gearing,” said Dann. “Spectacular gearing. And a rather special fighting chair. It was quite an interesting task getting it made up. Of course, the rod itself had to be more than a little different. I tried special aerospace composites. And you have to realize that an animal that can exert enough bite force to sever an undersea trans-oceanic cable is a problem. I’d wanted to catch it within IGFA rules of course. But it’s going to take more than forty feet of leader and double line and more than just a Bimini twist or two to hold. And 130-pound test lines are just not going to work on an animal in the twenty-to-sixty-ton range. I would have to catch one. Take it back and get IGFA to consider a heavier line class. I needed that fish first.”

“Ha. I once caught a three meter croc on five kilo line and a bass rod in the small craft dredging harbor in St Lucia estuary. I couldn’t land it of course, but I did bring it to the edge of the pier.” I said proudly. Not many people have had a half-ton crocodile on the end of bass rod. Admittedly, all the darn thing did was to log and make me lift it, by steady slow pressure. If it had tried anything else I would have broken off in seconds.

“Along with your sanity—right to the edge,” said Speairs. ” What were you doing fishing for crocodiles? And if you did land it, what would you have done with it?”

“We’d discussed that at the time,” I said. “Thought of keeping it in the guest bathroom. And I could have landed it if I had one of those IGFA permitted rope gaffs. I suppose we could have tied the gaff to the pier and run like hell. We weren’t fishing for crocodiles. We were after yellowfin perch. I got one, the croc got it, and we had a hour’s worth of tussle about who got to keep it. Anyway, I was a good long way above the estuary, even if a croc can jump six feet out of the water. More like what did our great fisherman think he’d do with a sixty-foot shark, when it got that close. What size boat did you have, Dann? Its tail could swat most things to pieces, let alone the damage it could do with its jaws.”

“The Lady Lucinda was adequate for the task,” said Dann, stiffly. “And I must admit I did have a commercial whaling harpoon with an explosive head on board. Just in case. After all a certain sperm whale sank the 238-ton Essex and the Ann Alexander.”

“So sad,” said Cthulhu.

“Anyway,” said Dann, “my technicians set up the bloop generator, the captain set a course for the outer reaches of the Pacific, the commercial mincer worked its way down the vast pile of whale meat and blubber, and I settled in for a pleasant cruise. Well, the weather is not so nice down in the roaring forties, but the swells were never higher than twenty feet.”

“Quite small for those promiscuous parts, really,” I said. I’d been down south to monitor toothfish long-line catches. I wasn’t kidding. And if Dann was not just yanking our chain, he could afford to pay for all the drinks … twice.

“Yes, but my steward didn’t like it much. He developed an allergy to smell of whale meat, and I have to admit it was pervasive. When we started chumming, he retreated to his cabin. I should have been suspicious, but I thought he was just sick. He was calling Nyarlhotep.”

“Like the poor bastard back in the Hotel in Mozambique?”

Dann grimaced. “Yes. With much the same effect. I lost three of my crew before we discovered it. We were within moments of turning back to take up the matter with the authorities in Australia when we started to pick up sharks on the fish-finder sonar. Big sharks. Well, enormous fish, whale size, not behaving like whales. I had to make a choice. I had two gruesome murders and an apparent suicide—I should have headed back immediately. But here was a whole school of the fish that could be my greatest triumph. I might never find them again. I made the wrong choice. I promised the skipper we’d turn back just as soon as we had evidence. After all, how much difference would the time taken to land one mammoth size fish add to a three week cruise?”

“Wouldn’t have helped. Nyarlhotep would have got you anyway,” said Cthulhu.

“How did he get there? I mean, was your steward this Nyarlhotep fellow? Have you got a picture of your crew?” asked Stephen Speairs. It seemed an odd question, all things considered.

Dann shook his head. “Of course he wasn’t. He merely summonsed him with the traditional rituals, calling down the white telephone into the sewer system which allows instant vocalizations across interstellar distances. Time and space mean little to the likes of Nyarlhotep, messenger of the elder Gods. He can appear anywhere. And it’s no use hoping for a photograph. His face is never seen, or if it is, not remembered. He probably has no face.”

“And how does he do this little appear anywhere trick, eh?” asked Stephen Speairs looking as if he would break out a notebook and start writing it down.

“Cthulhu does not know,” said the Ammonite. “We believe it is a form of the invisible waiter syndrome. That power that enables the table service of small bistro’s to vanish beyond the ken of men and Gods the instant that you look at your watch and realize that you have less than five minutes to get to a meeting with your boss, and don’t have any cash and need the bill now. Nyarlhotep has mastered this and is almost impossible to stop. But he will not come near R’lyeh.”

“Lucky for you this is where you ended up, Dann. So tell us about the fishing.” The less I knew about this Nyarlhotep the better. Besides I had a feeling we were only getting one side of the story. The other side might be no better, but then why had the man in the hotel toilet tried to warn me about the squid?

“I strapped into the fighting chair,” said Dann. “Look, pragmatism prevailed. I did have a rod support there. And the crew were hastily bolting the harpoon-gun in place, while the lure was being launched.”

“And the frigging pudding. You didn’t try to catch it on a fly?” I said.

Dann shook his head. “No, a lure made up to appear like a wounded Minke whale. Bob Peacock—my tackle agent—had it specially made up for me. I’d have preferred a bigger lure, but I had to have something that I could give a nice lifelike movement to; a twenty foot lure was about the limit of that. Two titanium steel 38/0 hooks , and a nice fillet of whale down the side. I’d thought about using down riggers, but decided on a surface-worked lure, as whales are air breathers and come to the surface when they’re injured, and if Megalodon was at all like a great white shark, they’d attack from beneath or behind. I still remember it like it was yesterday. It was just after dawn and the sea was gray and wild … but empty. Just white horses, not even a seabird. My injured whale lure was struggling and we poured chum. And then Megalodon hit. Broaching the water, a full thirty feet of pure muscle and teeth, smashing into the lure. It wasn’t like an express train. That’s too tame. It was bulkier and faster that. It was more like the lure—and me, by the shock transmitted through the rod, had accidentally been at been hooked onto a cross between Jimi Hendrix and a Saturn rocket. The drag was screaming and smoking in spite of liquid nitrogen cooling system. Miles of high-stretch high tensile line were disappearing into the depths …”

“A hundred footer didn’t even realize it had been hooked. It was still looking for the blue whale dinner special,” said Cthulhu disdainfully.

Dann didn’t appear to hear him, so locked was he in the fisherman’s tale-telling trance. “I had the skipper chase the shark. There was no way I would have enough line without him following the fish. My line was still hissing through the water …”

“The Megalodon was cruising around wondering what the hell happened to its dinner,” said Cthulhu.

“Inch by inch, I started to recover line,” said Dann.

“Which, if your vessel gets right above the fish, you can do,” explained Cthulhu.

“I was pumping it, exerting maximum lift,” said Dann, hauling and winding at an imaginary rod.

“The Megalodon decided to come up to the surface to see if it could try a little sky-hopping for a sighting of a spout,” interpreted Cthulhu.

Stephen Speairs snorted. “Sky-hopping? Flapping their little gossamer fins to keep their forty ton bulk aloft?”

Dann was so absorbed in his story that he didn’t even hear the interruptions. “Suddenly it breached. This vast white body—white as many-ice edge hunters are white, just kept coming out of the water. Coming for us like an exocet. The skipper reacted fast. Swung the wheel hard-over, but a ship the size of Lady Lucinda takes a while to respond, and this huge shark was falling down on us. The impact on the water was deafening, and the ship rolled to forty-five degrees. I was strapped in, and clinging to my rod. The great fish began her second run.”

“She thought it was worth looking further south,” said Cthulhu.

“All night and all day the battle raged,” Dann continued dreamily.

“The Megalodon swam around looking for the whale-diner for a bit,” said Cthulhu.

“I was exhausted. It was a battle of wills between me and the vastest fish in the ocean. The original leviathan.”

“I thought that was a whale,” I said, as Dann lubricated his throat.

The drink must have got him to notice the rest of us again. “Melville had it wrong. It meant sea monster in Hebrew,” he said.

“What I want to know is what happened to this Nyarlhotep character while all this was going on?” asked Stephen Speairs.

Cthulhu turned a hubcap sized eye on him. “You ask far too many questions about the faceless one. Are you one of his minions?”

Stephen Speairs did his best to look hurt. “I get accused of everything. First being a bank manager and then a minion. I don’t know which is worse.”

Dann plunged back into his tale. “Eventually the runs got shorter, and I thought we might be able to bring the fish to ship. I yelled for them to ready the harpoon gun. There we were, within fifty feet of biggest fish any man had ever fought. It surfaced and I could see it properly. I called out to Hansen to fire the harpoon gun.”

Cthulhu waved a suckered tentacle in despair. “And if there is one thing that Megalodons dislike it is people taking them for whales. A harpoon would be final insult.”

“The man was there, ready, but frozen with fear,” said Dann. “And before I could get him to fire—I didn’t dare get out of the fighting chair myself—a second vast shark came up out of the deep. It was even bigger than the first one.”

“And attacked the ship? Bit the line? Hauled the first one away by the tail?” I asked.

Dann shook his head sadly. “No. It had other things on its mind. And my Lady Lucinda might have survived a mere attack. But shark sex … shark sex is rough. Really, really rough. And when the participants in a good shark-shag weigh in at more than eighty tons each, it’s even rougher on the vessel that happens to be in the way. Poor old Lucinda had not a hope in hell. She was smashed to bits, and they didn’t even notice. You see, what I had assumed was a food attractant—in a species that is a little more evolved, but is evolved from a giant eating machine, where sex after dinner (because before dinner you might end up being dinner) is a good idea … whale chum is high class perfume. Lady-sharks dab a small quarter ton or so behind the pectorals. And my super-attractant blue whale call … was a super wolf whistle.”

Speairs snorted. “You got your comeuppance you might say.”

“So what was the bit about them being telepathic?” I asked. “I thought that meant they were going to rescue the one that was caught, I must admit.”

“No,” said Dann. “It just meant I was wasting my time fishing for them. That’s why they’ve never been even accidentally trapped even as adolescents, and haven’t been seen for years. I mean there are clues, like the rising number of sperm whales despite the fact that they were the number one target of whalers, and they’re slow breeders, and the fact that blue whale numbers are still far reduced and only barely increasing. But they can work out where humans are, and avoid them. We’re lousy eating. That’s why they called Cthulhu and told him I was drifting on a piece of deck and the fighting chair, drifting toward R’lyeh. I was cast up on the stinking beach here, more dead than alive. And then Cthulhu came. I’ve been in her service ever since, although it took some time and a fair bit of ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn‘ and understand just how widespread the cult were, and how all that kept me from Nyarlhotep was the scent of whale-blubber, before.”

“So what happened to your crew? What happened to Nyarlhotep? Why was he after you, and how come he didn’t succeed?” asked Speairs.

Cthulhu wrapped a tentacle around him and picked him up. “Why do want to know about Nyarlhotep all the time?” she said, suspiciously. “Who are you and what are you doing here? Speak now or be eaten, human.”

Stephen Speairs plainly realized Cthulhu wasn’t joking this time. He used his free hand to reach inside his jacket and produce a holographic ID card. He held it up to one monstrous eye. “Special investigator and undercover agent provocateur of the paranormal cataclysmic conspiracy branch of Borough of London Metropolitan Police,” he said. “I was on the Sloan Park werewolf case. I’d just wrapped that one up. Then I got a call that there might be a lead in our search for Nyarlhotep.”

“You caught a werewolf?” I asked.

“Well, it wasn’t a werewolf. Not in Sloan Park. More like a weredog. Or rather a werebitch. A werePekinese to be specific. Mind you, she did wear Prada. I caught her in very the act of savaging a stockbroker. It was a fair cop she said, when the uniformed branch came and took her away,” he said proudly.

“The Paranormal Conspiracy Branch?” I asked, staring at him over the rim of my glass.

“Yes,” said Speairs. “They were formed just after the great exploding Canvey Island Monster invasion of o’sixteen.”

“Ah, bollocks,” I said. “There’s no such thing.”

“Not yet,” said Cthulhu. “You’re from the future, aren’t you? We get at least one time-traveling copper showing up here every couple of weeks.”

* * *

To be continued

The Quiet Man

Written by David Carrico

Illustrated by Nathan Carlisle

The spaceship settled on the Washington Mall, nose pointed toward the Capitol. The crowds seemed to coalesce around the police barricades almost immediately. Despite the risk, no one wanted to miss out on the first visit from extra-terrestrials.

Every news channel world-wide was devoting 100% of its time to this event. There were cameras all around the perimeter of the mall. The feeds were competing with each other for the eye of the viewing public. The news anchors, cool, controlled manners notwithstanding, seemed somewhat strained while they discussed the import of the event.

The craft was lean and rakish. It looked dangerous, whether or not it really was. The Secret Service and other security agencies didn’t miss the import of the orientation of the nose. The Capitol and nearby buildings were evacuated immediately.

The crowds continued to swell. Banners with all the UFO cult labels began to appear. The police perimeter lines were being pushed in by the inexorable pressure of the people gathering.

Clang!

The noise echoed between the buildings. The lower half of the spaceship nose split into clamshell doors and began to open. The crowd recoiled for a moment, then pressed forward when a ramp descended to ground level. A figure strode down the ramp into the sunlight and was greeted by a collective “Aah.”

Leonine was the only word that described him. Tall, somewhat cat-like, with a blocky head and a huge mane of reddish-gold hair, he was impressive. The TV anchors were uniformly silent, unable to muster words to capture and frame the moment. He moved out away from the craft, until even the shadow of it was some distance behind him. Everyone watched while he reached up and touched something on his collar.

”I am Commander Khuran.” No speakers were in sight, but his voice resonated and reverberated throughout the space. “We are the Sha’Cha. These are our children.” Six giant holograms sprang into being above the Mall, rotating and circling so that all could see them clearly. If the commander was leonine, these were more feline. Different colors, different patterns, different clothing. “We have tracked them here. Take us to them, bring them here, or tell us what happened. We await them.” With that, he touched his collar again, clasped his hands behind his back, and settled in to wait.

When the response came, it was not from the government. A man in a black uniform pushed his way to the front of the crowd. People got out of his way as quickly as they could. The rather large rifle he was carrying may have had something to do with that. Before the nearest policemen could get to him, he ducked under the tape and jumped the barricade. When the cops tried to follow him, they found themselves blocked by something no one could see.

Everyone watched while he strode across the grass toward Commander Khuran. The news anchors broke into almost apoplectic commentaries.

The man stopped when he was perhaps twenty feet from the commander. He laid the rifle down on the ground, dropped his pistol belt on top of it, then unfastened and shrugged off his body armor and equipment vest. He discarded the cap, so that he stood bareheaded in the sunlight, blond hair stirring in the breeze. He gave a bow to the commander, then assumed a similar posture.

Commander Khuran beckoned to the man. He straightened. When he spoke, his voice was heard as well as the commander’s had been previously.

“I can tell you what has happened to them. I will tell you what has happened to them.”

At that, the crowd went nuts. The police had their hands full dealing with the crowd, but they were pushed back until they encountered an unseen barrier around the craft, the commander and the man in black.

Slowly, the noise began to die down. Cameras began to turn again to the two figures standing facing each other within the cleared area. Commander Khuran beckoned again, waving a hand at the ship in obvious invitation. The figure in black stood still for a moment, then began walking, almost marching, toward the ramp. The commander fell in beside him, and together they entered the spaceship. The ramp retracted. The doors closed. And everyone in the world was left wondering.

* * *

Ten years later

Rowf was doing his dog thing, sniffing everything in sight and watering every tree and bush we passed by. I swear, that dog’s bladder proved that the outside of something can be smaller than the inside.

I was walking along and looking at the stars, something I do a lot of. The sky was really black, and the stars just glittered in it. Beautiful. One of the things that makes me believe God is an artist. I find that a calming thought.

Rowf stopped so suddenly I just about fell over him. “What’s up, dog?” I laid my hand on his neck, feeling the hair rise. His ears were perked forward. I could hear the slow rumble of a warning growl coming from his throat. After a moment, I could hear what he heard—someone crashing through the brush.

I like my privacy—I have my reasons for that—so my property is very clearly posted No Trespassing. The fact that someone was blundering around on it in the dark lifted my hackles along with Rowf’s. It also stirred some memories that had lain quiet for a lot of years. I headed in the direction of the noise, Rowf trailing along behind.

The crashing grew closer and closer. Someone with no woods sense was running hard in the dark, risking a fall and a broken limb or worse. I stopped where I was, waiting. After a moment, I could see her. Light clothing, long hair, looking back over her shoulder when she burst through the brush and ran headlong into my chest with an “Oof”.

Now I freely admit that I’m a big man, and right then I still had my winter beard on and was dressed in some rather grungy working clothes. I’m not sure I would have wanted to run into someone who looked like me on a dark night. But she clung to my shoulders, panting.

“Please … please … don’t let them get me.”

“Don’t let who get you?”

“Three men … kidnapped me … tried to rape me …”

Okay, this was a bit more serious than trespassing.

“They … have guns …” she continued.

Yeah, a lot more serious than trespassing.

“Can you run some more?” I looked at her standing there, panting and trembling. “Right. Stupid question.” Fortunately, she was a little bit of a thing. I scooped her up and started back down the hill to my place. Rowf followed along, looking back and whining every few steps.

It didn’t take long to get back to my workshop. I opened the door and motioned her inside, then closed and locked the door after I flicked on the lights. The fluorescent shop lights came on, and we stood there blinking for a moment, and I got a good look at her. Short, maybe five foot two inches. Chestnut hair, a little longer than shoulder length, rather tousled at the moment. Jeans, a sweater, running shoes, all muddy—pretty light clothing for a spring night in northern Michigan. She didn’t look like much more than a kid.

“You’re safe, ma’am.” I kept my voice quiet and stood there. Like I said, I knew what I looked like. She’d been spooked enough. I wasn’t going to make any sudden moves around her.

I could see her trying to slow her breathing, trying to regain control. It took her a while, but she did it. She looked around the work shop, but always kept me in view from the corner of her eye. I gave her points for composure. Not too many women would be that strong after experiencing what she’d just gone through. At length, she turned and looked directly at me.

“Safe?” Now that she wasn’t gasping for every molecule of oxygen she could inhale, her voice was soft and sort of furry. I liked it. “So, just how safe am I?” Her expression was serious, her lips pursed.

“Well, unless those fools get lucky and stumble across us, I’d say very safe. You can clean up, and whenever you feel like it I’ll take you to where your car is and you can go home.”

She looked like she was going to say something, but was distracted by a large black nose that was sniffing her leg. “And who is this?”

“That’s Rowf.”

“Rowf? Seriously?” She didn’t quite laugh, but her voice danced with humor.

“What can I say? I liked Rowf the dog best of all the Muppets. So …” I spread my hands.

“Makes sense to me. Hey, Rowf.” She rubbed his ears. He leaned into it, evidence that she had good hands.

She straightened after a moment. Rowf looked at her, then turned and slowly made his way to his bed by the wood burning stove. She cocked her head at me. “Something wrong with him?”

“Partly years, partly he’s pretty sick. Cancer.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. He seems like a good dog.”

“Yep.” It hurt that I was going to lose him soon. I was closer to that dog than anyone since my dad died.

She looked at me full on for a moment, then turned her green eyes toward my latest project, standing revealed in the open shipping case. “Wow.”

Serious, but reverent. I liked that. Not for my ego’s sake, understand. Just that knowing somebody felt the impact of the work was enough. She looked at it for a long moment, then looked over her shoulder at me. “That yours?”

“Yep.”

“If that’s a Reidinger statue, then you must be Reidinger.”

“Call me John.” Okay, she wasn’t a kid. I was pleased that she recognized my work.

“Okay … John.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I’ve found the very reclusive and mysterious J. Reidinger. You know,” she looked at me from the corner of her eye, “you don’t look anything like the only photo of you I’ve seen.”

“That publicity photo? The one with the slicked back hair, the sunglasses and the leather trench coat?”

“That’s the one. You look … older.”

“The beard.” She looked confused. “The beard’s prematurely gray. Without it I look younger.”

Rowf’s ears perked up and he started growling again. I held a hand up. “Looks like they got lucky and we didn’t.”

I walked over to the work bench and pressed a button under the edge. A door popped open in what had moments before been only a blank wall. “You’ll be safe in there.”

“What is it?” She looked at it with distrust.

“An old bomb shelter that I’ve updated some. There’s a bathroom and some old clothes if you want to change. The door’s steel, and the only lock is on the inside. Hide in there until I tell you to come out.” She still didn’t look too certain about it. “Go on! They’re going to be here in a minute and you need to be out of sight.”

She slipped through the doorway and closed the door. The deadbolts snicked into place a moment later.

I reached over and hit the garage door button. I decided when I designed the shop that I’d best make allowances for a wide range of equipment, so the shop ceiling is very high and the garage door is almost tall enough to let a semi tractor in. It takes a while for the door to open all the way, so while it was rolling up I stuck a couple of screwdrivers into each hip pocket and stuffed the handle of a six pound sledge through the back of my belt. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I didn’t want to be without options if they had other ideas. It’s amazing how innocuous a screwdriver seems, but in the right hands …

There were three of them, all right, standing there blinking in the light like we had a few minutes earlier. I recognized them right off. Oh, I don’t mean I knew them, or knew who they were. But I knew what they were. What my dad used to call punks. Wannabe bad guys … the type who will hurt anyone weaker than they are just because they can, but who don’t have enough brains or enough steel in their spirit to do any more than that. These guys were wearing cowboy boots and jeans. It could just as well have been sweatpants or dungarees hung so low that the only thing that kept them up was the muscles of their butts. It doesn’t matter who they are, where they are, the color of their skin—they all look the same to me. My dad told me to have nothing to do with people like that. I’ve found that to be good advice.

I spoke while they were still blinking, taking the advantage and putting them on the defensive. “You guys know you’re trespassin’?” I also used the urban Italian accent I learned from Joey Delvecchio back during a time I’d spent the last few years trying to forget existed.

The two outside guys looked to the one in the center. Good. If there was only one set of brains in this operation, that would make it simpler. I hoped.

“Uh, yeah, we know,” the brains said. “My girlfriend got lost and we’re trying to find her.”

I started moving toward them. “Lost, huh? Don’cha think you’d be better off out looking by the highway? That is where she got lost, ain’t it?”

“We, uh, we started out there, but we think she came this way.”

“Well, guys …” I pursed my lips, “… I don’t see why anyone would do that, but you can see there ain’t no girlfriend here.” I stopped a couple of feet away.

“You sure, mister?” Brains looked at me with what he thought was a hard expression. His bulky friends—who I’d tagged Muscles One and Muscles Two—started edging around me. “‘Cause we chased—I mean we followed her here.”

“Well, I’m tellin’ you she ain’t here. And you’re still trespassin’, so either beat it or I call the cops.” This was sounding more and more like a bad movie.

Brains stuck his hand in his jacket pocket, which must have been the signal to his muscles, because they each grabbed one of my arms. Dumb and dumber, on cue.

“Okay, old man.” The punks thought they were dealing with someone on the other side of young, which to them meant weak. Dumb, like I said.

“Where’s the girl? If you don’t tell me, I’m gonna …”

I waited for Brains to finish spouting all the threats and profanity. I never have figured out why anyone thinks either is impressive. It’s all just words, worth nothing until someone acts.

“… so you better open up and tell me where she is!”

“You done?” I sneered. That got under his skin. He yanked a Saturday Night Special out of that jacket pocket and tried to insert it up my left nostril. From the smell of it, it hadn’t been cleaned in a while. He’d be lucky if it didn’t blow his hand off the next time he used it. Before he could start blustering again, Rowf came up out of his blanket by the stove.

Rowf’s papers say he’s a Labrador Retriever, but if I didn’t know better I’d swear there’s some Scottish Deerhound in his ancestry. Big dog. Coal black hair, with not a speck of white on him. Even at the age of nine and a half, his teeth were big and white and gleaming. Big bark. And when he lunged up out of that dark shadow barking for all he was worth with his lips curled back from his fangs, all three of the punks jumped. Brains turned and pointed his gun at Rowf.

“Down, Rowf!”

The punk pulled the trigger. Rowf yelped and fell over.

“Kid, you shouldn’t have done that.”

He turned to snarl something at me, and I introduced him to the steel reinforced toe of my size 13 work boot—kneecap first, then chin. A moment later, his two friends were on the ground alongside him.

Last man standing. I stood there flexing my hands for a moment, then I checked the three punks. Muscles One and Two were going to be out for a while. So was Brains. I turned to Rowf.

I went down on my knees by him. He was panting, eyes filled with pain. A large pool of blood told me there was nothing I could do for him. So I sat down on the concrete, placed his head on my lap and stroked him. He struggled to hook one leg over mine, then laid back. I don’t remember what I whispered to him. Probably something stupid like “good dog.”

It would have come to this anyway, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. It seemed like it took forever, but I’m sure it wasn’t very long before the panting and trembling ceased. I know I sat there, tears running down my face while I stroked him, until one of the punks started moaning.

It took a moment to realize what the sound was. When I did, a haze of hate clouded my vision. I wanted to kill someone … preferably the punks in front of me. I fought the feeling, and after a minute or so it drained away. That wasn’t who I was anymore.

I slid out from under Rowf’s head and laid it down gently. Then I went over to my work bench, put on my work gloves and picked up several items.

Muscles One was just starting to stir when I rolled him over on his stomach and pulled his arms behind him. Moments later, white plastic zip fasteners had his ankles and wrists tied to each other, then another tie looped between those fasteners to pull his feet and wrists together. Black duct tape looped around his eyes and head two or three times. Muscles Two didn’t take any longer to secure.

Then I moved to Brains, and looped his feet and hands together. Duct tape across the eyes. I was pretty sure that I broke his jaw, but although some of the teeth were cracked, I didn’t see any broken. I wiped the blood off of his chin before I slapped the duct tape across his mouth. The rag went into the wood stove, flaring for a moment before I shut the stove door. Last thing I did was wipe off the barrel of the Saturday Night Special and tuck it back into his jacket pocket. I wasn’t sure yet what I was going to do with these punks, but I was pretty certain I didn’t want traces of my DNA found on that toy.

I fished my keys out of my pocket and backed my pickup to the doorway. The punks weren’t light, but I picked them up anyway and threw them into the truck bed. I could see them struggling with the restraints, and snorted as I slammed the camper shell door. They weren’t getting out of those anytime soon.

Gunny Hackett would have given me points for the takedown and cleanup. I pushed that thought away ruthlessly.

There was a snick. I looked up to see the shelter door open a crack with a green eye staring through it. I motioned, and she opened the door all the way. “It’s all right, uh …” I stopped when I realized I didn’t know her name.

“Sharon. Sharon Talbot. So where are they?”

“Tied up in the back of my truck. They’re not going anywhere until we want them to.”

“Great! Now we can …” Sharon’s face changed. “What happened here?” I followed her gaze to where Rowf was still lying.

“One of them shot Rowf.”

Her face was aghast. “And you didn’t kill him? What did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” I sighed. “Barely. But I didn’t do anything to him.” Sharon’s expression now bordered on bewilderment. “In a very weird way, he did me a favor. I’ve spent the last two days trying to work up the nerve to put Rowf down. The cancer is wrapped around his intestines and the vet says to operate would kill him. I’ve let him live as long as he was enjoying life, but he was starting to hurt and just picking at his food.” My eyes misted, and I wiped them clear. “I got the drugs yesterday, and dug his grave this afternoon. I was going to do it tonight, after we got back from our walk. But then we met you.”

“And I brought all this trouble on you.” She laid her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

After a moment of quiet, I said, “I have to take care of Rowf. Will you be okay waiting?” She nodded.

I picked up Rowf’s blanket from his place by the stove. His rope chew toy fell out of it. It took me a couple of minutes to get the blanket wrapped around him well enough that I could pick him up without stumbling over blanket ends, but I managed. I nodded to the chew toy. “Would you pick that up and hand it to me, please?”

“I’ve got it.” She bent to retrieve it. “Go on, I’ll bring it.”

“You sure? It’s going to be a ways, and it’s dark.”

“I’m sure. Just get going.”

The place I had prepared wasn’t that far away; maybe two hundred yards to a flat bit of a clearing slightly uphill from the house and workshop. The full moon had risen, so there was plenty of light. Sharon followed in my footsteps, until we stood beside the hole.

It wasn’t the full six feet deep, but it was deep enough. I laid Rowf on the ground beside it, jumped in and then picked him up and laid him down one last time. The blanket had come loose by then, so that he looked less like a mummy and more like he was just covered by it. I pulled the corner back so I could see him one last time, then looked to where Sharon crouched by the edge and held out my hand. She gave me the chew toy and I knelt to place it between his front feet. I knew it didn’t make any difference. Rowf wasn’t going to play with it any more. I could have thrown it in the trash. But Rowf had played with that since he was a puppy. I remembered endless hours of toss and tug-of-war. In my mind, it was part of him. There was just something right about it being with him here.

It took a minute for me to make the final move, to smooth his head one last time and pull the blanket back over his form. I jumped and levered myself out of the hole, reached out and took the shovel standing in the dirt pile.

“This will take a little while, if you want to go back in.”

“No, I’ll wait.” Sharon’s voice was soft, but I noticed her arms were crossed. I took my jacket off and handed it to her before I began the work. It doesn’t take nearly as much time to fill up a hole as to dig it. We walked back to the work shop in silence.

“So,” Sharon said when we came in the door, “do we call the cops now?”

I walked over to the work bench, tossed my cap on it and ran my hands through my hair. “I really don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?” I could tell Sharon was pretty upset. She walked around to where she could see my face where I was leaning on my hands on the bench. I almost laughed to see her swallowed in my jacket, arms crossed but sleeve ends flapping empty. “Are you trying to protect those … those animals?”

I turned and looked out into the dark. There were reasons I’d lived alone for years. Some heavy memories. Some secrets with sharp edges. One came forward and filled my mind with a vision of another face. One with green eyes. One that wasn’t human. One that I should have protected a long time ago, but had failed. I knew I should keep my silence, but tonight the walls in my mind were very thin. I was so tired of carrying secrets, even those that were just mine.

It takes time to tear down walls, even thin ones. I don’t know how long I stood there, staring blindly into the night, wrestling with myself. I had hidden myself for so long and so well that I wasn’t sure I could demolish those barriers. And what was perhaps worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. You live a certain way long enough, after a while it becomes the right way just because that’s the way you do it.

I won’t say it was the hardest struggle of my life. I will say it’s one I don’t want to repeat. And it took a voice from the past to make the breakthrough. I was pretty much raised by my dad, after my mom died of cancer. Dad wasn’t what most people would consider well educated, but he understood people very well. He told me two things, once; one of which I remembered and one of which I forgot until that night. The one I remembered was, “Son, there will always be people who don’t like you. Make sure it’s for the right reasons.” The one I forgot was, “And if you don’t want your life to be poisoned bitterness, you have to open up to people and take the chance that they might hurt you.” Did I mention that Dad was pretty wise?

Hearing Dad’s voice in my mind was the decision point. I had been a recluse for the last nine plus years. Now it dawned on me that I was well on the way to becoming a hermit. A sudden resolve filled me to change that.

I came back from wherever I was wandering. Sharon was still there, wide-eyed, so maybe I hadn’t been gone too long. “You want to know why I don’t want to call the cops?”

“Yes, please.”

I pointed to a stool near the stove. “Take a seat.” She stared at me for a moment, then sat. “You’re old enough to remember. What was the big news story ten years ago?”

Sharon’s eyes widened. “The Sha’Cha!”

I could hear the capital letters in her voice. “Yeah, the Sha’Cha.”

“Did you have something to do with that?” She was excited.

I wasn’t. I held up a hand to hold her back. “Just listen, okay?” I guess I was more gruff than I thought I was, because she shrank back on the stool. “Sorry. I just … sorry. Just bear with me … this isn’t easy, and I’ve got to tell it right.” She gave a slow nod.

“Yeah, I had something to do with that. Did you see the video of the day the ship landed in Washington?”

“Yes!”

“You remember the guy who came out of the crowd and entered the ship, who told the Sha’Cha what they wanted to know?”

She nodded.

“That was me.”

Now her jaw dropped to match the widened eyes. “You’re …”

“Justin Reynolds.” I nodded to her. “The one and only.”

“Wow.” Her voice was soft. I noticed that she didn’t move away from me. That pleased me.

“I’ve always wanted to know …” Her voice was diffident.

“Why I did it?” She nodded. “You remember what I said on the Mall, before I went in the ship?” Another nod in response. “That wasn’t the first time I’d met Sha’Cha. I was the one who found their kids.”

Sharon’s eyes were wide again, and she took a deep breath. “So you were the one who …”

“I made the first contact. Or ‘First Contact’, as the newsies called it.”

“Wow.” She leaned back, put her feet on a higher rung and wrapped her arms around her knees. “So, what was it like?”

That’s how I found myself telling her the whole story; how the radar nets tracked something from outer space in to where it crashed in western Kentucky that night. I worked on an action team for one of the alphabet agencies: FBI, CIA, NSA, and others that you’ve probably never heard of. It doesn’t matter which one. It so happened that my team was the closest to the site. With a fast chopper and exact GPS coordinates, we managed to beat the local law enforcement there. We found a door or hatch sprung open. Gunny Hackett, our team lead, sent me in.

I was starting to sweat, the recollection of that night was so vivid. My shoulders moved in echo of how I stood when I stepped through that door, night vision goggles in place and turning everything a monochrome green. Even my feet were shuffling under the table, itching to move in the same patterns I stepped down that dark, twisted and half-collapsed corridor. I remember the adrenaline pumping, the hearing so acute it seemed like I could hear a fly’s heartbeat. I remembered moving past that final angle of bent hallway wall and finally seeing the occupants … passengers … saucer people … whatever they were.

There were six of them in the control cabin, but only two were still alive. Two of the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen. Imagine five foot tall bipedal house cats. No, that’s not what they looked like, but that’s as close as I can come to describing them. I was so … so shocked at what I saw that my gun slipped and clanked against my harness. That was when she looked up and saw me.

Pf’t’ka. Even ten years later that memory gave me a thrill. Green eyes meeting mine, wide set in that silver furred face. The other one looked something like a Burmese cat. Pf’t’ka was working with what looked to be a medical kit straight out of Star Trek, trying to save him. I distracted her for a moment, but she kept right on working, until one of her devices just gave a solid tone beep for several seconds. I remember her hands freezing, her gaze slashing to that device. I recognized the slump that came to her shoulders. I also recognized the yowling wail that poured from her the moment after that, the despair it signaled.

“So there was only the one left alive?” Sharon asked.

“Yes. Her name was Pf’t’ka.”

“I never knew that.” Sharon’s voice was subdued. “I don’t remember that being in the news stories.”

“It wasn’t. I found out … afterwards.”

Sharon didn’t say anything for a minute. That was good. I needed a bit of a break. Old feelings were coming back to me, old memories were surfacing—things I had stored away for a lot of years, things I had worked at suppressing. My head was starting to hurt. But since I had made it this far, I wasn’t about to stop now. I walked over to the work bench and leaned against it. She looked over at me.

“What happened after that?”

“I remember beckoning her to follow me to the door out of the craft. Gunny had a hooded coat that we threw over her. Joey Delvecchio and I hustled Pf’t’ka to the chopper and got her away.” Flashes of sitting in the chopper, watching Pf’t’ka’s face lit by the instrument panel lights. “Only to deliver her to her death.”

“Did you know that then?”

“No. We just took her to the closest secure facilities and turned her over to the science johnnies. Same difference.” I stared at Sharon, but I was seeing her face again—the face that still gave me nightmares.

The next part came out slowly. It took some effort to talk about the lab complex, because that’s where I failed.

My team got assigned to internal security, since we already knew what was going on. The lab teams were working 24/7. I usually took the night shift. I could see that lights were on and people were busy all over the place, except in the room where the glass isolation chamber was. Welcome to Earth, Pf’t’ka.

They were running her ragged. She wasn’t doing well. I overheard more than one conversation between doctors, techs and analysts. They all boiled down to two things. Even after the autopsies of the other bodies, they still didn’t know enough to be able to help her. Worse, orders came from the highest levels that no attempts to contact her people were to be made.

They called her “It.” I think it was then that the anger began. They knew her name by then. The least they could have done was have the courtesy to use it. She was a person. She deserved that much dignity.

I could see her getting weaker and weaker. Nobody could figure out why, if she was injured, or sick, or not able to metabolize the food we gave her. But every night I would spend time at the wall of the isolation chamber, looking in. And sometimes she would come out and look at me. Haggard as she was, she still resembled a silver Persian cat, one of the really elegant ones.

It didn’t take too long for me to arrive at Pf’t’ka’s final night.

“One night she walked over to the wall and put her hand up on the glass. After a moment, I matched it with my hand on my side of the wall. I don’t know how long we stood there, hand to hand, looking at each other, but I felt close to her. After a time, she dropped her hand, gave a funny little bow, and shuffled back to her bed behind the so-called privacy curtains.

“The next day they told me that Pf’t’ka died in the night. So we packed up and went home.” With what seemed to be a void in my spirit, one that my growing anger bid fair to fill.

“I’m sorry,” Sharon said.

“I was angry—enraged—with the people who allowed her to die and who prevented attempts to signal to the Sha’Cha.”

“And perhaps a little bit with yourself?”

I froze for a moment. That question lanced straight to the heart of the issue. “Yeah. Somewhere along the line I felt Pf’t’ka had a claim on me, one that I failed. And I was probably more angry with myself than anyone.”

“I know what happened next. Landing Day—the Mother Ship came to Washington.”

I could hear the capitals in her voice again, and winced.

She picked up on it. “What did I say?”

“That bit of UFO-speak just really grates on me. The ship that landed on the mall was no such thing. They have some big ships, true, but that one wasn’t much more than a Coast Guard cutter in their scheme of things. They picked it because it was large enough to have defensive screens and small enough to fit in the space of the Mall.”

“And you were there.” Sharon’s voice was a lot calmer than I felt.

“Yes. I was there.” I remembered sprinting to a building, riding the elevator to the top, then climbing stairs to access the roof. “We were on oversight, split between two buildings. Joey and I were on one, Gunny and Tarl were on the other. We were there when the ship set down.” Watching the crowd through scopes, looking for weapons or bombs. “We were there when the ship opened up and the commander came out.” I still remember the sheer impact of seeing what a grown Sha’Cha looked like. The grace, the carriage, the form and beauty. And I remember how my anger flared.

To this day I can’t think of that picture without getting angry. Seeing what Pf’t’ka could have grown into. Seeing her picture in the sky, along with the others. Knowing that someone had been and was still looking for her, still missed her, still wanted her … I have never felt more like a weapon than I did that day. A weapon that turned in the hand of those who had loosed it. If I had known the price I would pay … I hope I would have had the courage to still do what I did.

“I knew what our government would try to do, how they would try to hide everything. And I just couldn’t let that happen. The face of Pf’t’ka, her green eyes shining, her hand on the glass, drove me off that roof, out into the crowd and through them to the barricade.” I shrugged. “And we all know what happened after that.”

There was another long moment of silence. “I thought you went with them.” Sharon’s voice was quiet, but her eyes never left my face.

“I did for a while. When I left I thought I would never come back. I expected to end my life out among the stars, among the Sha’Cha.”

“Why?”

I stared at her. “Don’t you remember what it was like? The polls showed that 90% of Americans felt I had betrayed the US. Every other day the news channels had stories about how assassins had attempted to kill me.” That was just the ones the newsies found out about. There were others that didn’t make the records. “And the people who didn’t think I was a traitor blamed me for everything else that happened.”

The almost universal condemnation of the US for allowing Pf’t’ka to die without attempting to communicate with the Sha’Cha. The most unusual experience for the US of having widespread support among the Islamic countries for seeing to it that the “demons” were dead. The impeachment of the President and Vice-President of the United States. The “cleaning house” of Congress, where fewer than 5% of the incumbents were re-elected.

The almost unanimous vote of the United Nations to relocate to Australia.

And, oh, how the dynamic in the Middle East changed. The treaty between Israel and the Sha’Cha, which allowed the Israelis to deploy sensors and force-fields in defensive modes. Weapons and explosives couldn’t enter the country. When suicide bombers tried to use stuff that had been put in place before the fields went up, they found that personal sized force-fields existed. The CNN shot of a suicide bomber blowing himself up inside one was disturbing, to say the least—all the force of the blast concentrated on one body inside the force field produced puree of person. And when the Arabic countries and terrorist organizations tried to scream about how the bomber’s human rights had been violated, the Israeli defense minister’s response had been classic. “We have violated no one’s human rights. We did not force this man to do this. If he wants to blow himself up, that’s his business. We simply insured that he would not blow anyone else up when he did it.” After a few more of those incidents—all captured on video, thanks to the advanced sensors—the suicide bombers stopped … in Israel, anyway. And the rabbis ceased their muttering … about the treaty, anyway.

The turmoil in the science crowd was almost as bad. Most of the “Life started from spores from space” crowd merged with most of the evolutionists. At the same time the “Intelligent Design” crowd picked up support. Some of the arguments about the similarities between humans and the Sha’Cha got pretty intense. As far as I was concerned, it just proved that God used the same template more than once.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. The US economy sank like a rock. It was years before it recovered.

I hadn’t planned any of that. I suppose that most or all of it would have happened anyway. But they happened because of something I did. And I remember the bitterness I felt when it seemed that no one—no one—thought that I did the right thing.

“This was all your fault?” Sharon asked.

“Say my responsibility, rather. I did what I did.”

“So why did you come back?” For the first time I noticed that Sharon’s voice was calm, that she was asking questions like she was interested in the answers. I looked at her, and she looked back at me with a raised eyebrow.

“I really did mean to never come back. But after a while … I just didn’t fit. I never felt comfortable among the cats.” It was inevitable that the Sha’Cha would get that nickname. “So they brought me back and made arrangements.”

“Wait a minute,” Sharon interrupted. “I’ve seen the video of Landing Day dozens of times. The guy that went into the spaceship had blond hair. Yours is much darker.”

“I said they made some arrangements.” I shrugged. “For people who can fly between the stars faster than light, some things aren’t so hard. I used to be almost pure Nordic; now I look almost Italian.”

“What else?”

“Oh. Well, my teeth are perfect, now. No fillings or crowns. My fingerprints are different. And they tweaked my DNA a little, so that it doesn’t match what’s on record.”

“They … tweaked … your DNA.”

Another shrug. “What can I say? They feel like they owe me.”

Sharon cleared her throat. “You got Rowf when you came back, didn’t you?” She looked up at me.

“Yes.”

“And he was with you all this time.” That wasn’t a question. “Your only friend.”

“Yes.” My throat was tight.

“So you basically came back, crawled into a hole and pulled it in after yourself.”

I stood up straight. “Wait a minute! People were trying to kill me. If they knew I was back they’d come after me again.”

“How would they know you?”

“By …” My brain caught up with my voice.

“You don’t look like you did. How would they find you?”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I’d been hiding all these years for nothing.

Sharon had no pity. “If they’d really tried to find you, they could have. All they had to do was look for strangers. You keep to yourself, make no attempt to blend in, don’t talk to anyone. If you wanted to hide, you should have gone to Europe.”

Gunny Hackett would have my ears.

It took me a minute to find my voice. “So I wasted all this time. Figures.”

“I said you didn’t hide very well. I didn’t say you wasted the time.”

My turn to lift a sardonic eyebrow.

Sharon grinned for a moment, then continued with, “John, you had several severe shocks in relatively short order. You were hurt, wounded, damaged. I don’t blame you for hiding.” She reached out and patted my arm. “And not everything that happened was bad, you know. Even some of us hard-headed Yankees are starting to admit that.”

We sat in silence for another long moment before she spoke again. “So, when did you start doing Reidinger?”

“Ah, that. That comes under the heading of the three R’s.”

“Three R’s.” It wasn’t a question, and Sharon gave me a glare like my third grade teacher. She was good at it.

“Yep—reconciliation, rehabilitation and redemption. After a few weeks here, just me and Rowf, I was about to go nuts. I’ve been active all my life; I had to be doing something. I had done some work with metals in college, so I ordered in some welding and cutting equipment and started experimenting. In about a year, I did my first statue. I guess you could say the rest is history.”

“Oh, how ironic.” Sharon laughed. “J. Reidinger, the reclusive favorite of all the artsy crowd, is none other than Justin Reynolds, ostracized citizen of the USA.”

It took some effort, but I chuckled along with her. “That thought has occurred to me before. I’ve drawn more than a little comfort and satisfaction from it.”

She sobered quickly. “Okay, that’s the rehabilitation aspect. Redemption?”

“Even ignoring what I did that day, most of my adult life was spent doing things on the borderline, sometimes well over the line, of right and wrong. My work can’t make up for any of that, but maybe, just maybe, it can bring about some understanding, or at least provoke thought.”

“Oh, it does that.” Sharon gave a firm nod. “Dervish alone atones for any sins you might have committed. It’s beautiful, it’s disquieting, and no one who sees it can forget it.” I stored that comment away in my heart, where it brought no little warmth to me. “And reconciliation?”

“That’s the hardest one: to reconcile the Sha’Cha and humanity, to reconcile me and humanity.” I stopped for a moment. “To reconcile me with myself.” I clasped my hands in front of me. “To that end I offer up my work equally to the world and to the stars.”

“What do you mean?”

“For every Reidinger you know of, there is another among the Sha’Cha.”

“What? Does anyone else know this?”

“No, and I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell anyone.”

“Why?” Sharon was upset again.

“Because that’s the way I want it. There will come a time when my story will come out, when the Sha’Cha will tell it. Then my work will come together and everyone will see it. But not now.”

Sharon stared at me for a couple of minutes. I looked back at her, feeling shaken but purged and clean for the first time in a long time. I’d made my case, told my story. Now it was up to her.

At length, she blew air through her lips. “Okay, I see why you don’t want to call the cops. And I guess if I was in your shoes I’d be the same way. It’s just hard for me to see scum like that get away with what they tried.”

“Well, if it helps any, you didn’t get hurt. Think of it like I backed them off of you in the parking lot.” She nodded—with some reluctance, I judged, but she nodded. “Besides, I never said they’d get away with anything.”

Sharon gave me another of those third grade teacher looks. “And just what do you mean by that?”

I looked at the clock and stood up. “Come on and I’ll show you.”

We went out into the driveway. Sharon stepped up beside me, still swallowed in my jacket, while I pulled the signal unit from my pocket and pressed the button. We waited. In a matter of moments something large, black and almost silent moved in and settled on the helipad out on the lawn with a slight whistling sound. She turned to me, eyes at their widest for the night.

“Cargo lighter,” I said. “Just watch.”

The big door on the side opened up, spilling light somewhat yellower than my work shop fluorescents were flooding out the open shop door. A figure appeared in the door, dropped to the ground and strode toward us.

“Hai, friend John.” The big cat threw his arms around me. And he is big, at least two inches taller and a good fifty pounds heavier than I am.

“Hai, friend Asfet. Let go of me before you break me in two, you big lug.”

“So, who is this?” Asfet released me and turned to Sharon. “I am Asfet, what you would call, urrr, lieutenant.” He held out his hand to Sharon, who limply put hers out to be grasped. This shock had gotten to her more than anything else that had happened that evening. He turned back to me. “She is pretty, yes?”

“Yes, you old rogue, she is pretty.”

“That is good for you, then, friend John.” He clapped his hands together with a sound like a gunshot. “So, then, let us see what we have come for.”

“You know where it is.”

Asfet almost bounded into the workshop. I leaned over to Sharon, whose mouth was standing open. “Asfet is a bit of a connoisseur. He always wangles these trips, so he can be the first one to see the new work.”

“I see.” Her voice was thin, like she was gasping. I looked over at her to make sure she was still breathing. She was.

I chuckled. She hit my arm without looking. “Ow! What was that for?”

“For not telling me.” She looked at me with eyes blazing. “For springing this on me without warning.” Sharon was officially all right, crossed off the ‘concerned about’ list.

By now we had walked up behind Asfet, where he was studying the statue in the open shipping case. He looked back over his shoulder, all seriousness now. “It is your best work, my friend. Do you have a name for it?”

“Nope. You know I never name the ones I give you. You will have to name it.”

“A challenge it will be.” Asfet stared at it for a moment longer, then closed and latched the shipping case door. “The arguments about who will be chosen to display it will echo among the stars.” He fingered his collar for a moment, hissing something in his native tongue.

A moment later we were joined by three more crewmen and a floating dolly. While they took charge of loading the shipping case on the dolly, I pulled Asfet aside.

“Asfet, old friend, I need a favor.” Sharon was standing at my elbow. “In the back of my pickup are three men who have seriously annoyed my friend Sharon. I need them and their vehicle, a …” I looked to Sharon.

“Cadillac Escalade.”

I shook my head. Of course that’s what these fools would be driving. “… that’s parked on the road that runs along the north side of this property; I need them deposited in the parking lot closest to the Marquette police department. I need it done tonight, quiet and sneaky. Can you do that?”

A most alarming grin split Asfet’s face, displaying plenty of evidence that his forebears had been carnivores. “Of course we can do that, for you and for the pretty Miss Sharon. Oh, the fun to be had around you, friend John.” He rubbed his hands together.

“Good.” I smiled back. “You should also notify the police somehow that they are there. And, ah,” I grinned at Sharon, “if you can think of some way to encourage them to be honest, that would be good, too. No damage, mind you.” I pointed a finger at the cat, whose grin threatened to cross the line to predatory.

It was the work of just a moment more to open the back of the camper and let the crewmen pluck the punks out and plop them on top of the shipping case. The dolly bobbed a little, then moved off smoothly toward the cargo lighter. Asfet shook our hands once again, exclaimed, “We will have fun tonight,” and bounded off after the crewmen. A minute later, the big door closed. That slight whistling sound built up, the lighter lifted off the helipad, and in a moment it was gone.

I looked at Sharon. She looked back at me somewhat wild-eyed. “Can you live with that?” I asked.

Sharon gave her head a violent shake. “I guess so. That’s not, ah, exactly what I thought you had in mind. Of course, now that I think of it, I’m not at all sure what I thought you had in mind.” She laughed. “But yeah, that will do.” She yawned. “I need to get home.”

“You could stay here,” I offered. “I’ve got extra bedrooms.”

“No, John. I’ve had a long day and night, and I want to sleep in my own bed. Can you take me to my car?”

I opened the door of the truck in answer, and she climbed in.

It was only about a thirty minute drive to the restaurant’s parking lot where they had grabbed her. Just when I pulled up alongside her car, a lovingly maintained Trans Am, my comm buzzed. I popped it open after I parked the truck, read the brief text message and started howling with laughter. Sharon looked at me like I had just gone over the edge, so I passed her the comm. She started laughing even harder than I was.

Friend John -

Delivery made, pickup notice sent.

Have discovered that human urine is very noxious.

Aft cargo bay may never be the same.

A.

“Okay, okay,” Sharon gasped. “That’s good enough.”

She opened the door and slid out. Just before she closed it, she leaned back in. “John. Just for the record, not everyone thinks you were a traitor.”

I watched her taillights recede on the highway, then put the truck in gear and drove home.

After I pulled up in the driveway, I walked out on the lawn and just stared at the heavens for a while. I had been among them, for a time, but there was something about seeing them here that was just right. I said I think God is an artist. Certainly the beauty and elegance within creation must have come from an artist’s soul.

When I got cold, without thinking I said, “Come on, Rowf,” then stopped dead as the fresh pain knifed through me.

In human existence, great art often involves pain, suffering and grief; either as a subject or as a driver in the artist’s life. The fact that it can be expressed doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

I went into the house, alone.

* * *

Four days later

I looked up from where I was clearing out a flower bed to see a car coming up the driveway. I stood up, dusted off my knees and shoved my work gloves in my back pocket.

It was a Firebird. In fact, it was a Trans Am—a rather familiar Trans Am. It pulled to a stop not far from me. Sharon got out. Today she was wearing jeans and a bulky sweater.

“You clean up pretty well,” she smiled, rubbing at her chin to mimic my newly shaved face.

“Do you know you’re trespassing?” I asked deadpan.

“No. Really?” We laughed together.

“It’s good to see you.” It was, I discovered with a bit of surprise.

“I would have come out sooner, but do you have any idea just how hard this place is to find, when you’ve only been here once and that was in the dark?”

“Yes.” We laughed again, and stood there smiling at each other.

“I brought you something.” Sharon toed the ground.

“Huh?” The very soul of articulation, that was me.

“To make up for the trouble of the other night.”

“You didn’t have to do anything.”

“I want to. And it helps someone else out, too.”

Sharon opened the passenger door to the Trans Am. Out jumped a Labrador puppy, about six months old. She grabbed at the leash as he lunged toward me. I knelt down just before he careened into me.

The puppy was all paws and tongue, bouncing like only a puppy can, happy and excited. I wrestled him around a little, and he bounced back to Sharon, almost tripping her as he tried to wrap her up in the leash. If he fulfilled the promise of his feet, he’d be a big dog when he matured.

“He belongs to a friend of mine. She thought she wanted a big dog, but he turned out to be more than she can handle.” Sharon looked almost shy, and her voice was quieter. “I know he’s not Rowf, he can never be Rowf, but I think he’d be good for you and you’d be good for him.”

I looked around at where the pup was just wriggling around on the dry grass. I laughed to see his antics, and a dark spot in my life lightened a little.

“What did she name him?”

“Jack.”

I tried that in my mind. It sounded good. I knelt again. “Jack. Here, Jack.” The pup turned, tripped, and bumbled over to me, where he flopped on his back and waved all four feet in the air, begging for a belly scratch. I obliged him and he wriggled in delight.

“Thanks.” I stood and faced Sharon again. “Thanks for thinking of me.” It felt very odd, to know that someone was doing that.

She looked down at the ground, then back up at me with a very fierce expression on her face. “I just couldn’t stand to think of you here by yourself. You deserve better.”

A large smile broke out on my face when it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, the next ten years would hold more for me than the last ten.

* * *

The Waters of Eternity

Written by Howard A. Jones

Illustrated by Paul Davies

Thus said Asim el Abbas, slayer of ill-natured beasts and right hand of that most far-sighted of men, seeker of hidden things, Dabir ibn Khalil, favored of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, upon whom be peace. These are his words:

The girl was going to die. So the hakim had pronounced and Dabir said there was no reason to doubt him. The wasting sickness would soon snuff her candle. Yet the girl trotted back and forth between the members of the expedition, chattering as though it were a feast we rode for.

On this, the third day of our travel, God had blessed us with mild winds and a warm sun. Captain Sarsour and the four-man escort waited with Lina’s chaperone a few lengths ahead, at the mouth of the high, narrow pass. Pines fought for life here and there on the crags to either side, but snow and ice surmounted the heights. The soldiers made a brave sight, clad as they were in varied shades of blue, their helmets wrapped in turban cloth, their cuirasses gleaming. Gems flashed upon their belts and sword hilts. Not so many years ago I too had worn such gear, and ridden far under the banner of the caliph.

Lina lingered for a last look at the plains. I saw most of her long neck and thin face through her veil’s fabric. Moments ago she had been laughing at ducks arrowing overhead. Now she was solemn. Might she be searching for a last sight of her home for all her fourteen years, the city of Dariashan?

The hakim, on his gray mount, cleared his throat, but Lina did not respond. I looked to Dabir.

Dabir opened his mouth to speak, then brushed his small spade beard instead. He smiled sadly at me. “Give her another moment.” His voice was soft.

My horse snorted impatiently and bent to nibble clover.

A long moment passed, yet the girl showed no signs of moving.

“Lina,” Dabir said gently, “we must be going.”

Lina’s eyes were half-closed as she looked over her shoulder. “Of course of course, don’t rush my horse.” She giggled, then turned with a toss of her dark curls, her veil swinging.

Lina kicked her mount into a canter, and Dabir and the hakim and I followed the doomed girl.

Captain Sarsour started the column forward.

“I gave her too much bhang this morning,” the hakim confessed to Dabir, adding softly: “I thought she needed to relax. It’s made her … silly.”

“Yes,” Dabir agreed.

The hakim was silent for a time, but I sensed he had another purpose in riding beside my master. I was right, for soon he asked another question. “Do you think we’ll find the fountain?”

“It may be,” he said. “I have seen stranger things.” I knew from his tone that Dabir meant to conclude the conversation, but the hakim pressed on.

“Would we not have heard of such a miraculous fountain, were it true? Would not the map to it be revered, framed in gold, and kept under lock and key? It would not be kept in a corner, stuffed under some worthless scrolls. The matter is strange to me.”

“Some true things are kept hidden for good reason,” Dabir said.

The hakim gave him a funny look. He opened his mouth as if to ask further questions, but my master spoke first.

“How much longer will she last?”

The hakim glanced ahead before answering. The girl was out of earshot. “Two or three days at most. Long enough to get her to the fountain.”

“Good,” Dabir said, though his voice was grim. He clicked his tongue and urged his mount faster. The hakim had the sense this time not to pursue conversation.

I stayed at Dabir’s side. “Do you believe it’s real, master?” I asked quietly. He had been mostly silent on the topic since the governor had presented us with the faded map. A week’s worth of desperate searching by the whole of the palace staff had uncovered it, following the orders based upon the governor’s vague memory of a tale his grandfather had told. I did not know why Dabir’s mood was so dark, for surely he and I had looked upon many strange things in our years together. Could there not be a fountain that bestowed eternal life with its waters? Surely the governor believed it, and he was my master’s friend and superior.

Yet Dabir’s blue eyes were grim as they flicked to me. “I hope, Asim.”

Lina was the governor’s only child, the light of his life. Poets compared her laughter to music. Scholars praised her knowledge of the book-to-be-read, from which she could recite long passages. Her keen wit pleased my own master, who enjoyed instructing her. As for myself, I had little patience for women, especially those who chattered–yet I had enjoyed her singing, which echoed cheerily through the halls of the governor’s palace whenever Dabir and I were summoned there.

And so I hoped with Dabir.

Clouds blanketed the sun as we rode. Chill wind whipped down the heights. The trail steepened and we passed sheer drops of hundreds of feet. Then, in late afternoon, we reached a plateau several leagues across. High yellow grass waved about our horses’ withers, and clumps of pine trees and boulders and small hillocks broke the horizon. Foreboding filled me. Though I saw nothing as I searched the distance, I felt certain we were watched from behind the boulders. Lions, perhaps, or bandits.

Yet the day passed, and nothing ventured close but birds and rabbits. All was well after evening prayers. Even the weather was kinder, for the cold breeze that had blown throughout the day lessened beneath the dark blanket of clouds.

A scream woke me to nightmare. Instantly my hand found my sword and I rolled out of my covers. The watch soldier stared open-mouthed at the thing looming out of the starless night, the thing that even now doubly impaled the hakim on gigantic mandibles. The dying fire sketched a horse-high beast with a lobster’s segmented carapace and two waving antenna. A sickly number of legs skittered beneath its shell, and its mouth, inside the circle of its great mandibles, dripped foam as it opened and closed spasmodically.

It smelled of the grave, but sight alone was enough to take a man’s breath.

Dabir roused even as I yelled to God to give me strength. Sarsour shouted for his soldiers to take up arms, but I paused only to draw my sword and slap the stunned soldier on the back. “To battle!”

He picked up his courage and followed.

The hakim had ceased struggling. His body shook this way and that as the monster insect turned to us. The mandibles opened and he dropped like a grain sack.

Many were the monster’s legs, and they were swifter than I supposed. Its mandibles clacked like dancer’s bracelets. I was close enough now to see the black eyes set in the horror of a face. I cried out and cut. It was a mighty stroke, and sheered the insect’s mandible in half. So great was my blow that I lost balance and followed the direction of my swing. It was a beginner’s error not to have better planted my feet, and I attribute it to my fatigue and the unevenness of the ground; moreover, that God had not written my death for that moment, for there came a hissing noise from behind me and then a scream that did not stop. I rolled to my feet to see the face and tunic of the soldier covered in smoking black ichor. He threw down his sword and reached for the pitted ruin of his face, then wailed all the more as he yanked his hands away.

The remaining mandible impaled his neck and he ceased his cries.

Two of the soldiers plied their arrows against the thing, but that was folly, as even Sarsour saw, for he cursed them. “Lances, you fools!” He picked up one and tossed it to one man, then charged forward with a lance of his own. He did not lack courage.

I readied to follow, but Dabir called to me. “Asim!”

I looked past the bulk of the monster and saw Dabir holding something aloft. His oil flask. “Get fire!”

He dashed past Lina, who crouched in her blankets, her eyes like white pearls, and strode determinedly for the monster.

I leapt to obey, though I did not like it. The caliph had charged me with protecting Dabir by day and by night, yet what was I to do when Dabir sent me one way while marching to death the other?

Even as I raced to the fire I saw a smoking green spray shoot from the creature’s mouth and burn through a soldier’s face. He wailed only for a moment before falling. Sarsour and the remaining two stabbed the thing with their lances.

I snatched a blanket, whipped it around my hand, and grabbed a handful of sticks at the fireside. These I thrust into the dancing flames. In moments they were alight, and I looked back to Dabir.

Sarsour shouted for him to stay clear, but Dabir sidestepped one of the guards and the mandible I’d chopped, then hurled the contents of a cup he carried into the creature’s face. The thing hissed its anger as the oil splattered.

The nearest soldier pulled Dabir back, then tackled him as a smoking stream spewed from the thing’s orifice. It missed them by mere handspans. The other soldier danced away, but Sarsour jabbed the monster’s mouth. It let out a high-pitched hissing sound.

“Asim!” Dabir cried even as I dashed forward, the flames trailing from the burning brands in my hand, “aim for its face!”

I was not so witless to have failed to divine his plan. I closed on the bug, and I threw the sticks, and my aim was good. I lashed it like a fiery whip and the flames licked up across the oil and spread over its face. “Get back!” I called.

But Dabir did no such thing. As the creature turned its flaming face from us he ran forward to its side and splashed it yet again with oil. The fire licked up along its carapace and it screeched.

Flame ate at the thing, and it tossed this way and that, as if it meant to dislodge a rider. Twice more it sprayed forth ichor, but we had all withdrawn. Its blackened limbs were still twitching a half hour later even after fire had consumed it.

We relocated the camp, bearing the bodies of the fallen with us. Fadil, the stocky soldier who had saved my master, helped me recover the horses, for God had given them the good sense to flee. Upon our return I discovered Dabir and Sarsour confronting each other beside the crackling fire. The girl wept nearby while the handsome Tarik looked on curiously.

“… to be an expert on such things,” Sarsour was saying.

“Do you suggest I should have foreseen the insect’s coming, witless one?”

“We delayed for two days so we could have an ‘expert’ who’s useless! I’ve lost two men, her hakim, and her chaperone. Now you tell me you don’t even know medicines!”

“Do not threaten my master,” I said, and put my hand to my sword.

The captain snarled and placed a large-knuckled hand on his own hilt.

“Stop!”

As one, Dabir, Sarsour, and I turned to the girl.

Lina’s eyes blazed with fever or fury. “Four lie dead and you would duel?”

“This is men’s talk,” the captain said gruffly.

“Am I not the governor’s daughter? Am I not your charge?” Lina swung a hand at my master. “He is no hakim, but Dabir has pledged to aid me, and I accept his offer. Captain, I treasure your bravery, but save it for your foes. Dabir could not have guessed a monster would attack us any more than you could.”

Sarsour frowned, saying nothing, but the tension was broken as my master bent to a pack beside him that I recognized for the hakim’s. Sarsour glared at his back.

“This man is beloved of the caliph, may peace be upon him,” I said. “And the caliph placed him in my charge. Men do not lightly cross swords with Asim el Abbas. If you are fond of your head’s seating, I would watch your tongue.”

He scowled, but turned from me.

Dabir prepared a potion for the girl from the healer’s notes and bedded down near her. I kept watch next to him, trusting neither Sarsour nor the dark grasslands, which might vomit up another horror at any time. The girl passed soon into sleep, and I thought my master had as well, but after a time I heard him whisper my name.

“Asim.”

“Yes, master?” I answered softly.

“You are sworn to protect me. Yet … I would think, if something horrible were to happen, you would know what to do.”

I hunted for meaning in his words. “You have been thinking about the men wounded by the great bug,” I said. It was not like him to ponder such things, and I wondered at his weakness, although it was a horrible death and men would rightly fear it.

“Suppose it was something like that, yes. If I was wounded or … changed, somehow. I trust you would not let me linger.”

“Nay, I will let no harm come to you—”

“Promise me, Asim, that you would send me to God.” His voice was low, insistent.

I thought first to remind him again of my oath of protection. Yet something stayed my tongue. He had never spoken to me like this before, and I felt his eyes fastened sharply upon me. “By the ninety and nine holy names, I promise, master.”

This must have satisfied him, for he rolled onto his back. “I did not think we would find it,” he said. “Yet we have seen two of the map’s landmarks. I no longer think the tale a fable.”

Earlier that day we had passed a great mottled rock shaped like a goat skull, and a small oval lake shimmering like a mirror.

“Now the trick is to keep the girl alive,” he said quietly.

“But you have mastered the hakim’s medicines.”

“I do not recognize all of the medicines.” His voice was softer even than the nearby crickets. “Many of them are unknown to me, and even though some are labeled, I do not understand their use.” He was quiet for a time. “Even if I can induce her to live another few days …”

“What, master?”

He did not respond. I wondered if he were on the cusp of one of his black moods, which might explain his brooding. Once they seized him he was poor company for many days. “Do not fear for the girl, master,” I said. “You will see her through.”

“It may be so,” said Dabir. But his voice did not betray hope.

I woke late, to my master’s voice. He spoke with Lina. A short distance away, Sarsour, Fadil, and Tarik dug at the earth.

“Did you see his preparations?” Dabir was asking.

“No, I did not.”

I looked over at them, but did not rise.

“I’m sorry, then,” Dabir said. “I do know that the bhang would help ease your sorrow, and any pain—”

“No.” Her voice was suddenly sharp. “No more bhang. I’m dying. No more. It makes a fool of me, and if I am to die this day it will not be as a fool.”

“I don’t think you’ll die this day, lady.”

“How soon then? Tomorrow? How long do I have? The truth.”

The steady chunk of spade into dirt paused for a moment, before Sarsour mouthed a low curse. The spade work resumed. Why, I wondered, did they have spades at hand on this journey in the first place? And then I realized that they must have been packed should the girl die.

I watched Dabir. His lips pursed. “The hakim said you had two or three days. We should reach the fountain by then.” He smiled. “You heard the captain this morning. He thinks we’ll get there tonight.”

“And do you think they’ll be some magic waters there, Dabir? If such a thing existed, surely the map would not have been left rotting in father’s archives. Would not the world overrun with immortals? Would not the fountain be fortified behind great walls and manned by the caliph’s finest?”

“The waters are hidden by those who no longer wished the waters used against them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Dabir said flatly, “that I believe the fountain will be there.”

“Myths,” she said quietly, and pulled off her blanket to shove her small feet into gold-trimmed slippers.

I sat up and stretched my arms.

“I would have done things a little differently,” she said to Dabir, “had I known all this would happen. Been kinder to my cousins. Paid more heed to the words of the holy men—”

“There’s still hope, lady.”

“I am young, Dabir, but not stupid. Don’t lie to me.”

“Dabir never lies, young mistress,” I said. “There is still hope. God’s ways are unknowable, and your fate is surely written, but do not presume to guess the end of your thread.”

She hugged her knees to her chest. “This was all father’s idea. I didn’t want to come out here. I wanted to spend my last days in the palace. And I certainly didn’t mean for anyone to die because of me and some stupid old map.”

“Lina.” Dabir took one of her hands and stared at her until she met his eyes. “That wasn’t your fault. Whatever happens to … any of us, on this journey, is not your fault. You must realize that. It is our choice.”

She shook her head wearily. “No one would be out here if it wasn’t for me.”

“That may be. But we’d be risking our lives doing something, Lina. Isn’t it better that we risk our lives for someone we love?”

“You love me?” She asked, her voice a little breathless. Dabir was not just famed and wealthy, women found him handsome. I have heard them whisper his praises. He struck me as overly lean, but then God had not troubled me with the skills to guess what a woman liked.

“I love all that is wise and beautiful.” Dabir’s voice was gentle. “I would see you come into your years. I would see your beauty flower and watch the poets wrestle one another with couplets of praise for your wisdom and grace of step while minstrels played.” He bowed his head.

She smiled then, and despite the disheveled locks of her hair and her tired eyes she was lovely.

* * *

Lina hunched forward in her saddle, clutching her cloak tight despite warmth that streamed from the sun. During midday prayers her forehead was damp and her breathing shallow. Dabir talked her into consuming a small amount of bhang, but it made no difference. I knew little of healing, but my sense was that she’d tapped her last keg of strength and no drugs could aid her.

Dabir was concerned enough that he sent me to confer with Sarsour, riding point with the governor’s map. It was afternoon by then and there was little wind. Each of us was masked by dust broken with rivulets of sweat.

Sarsour’s eyebrows rose when I reined in beside him.

“She’s failing,” I told him quietly. “How much farther?”

“We’ve passed all but one marker now. The cliffs back there, and the three rounded boulders two hours back.”

“How much farther?”

“I’m not sure. It shouldn’t be too much longer.”

He was wrong. The afternoon wore on and we descended into a narrow valley where bright purple flowers waved cheerily in the wind. Wild hares bounded between low bushes and an antelope bent to drink from a bubbling creek. The scene was improbably lovely and it looked a fine place to dig a grave.

Lina did not die there, though. I lifted her on the saddle before me, refraining from comment at her lightness. She weighed less than a grain sack.

She dozed in my arms as evening came, her breath shallow and quick. Our shadows stretched around us as the trail twisted once more into the heights. All conversation had ceased. We pushed on, each of us resolved to reach the waters this day, for it took no scholar to realize the girl would not last the night.

And then Sarsour halted and threw up his hand. He urged his grunting horse closer, peered at the rocks beneath an overhang, then let out a triumphant little laugh. “This is it!”

“Where’s the fountain?” Fadil asked.

“This is the final landmark. This trail here will take us up to the valley!” And he urged his horse up a sandy, nearly vertical slope.

Trail was a grand term. Goat path described it better, and I have seen goats that might have bypassed it for easier climbs. Sarsour didn’t get too far before turning back and dismounting. “We’ll have to go it on foot,” he said. “I will carry Lina—”

“I shall carry her,” I said.

“No.” He lifted his chin in challenge. “You have said your job is to guard your master. I shall carry the girl.” He did not finish with the word lackey, though his tone implied it. He clasped the girl’s arms. I swung down from my mount, but swift as I was, Dabir was there to put a hand on my arm before it reached my saber.

Sarsour bestowed a final glare upon us, then lifted the protesting girl from the horse and carried her easily. He motioned to Fadil and Tarik, who followed.

“He lacks manners,” I said to Dabir, who shshed me. Some word had passed between Sarsour and the soldiers, and they turned to face us. Fadil drew first, then Tarik, and suddenly we confronted two bared blades. Sarsour continued up the path with Lina.

Now my hand found my hilt and my blade licked forth.

“Steady!” Dabir said. And thus I did not leap at the soldiers, though my knees were flexed.

Their faces were grim, but they did not advance against us.

“What is this, Captain?” Dabir called. “Do not let her drink without me!” His voice was almost frantic. But Sarsour, briefly silhouetted by the sun against the sky at the height of the path, did not answer, nor even look back. He strode down the other side of the hill and out of sight.

“They cannot match me, master,” I said.

My eyes did not waver from the blades of those against me. They, in turn, eyed me. Their betrayal kindled my anger, for I had found them good men. Both were calm and capable, and while Persian, were hardy enough. Broad, quiet Fadil had especially impressed me, so his challenge filled me with bitterness.

“We four have shared the salt,” Dabir said. “And you saved me.”

Fadil nodded. “It is true.”

“You would slay me now?”

“The captain gave orders that he advance to the fountain first.”

“The girl will die without me! You must let me pass!”

Fadil shook his head. “She is safe with Sarsour, now.”

Dabir spoke quickly. “The four of us risked blood together. Asim raised his sword with you. Are you not sword brothers?”

Fadil’s eyes flicked down at his sword, then up again. Tarik watched him. “We are sworn to obey the captain.”

“You are both honorable men,” Dabir said. “I have seen it. I would not see your blood shed. The governor needs such men as you; as Asim and myself. Tell me, which action will please him less? That you stepped aside, or that the four of us shed our blood?”

Fadil breathed deeply.

“Dabir is the governor’s friend; he sat at the caliph’s right hand,” Tarik said to his companion. His dark eyes were narrowed tensely.

“I know.” Fadil snapped. Another moment passed. Finally Fadil straightened and slid home his sword into his sheath. Tarik put up his own with a loud sigh of relief.

“He said only that he was to reach the fountain first,” Fadil declared. “He has surely done so.” He stepped aside. “I would not spill the blood of a rafik.”

“Come, Asim!” Dabir dashed past them. I scowled and followed.

“You too, fools!” I said in passing. “If there are more dangers, can Sarsour wield his sword with the girl in hand?”

Their footsteps scuffed the dirt behind us.

We cleared the top and looked down into a tiny bowl-shaped valley. The roofless building in its center resembled a caravanserai more than any infidel temple. Thick-leafed ivy smothered its walls. The girl stood hunched by Sarsour, drinking from a flask at the structure’s far end.

“Stop!” Dabir cried.

We ran down from the height. Long strands of ivy hung like a curtain from the arched entryway and I saw as we closed that the plants writhed.

“Master!” My blood thinned and the breath of icy djinn fell upon my neck. “The plants live!”

“Nay,” said Dabir.

It was not until we reached the threshold that I saw the greenery did not move of its own accord, but in response to the small red and brown bugs that burrowed among its leaves, their antennae twitching–insects that might well have been brothers to the monster which we had fought, for they were identical in all but size. Some were tiny, some the length of my arm. Might there be others nearby grown to match that we had battled?

Sarsour snarled and waited with drawn blade. He pushed Lina back even as she cried for him to stop.

There was no place for larger monsters to hide, for the courtyard was bare save for greenery-choked lumps that might have been benches and some rusted helms and weapons beside the pool and the fountain which rose from it.

I had seen grander things. The fountain was but an old, man-high cylinder of stone surrounded by a plain pool beside the far wall. Dark liquid trickling from its height had stained the stone along its path an ugly greenish-black.

A fetid odor reached my nostrils and grew stronger as we closed on the water.

“Fadil!” Sarsour roared. “I told you to keep them back!”

“You said to make sure you reached the fountain first,” I heard Fadil answer from behind me.

Sarsour spat. “You shave meaning like a miser with his coins.”

“Hold,” Dabir told me. His breath came swiftly. We stopped two spear lengths from the captain. If he advanced but a step I meant to ignore my master.

“Did you drink the water?” Dabir asked Lina. I had seldom hear his voice so heavy with fear.

“I did,” she said weakly. “It was foul.”

“We both drank!” Sarsour said. “If it tasted like honey, immortals would stride everywhere. Fadil, Tarik, these two meant to keep it secret.”

“What?” Dabir’s voice suddenly rang with hope, the first I had heard from him in days. “Lina,” he demanded, “who drank first?”

Sarsour cut off the girl’s answer. “You are a fine actor! Look, Fadil—do you not see his eyes roll as he lies?”

“You are a braying ass,” I said.

“Nay, I am more clever than you think. Do you not see how they blocked us at every hand? How they delayed their coming? How they scoffed at the tale? How they kept knowledge of perils from us? They would keep this secret only for the caliph!”

“You mistake me, Captain,” Dabir said. “And I gather now that you drank first.”

“I did. It can be our secret,” Sarsour implored the men behind us “We can sell the water for the wealth of kingdoms!”

A sad smile spread across Dabir’s face. “And what did you plan for the governor’s daughter?”

“She shall be the first of my wives.”

Enough madness had passed his lips. I charged him. He swung up his blade in time to parry. Sparks flew.

“Asim, no!” Dabir called.

I turned Sarsour as we fought so that I might see both Fadil and Tarik, but they watched from either side of my master, arms folded.

Lina had circled around to Dabir, who sheltered her protectively with one arm. “Asim!” she cried. “Do not kill him!”

But I do not take orders from children. Do I hesitate to slay a frothing dog?

Sarsour was mighty and skilled and we spun across the courtyard, trading blows. Our shadows, stretched by the sinking sun, loomed across the stone.

The captain’s lips were bared in a grimace. He beat me back, then readied another swing as his mouth twisted wide. He blinked, and the blade lowered. He looked down at his side. I might have killed him then, but something stayed my hand. I sensed a ruse.

It was no act. Sarsour collapsed to the stones. His sword rang dully as it landed near his thigh. I wondered if I had struck him and not noticed. He pushed himself up on one hand, groaned.

“Get up!” I called.

Sarsour’s eyes rolled like a drunkard’s. His lips drew back from his teeth. His brow furrowed. He screamed.

“Did you strike him?” Fadil called.

I stepped back, shaking my head.

Sarsour shrieked to the clouds, again and again, his calls rising in pitch. His form twisted and writhed and slid in on itself in a blur … and suddenly there was another blood-red bug crawling on the stone.

Behind me came the unmistakable sound of retching—one of the soldiers. I was too shocked by the transformation to look back and see which.

Lina screamed. I was still trying to wrest meaning from my eyes, but she had already done so and reached a terrifying conclusion.

“Dabir!” She cried. “It was the water! It’s going to happen to me!”

At last I turned from the insect that had been Sarsour, now prodding empty clothes with its mandibles. The girl wept on my master’s shoulder.

“It’s going to happen to me …”

“Shh.” He stroked her hair. “It will not happen to you. You are safe.”

I stepped closer to them as the girl pulled away to stare inquisitively at my master’s face.

“I did not believe the tale at first,” Dabir said, “but then when we spotted the landmarks, and the great insects …”

“What is this about, master?” I asked.

“Have you heard of the land of Hattusha[1], Asim? Once it was mighty and warred with the great powers of the ancient world. These mountains were its home. And this was a temple where certain of its priests worshipped an efreet who cursed, and blessed, a fountain. Two would drink. One would achieve immortality, the other a life prolonged. Yet you know as well as I the way words are twisted by the mighty.”

“I don’t understand,” Lina said.

“The one granted immortality would be transformed. As Sarsour has been. Hundreds, thousands, of prisoners were cursed thus so that their captors—those who drank immediately after—would thrive. One day the people of the hills rose up, destroyed the temple, slew the priests, and toppled Hattusha. They even stopped the fountain so that no others would be tempted by its terrible power. Yet over the years the cursed water has begun to trickle forth once more.”

“So she will live,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you,” I said, thinking aloud—”all along you were planning to drink first. To save her. That explains—”

Dabir frowned, but it was the girl who spoke over me.

“You meant to drink first?”

“I meant to save you.”

Her eyes were bright as she looked upon him, and I saw more than gratitude in the look she fixed upon my master.

One thing remained to be done. I strode after the scurrying bug that had been Sarsour and lifted my heel above it.

“Let him be!” Dabir said.

Bewildered, I lowered my foot to the ground.

“Leave him to his immortality,” Dabir declared.

What more is to be said? We used our own strength to topple the column and worked into the night to stop the pool and fill it with stones. Lina we escorted back to a grateful governor. We had saved his daughter but he had lost his little girl, for she was forever after haunted by the trip to the fountain and the way it had ended or forever altered lives. Her beauty flowered, and later that year she married a wealthy man who was said ever after to treat her like a gift from paradise.

Yet long years later she confided to me that from that moment beside the fountain she had never entirely stopped loving Dabir.

* * *

[1] The kingdom of the Hittites.

Why Carol Won’t Sit Next To Me At Science Fiction Movies

Written by Mike Resnick

Carol has a high threshold for embarrassment. You can’t be married to me for 45 years and not have one. But recently she has announced that she will no longer sit next to me at science fiction movies, that indeed she will sit on the far side of the theater and do her very best to pretend that she doesn’t know me.

She’s right. I’m just not much fun to be around at science fiction movies. I don’t know quite how this came about. I used to love them when I was growing up. I forgave them their lack of special effects and their B-movie casts and budgets. Okay, so Them paid no attention to the square-cube law; except for that, it was as well-handled as one could possibly want. And maybe The Thing wasn’t quite what John Campbell had in mind when he wrote “Who Goes There?”, but it was treated like science fiction rather than horror (the same cannot be said for the big-budget remake), and the overall ambience was rational. As for Forbidden Planet, nothing I’ve seen in the last 50 years has stirred my sense of wonder quite as much as Walter Pidgeon’s guided tour of the wonders of the Krell. A decade and a half later Stanley Kubrick made a trio of wildly differing but excellent science fiction movies—Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange—each of which treated the field with respect.

Then, just about the time I stopped dabbling at it and became a full-time science fiction writer, Hollywood started turning out one intellectually insulting science fiction movie after another. I mean, these things were almost dumber than network television shows. And I started muttering—louder and louder with each movie, Carol assures me—things like “No editor paying 3 cents a word for the most debased science fiction magazine in the world would let me get away with that!” Before long audiences would pay more attention to my rantings than to the movies.

I keep hearing that science fiction movies are getting better, that now that George Lucas has shown what could be done on the big screen we no longer have anything to be ashamed of when comparing ourselves to other genres.

That makes me mutter even louder.

So let me get it off my chest, which is a figure of speech, because actually the stupidity of science fiction movies is much more likely to eat a hole in my stomach lining.

And let me add a pair of stipulations:

First, I’m only interested in movies that aspired to be arch-bishop, which is to say, movies with major budgets and major talent, efforts that really and truly meant to be good movies. I will not consider such epics as Space Sluts in the Slammer (yes, it really exists), as it seems not unreasonable to assume it was never meant to be a contender for the year-end awards.

Second, when I speak of stupidities, I’m not talking about the nit-picking that goes on in outraged letter columns or esoteric fanzines. If the math or science are wrong only in areas that scientists, mathematicians, or obsessive science fiction fans would find fault with, I’ll ignore it. If George Lucas doesn’t know what a parsec is, or Gene Roddenberry and his successors think you can hear a ship whiz by in space, I’m willing to forgive and forget.

So what’s left?

Well, let’s start with Star Wars. First, has no one except me noticed that it’s not pro-democracy but pro-royalty? I mean, all this fighting to depose the Emperor isn’t done to give the man on the street (or the planet) a vote; it’s to put Princess Leia on the throne and let her rule the galaxy instead of him, which is an improvement only in matter of degree. And it drives me crazy that in 1991 we could put a smart bomb down a chimney, and that in 2002 we could hit a target at 450 miles, but that computerized handguns and other weaponry can’t hit a Skywalker or a Solo at 25 paces.

Return of the Jedi? Doesn’t it bother anyone else that Adolf Hitler—excuse me; Darth Vader—the slaughterer of a couple of hundred million innocent men and women, becomes a Good Guy solely because he’s Luke’s father? (Or maybe I should say, solely because we know he’s Luke’s father. After all, he was Luke’s father in the first two films, but we didn’t know it and hence he was a villain.)

And what could be sillier than that final scene, where Luke looks up and sees Yoda and the shades of Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi smiling at him. That was too much even for Carol, whose first comment on leaving the theater was, “Poor Luke! Wherever he goes from now on, he’s a table for four.”

Then along came E.T., which, for a few years at least, was the highest-grossing film of all time, until replaced by an even dumber one.

You think it wasn’t that intellectually insulting? Let’s consider the plot of that billion-dollar grosser, shall we?

1. If E.T. can fly/teleport, why doesn’t he do so at the beginning of the film, when he’s about to be left behind? (Answer: because this is what James Blish used to call an idiot plot, which is to say if everyone doesn’t act like an idiot you’ve got no story.)

2. Remember the scene where E. T. gets drunk? Sure you do. Now think of the next scene. What mother of teenaged children walks through a kitchen littered with empty beer cans and doesn’t notice them? (Answer: in all the world, probably only this one.) This is the blunder that started me muttering loud enough to disturb other moviegoers for the first time.

3. While we’re on the subject of the mother and the kitchen, what is a woman with an unexceptional day job doing living in an $900,000 house in one of the posher parts of the Los Angeles area? (Even I don’t have an answer to that.)

4. Why does E.T. die? (Answer: so he can come back to life.)

5. Why does E.T. un-die? (Still awaiting an answer, even a silly one, for this.)

6. When E.T. finally calls home, the lights in the room don’t even flicker. I’m no scientist, but I’d have figured the power required to reach a ship traveling away from us at light speeds would have shorted out the whole city.

Cheap shots, Resnick (I hear you say); you’re purposely avoiding the films that were aimed at an adult audience, films like Blade Runner and Signs, for example.

All right. Let’s take Blade Runner (which borrowed its title from an old Alan E. Nourse novel and has neither a blade nor a runner in the whole damned movie). Great future Los Angeles; it really put you there. Nice enough acting jobs, even if Harrison Ford was a little wooden. Wonderful sets, costumes, effects.

But the premise is dumber than dirt. We are told up front that the androids are going to expire in two weeks—so why in the world is Harrison Ford risking his life to hunt them down when he could just go fishing for 14 days and then pick up their lifeless bodies?

But that premise looks positively brilliant compared to the critically-acclaimed Mel Gibson movie Signs, which grossed about half a billion dollars worldwide a few short years ago.

Consider: would you travel 50 trillion miles or so for a little snack? That’s what the aliens did. If they’re here for any other reason except to eat people, the film never says so.

Okay, let’s leave aside how much they’re paying in terms of time and energy to come all this way just to eat us for lunch. What is the one thing we know will kill them? Water (which also killed the Wicked Witch of the West, a comparison that was not lost on some perceptive viewers). And what are human beings composed of? More than 90% water.

So the aliens come all this way to poison themselves (and then forget to die until someone hits them with a baseball bat, which Hollywood thinks is almost as devastating a weapon against aliens of indeterminate physical abilities as a glowing sword.)

By now I didn’t just mutter in the theater, I yelled at the screenwriters (who, being 3,000 miles away, probably didn’t hear me.) But I figured my vocalizing would soon come to an end. After all, we all knew that the sequel to The Matrix would show the world what real science fiction was like; it was the most awaited movie since Lucas’ all-but-unwatchable sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy.

So along comes The Matrix Retarded … uh, sorry, make that Reloaded. You’ve got this hero, Neo, with godlike powers. He can fly as fast and far as Superman. He can stop a hail of bullets or even bombs in mid-flight just by holding up his hand. He’s really quite remarkable, even if he never changes expression.

So does he fly out of harm’s way when a hundred Agent Smiths attack him? Of course not. Does he hold up his hand and freeze them in mid-charge? Of course not. Can Neo be hurt? No. Can Agent Smith be hurt? No. So why do they constantly indulge in all these easily avoidable, redundant, and incredibly stupid fights?

Later the creator of the Matrix explains that the first Matrix was perfect. It only had three or four flaws, which is why he built five more versions of it. Uh … excuse me, but that’s not that way my dictionary defines “perfect.”

You want more foolishness? The whole world runs on computers, which means the whole world is powered by electricity to a far greater extent than America is at this moment. So why is the underground city lit only by burning torches?

I hit J above high C explaining to the screen what the least competent science fiction editor in the world would say to the writer who tried to pawn The Matrix Reloaded off on him.

Now, you’d figure Stephen Spielberg could make a good science fiction movie, wouldn’t you? I mean, he’s the most powerful director in Hollywood’s history. Surely if he wanted to spend a few million dollars correcting flaws in the film before releasing it to the public, no one would dare say him nay.

So he makes Minority Report, and to insure the box office receipts he gets Tom Cruise to star in it and announces that it’s based on a Philip K. Dick story. (Dick is currently Hollywood’s favorite flavor of “sci-fi” writer, this in spite of the fact that nothing adapted from his work bears more than a passing resemblance to it.)

And what do we get for all this clout?

Well, for starters, we get a future less than half a century from now in which the Supreme Court has no objection to throwing people in jail for planning crimes.

We get a scene where Tom Cruise escapes from the authorities by climbing into a car that’s coming off an assembly line and driving away in it. That one really got me muttering at a hundred-decibel level. Has anyone ever seen a car come off an assembly line with a full tank of gas?

We are told that the three seers/mutants/whatever-they-are can only foresee capital crimes. Even bank robberies slip beneath their psychic radar. But in a crucial scene, one of them predicts or foresees a necessary rainstorm. (I hit 120 decibels on that one.)

It’s also explained that their powers have physical limits. If they’re in Washington, D.C., they can’t foresee a crime in, say, Wilmington, Delaware. But the villain of the piece, who knows their abilities and limitations better than anyone, plans to use them to control the entire nation, which the last time I looked at a map extends even beyond Delaware. (140 decibels that time.)

Okay, I’m too serious. These are just entertainments. I should go see one made from a comic book—Hollywood’s Intellectual Source Material Of Choice these days—and just sit back and enjoy it.

Good advice. So we went to see Hulk. You all know the story; it’s swiped from enough science fictional sources. I didn’t mind the poor animation. I didn’t mind the idiot plot that had Bruce Banner’s father responsible for his affliction. I didn’t mind this; I didn’t mind that. Then we came to Thunderbolt Ross, the 5-star general—and suddenly I was muttering again.

I was willing suspend my disbelief for this idiocy, but alas, I couldn’t suspend my common sense. Here’s this top military commander, the film’s equivalent of Douglas MacArthur or Tommy Franks. And here’s the Hulk, who makes Superman look like a wimp. Now, you have to figure that even a moderately bright 6-year-old ought to be able to conclude that if attacking the Hulk and shooting him doesn’t hurt him, but just makes him bigger and stronger and angrier and more destructive, the very last thing you want to do when he’s busy being the Hulk rather than Bruce Banner is shoot or otherwise annoy him, rather than simply wait for him to change back into his relatively helpless human form. That, however, seems to be beyond both our general and our screenwriters.

Even the good science fiction movies assume that their audiences are so dumb that logic means nothing to them, as long as you dazzle them with action and zap guns and aliens and the like.

Take The Road Warrior (a/k/a Mad Max 2), which is truly a fine movie: well-acted, well-conceived, well-directed. And yet …

In The Road Warrior’s post-nuclear-war future, the rarest and most valuable commodity in the world is refined oil (i.e., gasoline), because the distances in Australia, where it takes place, are immense, and you can’t get around without a car or a motorcycle. The conflict takes place between the Good Guys, who have built a primitive fortress around a refining plant, and the Bad Guys, a bunch of futuristic bikers, who want to get their hands on that gasoline, which is so rare that it’s probably worth more per drop than water in the desert.

So what do the bad guys who desperately need this petrol do? They power up their cars and bikes and race around the refinery for hours on end, day in and day out. If they had the brains to conserve a little of that wasted energy, they wouldn’t have to risk their lives trying to replace it. (And, while I’m thinking of it, where do they get the fuel to power their dozens of constantly-running vehicles?)

Then there were Spielberg’s mega-grossing dinosaur movies, Jurassic Park and The Lost World. The former hypothesizes that if you stand perfectly still six inches from a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex he won’t be able to tell you’re there. I would like to see the screenwriter try that stunt with any hungry carnivore—mammal, reptile, or dinosaur—that has ever lived on this planet. The latter film shows you in graphic detail (and with questionable intelligence) that a T. Rex can outrun an elevated train, but cannot catch a bunch of panicky Japanese tourists who are running away, on foot, in a straight line.

Although these two films are the prime offenders, simply because Spielberg has the resources to know better, I am deathly tired of the superhuman (uh … make that supercarnosaur) feats with which Hollywood endows T. Rex, who seems to be the only terrifying dinosaur of which it was aware until someone told Spielberg about velociraptors. (Give them another decade or two and they might actually discover allosaurs and Utahraptors.)

T. Rex weighed about seven tons. By comparison, a large African bull elephant weighs about six and a half tons, and could probably give old T. Rex one hell of a battle. But no one suggests that an elephant can throw trucks and trains around, break down concrete walls, or do any of the other patently ridiculous things T. Rex can do on screen.

And the list goes on and on. In Alien they all go off by themselves to search for the creature; haven’t they learned anything from five centuries of dumb horror movies? At the end of Total Recall, Governor Schwarzenegger is outside for maybe six minutes while Mars is being miraculously terraformed. Just how long do you think you could survive on the surface of Mars in 100-below-zero weather with absolutely no oxygen to breathe?

Some “major” films are simply beneath contempt. I persist in thinking that Starship Troopers was misnamed; it should have been Ken and Barbie Go To War. And if that wasn’t a bad enough trick to pull on Robert A. Heinlein after he was dead, they also made The Puppet Masters, which was handled exactly like a 4th remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Then there’s Armageddon, which tries to make the case that it’s easier to teach hard-drinking functionally illiterate wildcatters how to be astronauts in a constricted time period than to teach highly intelligent physically fit astronauts how to drill for oil. And Ghod help us, it was Disney’s highest-grossing live action film until Pirates of the Caribbean came along.

And when I was sure it couldn’t get any worse, along came the stupidest big-budget film of all time—The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Consider:

1. Alan Quartermain can hit a moving target at 900 yards in the year 1899 A.D. With a rifle of that era.

2. Bruce Banner—excuse me: Dr. Jekyll—changes into the Hulk—oops: make that Mr. Hyde—and suddenly he’s 15 feet tall and even his muscles have muscles. He’s a bad guy—except when, at the end, the plot requires him to be a good guy and rescue all the other good guys at enormous personal cost, which he does for no rational reason that I could discern.

3. Mina Harker is a vampire. She’s Jonathan Harker’s wife, and Jonathan, as you’ll remember, is the guy who visits Dracula and sells him an English estate. (I always felt Dracula shouldn’t have stopped terrifying hot-shot realtors with just one, but let it pass.) Well, Mina is a Good Guy, and certainly, given her physical features, a more Extraordinary Gentleman than any of the others. She can fly (Dracula couldn’t), she can cross over water (movie vampires can’t), and she can command a combat team (honest) of half a million bats. She also drinks blood, but only of Bad Guys.

4. The Invisible Man joins the team. Well, no one reads H. G. Wells any more, so they announced that the original Invisible Man was dead and this cockney guy has replaced him. He spends most of his time being invisible in sub-zero weather, occasionally mentioning that it’s chilly without his clothes on, but he never gets dressed, goes inside, or even puts on a pair of shoes.

5. Dorian Gray. Well, he’s got this picture, see? Oh, and he can’t be harmed. Cut him, shoot him, and two seconds later he’s whole, unharmed and unmarked. But if he should ever just see his picture, he turns immediately and gruesomely and eternally to dust. Funniest action scene in the picture is a fight to the death (honest!) between Dorian Gray, who literally cannot be harmed or killed, and Mina Harker, who is already dead.

6. Captain Nemo is a bearded Indian who is a master of karate.

7. The only Victorian figure missing is Sherlock Holmes, so of course the youngish villain turns out to be Moriarty (who Sherlock killed when he was an aging professor a few years before 1899.)

8. And, oh yeah, there’s an American secret agent named Tom Sawyer, who’s about 22 years old—a really neat trick since anyone who’s ever read Mark Twain knows that Tom was a teenager before the Civil War.

I think it’s nice that the screenwriter brought back all these Victorian and pre-Victorian characters. It would have been even nicer if he’d ever read a single book in which they appeared.

How do they travel? In a half-mile-long 20-foot-wide version of the Nautilus. (And as this 2500-foot-long ship is going through the narrow canals of Venice, even Carol couldn’t help wondering how it turned the corners.)

There is a convertible car. (After all, this is 1899. They hadn’t invented hardtops yet.) Alan Quartermain and two other Extraordinary Gentlemen have to drive down the broad paved boulevards (broad paved boulevards???) of Venice. There are 200 Bad Guys on the roofs on both sides of the street, all armed with automatic weapons. They fire 18,342 shots at the car—and miss. Alan Quartermain and his ancient rifle don’t miss a target for the entire and seemingly endless duration of the film.

What are the Extraordinary Gentlemen doing? They’re stopping Moriarty from getting rich by selling weapons to rival European nations. And where is he getting these weapons? Easy. He has built a two-mile-square fortified brick city in the middle of an ice-covered Asian mountain range, and filled it with thousands of machines capable of creating really nasty weapons. I figure the cost of creating the city, shipping in the tons of iron he has to melt to make weapons, and building/importing the thousands of machines required to build the weapons, set him back about $17 trillion. But he’s going to make $200 million or so selling weapons, so he’s in profit. Isn’t he???

Every single aspect of the film is on this level. The real Nairobi consisted of two—count them: two—tin-roofed shacks in 1899, but in the movie it’s a thriving city. And it’s a city in clear sight of Kilimanjaro—which is passing strange, because every time I’ve been there it’s a 2-hour drive just to see Kilimanjaro in the distance. Quartermain lives in a place which I suppose is meant to be the Norfolk Hotel, but looks exactly like an antebellum Southern mansion, complete with liveried black servants who speak better English than Sean Connery (who played Quartermain and will be a couple of lifetimes living it down).

It’s mentioned a few times that Alan Quartermain can’t die, that a witch doctor has promised him eternal life. In the end he dies, and despite his having repeated this story about the witch doctor ad nauseum, the remaining Extraordinary Gentlefolk carry his body—unembalmed, I presume—all the way from the Asian mountains to East Africa and bury him there, place his rifle on the grave, and walk away. Then the witch doctor shows up, does a little buck-and-wing and a little scat-singing, and the rifle starts shaking as if something’s trying to get out of the grave. End of film. My only thought was: “It’s the writer, and they didn’t bury the sonofabitch deep enough.”

Okay, I’ve really got to calm down. I’m starting to hyperventilate as I write this.

(Pause. Take a deep breath. Relax.) I prefer science fiction to fantasy both as a writer and a reader. I prefer the art of the possible to the impossible, the story that obeys the rules of the universe (as we currently know them, anyway) to the story that purposely breaks them all.

And yet … and yet, for some reason that eludes me, Hollywood, which seems unable to make a good science fiction movie to save its soul (always assuming it has one, an assumption based on absolutely no empirical evidence), has made a number of wonderful fantasy movies that are not intellectually offensive and do not cheat on their internal logic: Field of Dreams, Harvey, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Portrait of Jennie, Something Wicked This Way Comes, even The Wizard of Oz and the Harry Potter films (well, the first one, anyway).

No, this is not blanket praise for all fantasy films. As I was walking out of The Two Towers I complained to Carol that I’d just wasted three hours watching what amounted to spring training for the real war in the next film. And about three hours into The Return of the King, as I was watching the 20th or 25th generic battle between faceless armies that I didn’t care about, I had this almost-unbearable urge to find an usher and say, “Let my people go!”

But for the most part, I find that fantasy movies don’t raise my bile the way science fiction movies do. How can big-budget science fiction films be so ambitious and so dumb at the same time, so filled with errors that no editor I’ve ever encountered (and that’s a lot of editors, including some incredibly lax ones) would let me get away with?

Uh … Carol just stopped by. She said she heard me muttering and cursing and wondered what the problem was. I invited her to read a bit of this article over my shoulder.

*Sigh* Now she says she won’t sit in the same room with me when I’m writing about science fiction movies.

* * *

Why Do So Many People Resist the Idea of Global Warming?

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

I think I have the answer.

During the last two years, I’ve interviewed many people from many walks of life for my show The Future And You. In these interviews global warming is a topic that pops up frequently. Roughly half of my guests have a strong opinion about it, either agreeing that its existence is a forgone conclusion or disagreeing with its existence on the grounds that it is a fad, or hype or even an outright hoax.

Many of those who accept the theory of global warming tell me that those who refuse to accept it are self-serving business people who care more about their personal wealth than about the future of our earth.

While this is a claim I’ve heard from many mouths, some of them quite learned, my perception is that it says more about the biases of the claimants than about the resisters, since most of the people who resist the idea of global warming are not rich. Instead of having businesses, they have jobs just like everyone else.

When pointing this out to believers the most popular response I get is: “Well, then the rich business people must have them all fooled.” Which again says more about the perceptions of the claimants than about the resisters, since what they are trying to say without voicing it openly is that most people are sufficiently ignorant that they will believe anything they are told as long as they are told it by rich business people.

Granted, I like to think I’m pretty darned smart, but I absolutely refuse to believe that everyone else is stupid. Not because I find such an elitist argument to be unpalatable—I’ve been forced by solid evidence to swallow uglier and more painful concepts than that—it’s that I don’t think it’s accurate.

But if universal gullibility is not the source of the resistance, what is? Clearly the resistance is real; and for it to be so powerful and so pervasive it must come from something important.

In order to discover its source, I have examined my own resistance to the idea of global warming. A resistance so rigid it took fourteen months to reverse; a process which was completed only this year and never would have happened at all had I not interviewed many people from many walks of life for my show. As much as I hate climbing aboard other people’s bandwagons, I am now a convert. I think I dislike being in this camp even more than I dislike my newfound awareness that global warming is real. However, as I mentioned, this gives me a unique opportunity for self-analysis.

Through careful examination, I feel I have located the primary source of my resistance. If I am correct, most of my resistance I acquired over a period of decades from experiences unrelated to global warming.

In the course of my half century on this planet, I have seen many ideas grow so popular with the general public that they dominated the popular media. Most of these ideas had no basis in science, and some contradicted scientific principals with joyous abandon. This however had no effect in slowing their popularity. If anything, being contrary to science seemed to work in their favor.

The popularity of each of these ideas grew not because they were accurate or contained any particular merit, but because they were so easily used as a vehicle to satisfy three of the most basic, and therefore most powerful, human desires: (1) money, (2) fame and (3) acceptance.

How were they used for this?

(1) Money. An incalculable amount of wealth was amassed by thousands who wrote books, articles, gave speeches and lectures, and taught classes about the idea.

(2) Fame. It was easy to get on TV if one claimed the idea was true.

(3) Acceptance. Believing was required in order to be part of the “in” crowd.

Some of the easiest and most obvious examples of such ideas can be plucked from the smorgasbord of paranormal beliefs of the last few decades—and a bountiful harvest it is: ESP, biorhythms, pyramid power, ancient astronauts, crop circles, healing crystals, the Bermuda Triangle, UFO’s, astrology and every possible incarnation (or reincarnation, if you prefer) of spiritualism.

Describing these examples in detail is, of course, unnecessary. If you’ve been aware of the world long enough to see them you know precisely what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, no amount of explanation will be sufficient to clue you in as to the peculiarities of the feedback loop we call the modern media.

My own response to seeing the rise and sometimes fall of these examples was not unique. Many who have watched these ideas come and go have noticed the similarities of how they rose through the media to become overwhelmingly popular. And having noticed these similarities have become skeptical of new ideas which follow the same path of exponential growth.

It is an unfortunate coincidence that the idea we call global warming has followed this exact path. And to make sure you are clear on this I’m going to repeat each of the basic human desires I mentioned earlier but with the words “global warming” inserted in the description.

(1) Money. It is unfortunate that there has been so much money to be made in writing books and articles which support the idea of global warming because that makes each of the writer’s motivations appear suspicious. It is also unfortunate that audiences will pay money to hear speeches and lectures and seminars supporting the idea of global warming because that makes the speaker’s motivations appear suspicious.

(2) Fame. It is unfortunate that it has been so easy to get on TV by supporting the idea of global warming because that makes the motivations of those on TV appear suspicious.

(3) And it is most unfortunate of all that believing in global warming is now required in order to be part of the “in” crowd because that makes every believer’s motivations appear suspicious.

Mind you, none of these unfortunate things can change whether or not global warming is real. None of them have any bearing upon reality. They can only affect our perceptions of reality. But since all the decisions we make and all the actions we take hinge on our perceptions, it is our perceptions that control our future.

And it is grossly unfortunate that there have been so many reasons to be skeptical of something so well documented scientifically and so crucial to the long term stability of our civilization.

* * *

Revealed Falsehoods

Written by Mike Resnick

Over the past century, the giants of science fiction have occasionally written a line or two that somehow survives them and their work, and is eventually viewed by most members of the field as a Revealed Truth.

Being a natural-born cynic (well, Caesarian actually, but let it pass), I’m here to tell you that Truth, revealed or otherwise, never set anyone free. It is Doubt that sets people free.

You think not? Let’s examine some of these truths that science fiction readers and writers seem to think are immutable.

And let’s start with one that even non-science-fiction people like to quote: Isaac Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, which states that a robot cannot harm a human being, or through inaction allow harm to come to a human being.

Sounds sensible. Of course we’ll build that into every robot we ever make. Everyone knows that.

Uh…well, maybe not quite everyone. Seems to me that in 1991, the entire world saw a smart bomb, which is nothing but a robot in other-than-humanoid form, find its way down an Iraqi chimney. In 2003, we saw the Navy fire a smart bomb into the air while at sea, and the bomb, using its (non-positronic) brain, found its target 450 miles away.

So much for First Law.

Then there’s TANSTAAFL - the war cry of fans in the 1960s and 1970s, which was Robert A. Heinlein’s acronym for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, a battle cry voiced in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

But of course it’s ridiculous. There are free lunch programs all the hell over. Check your local school. Or look at New York, where Mayor Michael Blumberg has just proposed not only free lunches, but cash payments to poor people who don’t break the law, to parents who actually read their kids’ report cards, to kids who obey the law by attending school, and so on.

If there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, it’s only because it’s been surpassed by a couple of hundred more lucrative free things.

Okay, let’s go back to one of the fathers of science fiction, H. G. Wells. Wells explained, time and again, that the proper way to write science fiction was to take one, and only one, scientific breakthrough and write a story around it, that the public couldn’t possibly buy more than one a book.

Sounds logical … but it’s dumb. It presupposes that the 1950s public couldn’t deal with, say, jet planes, television, and the Salk polio vaccine at the same time, or that no 1990s story proposing space flight, cell phones, AIDS medications, and DVDs could be assimilated by the man (or reader) on the street.

And another revealed truth bites the dust.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The only answer is: to whom? Not to the people who create it. Not to the people who apply it. Not to all the people who benefit from it. (I love the late George Alec Effinger’s response to reading about faster-than-light drives and zap guns and all the other tropes of science fiction that some misguided authors feel they must explain, at length, in their stories: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from doubletalk.”)

Then there’s Damon Knight’s classic definition of science fiction: “Science fiction is what I’m pointing at when I say ‘That’s science fiction.’”

Witty as all get-out. Great line at parties. But I’ve been hearing it quoted as something meaningful for more than four decades now. Let’s try an experiment: substitute the word “Jabberwocky” or any other nonsense word of your choice. Seems just as brilliant (and just an uninformative), doesn’t it?

Then there’s Robert E. Howard’s classic and oft-quoted line (though of course Nietzsche said it first): “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Sure sounds good. But maybe you should ask a quadriplegic car crash survivor, or someone who’s just lost a lung and a kidney to cancer, if they think they’re any stronger because of what didn’t kill them.

Sturgeon’s Law—”90% of everything is crap”—is so famous that even the New York Times has quoted it. I’d have no problem with it if it were limited to television, movies, and Windows Vista, but it’s all-inclusive, and your brain would surely qualify for Sturgeon’s 90% if you believed 90% of all medical and technological breakthroughs (or Baen books, for that matter) were crap.

Back to Isaac Asimov, whose second most famous statement is “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.” Which may very well be true, but doesn’t acknowledge the far more meaningful corollary, which is that the competent don’t wait that long.

I’m sure you can think of more of science fiction’s Revealed Falsehoods and Half-Truths, but you get the idea. Even in a field as cerebral and forward-looking as ours, we pay lip service to a lot of lines that sound brilliant but hold about as much water as a sieve.

So the next time someone comes up to you and proves how brilliant we are by quoting an unquestioned statement by one of our leading lights, make sure you’re within reach of the saltcellar, because you’re going to have to take what they tell you with a few grains of sodium chloride.

* * *

The Economics of Writing

Written by Eric Flint

I ended my last essay by posing the two major objections to the policy of using free or cheap online distribution of an author’s works as a promotional method, which I both advocate and practice personally.

So, in my next essays, I will deal with the two most important—and rational, let me say—objections to my approach to the problem.

The first is this:

What might work for one author, won’t work if all of them do it. To put it another way, it may be true that if a few authors use free or cheap distribution online of their work it rebounds to their advantage, because it helps them penetrate the opacity of the book market. But if all authors did it, that same opacity would close down again—except that the level of income of all authors would have been lowered in the process …

Similarly, so the argument goes, if a few authors start handing out their work for free, because they get an immediate promotional benefit from doing do, sooner or later all authors will be forced to do it simply in order to compete—and all authors will see an overall decline in their income. Including the scab idiot who started the ball rolling, because he was too short-sighted to see the inevitable end result.

Both argument are closely related, and both of them—even if the proponents don’t realize it—are based on making an analogy between an author’s labor and the kind of wage labor which can be and often is organized by trade unions. The arguments amount to saying that an author who hands out his or her work online for free is the equivalent of a scab, a strike-breaker.

Let me begin by disposing of the obvious rejoinder to these arguments, which is that authors are not on strike to begin with, so how can an author be breaking a non-existent strike? That’s true, of course, but it’s also begging the question a little. The underlying argument, whether there’s a strike going on or not, is that a worker who agrees to work for less than the prevailing wage in a given industry is in effect lowering the wages for every worker in that industry.

This is true enough, and it’s the reason some trade unionists will routinely refer to anybody who works in a non-union job in a given industry as “scab labor.” I disagree with that usage of the term myself, and did so during the quarter of a century I spent as a trade union activist. Quite strongly, in fact. But my disagreement doesn’t stem from a different assessment of the net effect of non-union labor. The ridiculous and none-too-hard-to-figure-out-who’s-paying-for-it claims of “right to work” advocates notwithstanding, it’s a simple fact—which anyone can check for themselves quite easily—that states with “right to work” laws typically have lower wages and benefits for labor in any given industry than states without such anti-labor laws. Often, much lower wages and benefits.

The reason I disagreed with the usage was because I felt and still do that the underlying problem was and is the continuing default of the labor movement, whose overly paid and usually bureaucratic leadership is generally sluggish and inept at the task of organizing trade unions in non-union shops. So, the charge that non-union labor, as such, is “scab labor” is simply a dishonest way of covering up their own failings. It’s a variant of the old sour grapes defense mocked by Aesop in one of his fables: “Ah, that labor is scab labor anyway.”

Still, coming back from the digression, we’re left with the underlying issue. Whether or not non-union workers who agree to work for lower wages than union workers deserve the pejorative term “scab”—which they don’t, if there’s no actual strike-breaking taking place—it’s still a fact that non-union labor generally lowers the wages and benefits in any given industry.

(Yes, yes, yes, there are some exceptions—but, on closer look, even those exceptions typically disappear. The most common reason, by far, that some non-union companies pay wages and benefits that are equal to or even better than union shops, is simply to keep the union out. The owners or management are willing to pay what amounts to a premium so they don’t have to deal with trade unions in their ongoing operations. Fine and dandy. But if the trade unions were to suddenly disappear, those high wages and benefits would drop like a stone.)

That being the case, why wouldn’t the principle apply to what I’m proposing? In other words,. why wouldn’t a generalized policy of handing out many works for free online, applied by many authors, produce over time a decline in the overall compensation for writing fiction as a form of labor? It seems obvious, after all, that if customers know they can get fiction for free, they will be increasingly unwilling to pay for it; or, if they are, won’t be willing to pay as much as they did before.

Yes, the argument seems obvious—but it’s just as obviously wrong. In fact, it’s as full of holes as the proverbial Swiss cheese.

Let’s start with the most basic problem with the analogy between authors and wage laborers. It’s simple: With the exception of authors who work on a work-for-hire basis, authors are not wage laborers to begin with.

People often ask me what I like most about being able to make a living as a full-time writer, working entirely for royalties. (I.e., I do no writing on a work-for-hire basis.)

Most of the time, I think they expect me to respond along the lines of: “It’s nice doing creative work that I enjoy.” And, indeed, that’s my second reason for enjoying my occupation. But it’s not the first reason, not by a long shot. First, because it wouldn’t be true anyway. The notion that “non-creative” work is dull and tedious is often wrong on all three counts. True enough, some non-creative labor is genuinely dull and tedious. I can well remember working in an auto forge in Detroit running a trim press. My job, all day, consisted of punching out the auto parts made in the steam hammer whose crew I was part of. In the summer, in temperatures that often exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, joy. I also spent several years working in the meatpacking industry, usually at jobs that were every bit as dull and repetitious and sometimes just as hard.

But much “non-creative” labor is not only not dull and tedious, it’s very far from being “non-creative” in the first place. Nor do you have to ascend to the rarified heights of being a rocket scientist to discover that fact. To give a personal example again, I spent many years as a skilled machinist, usually operating a horizontal or vertical boring mill and often doing highly complex and challenging work. Anybody who thinks such labor is simply rote labor and doesn’t require a great deal of intelligence and, yes, creativity, is either a fool or a snob or both.

Granted, the work I do now is more interesting to me. But the main reason I love being a full-time writer is as crude and simple as it gets:

I don’t have a boss. I don’t have to punch a time clock. As long as I produce sufficient work of good enough quality for my customers at reasonably regular intervals—which is a given for almost anybody who works for a living—my time is my own and I answer to nobody.

Or, to put it as simply as possible, I am not a wage-laborer any more.

In narrowly economic terms, in fact, I am a small independent businessman. Granted, it’s a one-person business and I employ no laborers of my own. But that’s not particularly unique to writers. There are lots of one-person businesses in the world.

That being the case, it’s not only fallacious but even dishonest for writers to try to use an analogy between themselves and wage-laborers. The analogy washes over—tries to, rather—the essential and critical difference.

The reason wage-laborers generally need a trade union is because, as a rule, their labor is interchangeable. That’s true even in cases where the labor itself is very highly skilled or in short supply. Even the most skilled machinist—or airline pilot or air traffic controller, to use another example—can be replaced. Not easily, perhaps, but they can be in a pinch.

So, if you allow unregulated competition between workers, you will invariably see an overall decline in wages and benefits. And if anyone doesn’t believe me, I can only shrug my shoulders and recommend you study the history of economic relations over the last quarter of millennium, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It’s blindingly obvious to anyone who doesn’t have an ax to grind.

My labor today, however, is not interchangeable. I don’t get paid by an employer in the first place. For a writer, a publisher is not a boss—even if he or she typically only publishes through one house. What the publisher houses actually are is a service that the author contracts with to produce and distribute their work. But an author’s income doesn’t come from the publisher. It comes from sales of the author’s work, the proceeds of which are divided between the author and a publishing house according to specific terms laid out in a contract for a specific book.

In short, my income derives from royalties, not wages. Those royalties, in turn, derive from sales of my books to my customers—or “fans,” as customers are normally referred to in the entertainment industries. The ultimate economic relationship is between me and my fans, and no one else. All the other parties involved in the process—publishers, distributors, retail outlets—are simply intermediaries.

An author’s fan base may be large or small. In my case, it’s large enough to enable me to make a full-time living from sales of my books. In the case of most authors, it’s not. In fact, it’s not even close. Most published authors derive only incidental income from their writing, and even most writers who get published regularly don’t make enough from sales of their work to be able to make a living as full-time writers.

It’s that fact, of course, that gives so many authors the illusion that they are comparable to wage-laborers. But they’re confusing a general relationship of economic power—”clout,” to use a slang term—with the specific relationship between wage-laborer and employer. Yes, it’s true that because most authors don’t sell very well, that publishing houses can often push them around or dispense with their services altogether. They don’t always behave that way, mind you. There are plenty of cases of publishing houses who actually go out of their way to keep an author in print even thought they don’t sell particularly well, at least for a while. But it’s certainly true, especially in the modern era where publishing is dominated by giant corporations instead of being—as it was in decades past—an industry dominated by independent houses, that it’s far more common for low-selling authors to be given short shrift by their publishers.

Being blunt, so what? The same is true in any entertainment industry. For every movie star who can pull in millions of dollars for making one film—who can, in fact, more or less make or break that film—there are thousands of part-time actors scrabbling at the edges. For every top athlete making millions of dollars a year, there are thousands scrabbling at the edges. For every top-selling popular singer or musician, the same is true.

We do not therefore conclude that the basic economic relationship in a given entertainment industry is determined by the bit players and the wannabes. It isn’t. Rather, and exactly the opposite from industries dominated by wage labor as the principal form of labor, the basic relationship is developed from the top down. It is, like it or not, the superstars and the most valuable players who primarily determine the level of compensation and the principles of that compensation.

Why? For the good and simple reason that, push comes to shove, they are the ones who draw the customers. Not their “bosses,” who aren’t bosses to begin with.

People came and paid for tickets to see Michael Jordan play basketball or Reggie Jackson or Nolan Ryan play baseball. They did not come to see the owners of those teams sitting in their sky boxes.

People pay for movie tickets or buy DVDs to see Will Smith or Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts perform. Some of them are also drawn by the name of the movie’s director. But I can assure you that the number of people sitting in a movie theater who know or care who the producers of that movie were can be counted on the fingers of one hand—and the number that comes up will usually be zero. The same is true, even more so, for people sitting at a musical performance.

The same is true, as a rule, for people buying a book. Almost every reader can tell you the name of the author of the book they’re reading. Not more than one in a hundred are likely to notice the name of the publishing house. There are some exceptions, of course, but not many. In science fiction, over the decades, one or another publishing house would develop such a distinctive identity that at least some readers were drawn by the identity of the house itself, and an even larger percentage recognized the identity. But, even there, the main reason for the distinctiveness was that a publishing house or magazine developed a very popular set of stable lead writers.

And that’s why it’s ridiculous to try to make an analogy between independent workers in an entertainment industry and wage laborers. The identity of any individual wage laborer vanishes in the process of the work. Indeed, as a rule, it has to vanish or the end product is deficient. When I worked as a machinist, for instance, any shaft I made on a lathe or housing I machined on a boring mill had to be indistinguishable from any other in that line. Why? Because what the customer was paying for was a product all of whose proportions fell within a very narrow range of tolerances. However creative may have been the work of figuring out how to make that product, the individual worker’s creativity became invisible in the product itself.

The opposite is true in entertainment. Much as they might like to—in some cases, fervently wish to—it’s just a cold fact of life that a movie producer can’t use actors interchangeably. He can’t produce a “Tom Hanks movie” without Tom Hanks. He can’t tell the real Tom Hanks that if he doesn’t agree to work for peanuts he’ll go out and hire another Tom Hanks.

Granted, a producer—or a publisher, or the owner of a sports team—can decide that he’ll make as much money if he contracts for the services of a different actor or writer or athlete. But then he still has to deal with that actor or writer or athlete, and he’ll still have to deal with them on whatever economic basis is determined by that individual’s performance in the market place.

So, over time, certain basic contractual terms become established for everybody—or most people, at least—in a specific entertainment industry. To use commercial fiction publishing as an example, the standard contract for any writer (except writers on a work-for-hire basis) is as follows, in terms of royalties paid:

For a hardcover title, the author will get either 10% or 12.5% or 15% of the cover price of the book for each and every copy sold. The difference is determined by the level of sales: an author gets 10% for the first 5000 copies sold, 12.5% for the next 5000, and 15% for any copies sold past ten thousand. For a mass market paperback, the percentages are 8% for all copies sold up to one hundred and fifty thousand, and 10% thereafter. For trade paperbacks, there’s a slightly wider fluctuation in terms—some houses pay the same rates as for hardcovers—but the general rule of thumb is that an author will get 7.5% of the cover price for every copy sold.

Those established percentages are not and were not set by little-published authors. They were established, over time, between publishing houses and their bestselling authors and the agents for those authors. And having been established, became generalized throughout the industry for all authors. (It’s true that new authors often have to sell a first book on a slightly sub-standard basis—for instance, 6% and 8% for paperback royalties instead of the standard 8% and 10%. But that’s a passing phase, one way or another. If they can’t sell any more books, it’s a moot point. And if they do, they’ll soon start getting the standard rates.)

Okay, so much for the basic economics involved. Now let’s go back and look at the question posed directly.

Given these specific economic relationships, what is the net effect on the income of authors as a whole if some of the authors start handing out some of their works for free in electronic format?

Well, the first and most obvious effect is that the authors who do so will become better known to the reading public at large. And, as a result of their greater visibility, will generally see an increase in their sales.

I need to stress that this is not guesswork on my part. It’s something that has been proven in practice over a period of years—by me, among other authors.

I can demonstrate this concretely, by using two of my novels as my examples.

The first book I put up for free online—in fact, it was the first volume in the Baen Free Library—was my first novel, Mother of Demons.

Mother of Demons was published in September of 1997, and it was only published in a mass market paperback edition, as was the standard practice at the time for first novels. (Most science fiction novels, actually.)

The initial sales were decent—good enough for the publisher to contract for more work from me—but hardly spectacular. Within two years, by which time the vast majority of books will have had most of their sales, the book had sold a little over ten thousand copies, with a 55% sell-through. (To remind you, “sell-through” refers to the percentage of books shipped which are actually sold.) That was slightly above average for a first novel in science fiction at the time, but only slightly.

At that point—partly because, being frank, I knew I had nothing much to lose—I put Mother of Demons up for free online in the Baen Free Library. Jim Baen and I, after discussing the matter, both thought it would be an interesting experiment. Jim was convinced that an author would lose nothing from doing so, and might very well gain as a result, and I was willing to be the guinea pig.

What happened next, over the many years that have followed, is both fascinating and instructive. Here are my royalty figures for Mother of Demons, for each successive royalty period. For those of you who don’t know, there are two royalty periods a year in publishing, at six month intervals. As a rule, though not always, the periods end on June 30 and December 31.

You probably have to be an author to grasp immediately just how anomalous these results are. Here are the basic rules of thumb in commercial publishing when it comes to sales:

Rule Number One. 80% of all the sales of a title will happen in the first three months after it is published.

Rule Number Two. Thereafter, sales will decline steeply.

Rule Number Three. Within a few years—almost always less than five, and usually only two or three—sales are so low that it’s no longer worth it for a publisher to pay the warehousing costs to keep the title in print.

Rule Number Four. Sell-through rarely improves, and usually declines over time.

But with Mother of Demons, none of those rules applies.

As of the end of the last royalty period, almost nine years after the novel was first published, more than half of the sales came after the initial sales period. Almost 60%, in fact.

Although no other period, of course, came close to that first period in total sales, there was no noticeable decline thereafter until June 2005. For the first six years, though the end of 2004, the book sold an average of 873 copies each period. Then, even the clear drop that took place after six years simply seems to have set a new plateau for regular sales. In the two years that have elapsed since then, average sales dropped to 515 copies. But that “average” has seen hardly any fluctuation at all, and certainly no decline.

As of the day I’m writing this essay, August 29 of 2007, I am only three days away from the tenth anniversary of the publication of Mother of Demons. My first novel, mind you, and a novel which has been available for free in an electronic edition for the last seven years—and which has never gone out of print.

Do you have any idea how unusual it is for an author’s first novel to still be in print ten years after it came out? The exact percentages are unknown, but they are undoubtedly less than five percent, and probably less than one percent.

Before much longer—I figure, about a year from now—the existing print run for Mother of Demons will have been sold out. Normally, even for a novel with “long legs,” especially a paperback edition, that’s the point at which a publisher decides to let it go out of print. Even if sales are steady, they simply aren’t big enough to justify another print run, given the economics of mass market printing. It’s not worth doing a print run smaller than five thousand copies, and publishers prefer at least ten thousand. Even with the solid existing sales of Mother of Demons, it would take too many years to sell that many copies.

As it happens, however, Mother of Demons is not going out of print. Toni Weisskopf, who replaced Jim Baen as Baen Books’ publisher after Jim’s death last year, told me a couple of months ago that she was planning to do a limited hardcover edition of the novel. It’ll be a small print run, but that’s economically viable for a book which has small but solid sales.

So. Almost eight years ago, I put up my first novel for free online—as a result of which it got most of its sales since then, and is still selling well enough that even after the mass market edition finally runs out, the publisher is going to keep it in print in a hardcover edition.

Nobody knows exactly what percentage of first novels never go out of print for ten years and then get reissued in a hardcover edition. But the percentage is probably somewhere in the top one-tenth of one percent.

We’ll see the same pattern, in a moment, with another novel of mine. But, before I move on, let me just make a note. The next novel whose sales I’ll analyze, 1632, is the first novel in what has become a long-running and popular series, with (to date, as of this October) six novels and six anthologies in print by January 2008. Some people who argue with me on this subject will claim that the ongoing sales of 1632 are due to that, not to the fact the book has been made available for free online for many years.

Baloney—and I know it’s baloney because Mothers of Demons is not part of any series. It’s a stand alone novel, which has no sequel that might keep stimulating its sales as the first book in a series.

Here are the comparable royalty figures for 1632, which was first published in February of 2000 in a hardcover edition. That edition was followed by a mass market paperback issue that came out exactly a year later, in February of 2001. I’ve forgotten the exact date that I put the novel up for free in the Baen Free Library, but it was sometime in that same year.

One note of explanation. I’m only using the paperback royalty figures because, for our purposes here, it’s the paperback figures that are critical. A book that comes out first in a hardcover edition, followed by a paperback reissue, sees an almost complete stop to hardcover sales once the paperback appears. So you can’t use hardcover royalty figures to gauge a book’s longevity.

Except for the first sales period, ending December 31 of 2001, all of these sales took place after I put the novel up for free online.

What we discover is exactly the same pattern. As before, no period enjoyed the same level of sales as the very first period. But that’s a given with almost any book, certainly a novel. (The rules for textbooks mandated by schools are different, of course. But very few novelists—and practically no living ones—have a phalanx of teachers and college professors to keep maintaining their sales by making their books assigned texts in classes that the students have to buy, whether they want to or not.)

But—this is completely out of whack with normal commercial publishing experience—most of the sales took place after that initial period. And the result is even more striking than it was with Mother of Demons. As of the last royalty period, 1632 has sold almost ninety-five thousand copies in paperback. Fully two-thirds of those sales happened after that first big sales period—and after the book was made available for free to the public in an electronic edition posted in a well-known and well-advertised web site.

There hasn’t been the same steady increase in sell-through that we saw with Mother of Demons. But that’s because 1632 started at 85% and soon reached 90%. If you ask any experienced publisher or publishing sales representative, they will tell you that a ninety percent sell-through rate is just about as high as any sell-through can ever get, in the real world. A “perfect” sell-through of one hundred percent is only theoretically possible—and it wouldn’t actually be “perfect” anyway. Truth be told, I’ve never been that happy that 1632 has maintained such a phenomenal sell-through for all these years.

Yeah, yeah, fine, it’s great for bragging rights. But the fact is that a sell-through that high is partly reflecting a bottleneck caused by the fact that the miserable misbegotten distributors—do the jerks pay any attention to their own figures?—aren’t ordering enough copies to begin with. I’d far rather see the sell-through drop to eighty or even seventy percent, if that reflected greater shipping orders and therefore a better circulation of the book.

Still, that grumpiness aside, the fact that 1632 has maintained almost a ninety percent sell-through for many years, despite being available for free in an electronic edition, is actually enough in itself to make a mockery of the argument that putting up works for free hurts an author’s sales.

Notice, furthermore, that the sales have never dropped at all, once we get past that initial period. Since the period ending December of 2002—almost five years, now—1632 keeps selling, period after period, with no discernible decline in sales. There are fluctuations from one period to the next, naturally, but there is no overall decline at all. The average sales for any given six-month period during that five year stretch have been 6,645 copies—and the sales in the last period were higher than that average.

Part of the explanation, of course, is that 1632 is the first novel in a long series. One of the other rules of thumb in publishing is that the first novel in a series will always outsell all the other, later volumes—for the good and simple reason that readers who come into a series midway and enjoy whatever book they happened to stumble across, will typically start the series at the beginning by going out and finding the first book. To a lesser degree, the same phenomenon applies to all later books in the series.

So, if you step back and look at sales of a series over a long stretch of time, what you will almost always discover is that the sales fall on a sliding continuum, with the earlier books selling more copies than the later ones. Mind you, this is a relative relationship of sales, not an absolute limit. With a successful series, all of the books in it will show increasing sales. But the earlier volumes, especially the first one, will always sell more copies than later volumes.

Fine. But I think it’s patently absurd to claim that the fact the novel has been available for free in electronic format during that entire period has nothing to do with it—much less that it somehow hurt the sales of the book.

I will now make two very blunt statements:

One. It is preposterous—downright lunacy—to accuse me of being a “scab” and lowering the pay rates for all authors, when I make far more money than ninety-nine percent of them. For the past several years, my annual gross income as a writer has been around $150,000. In fact, it’s been slowly climbing. That certainly doesn’t put me in the league of really top-selling authors like John Grisham or Robert Jordan or Nora Roberts—much less J.K. Rowling—but it does put me in the top one percentile of all commercial fiction authors, including science fiction and fantasy authors.

To put it another way, you might just as well—and just as idiotically—accuse major league baseball players of lowering the pay scales for ball players in the minor leagues. Or accuse established character actors who get regular work in the movies of lowering the pay scales for bit part actors and extras. (That’s what an author like me is, by the way, if we use the movies as an economic analogy. I’m not one of the top stars, but I get lots and lots of work and make an income that’s at least twice the median income for Americans today.)

Two. It is just as preposterous—downright lunacy, again—to claim that my policy of putting up all of my works for free online after an initial period is hurting my income, and therefore the income of other authors. In fact, it does the opposite.

So much for the “scab” theory.

All right. This essay is already over five thousand words long, and so I’ll have to break until the next issue of the magazine coming out in December. I believe I’ve thoroughly demolished the “scab theory,” but that still leaves the fallback argument. Which amount this:

Okay, fine, jackass. So you’re not a “scab.” What you are instead is a predator, and to make things worse, a predator who is invading an ecology that’s not accustomed to your methods of predation. What’s happening here is that the good sales you’re bragging about come as a result of predating on the sales of other authors who don’t put up their work for free. And, eventually—like any voracious and out-of-control predator—you will wind up predating yourself out of existence. The day will come when the success of predators like you and other authors who do the same will drive out so many authors that the publishers will finally be able to force you to accept lower terms.

There are so many fallacies lurking under this notion that I’ll need a full essay to deal with them. But, as I break off, I will simply urge the readers of this column to spend the next couple of months—occasionally, occasionally—pondering two simple questions.

Where is it written, and in what holy text, that the pie for commercial fiction is fixed and only so large? And, therefore, that the success of one author must come at the expense of another?

The reality is quite the opposite, as I’ll show in my next column.

* * *

Scattershot

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Scattershot the First: Harold Bloom coined the term “Anxiety of Influence” in the 1970’s, describing the situation facing the contemporary poet, but it transports effortlessly to science fiction. Poets, Bloom theorized, are intimidated by the work of previous poets, they have to write in the penumbra of that work, at every juncture their individual voice and subject treatment must compete with all of the great (or at least distinctive) poetry of the past. In order to surmount this anxiety, which can be the cause of crippling imitativeness or outright paralysis, poets must resort to a series of strategies, most of them of Freudian cast. Kill the father, overrun the castle, and so on. This anxiety has always been a problem, Bloom wrote, but it becomes weightier with chronology, with the accumulation of work, with the gravity of history. It may be the major problem confronted by the contemporary poet. There are those who will not admit to any anxiety at all, but those “poets” are for the most part non-readers of poetry. Of which, the editors of the quarterlies will tell you, there are tens of thousands.

The problem is obviously present in dear old science fiction. Has been for a long time, certainly at any point past the furious, expansive 1930’s and 1940’s when (as Alexei Panshin noted) the geography of the known and unknown universe and of our collective futures was being charted. Every science fiction writer since about 1950 has had to deal with that staggering backlog of innovative material. As science fiction eased its way past a succession of birthdays, (dating that birth from the cover date, April 1926, of the first issue of Amazing Stories), the weight of circumstance, the sheer growth of the repertoire changed the way it was written, the way in which writers approached the material. You can do variations on “Nightfall” or “The Cold Equations” but you can’t write them again and successors will create variations on your variations. What had happened by any mid-80’s issue of Isaac Asimov’s Magazine was that a reader without knowledge of the founding sources could feel helpless.

That anxiety of influence lays then on readers no less than writers; science fiction, a literature of convention and accretion, became insistently arcane almost of necessity. There may be fewer great science fiction writers than great poets (and the history of written poetry is more than a dozen times longer) but the harrowing and increasingly specialized nature of this medium may make that anxiety even more insistent. “Most of the stories I read now are cries of pain” Algis Budrys wrote in Galaxy in 1966. (1966!) “Most of the novels are funerary objects.”

Scattershot the Second: I noted in an earlier column how little help the important writers of the 1940’s and 1950’s had. There were some tolerant editors (notably Boucher & McComas, as with Alfred Bester) and there were sympathetic readers, some of whom studied his work with the intensity that young Beethoven brought to Mozart, but those short stories and the two amazing novels were essentially written. The Demolished Man, as I have noted, was rejected by every extant publisher of science fiction before being placed with the fan press, Shasta.

Under the circumstances, the body of work emerging from category science fiction in the 1940’s and 1950’s has to be viewed in the aggregate as a some kind of testimony to the human spirit. Thirty years ago I reminded Bruce McAllister that Kuttner and Moore stories like “Vintage Season,” “The Cure,” “The Code,” “Rain Check,” and “The Twonky” were sold to Astounding for a penny a word by two writers who (as Asimov reminisced about his parallel 1940’s career) had no reason to believe that after their initial publication the stories would ever appear anywhere else. “That’s remarkable,” Bruce said, “And you can’t say that they were writing stories like that for the money. The money couldn’t justify. It had to be out of love.”

Crazy love, say I, and when you look at it that sprawl of work in its flabbergasting aggregate, if you consider the entire run of John Campbell’s first decade, you have to resort to the spiritual or metaphysical to explain. Like the early Christian martyrs, this group of writers must have felt that the only true reward would be the enlistment itself, that the rewards if not on Earth would be in heaven. Duke Ellington, taking his band on the road in those decades, playing in small venues in cities far from New York, or atrocious venues in New York, would have understood this. “Gentlemen,” Murray Kempton recalls him saying before he took his band out to a really disheveled Madison Square Garden to play for Mike Todd’s birthday party, “It is our only responsibility to be better than what we see happening before us.”

Those troupers of the Golden Age were better than almost anything around them. They had to have known it. I cannot conceive of them not knowing it because otherwise the work would not have existed.

Scattershot the Third: The National Aeronautics and Space Agency was almost entirely the creature of the three Presidents of the 1960’s. Being so was the price of the Apollo Missions. “F– control!” one of my astronauts shouts in the craft on the first page of Beyond Apollo. “They’re all a bunch of pimps for the politicians anyway.” The true purpose of Apollo in the late 1960’s as the Moon landing became ever more imminent, was to divert public attention from the disaster of Vietnam, to give the populace “One of the few things to look at that they could feel came from their tax dollars and that would interest them.” (Don’t blame me for that line; it was John Campbell’s to me in June 1969.) When the moon had been “conquered,” when the Vietnam War had evanesced due to public disgust, when the disastrous and nearly fatal Apollo 13 showed how ersatz and dangerous the Apollo program could be, it all collapsed. There will be a moon landing again, and landings on Mars and maybe Jupiter, but they will not occur within the lifetime of anyone now on this planet, and if they occur at all will be in an entirely reconfigured social context.

A statement of mine to this point and phrased more mildly in the 1969 Science Fiction Writers of America Bulletin which I was then editing spurred enough loathing to get me pitched out of that voluntary position. It seems to me now to be unexceptionable. Some readers will hate the previous paragraph, but I can’t imagine that many will disagree with its fundamental point. The trap of government finance is that the agency or persons so financed become the government’s agents. Heinlein understood that pretty well more than half a century ago (and argued thus for space as private enterprise), and it is worth paying tribute to that insight in this year of his centenary. The old man and I had our share of disagreements, but here I am as much his acolyte and enabler as Neil Armstrong or Michael Collins were (perhaps unwillingly) Richard Nixon’s.

August 2007: New Jersey

Mail - July/August 2007

Written by Jim Baen’s Universe! staff

From Cory Caleb:

Just a comment and a (bunch of) support for you, Eric.

I first ‘found’ Baen as a publisher through David Weber’s Honor Harrington books. And some of his other works, also published by Baen (first purchased at a local used-books store until I ‘caught up’ with the series around the time of Honor Among Enemies, and then purchased brand-new from Kepler’s and Printers, Inc. And then I found your work through poking around on the web (living in Silicon Valley, I was one of the proverbial ‘early adopters’ of everything from web browsing in general through expensive hardware that was cheap ten months later!).

I think it was 1999 when I first purchased anything from the WebScriptions service. I had shelves and shelves of paper books, but - silly, foolish early adopter that I was and am - I had also purchased a Rocket eBook reader. I liked the device, though it certainly had flaws. Since that time, I’ve bought a great many books (and frequently WebScription months). Sure, I could probably track down bootleg copies but - why bother? I get quality for an eminently reasonable price, and I get to be fairly sure that the author’s seeing at least a portion of what I’ve paid.

I have a job that requires I sit in front of a computer for hours on end, generally in the wee hours of the night and morning. When nothing is breaking - I’m just watching and waiting for things to break. Reading books in a web browser window is a great solution to keeping me alert. I can read a bit of something new from a new author. I can re-read a book I’ve enjoyed. I can see what happens next to my favorite group of characters. I can - and here, as a younger reader (I guess - I’m thirty-two) I really appreciate the work you and Jim Baen did - discover and re-discover works that were published well before I was born and had not been particularly aware of before.

I frequent Amazon and Borders and the local brick-and-mortar shops. I buy a fair number of books (while sci-fi, and specifically military sci-fi are my favorite types of fiction, like anyone else, I read all sorts of stuff) in various formats, but I never fail to buy at least a few WebScription months each year.

Your point about piracy and the reasons for it was fairly spot-on. One of the interesting things to note is that back in the heyday of Napster, when illegal music sharing and piracy were at their height (or so we’re often told), I bought one or two CDs a week. Think about that - one or two a WEEK. Easily fifty to a hundred each year. Now, not so much. I buy almost no CDs at all, in truth. One or two a YEAR, if it’s busy. I do buy from the iTunes music store, however - having one of the near-ubiquitous white rectangles and embracing the convenience of browse-sample-buy-have. The DRM issues are a little annoying, but I rarely notice it. And hey - guess what - the DRM free stuff is there too.

I guess I’m rambling here - the danger of it being two-thirty in the morning and nothing happening!

Just wanted to say Thank You. For putting your books up. For telling your stories. And for making the reading of ebooks not have to suck so badly. And thanks for taking your valuable time to read this.

-Caleb

From Maria Schneider:

Dear Editors:

I would just like to thank Baen and the bar for having a forum that allowswriters to get critiques, the possibility of publication—and to be read in a timely manner by professional slush readers. In a world of photocopied rejection forms, Baen offers an unmatched opportunity—feedback from well-read, big-hearted professionals.

I hate the board, I really do. It means taking a deep breath and putting my work on the line. I know when I put it out there I am going to be asked to step up and make it better. It means…feedback on the best parts of my story and on the worst parts.It challenges me as a writer and a person—and makes both better.

The bar is obviously a huge, huge, HUGE amount of work.

I just want you to know it is deeply appreciated.

Thanks to all the bar-flies and to Baen for expending time, energy, money—and heart.

Maria

October 2007

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Senator (and presidential candidate) John McCain is joined by Jack McDevitt, Eric Flint, Randal L. Schwartz, Stoney Compton, Alethea Kontis (an editor at Solaris Books and buyer for Ingram), Doctor Aubrey de Grey (a gerontologist promoting medical life extension), Uncle Timmy (founder and chairman of the SF&F convention LibertyCon) and Walt (Bananaslug) Boyes for the September and October 2007 episodes of The Future And You.

The Future And You is an award-winning audio podcast about the future which may be downloaded and enjoyed, or even copied and shared, for free. Every episode contains numerous interviews which reveal a wide variety of ideas and opinion about the future from a wide variety of people.

And as always, each episode of The Future And You contains an installment in our serialization of the hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they do their bit to let the world at large know what’s in the current issue of Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine.

* * *

Topics in the October episode

Senator (and presidential candidate) John McCain manages to first pleasantly surprise and then thoroughly scare your host with his answers to your humble host’s questions. Not questions about the war, mind you, but about federal funding of scientific research.

The senator describes his support of embryonic stem cell research, and specifies that this support is not given lightly. He understands that the issue has split the pro-life community—a community in which the senator includes himself. “I have prayed a lot about it,” he says, and explains that his support it not just in general terms; he’s in favor of it receiving federal funding. He also voices support for continued federal funding of nanotechnology research.

But it’s when asked whether he favors the manned mission side of NASA or the robotic probe side that Senator John McCain says something all who favor space research need to hear. “I think those decisions have been delayed for a long time. We need more congressional hearings on them. And we should understand that it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to fund both. And our problem in NASA for a long time has been a failure to set priorities, and trying to fund everything. As president, I will make those decisions and set those priorities.”

If I understand the senator correctly, he intends to close down many of NASA’s divisions and projects, and lay off many of its scientists and engineers—a scary thought for all those who believe humanity’s vast future can not be squeezed into one claustrophobic little planet of questionable climatic stability.

Eric Flint is highly skeptical of both nanotechnology and The Singularity; “Hooey,” he calls them both. The late Jim Baen, he recalls, also thought nanotechnology was nonsense and yet, though it seems contradictory, was a big fan of The Singularity. (Eric laughs as he explains that “the word contradictory was made for Jim Baen.”)

While Eric Flint is optimistic about the future in general, he laments what he sees as a slowing in the rate of scientific advancement during the last half century. Instead of advancement, he says, “what we get today is endless refinements of existing technology.” There was a time when we saw a parade of things that never existed before: the phonograph, the automobile, radio, TV, scuba gear, airplanes, rockets, calculators, computers; now we just keep improving the old stuff. His theory is that our modern economy is currently dominated by a small number of giant corporations; and radical scientific advancement would upset their applecart.

Eric also admits his reaction to cryonics is a bit hostile, but explains why he feels this way.

Jack McDevitt says he is not as optimistic about the future as he used to be and provides many concrete examples from his own experiences. For example, he laments that our government has stopped looking for asteroids which threaten to hit the earth—a project which would cost little and yet might easily save millions of lives. He also worries that “too many people think patriotism means following the President, no matter what.” He feels the Singularity is a real danger for our future. And on a philosophical note; he explains one of the secret little hypocrisies which we all share: “We say we want the schools to make our kids smart,” but what we really want is for them to “make our kids think like us.”

Doctor Aubrey de Grey is a gerontologist promoting medical life extension. He speaks of extending human lives, as well as nanotechnology, AI (artificial intelligence) and The Singularity. He believes that significant medical life extension can be achieved within a few decades without requiring nanotechnology, but that extending life expectancies indefinitely will require we develop a robust nanotechnology.

Having worked for a while in what’s known as “Weak AI,” he describes with some familiarity, but not a lot of confidence in its eventual success, an ongoing project which is attempting to produce something called “Friendly AI” (Strong AI which has been specifically engineered to be incapable of harming humans—apparently reminiscent of Asimov’s three laws of robotics.) He mentions that he sees no need, either practical or ethical, for Strong AI (AI with recursive self-improvement).

In nanotechnology, Doctor de Grey points out that molecular manufacturing (sometimes envisioned as smart dust or a magic box or even the infamous gray goo) can only be achieved with recursive self-replication, which we will almost surely not develop for many decades. Fortunately, biomedical uses of nanotech during the next decade or two will not require recursive self replication, and will yield many astounding benefits.

He worries that unanticipated technological innovations will periodically become widely available without our having the time needed to think about their ramifications, and that this will cause terrible instability within our civilization.

Predicting the approach of the Singularity, he feels, is far less certain than predicting the coming developments in medical longevity.

Alethea Kontis is a fantasy editor for Solaris Books in the UK and a buyer for Ingram as well as a writer of short fiction. Within fiction, she sees a lot of blending of the genres, and describes a variety of cross fertilizations. Horror, for example, seems to be working its way into every genre; along with SF&F going into mainstream and vise versa. She also sees many writers worrying about being pigeonholed. “Everyone wants to be in the literary or mainstream rather than any one genre.”

She feels that the SF&F short story market is moving more strongly online with several professional level magazines becoming increasingly popular. And people who read online tend to gravitate to the shorter of the short stories, she says. Thus, even though electrons are cheap, this is putting pressure on the magazines and writers to provide readers with stories that are shorter and more tightly written.

Outside of writing, Alethea has noticed that her friends, like herself, rarely watch TV anymore. Instead, they watch DVDs or download shows off the internet. Her worry is that this will limit the creation of quality TV shows since the advertising money has even now started to dry up.

As always, each episode of The Future And You contains another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they do their bit to let the world at large know what’s in the current issue of Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine.

* * *

Topics in the September episode

Jack McDevitt, author of the Nebula Award winning novel Seeker, as well as thirteen other novels, has made a career out of imagining our future. Here he describes what he anticipates and wishes for our future, as well as what he fears.

Doctor Aubrey de Grey explains that if you can cause a mouse to live an unnaturally long life you can win a huge cash prize. Inspired by the now famous space-commercializing “X-Prize,” The Methuselah Mouse Prize is just as real but is designed to popularize and promote innovative medical research in Life Extension. Doctor de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation—who is both a gerontologist and a transhumanist—speaks of this and other aspects of medical life extension.

Randal L. Schwartz: What would you do if you were unjustly arrested on felony charges as a computer hacker? Randal L. Schwartz knows what he would do since this actually happened to him.

Uncle Timmy: In his twenty years of running a science fiction convention, Uncle Timmy (the founder and chairman of LibertyCon) has spent quality time with some of speculative fiction’s greatest visionaries. In this candid interview Uncle Timmy reveals memories and anecdotes from behind those many scenes.

And as always, each episode of The Future And You contains another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and features ten minutes of Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug) & Stoney Compton as they let the world know what’s in the current issue of Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine.

* * *

News Items in the September and October issues

Dragon*Con

Peggy Gregory (my photographer/assistant/sister) and I attended Dragon*Con in Atlanta over the Labor Day Weekend. We were accompanied by my girlfriend Veronica and her daughter Whitney who turned eighteen during the trip.

While there I spoke on panels, did a book signing, got some nice interviews for my show, renewed old friendships, made a few new friendships, chatted with Eric Estrada, and embarrassed myself by greeting Jody Lynn Nye’s husband Bill Fawcett with a hardy, “Hi, Bob.”

Despite the flub, my little group and I had a nice time. We enjoyed the art show, dealer room and walk of fame; we joined the audience for a taping of an episode of “The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd” and saw hundreds of people in wonderfully handmade costumes, including countless scantily clad women in bikini armor, cheerleading outfits and belly dancing regalia.

* * *

Your host is now a Contributing Editor

As many of you know, for almost a year now I’ve been a columnist for Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine. I’ve found this both enjoyable and fulfilling.

I am pleased to announce that a few weeks ago (on August 18, 2007) my name was added to the staff page on the Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine website and I was promoted to “Contributing Editor.”

I’m proud to see my name included with the rest of the magazine’s staff. Not just because it provides me with a nifty new brag, but because it makes me feel more a part of the JBU team.

* * *

Email from Listeners

I receive many emails from listeners each month. Sometimes the listeners just want to tell me they enjoy the show, but sometimes they have ideas, opinions, theories or facts that they wish to contribute. Here are some recent emails.

Randal L. Schwartz (who has appeared in several episodes) wrote:

-QUOTE-

After listening to my bit about the singularity, I realize that I have a better model now, and actually some concession to your point of view.

Science processes are roughly:

() Theorize based on existing knowledge

() Synthesize a new experiment to expand the knowledge

() Perform the experiment

() Observe its results

() Analyze the results for conformance/deviance with existing knowledge

() Repeat

Of these, having ultra cheap thinking can help all but the “perform the experiment”. However, “perform the experiment” is what I called the “gating factor” since without ultracheap resources, would require a prioritization of resources from other human activities.

For example, in gene research, although we have huge amounts of data that having cheap thinking about that data might help with theorize and synthesize, it won’t help with performing the experiment… we still have to create a critter, let it grow up, and then see if our gene splicing worked as we predicted.

But there is a place where cheap thinking can help narrow the experimentation: protein folding. “Folding-at-home” is a demonstration that the bottleneck for that is computing, not experiments.

And I’m sure there are a few others; but unfortunately, not many. :)

-UNQUOTE-

* * *

Barry Hayworth is a professional statistician in Brisbane, Australia. He wrote a very long email describing the trends he sees. Here is a long contiguous segment from his email:

-QUOTE-

For many years I worked with a commercial market research company, these days I work for a government statistical agency in the state of Queensland, which performs survey research to inform social policy. My professional life has a lot to do with how to draw good and representative samples of people and businesses for surveys. This mostly means telephone surveying, creating lists of phone numbers at random to target the people we want. For the last twenty years or so this has been the mainstay of the Market Research industry, being quick, easy and accurate - almost everyone has a telephone, electronic telephone directories have been readily available to draw samples from, and computer systems were available to allow results to be entered directly into the computer by the telephone interviewer.

However, the golden age of telephone surveys is coming to an end. Several trends are conspiring to make this more difficult. First, there is the technology. The stereotypical house, with one phone connected by landline, is starting to decline. As more and more people have mobile phones, households which have only mobile phones and no landline are starting to become more common. These sorts of households are hard to survey, as random phone samples are generally generated only for landlines (here in Australia landlines and mobile numbers use different prefixes, so there is no confusion between the two - I believe that the US is different in that regard). To make life harder, mobile phones are much less likely to be listed in the phone book - a landline will be listed by default, but a mobile won’t be. Even if we did generate a random list of mobile numbers we would have no idea where they were located. This makes life hard if we’re trying to survey people in a particular city, or even a state. This is a worry, because mobile-only households tend to be younger people or those who have moved recently, and leaving them out has the danger to bias our surveys towards people who are older and more conservative.

Another rather worrying trend for the survey industry is the difficulty in getting directory listings. For many years (starting in the late 80s) it was possible to buy a CD ROM with the full contents of the Australian white pages directory, which could be exported and manipulated at will - simple, cheap and up-to-date. Because Australia is a relatively small country, the whole directory would fit on a single CD. These CDs did not come from the official government telecom Telstra, but from small startup companies which had the directories scanned or data entered, then prepared the CDs. Even when we didn’t draw a sample directly from phone book, these listings were invaluable for working out what phone number ranges were in use - in Australia (and I assume elsewhere) there are vastly more phone number allocated to the different telcos than are actually in use.

The problem is that Telstra (now partially privatized and flexing its commercial muscles) has recently put a stop to this. Through a series of court cases, they managed to convince the courts that they hold copyright over the telephone directory, and that organizations which repackaged it on CD ROM were in violation of this copyright. Oddly it was the copyright argument which was used, rather than (say) privacy (as the CD ROM directories allowed reverse searching of phone numbers). The result of this, for the likes of us, is that we need to find some other comprehensive source of phone numbers for our surveys, or risk results that don’t properly represent the people we are trying to measure. We’re looking into a few possibilities, but so far haven’t come up with anything.

A third problem for surveys is competition from telemarketers. Very few people enjoy being telemarketed, the problem for the likes of us is that the prevalence of telemarketers has eroded people’s goodwill towards unexpected phone calls - they are much more likely to hang up before we get a chance to say what we are doing (what we call a “Phone Slam”). Recently, a national Do Not Call Register has been set up such that it is illegal for a telemarketer to call someone on the register. This has been well received - to date, there are 1.5 million numbers on the list, which isn’t bad for a population of 20 million. Whether we’ll see response rates increase is another matter, though.

Anyway, thanks again for the podcast - I’ve been really enjoying it.

Barry Haworth.

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