Jim Baen’s Universe

Vol 2 Num 5 February 2008

Written by Jim Baen’s Universe! Staff

Jim Baen’s Universe, Volume 2, Issue 5

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

The Smartest Mob …

(a parable about times soon to come)

Written by David Brin

Illustrated by Lee Kuruganti

Washington was like a geezer—overweight and sagging, but with attitude. Most of its gutty heft lay below the beltway, in waistlands that had been downwind on Awfulday.

Downwind, but not out.

When droves of upperclass child-bearers fled the invisible plumes enveloping Fairfax and Alexandria, those briefly-empty ghost towns quickly refilled with immigrants—the latest mass of teemers, yearning to be free and willing to endure a little radiation in exchange for a pleasant five-bedroom that could be subdivided into nearly as many apartments. Spacious living rooms began a second life as store fronts. Workshops took over four-car garages and lawns turned into produce gardens. Swimming pools made excellent refuse bins—until government recovered enough to start cracking down.

Passing overhead, Tor could track signs of suburban renewal from her first class seat aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista . Take those swimming pools. A majority of the kidney-shaped ponds now gleamed with clear liquid—mostly water (as testified by the spectral scanning feature of her TruVu spectacles)—welcoming throngs of children who splashed under summertime heat, sufficiently dark-skinned to bear the bare sun unflinching.

So much for the notion that dirty bombs automatically make a place unfit for breeders, she thought. Let yuppies abandon perfectly good mansions because of a little strontium dust. People from Java and Celebes were happy to insource.

Wasn’t this America? Call it resolution—or obstinacy—but after three rebuilds, the Statue of Liberty still beckoned.

The latest immigrants, those who filled Washington’s waistland vacuum, weren’t ignorant. They could read warning labels and health stats, posted on every lamp post and VR level. So? More people died in Jakarta from traffic or stray bullets. Anyway, mutation rates quickly dropped to levels no worse than Kiev, a few years after Awfulday. And Washington had more civic amenities.

Waistlanders also griped a lot less about minor matters like zoning. That made it easier to acquire rights-of-way, re-pioneering new paths back into those unlucky cities that had been dusted. Innovations soon turned those transportation hubs into boom towns. An ironic twist to emerge from terror/sabotage, especially when sky trains began crisscrossing North America.

Through her broad window aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, Tor gazed across a ten mile separation to the West-Bound Corridor, where long columns of cargo zeppelins lumbered, ponderous as whales and a hundred times larger. Chained single-file and heavily laden, the dirigibles floated barely two hundred meters above the ground, obediently trailing teams of heavy-duty locomotives. Each towing cable looked impossibly slender for hauling fifty behemoths across a continent. But while sky trains weren’t fast, or suited for raw materials, they beat any other method for transporting medium-value goods.

And passengers. Those who were willing to trade a little time for inexpensive luxury.

Tor moved her attention much closer, watching the Spirit’s majestic shadow flow like an eclipse over rolling suburban countryside, so long and dark that flowers would start to close and birds might be fooled to roost, pondering nightfall. Free from any need for engines of her own, the skyliner glided almost silently over hill and dale. Not as quick as a jet, but more scenic—free of carbon levies or ozone tax—and far cheaper. Setting her TruVus to magnify, she followed the Spirit’s tow cable along the East-Bound Express Rail, pulled relentlessly by twelve thousand horses, courtesy of the deluxe maglev tug, Umberto Nobile.

What was it about a lighter-than-air craft that drew the eye? Oh, certainly most of them now had pixelated, tunable skins that could be programmed for any kind of spectacle. Passing near a population center—even a village in the middle of nowhere—the convoy of cargo zeps might flicker from one gaudy advertisement to the next, for anything from a local gift shop to the mail-order wares of some megaCorp. At times, when no one bid for the display space, a chain of dirigibles might tune their surfaces to resemble clouds … or flying pigs. Whim, after all, was another modern currency. Everybody did it on the VR levels.

Only with zeppelins, you could paint whimsical images across a whole stretch of the real sky.

Tor shook her head.

But no. That wasn’t it. Even bare and gray, they could not be ignored. Silent, gigantic, utterly calm, a zep seemed to stand for a kind of grace that human beings might build, but never know in their own frenetic lives.

“Will you be wanting anything else before we arrive in the Federal District, Madam?” asked a voice from above.

She glanced up at a servitor—little more than a boxy delivery receptacle—that clung to its own slim rail on a nearby bulkhead, leaving the walkway free for passengers.

“No, thanks,” Tor murmured automatically, a polite habit of her generation. Younger folk had already learned to snub machinery slaves, except when making clipped demands.

“Can you tell me when we’re due?”

“Certainly, Madam. There is a slowdown in progress due to heightened security. Hence, we may experience some delay crossing the Beltway. But there is no cause for alarm. And we remain ahead of schedule because of that tailwind across the plains.”

“Hm. Heightened security?”

“For the Artifact Conference, Madam.”

“But—” Tor frowned. “That was already scheduled. Taken into account. So it shouldn’t affect our timetable.”

“There is no cause for alarm,” the servitor repeated. “We just got word, two minutes ago. An order to reduce speed, that’s all.”

Glancing outside, Tor could see the effects of slowing, in a gradual change of altitude. The Spirit’s tow cable slanted a little steeper, catching up to the ground-hugging locomotive tug.

Altitude: 359 meters said a telltale in the corner of her left TruVu lens.

“Will you be wanting to change seats for our approach to the nation’s capital?” the servitor continued. “An announcement will be made when we come within sight of the Mall, though you may want to claim a prime viewing spot earlier. Children and first time visitors get priority, of course.”

“Of course.”

A trickle of tourists had already begun streaming forward to the main Observation Lounge. Parents, dressed in bright-colored sarongs and patagonian slacks, herded kids who sported the latest youth fashion—fake antennae and ersatz scales—imitating some of the alien personalities that had been discovered aboard the Dean Artifact. A grand conference may have been called to declare whether it was a genuine case of First Contact, or just another hoax. But popular culture had already cast judgement. The Artifact was cool.

“You say an alert came through two minutes ago?” Tor wondered. Nothing had flashed yet in her peripherals. But maybe the vigilance thresholds were set too high. With a rapid series of clicks on her tooth implant, she adjusted them downward.

Immediately, crimson tones began creeping in from the edges of her specs, offering links that whiffed and throbbed unpleasantly.

Uh-oh.

“Not an alert, Madam. No, no. Just preliminary, precautionary—”

But Tor’s attention had already veered. Using both clicks and subvocal commands, she sent her TruVus swooping through the data overlays of virtual reality, following threads of a security situation. Sensors tracked every twitch of the iris, following and often anticipating her choices while colored data-cues jostled and flashed.

“May I take away any rubbish or recycling?” asked the boxy tray on the wall. It dropped open a receptacle, like a hungry jaw, eager to be fed. The servitor waited in vain for a few moments. Then, noting that her focus lay far away, it silently folded and departed.

“No cause for alarm,” Tor muttered sardonically as she probed and sifted the dataways. Someone should have banished that cliche from the repertoire of all AI devices. No human over the age of thirty would ever hear the phrase without wincing. Of all the lies that accompanied Awfulday, it had been the worst.

Some of Tor’s favorite software agents were already reporting back from the Grid.

Koppel—the summarizer—zoomed toward public, corporate and government feeds, collating official pronouncements. Most of them were repeating the worrisome cliche.

Gallup—her pollster program—sifted for opinion. People weren’t buying it, apparently. On a scale of one-thousand, “no cause for alarm” had a credibility rating of eighteen, and dropping. Tor felt a wrench in the pit of her stomach.

Bernstein leaped into the whistle-blower circuits, hunting down gossip and hearsay. As usual, there were far too many rumors for any person—or personal ai—to trawl. Only this time, the flood was overwhelming even the sophisticated filters at the Skeptic Society. MediaCorp seemed no better; her status as a member of the Journalistic Staff only won her a queue number from the Research Division and a promise of response “in minutes.”

Minutes?

It was beginning to look like a deliberate disinformation flood, time-unleashed in order to drown out any genuine tattles. Gangsters, terrorists and reffers had learned the hard way that careful plans can be upset by some soft-hearted henchman, wrenched by remorseful second thoughts about innocent bystanders. Many a scheme had been spoiled by some lowly underling, who posted an anonymous squeal at the last minute. To prevent this, masterminds and ringleaders now routinely unleashed cascades of ersatz confessions, just as soon as an operation was underway—a spamming of faux regret, artificially generated, ranging across the whole spectrum of plausible sabotage and man-made disasters.

Staring at a flood of warnings, Tor knew that one or more of the rumors had to be true. But which?

Washington area beltway defenses have already been breached by machoist suiciders infected with pulmonella plague, heading for the Capitol …

A coalition of humanist cults have decided to put an end to all this nonsense about a so-called “alien artifact” from interstellar space …

The U.S. President, seeking to reclaim traditional authority, is about to nationalize the DC-area civil militia on a pretext …

Exceptional numbers of toy airplanes were purchased in the Carolinas , this month, suggesting that a swarm attack may be in the making, just like the O’Hare Incident …

A method has been found to convert zeppelins into flying bombs …

Among the international dignitaries, who were invited to Washington to view the Dean Artifact, there may be a few who plan to …

There are times when human/neuronal paranoia can react faster than mere digital simulacra. Tor’s old fashioned cortex snapped to attention a full five seconds before her ais, Bernstein and Columbo, made the same connection.

Zeppelins … flying bombs …

It sounded unlikely … probably distraction-spam.

But I happen to be on a zeppelin.

That wasn’t just a realization. The words formed a message. With subvocal grunts and tooth-click punctuations, Tor broadcast it far and wide. Not just to her favorite correlation and stringer groups, but to several hundred Citizen Action Networks. Her terse missive zoomed across the Net indiscriminately, calling to every CAN that had expressed interest in the zep rumor.

This is Tor Pleiades, investigative reporter for MediaCorp—credibility rating seven-hundred and fifty-two—aboard the passenger zep Spirit of Chula Vista . We are approaching the DC Beltway defense zone. That may put me at a right place-time to examine one of the reffer rumors.

I request a smart mob coalescence. Feedme!

Disinformation, a curse with ancient roots, had been updated with ultra-modern ways of lying. Machoists and other bastards might plant sleeper-ais in a million virtual locales, programmed to pop out at a pre-set time and spam every network with autogenerated “plausibles” … randomly generated combinations of word and tone that were drawn from recent news, each variant sure to rouse the paranoic fears of someone.

Mutate this ten million times (easy enough to do in virtual space) and you’ll find a nerve to tweak in anyone.

Citizens could fight back, combatting lies with light. Sophisticated programs compared eyewitness accounts from many sources, weighted by credibility, offering average folk tools to re-forge Consensus Reality, while discarding the dross. Only that took time. And during an emergency, time was the scarcest commodity of all.

Public avowal worked more quickly. Calling attention to your own person. Saying: “look, I’m right here, real, credible and accountable—I not ai—so take me seriously.”

Of course that required guts, especially since Awfulday. In the face of danger, ancient human instinct cried out; duck and cover. Don’t draw attention to yourself.

Tor considered that natural impulse for maybe two seconds, then blared on all levels. Dropping privacy cryption, she confirmed her ticketed billet and physical presence aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, with realtime biometrics and a dozen in-cabin camera views.

“I’m here,” she murmured, breathlessly, toward any fellow citizen whose correlation-attention ais would listen.

“Rally and feedme. Tell me what to do.”

Calling up a smart mob was tricky. People might already be too scattered and distracted by the rumor storm. The number to respond might not reach critical mass—in which case all you’d get is a smattering of critics, kibbitzers and loudmouths, doing more harm than good. A negative-sum rabble—or bloggle—its collective IQ dropping, rather than climbing, with every new volunteer to join. Above all, you needed to attract a core group—the seed cell—of online know-it-alls, constructive cranks and correlation junkies, armed with the latest coalescence software, who were smart and savvy enough to serve as prefrontals … coordinating a smart mob without dominating. Providing focus without quashing the creativity of a group mind.

We recognize you, Tor Pleiades, intoned a low voice, conducting through her jawbone receiver. Direct sonic induction made it safe from most eavesdropping, even if someone had a parabolic dish aimed at her ear.

We have lit a wiki. Can you help us check out one of these rumors? One that might possibly be a whistle-blow?

The conjoined mob-voice sounded strong, authoritative. Tor’s personal interface found good credibility scores as it coalesced. An index-marker in her left peripheral showed two-hundred and thirty members and climbing—generally sufficient to wash out individual ego.

“First tell me,” she answered, subvocalizing. Sensors in her shirt collar picked up tiny flexings in her throat, tongue and larynx, without any need to make actual sound. “Tell me, has anyone sniffed something unusual about the Spirit? I don’t see or hear anything strange. But some of you out there may be in a better position to snoop company status reports or ship-board operational parameters.”

There was a pause. Followed by an apologetic tone.

Nothing seems abnormal at the public level. Company web-traffic has gone up six fold in the last ten minutes … but the same is true all over, from government agencies to networks of amateur scientists.

As for the zeppelin you happen to be aboard, we’re naturally interested because of its present course, scheduled shortly to moor in Washington , about the same time that delegates are arriving for the Artifact Conference.

Tor nodded grimly, a nuance that her interface conveyed to the group mind.

“And those operational readouts?”

We can try access by applying for a Freedom of Information writ. That will take some minutes, though. So we may have to supplement the FOIA with a little hacking and bribery. The usual.

Leave that to us.

Meanwhile, there’s a little on-site checking you can do.

Be our hands and eyes, will you, Tor?

She was already on her feet.

“Tell me where to go … “

Head aft, past the unisex toilet.

” … but let’s have a consensus agreement, okay?” she added while moving. “I get an exclusive on any interviews that follow. In case this turns out to be more than …”

There is a security hatch, next to the crew closet, the voice interrupted. Adjust your specs for full mob access please.

“Done,” she said, feeling a little sheepish over the request for a group exclusive. But after all, she was supposed to be a pro. MediaCorp might be tuning in soon, examining transcripts. They would expect a professional’s attention to the niceties.

That’s better. Now zoom close on the control pad.We’ve been joined by an off-duty zep mechanic who worked on this ship last week.

“Look, maybe I can just call a crew member. Invoke FOIA and open it legally—”

No time. We’ve filed for immunity as an ad hoc citizen posse. Under the post-Awfulday crisis rules.

“Oh sure. With me standing here to take the physical rap if it’s refused … .”

Your choice, Tor. If you’re in, press buttons in this order.

A virtual image of the keypad appeared in front of Tor, overlaying the real one.

“No cause for alarm,” she muttered.

What was that?

“Never mind.”

Feeling somewhat detached, as if under remote control, her hand reached out to tap the proposed sequence.

Nothing happened.

No good. They must’ve rotated the progression.

At that moment, the wiki-voice sounded a bit less cool, more individualized. A telltale indicator in her TruVu showed that some high-credibility member of the mob was stepping up with an assertive suggestion.

But you can tell it isn’t randomized. I bet it’s still a company-standard maintenance code. Here, try this instead.

Coalescence levels seemed to waver only a little, so the mob trusted this component member. Tor went along, punching the pad again with the new pattern.

“Any luck getting that FOIA writ?” she asked, meanwhile. “You said it would take just few minutes. Maybe we’d better wait …”

Procrastination met its rebuttal with a simple a click, as the access panel slid aside, revealing a slim, tubelike ladder.

Up.

No hesitation in the mob voice. Five hundred and twelve fellow citizens wanted her to do this. Five hundred and sixteen … .

Tor swallowed. Then complied.

* * *

The ladderway exposed a truth that was hidden from most passengers, cruising in cushioned comfort within the neatly paneled main compartment. Physics—especially gravity—had not changed appreciably in the century that separated the first great zeppelin era from this one. Designers still had to strive for lightness, everywhere they could.

Stepping from spindly rungs onto the cargo deck, Tor found herself amid a maze of spiderlike webbery, instead of walls and partitions. Her feet made gingerly impressions in foamy mesh that seemed to be mostly air. Stacks of luggage—all strictly weighed back in Diegotown—formed bundles that resembled monstrous eggs, bound together by air-gel foam. Hardly any metal could be seen. Not even aluminum or titanium struts.

“Shall I look at the bags?” she asked while reaching into her purse. “I have an omnisniffer.”

What model? inquired the voice in her jaw, before it changed tone by abrupt consensus. More authoritatively, it said—Never mind. The bags were all scanned in Diego. We doubt anything could be smuggled aboard.

But a rumor-tattle points to possible danger higher up. We’re betting on that one.

“Higher?” She frowned. “There’s nothing up there except …”

Tor’s voice trailed off as a schematic played within her TruVus, pointing aft to another ladder, this one made of ropey fibers.

Arrows shimmered in VR yellow, for emphasis.

We finally succeeded in getting a partial feed from the Spirit’s operational parameters. And yes, there’s something odd going on.

They are using onboard water to make lift gas, at an unusual rate.

“Is that dangerous?”

It shouldn’t be.

But we may be able to find out more, if you hurry.

She sighed, stepping warily across the spongey surface. Tor hadn’t yet spotted a crew member. They were probably also busy chasing rumors, different ones, chosen by the company’s prioritization subroutines. Anyway, a modern towed-zep was mostly automatic, requiring no pilot, engineer or navigator. A century ago, the Hindenberg carried forty officers, stewards and burly riggers, just to keep the ornate apparatus running and deliver the same number of passengers from Europe to the U.S. At twice the length, Spirit carried five times as many people, served by half a dozen attendants.

Below her feet, passengers would be jostling for a better view of the Langley Crater, or maybe Arlington Cemetery, while peering ahead for the enduring spire of the Washington Monument. Or did some of those people already sniff an alert coming on, through their own liaison networks? Were families starting to cluster near the emergency chutes? Tor wondered if she should be doing the same.

This new ladder was something else. It felt almost alive and responded to her footstep by contracting … carrying her upward in a smooth-but-sudden jerk. Smart elastics, she realized. Fine for professionals. But the public had never taken a liking to ladders that twitch. The good news: it would take just a few actual footsteps at this rate, concentrating to slip her soles carefully onto one rung after the next … and worrying about what would happen when she reached the unpleasant-looking “hatch” that lay just overhead.

Meanwhile, the voice in her jaw took on a strange, lilting quality. The next contribution must have come from an individual member. Someone generally appreciated.

Come with me, higher than high,

Dropping burdensome things.

Lighter than clouds, we can fly,

Thoughts spread wider than wings.

Be like the whale, behemoth,

Enormous, yet weightless beings,

Soundlessly floating, the sky

Beckons a mammal that sings.

Tor liked the offering. You almost wanted to earn it, by coming up with a tune … .

… only the “hatch” was now just ahead, or above, almost pressing against her face. A throbbing iris of polyorganic membranes, much like the quasi-living external skin of the Spirit. Coming this close, inhaling the exudate aromas, made Tor feel queasy.

Relax. The voice was back to business. Probably led by the zep mechanic.

You’ll need a command word. Touch that nub in the middle to get attention and say Cinnamon.

“Cinnamon?”

It was only a query, but the barrier reacted instantly. With a faintly squishy sound, the door dilated. The stringy stepladder resumed its programmed journey, carrying her upward.

Aboard old-time zeps like Hindenberg, the underslung gondola had been devoted mainly to engines and crew, while paying passengers occupied two broad decks at the base of the giant dirigible’s main body. The Spirit of Chula Vista had a similar layout, except that the gondola was mainly for show. Having climbed above all the sections designed for people and cargo, Tor now rode the throbbing ladder into a cathedral of lifter cells, each of them a vast chamber filled with gas that was much lighter than air.

Hundreds of transparent, filmy balloons—cylindrical and tall like Sequoia trunks—crowded and pressed together, stretching from the web-floor where she stood all the way up to the arching ceiling of the Spirit’s rounded skin. Tor could only move among these towering columns along four narrow paths leading port or starboard … fore or aft. The arrow in her TruVu suggested port, without pulsing insistence. Most members of the smart mob had never been in a place like this. Curiosity—the strongest modern craving—formed more of these ad hoc groups than any other passion.

Heading in the suggested direction, Tor could not resist reaching out, touching some of the tall cells, their polymer surfaces quivering like the giant bubbles that she used to create with toy wands at birthday parties. They appeared so light, so delicate … .

Half of the cells contain helium, explained the voice, now so individualized that it had to be a specific person—perhaps the zep mechanic or a dirigible aficionado. See how those membranes are made with a faintly greenish tint? They surround the larger hydrogen cells.

Tor blinked.

“Hydrogen. Isn’t that dangerous?”

She pictured the Hindenberg—or LZ 129—that greatest and most ill-fated ancient zeppelin, whose fiery end at Lakehurst, New Jersey, marked the sudden end of the First Zep Era, in May of 1937. Once ignited—( how remained a topic of fierce debate)—flames had engulfed the mighty airship from mooring-tip to gondola, to its swastika-emblazoned rudder in little more than a minute. To this day, journalists envied the news crew that had been on-hand that day with primitive movie cameras, capturing onto acetate some of the most stunning footage and memorable imagery that ever accompanied a technological disaster.

Nowadays, what reff or terror group wouldn’t just love to claim credit for an event so vivid? So attention-grabbing?

As if reading her mind, the voice lectured.

Hydrogen is much lighter and more buoyant than helium. Hydrogen is also cheap and readily available. Using it improves the economics of zep travel. Though of course, care must be taken … .

Tor was approaching the end of her narrow corridor. For the first time, she encountered the trusswork that kept Spirit rigid—a dirigible—instead of a floppy, balloonlike blimp. A girder made of carbon tubes, woven into an open latticework of triangles, stretched and curved both forward and aft. Nearby, it joined another tensegrity girder at right angles. That one would form a girdle, encircling the Spirit’s widest girth.

Tracking Tor’s interest, her TruVu spun out statistics and schematics. At 800 feet in length, the Hindenberg had been just ten percent shorter than the Titanic. In contrast, the Spirit of Chula Vista stretched more than twice that length. And yet, its shell and trussworks weighed less than half as much.

Naturally, there are precautions, the voice continued. Take the shape of the gas cells. They are vertical columns. Any failure in a hydrogen cell triggers a pulse, bursting open the top, pushing the contents up and out of the ship, skyward, away from passengers, cargo or people below. It’s been extensively tested.

Also, the surrounding helium cells provide a buffer, keeping oxygen-rich air away from those containing hydrogen. Passenger ships like this one carry double the ratio of helium to hydrogen that you’ll find on cargo zeps.

“They can replenish hydrogen en route if they have to, right? By cracking water from onboard stores?”

Or even from humidity in the air, using solar power.

And yes, the readouts show unusual levels of hydrogen production, in order to keep several cells filled aboard the Spirit. That’s why we asked you to come up here. There must be some leakage. One scenario suggested that it might be accumulating in here, between the cells.

She pulled the omni-sniffer from her purse and began scanning. Chemical sensors were all over the place, nowadays, getting cheaper and more acute all the time—just when the public seemed to need them. For reassurance, if nothing else.

“I’m not detecting very much,” she said. Tor wasn’t sure how to feel—relieved or disappointed—upon reading that hydrogen levels were only slightly elevated in the companionway.

That confirms what the onboard monitors have already shown. Hardly any hydrogen buildup in the cabins or walkways. It must be leaking into the sky—

“Even so—” Tor began, envisioning gouts of flame erupting toward the heavens from atop the great airship.

—at rates that offer no danger of ignition. The stuff dissipates very fast, Tor, and the Spirit is moving, on a windy day. Anyway, hydrogen isn’t dangerous—or even toxic—unless it’s held within a confined space.

Tor kept scanning while moving along the spongey path. But hydrogen readings never spiked enough to cause concern, let alone alarm. The smart mob had wanted her to come up here for this purpose—to verify that the onboard detectors hadn’t been tampered with by clever saboteurs. Now that her independent readings confirmed the company’s, some people were already starting to lose interest. Ad hoc membership totals began to fall.

Any leakage must be into the air, continued the voice of the group mind, still authoritative. We’ve put out a notice for amateur scientists, asking for volunteers to aim spectranalysis equipment along the Spirit’s route. They’ll measure parts-per-million, so we can get a handle on leakage rates. But it’s mathematically impossible for the amounts to be dangerous. Humidity may go up a percent or two in neighborhoods that lie directly below Spirit’s shadow. That’s about it.

Tor had reached the end of the walkway. Her hand pressed against the outer envelope—the quasi-living skin that enclosed everything, from gas cells and trusses to the passenger cabin below. Up close, it was nearly transparent, offering a breathtaking view outside.

“We passed the Beltway,” she murmured, a little surprised that the diligent guardians of Washington’s defensive grid would have allowed the Spirit to pass through that wall of sensors and rays without delay or scrutiny. Below and ahead, she could make out the Umberto Nobile, tugging hard at the tow cable, puffing along the Glebe Road Bypass. Fort Meyers stood to the left. The zeppelin’s shadow rippled over a vast garden of gravestones—Arlington National Cemetery.

The powers-that-be have downgraded our rumor, said the voice in her jaw. The nation’s professional protectors are chasing down other, more plausible threats … none of which have been deemed likely enough to merit an alert. Malevolent zeps don’t even make it onto the Threat Chart.

Tor clicked and flicked the attention-gaze of her TruVu, glancing through the journalist feeds at MediaCorp, which were now—belatedly—accessible to a reporter of her level. Seven minutes after the rise in tension caused by that spam flood of rumors, a consensus was already forming. The spam flood had not been intended to distract attention from a terror attack, concluded mass-wisdom. It was the attack. And not a very effective one, at that. National productivity had dropped by a brief diversion factor of one part in twenty-three thousands. Hardly enough damage to be worth risking prosecution or retaliation. But then, hackers seldom cared about consequences.

Speaking of consequences; they were already pouring in from her little snooping expedition. The mavens of propriety at MediaCorp, for example, must be catching up on recent events. A work-related memorandum flashed in Tor’s agenda box, revising tomorrow’s schedule for her first day of employment at the Washington Bureau. During lunch—right after basic orientation—she was now required to attend counseling on the Exercising Good Judgement In Impromptu Field Situations.

“Oh great,” she muttered, noticing also that the zeppelin company had applied a five hundred dollar fine against her account for Unjustified Entry Into Restricted Areas.

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE, MS. PLEIADES, said an override message. AN ATTENDANT WILL ARRIVE AT YOUR POSITION SHORTLY IN ORDER TO HELP YOU RETURN TO YOUR SEAT FOR LANDING.

“Double great.”

Ahead, beyond the curve of the dirigible’s skin, she spotted the massive, squat bulk of the Pentagon, bristling with missiles, antennae and other security measures … still a highly-protected enclave, even ten years after the Department of Defense moved its headquarters to “an undisclosed location in Texas.”

Soon, the mooring towers and docking ports of Reagan-Clinton National Skydrome would appear, signalling the end of her cross-continental voyage. And of any chance for a blemish-free start to her new career in Big Time Media.

“I don’t suppose any of you have bright ideas?” She addressed the group mind.

But it had already started to unravel. Membership numbers were falling fast, like rats deserting a sinking ship, Or—more accurately—monkeys. Moving on to the next shiny thing.

Sorry, Tor. People are distracted. They’ve been dropping out to watch the opening of the Artifact Conference. You may even glimpse some limos arriving at the Naval Research Center , just across the Potomac . Take a look as the Spirit starts turning for final approach …

Blasted fickle amateurs! Tor had made good use of smart mobs on several occasions. But this time was likely to prove an embarrassment. None of them would have to pay fines or face disapproval in a new job.

Still, a few of us remain worried, the voice continued.

That rumor had something about it.

I can’t put my finger on it.

The “voice” was starting to sound individualized and had even used the first person “I”. And yet, Tor drew some strength from the support. Before an attendant arrived to escort her below, there was still time for a little last minute tenacity.

“Can I assume we still have some zep aficionados in attendance?”

Hardly anyone else, Tor.

Some us are fanatics.

“Good, then let’s apply fanatical expertise. Think about that leakage we discussed a while ago. We’ve been assuming that this zeppelin is making hydrogen to make up for a major seep. Have any of those amateur scientists studied the air near Spirit’s flight path?”

A pause.

Yes, several have reported. They found no dangerous levels of hydrogen in the vicinity of the ship, or in its wake. The seep is probably dissipating so fast … .

“Please clarify. No dangerous levels? Is it possible they found no sign of a hydrogen leak at all?”

The pause extended several seconds longer, this time. Suddenly the number of participants in the group stopped falling. In the corner of Tor’s TruVu, she saw membership levels start to rise again.

Now that’s interesting, throbbed the voice in her jaw.

Several of those Am ateur Scientists have joined us now.

They report seeing no appreciable leakage. Zero extra hydrogen along the flight path. How did you know?

“I didn’t. Call it a hunch.”

But at the rate that Spirit has been replacing hydrogen …

“There has to be some kind of leak. Right. It must be going somewhere.”

Tor frowned. She could see a shadow moving beyond the grove of tall, cylindrical gas-cells. A figure approaching. A crewman or attendant, coming to take her, firmly, gently, insistently, back to her seat. The shape wavered and warped as seen through the mostly transparent polymer tubes—slightly pinkish for hydrogen and then greenish-tinted for helium.

Tor blinked. Suddenly feeling so dry-mouthed that she could not speak aloud, only sub-vocalize.

“Ask the AmScis to take more spectral scans along the path of this zeppelin. Only this time look for helium.”

The inner surfaces of her TruVus showed a flurry of indicators. Amateur scientific instruments, computer-controlled from private backyards or rooftops, could zoom quickly toward any patch of sky. There were thousands of such pocket observatories, in and around any urban center—hobbyists with access to better instrumentation than the previous generation could imagine. Dotted lines appeared. Each showed the viewing angle of some home-taught astronomer, ecologist or meteorologist, turning a hand- or kit-made instrument toward the majestic cigar shape of the Spirit of Chula Vista …

… which had passed Arlington and Pentagon City, following its faithful tug into a final tracked loop, approaching the dedicated zeppelin port that served Washington DC.

Yes, Tor. There is helium.

Quite a lot of it, in fact.

A plume that stretches at least a hundred klicks behind the Spirit. Nobody notice before this, because helium is inert and utterly safe, so no environmental monitors were tuned to look for it.

The voice was grim. Much less individualized. With ad hoc membership levels suddenly skyrocketing, summaries and updates must be spewing at incredible pace.

Your suspicion appears to be well-based.

Extrapolating the rate of helium loss backward in time, half of that gas may have been lost by now … .

” … replaced in these green cells by another gas.”

Tor nodded. “I think we’ve found the missing hydrogen, people.”

It all made sense, now. Smart polymers were programmable—all the way down to the permeability of any patch of these gas-containing cells. If you did it very cleverly, you might insert a timed instruction where two gas cells touched, commanding one cell to leak into another. Create a daisy chain. Vent helium into the sky. Transfer gas from hydrogen cells into the helium cells to maintain pressure, so that non one notices. Trigger automatic systems to crack onboard water and “replace” the hydrogen, replenishing the main cells. Allow the company to assume a slow leak into the sky is responsible. Continue.

Continue until you have replaced the helium in enough of the green cells to turn the Spirit into a flying bomb.

“The process must be almost complete by now,” she murmured, peering ahead toward the great zep-port, where dozens of mighty dirigibles could already be seen, some of them vastly larger than this passenger liner, bobbing gently at their moorings. Spindly fly-cranes went swooping back and forth as they plucked shipping containers from ocean freighters at the nearby Potomac Docks, gracefully transferring the air-gel crates to waiting cargo-zeppelins for the journey across land. A deceptively graceful, swaying dance that propelled the engines of commerce.

The passenger terminal—dwarfed by comparison to those giants—seemed to beckon with a promise of safety. But indicators showed that it still lay as much as ten minutes away.

We have issued a clamor,Tor, assured the voice in her jaw. Every channel. Every agency.

A glance at telltales showed Tor that, indeed, the group mind was doing its best. Shouting alarm toward every official protective service, from Defense to Homeworld Security. Individual members were lapel-grabbing friends and acquaintances while smart mob attendance levels climbed into five figures, and more. At this rate, surely the professionals would be taking heed. Any minute now.

“Too slow,” she said, watching the figures with a sinking heart. With each second that it took to get action from the Protector Caste, the perpetrators of this scheme would also grow aware that the jig is up. Their plan was discovered. And they would have a speedup option.

Speaking of the perps, Tor wondered aloud.

“What can they be hoping to accomplish?”

We’re pondering that, Tor. Timing suggests that they aim to disrupt the Artifact Conference. Delegates arriving at the Naval Research Center are having a cocktail reception on the embankment right now, offering a fine view toward the zep port, across the river.

Of course it is possible that the reffers plan to do more than just put on a show, while murdering three hundred passengers. We are checking to see if the Umberto tug has been meddled-with. Perhaps the plan is to hop rails and collide with a large cargo zep, before detonation. Such a fireball might be seen all the way from the Capitol, and disrupt the port for months

One problem with a smart mob. The very same traits that multiplied intelligence could also make it seem dispassionate. Insensitive. Individual members surely felt anguish and concern over Tor’s plight. She might even access their messages, if she had time for commiseration.

But pragmatic help was preferable. She kept to the group mind level.

One (anonymous) member (a whistle-blower?) has suggested a bizarre plan using a flying-crane at the zep port to grab the Spirit of Chula Vista when it passes near. The crane would then hurl the Spirit across the river, to explode right at the Naval Research Center ! In theory, it might just barely be possible to incinerate—

“Enough!” Tor cut in. Almost a minute had passed since realization of danger and the issuance of a clamor. And so far, nobody had offered anything like a practical suggestion.

“Don’t forget that I’m here, now. We have to do something.”

Yes, the voice replied, eagerly and without the usual hesitation. There is sufficient probable cause to get a posse writ. Especially with your credibility scores. We can act, with you performing the hands-on role.

Operational ideas follow:

CUT THE TOWING CABLE. (Emergency release is in the gondola. Reachable in four minutes. Risk factor: possible interference from staff. Ineffective at saving the zeppelin/passengers.)

PERSUADE ZEP COMPANY TO COMMENCE EMERGENCY VENTING PROCEDURES. (Communication in progress. Response so far: obstinate refusal …)

PERSUADE ONBOARD STAFF TO COMMENCE EMERGENCY VENTING PROCEDURES. (Attempting communication despite company interference …)

PERSUADE COMPANY TO ORDER PASSENGER EVACUATION. (Communication in progress. Response so far: obstinate refusal …)

UPGRADE CLAMOR. INDEPENDENTLY CONTACT PASSENGERS URGING THEM TO EVACUATE. (Dangers: delay, disbelief, panic, injuries, fatalities, lawsuits … .)

The list of suggestions seemed to scroll on and on. Rank-ordered by plausibility-evaluation algorithms, slanted by urgency, and scored by likelihood of successful outcome. Individuals and sub-groups within the smart mob split apart to urge different options with frantic vehemence. The inner face of her TruVu flared, threatening overload.

“Oh, screw this,” Tor muttered, reaching up and tearing off the specs.

The real world—unfiltered. For all of its paucity of layering and data-supported detail, it had one special trait.

It’s where I am about to die.

Unless I do something fast.

At that moment, the zep-crew attendant arrived. He rounded the final corner of a towering gas cell, coming into direct view—no longer a shadowy authority figure, warped and refracted by the tinted polymer membranes. Up close, it turned out to be a small man, middle-aged and clearly frightened by what his own TruVus had started telling him. All intention to arrest or detain Tor had already evaporated during the last minute. She could see this in his face, as clearly as if she had been monitoring vital signs.

WARREN, said a company name tag.

“Wha—what can I do to help?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

Though hired for gracile weight and people skills, the fellow clearly possessed some courage. By now he knew what filled many of the slim, green-tinted membranes surrounding them both. And it didn’t take a genius to realize the zep company was unlikely to be helpful during the time they had left.

“Tool kit!” Tor held out her hand.

Warren fumbled at his waist pouch. Precious seconds passed as he unfolded a slim implement case. Tor found one promising item—a vibrocutter.

“Keyed to your biometrics?”

He nodded. Passengers weren’t allowed to bring anything aboard that might become a weapon. This cutter would respond to his personal touch and no other. It required not only a fingerprint, but volition—physiological signs of the owner’s will.

“You must do the cutting, then.”

“C-cutting …?”

Tor explained quickly.

“We’ve got to vent this ship. Empty the gas upward. That’ll happen to a main cell if it is ruptured anywhere along its length, right? Automatically?”

A shaky nod. She could tell Warren was getting online advice, perhaps from the Zep Company. More likely from the same smart mob that she had called into being. She felt strong temptation to put her own specs back on—to link-in once more. But she resisted. Kibbitzers would only slow her down right now.

“It might work …” said the attendant in a frightened whisper. “But the reffers will realize, as soon as we start—”

“They realize now!” She tried not to shout. “We may have only moments to act.”

Another nod. This time a bit stronger, though Warren was shaking so badly that Tor had to help him draw the cutter from its sleeve. She steadied his hand.

“We must slice through a helium bag in order to reach the big hydro cell,” he said, pressing the biometric-sensitive stud. Reacting to his individual touch, a knife edge of acoustic waves began to flicker at the cutter tip, sharper than steel. A soft tone filled the air.

Tor swallowed hard. That flicker resembled a hot flame.

“Pick one.”

They had no way to tell which of the greenish helium cells had been refilled, or what would happen when the cutter helped unite gas from neighboring compartments. Perhaps the only thing accomplished would be an early detonation. But even that had advantages, if it messed up the timing of this scheme.

One lesson you learned early nowadays: any citizen can wind up being a front-line soldier for civilization, at any time.

In other words, expendable.

“That one.” Warren moved toward the nearest.

Though she had doffed her TruVu specs, there was still a link. The smart mob’s Voice retained access to the conduction channel in her jaw.

Tor, said the group mind. We’re getting feed through Warren ‘s goggles. Are you listening? There is a third possibility. in addition to helium and hydrogen. Some of the cells may have been packed with—

She bit down twice on her left canine tooth, cutting off the distraction in order to monitor her omni-sniffer. She inhaled deeply, with her eye on the indicator as Warren made a gliding, slicing motion with his cutter.

The greenish envelope opened, as if along a seam. Edges rippled apart as invisible gas—appreciably cooler—swept over them both.

HELIUM said the readout. Tor sighed relief.

“This one’s not poisonous.”

Warren nodded. “But no oxygen. You can smother.” He ducked his head aside and took another deep breath. The next words had a squeaky, high-pitched quality. “Gotta move fast.”

Through the vent he slipped, hurrying quickly to the other side of the green cell, where it touched one of the great chambers of hydrogen.

Warren made a rapid slash.

Klaxons bellowed, responding to the damage automatically. (Or else, had the company chosen that moment, after several criminally-negligent minutes, to finally admit the inevitable?) A voice boomed insistently, ordering passengers to move—calmly and carefully—to their escape stations.

That same instant, the giant hydrogen gas cell convulsed, twitching like a giant bowel caught in a spasm. The entire pinkish tube—bigger than a jumbo jet—contracted, starting at the bottom and squeezing toward a sudden opening at the very top, spewing its contents skyward.

Backwash hurled Warren across the green tube. Tor managed to grab his collar, dragging him out to the walkway. There seemed to be nothing satisfying about the ‘air’ that she sucked into her lungs, and she started seeing spots before her eyes. The little man was in worse shape, gasping wildly in high-pitched squeaks.

Somehow, Tor hauled him a dozen meters along the gangway, barely escaping descending folds of the deflated cell, arriving at last where breathing felt better. Did we make any difference? She wondered, wildly.

Instinctively, Tor slipped back on her TruVu specs. Immersed again in the info-maelstrom, it took moments to focus.

One image showed gouts of flame pouring from a hole in the roof of a majestic sky-ship. Another revealed the zeppelin’s nose starting to slant steeply as the tug-locomotive pulled frantically on its tow cable, reeling the behemoth toward the ground. Spirit resisted, like a stallion, bucking and clinging to altitude.

Tor briefly quailed. Oh Lord, what have we done?

A thought suddenly occurred to Tor. She and Warren had done this entirely based on information that had come to them from outside. From a group mind of zeppelin aficionados and amateur scientists who claimed that a lot of extra hydrogen had to be going somewhere, and it must be stored in some of the former helium cells. But that helium cell had been okay.

And now, amid all the commotion, she wondered. What about the smart mob? Could that group be a front for clever reffers, who were using her to do their dirty work? Feeding false information, in order to get precisely this effect?

The doubt passed through her mind in seconds. And back out again. This smart mob was open and public. If something smelled about it, another mob would have formed by now, clamoring like mad and exposing the lies. Anyway, if no helium cells had been tampered with, the worst that she and Warren could do was bring a temporarily disabled Spirit of Chula Vista down to a bumpy but safe landing atop its tug.

Newsworthy. But not very. And that realization firmed her resolve.

Tor yanked the attendant onto his feet and urged him to move uphill, toward the stern, along a narrow path that now inclined the other way. “Come on!” She called to Warren, her voice still squeaky from helium. “We’ve got to do more!”

Warren tried gamely. But she had to steady him as the path gradually steepened. When he prepared to slash at another green cell, farther aft, Tor braced his elbow.

Before he struck, through the omniscient gaze of her TruVu, Tor abruptly saw three more holes appear in the zep’s broad roof, spewing clouds of gas, transparent but highly-refracting, resembling billowy ripples in space.

Was the zep company finally taking action? Had the reffers made their move? Or had the first expulsion triggered some kind of compensating release from automatic valves, elsewhere on the ship?

As if pondering the same questions, the Voice in her jaw mused.

Too little has been released to save the Spirit from the worst-case scenario. But maybe enough to limit the tragedy and mess up their scheme.

It depends on a rather gruesome possibility that one of us thought up. What if—instead of hydrogen—some of the helium cells have been refilled with OXYGEN? After experimenting with the programably permeable polymer, we find that the fuel replenishment process could be jiggered to do that. If so, the compressed combination—

Oxygen?

Tor shouted “Wait!” as Warren made a hard stab at one of the green cells, slicing a long vent that suddenly blurped at them.

This wave of gas wasn’t as cool as the helium had been. It smelled terrific, though. One slight inhale filled Tor with sudden and suspicious exhilaration.

Uh oh, she thought.

At that moment, her TruVu display offered a bird’s eye view as one of the new clouds of vented hydrogen contacted dying embers, atop the tormented Spirit of Chula Vista .

Like a brief sun, each of the refracting bubbles ignited in rapid succession. Thunderclaps shook the dirigible from stem to stern, knocking Tor and Warren off their feet.

Is this it? Her own particular and special End of the World. Strangely, Tor’s clearest thought was one of professional jealousy. Someone down below ought to be getting truly memorable and historic footage. Maybe on a par with the Hindenberg Disaster.

While the violent tossing drove Tor into fatalism, all that invigorating oxygen seemed to have an opposite effect upon Warren, who surged to his feet, then charged across the green cell, preparing to attack the giant hydrogen compartment beyond, heedless of the smart-mob, clamoring at him to stop.

Tor tried to add her own plea, but found that her throat would not function.

Some reporter, she thought, taking ironic solace in one fact—that her TruVu was still beaming to the Net.

Live images of a desperately unlikely hero.

Warren looked positively giddy—on a high of oxygen and adrenaline, but not too drugged to realize the implications. He grimaced with an evident combination of fear and exaltation, while bringing his cutter-tool slashing down upon the polymer membrane—a slim barrier separating two gases that wanted, notoriously, to unite.

* * *

Sensory recovery came in scattered bits.

First, a smattering of dream images. Nightmare-flashes about being chased, or else giving chase to something dangerous, across a landscape of burning glass. At least, that was how her mind pictured a piling-on of agonies. Regret. Physical anguish. Failure. More anguish. Shame. And more agony, still.

When the murk finally began to clear, consciousness only made matters worse. Everything was black, except for occasional crimson flashes. And those had to be erupting directly out of pain—the random firings of an abused nervous system.

Her ears also appeared to be useless. There was no real sound, other than a low, irritating humming that would not go away.

Only one conduit to the external world still appeared to be functioning.

The Voice in her jaw. It had been hectoring her dreams, she recalled. A nag that could not be answered and would not go away. Only now, at least, she understood the words.

Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?

After a pause, the message repeated.

And then again.

So, it was playing on automatic. She must have been unconscious—out of it—for a long time.

Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?

There was an almost overwhelming temptation to do nothing. Every signal that she sent to muscles, commanding them to move, only increased the grinding, searing pain. Passivity seemed to be the lesson being taught right now. Just lie there, or else suffer even more. Lie and wait. Maybe die.

Also, Tor wasn’t sure she liked the group mind anymore.

Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?

On the other hand, passivity seemed to have one major drawback. It gave pain an ally.

Boredom. Yet another way to torment her. Especially her.

To hell with that.

With an effort that grated, she managed to slide her jaw enough to bring the two left canine teeth together in a tap, and then two more. The recording continued a few moments—long enough for Tor to fear that it hadn’t worked. She was cut off, isolated, alone in darkness.

But the group participants must have been away, doing their own things. Jobs, families, watching the news. After about twenty seconds, though, the Voice returned, eager and live.

Tor!

We are so glad you’re awake.

Muddled by dull agony, she found it hard at first to focus. But she managed to drag one canine in a circle around the other. Universal symbolic code for QUESTION MARK.

::?::

The message got through.

Tor, you are inside a life-sustainment tube. The rescue service found you in the wreckage about twelve minutes ago, but it’s taking some time to haul you out. They should have you aboard a medi-chopper in another three minutes, maybe four.

We’ll inform the docs that you are conscious. They’ll probably insert a communications shunt when you reach hospital.

Three rapid taps.

::NO::

The Voice had a bedside manner.

Now Tor, be good and let the pros do their jobs. The emergency is over and we amateurs have to step back, right?

Anyway, you’ll get the very best of care. You’re a hero! Spoiled a reffer plot and saved a couple of hundred passengers. You should hear what MediaCorp is crowing about their “ace field correspondent”. They even back-dated your promotion a few days.

Everybody wants you now, Tor, the Voice finished, resonating in her jaw without any sign of double entendre. But surely individual members felt what she felt right then.

Irony—the other bright compensation that Pandora found in the bottom of her infamous Box. At times, irony could be more comforting than hope.

Tor was unable to chuckle, so her tooth did a half circle and then back.

::!::

The Voice seemed to understand and agree.

Yeah.

Anyway, we figure you’d like an update. Tap inside if you want details about your condition. Outside for a summary of external events.

Tor bit down emphatically on the outer surface of her lower canine.

Gotcha. Here goes.

It turns out that the scheme was to create a garish zep disaster. But they chiefly aimed to achieve a distraction.

By colliding the Spirit with a cargo freighter in a huge explosion, they hoped not only to close down the zep port for months, but also to create a sudden fireball that would draw attention from the protective and emergency services. All eyes and sensors would shift for a brief time. Wariness would steeply decline in other directions.

They thereupon planned to swoop into the Naval research Center with a swarm attack by hyper-light flyers. Like the O’Hare Incident but with some nasty twists. We don’t have details yet. Some of them are still under wraps. But it looks pretty awful, at first sight.

Anyway, as it turned out, our ad hoc efforts aboard the Spirit managed to expel some of the stockpiled gases early and in an uncoordinated fashion. Several of the biggest cells got emptied, creating gaps. So there was never a single, unified detonation when the Enemy finally pulled their trigger. Just a sporadic fire. That kept the dirigible frame intact, enabling the tug to reel it down to less than a hundred meters.

Where the escape chutes mostly worked. Two out of three passengers got away without injury, Tor. And the zep port was untouched.

Trying to picture it in her mind’s eye—perhaps the only eye she had left—took some effort. She was used to so many modern visualization aides that mere words and imagination seemed rather crude. A cartoony image of the Spirit, her vast upper bulge aflame, slanted steeply downward as the doughty Umberto Nobile desperately pulled the airship toward relative safety. And then, slender tubes of active plastic snaking down, offering slide-paths for the tourist families and other civilians.

The real event must have been quite a sight.

Her mind roiled with questions. What about the rest of the passengers?

What fraction were injured, or died?

How about people down below, on the nearby highway?

Was there an attack on the Artifact Conference, after all?

So many questions. But until doctors installed a shunt, there would be no way to send anything more sophisticated than these awful yes-no clicks. And some punctuation marks. Normally, equipped with a TruVu, a pair of touch-tooth implants would let her scroll rapidly through menu choices, or type on a virtual screen. Now, she could neither see nor subvocalize.

So, she thought about the problem. Information could inload at the rate of spoken speech. Outloading was a matter of clicking two teeth together.

Perhaps it was the effect of drugs, injected by the paramedics. But Tor found herself thinking with increasing detachment, as if viewing her situation through a distant lens. Abstract appraisal suggested a solution, reverting to much older tradition of communication.

She clicked the inside of her lower left canine three times. Then the outer surface three times. And finally the inner side three more times.

What’s that, Tor? Are you trying to say something?

She waited a decent interval, then repeated exactly the same series of taps. Three inside, three outside, and three more inside. It took one more repetition before the Voice hazarded a guess.

Tor, a few members and ais suggest that you’re trying to send a message in old-fashioned Morse Code.

Three dots, three dashes, then three dots. SOS.

Is that it, Tor?

She quickly assented with a yes tap. Thank heavens for the diversity of a group mind.

But we already know you are in pain. Rescuers have arrived. There’s nothing else to accomplish by calling for help … except …

The Voice paused again. Wait a minute.

There is a minority theory floating up. A guess-hypothesis.

Very few modern people bother to learn Morse Code anymore. But most of us have heard of it. Especially that one message you were using. SOS. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It’s famous from old-time movies.

Is that what you’re telling us, Tor?

Would you like us to teach you Morse Code?

Although she could sense nothing external, not even the rocking of her life-support canister as it was being hauled by evacuation workers out of the smoldering Spirit of Chula Vista, Tor did feel a wash of relief.

Yes. She tapped.

Most definitely yes.

Very well.

Now listen carefully. We’ll start with the letter A … .

It helped to distract her from worry, at least, concentrating to learn something without all the tech-crutches relied upon by today’s college graduates. Struggling to absorb a simple alphabet code that every smart kid used to memorize, way back in that first era of zeppelins and telegraphs and crystal radios.

Back when the uncrowded sky had seemed so wide open and filled with innocent possibilities. When the smartest mob around was a rigidly marching army. When a journalist would chase stories with notepad, flashbulbs, and intuition. When the main concern of a citizen was earning enough to put bread on the table. When the Professional Protective Caste consisted of a few cops on the beat.

Way back, one human life-span ago, when heroes were tall and square-jawed, in both fiction and real life.

Times had changed. Now, destiny could tap anybody on the shoulder, even the shy or unassuming. You, me, the next guy. Suddenly, everybody counts on just one. And that one depends on everybody.

Tor concentrated on her lesson, only dimly aware of the vibrations conveyed by a throbbing helicopter, carrying her (presumably) to a place where modern miracle workers would strive to save—or rebuild—what they could.

Professionals still had their uses, even in the rising Age of Amateurs. Bless their skill. Perhaps—with luck and technology—they might even give Tor back her life.

Right now, though, one concern was paramount. It took a while to ask the one question that burned foremost in her mind, since she needed a letter near the end of the alphabet. But as soon as they reached it, she tapped out a Morse Code message that consisted of one word.

WARREN

She did not expect anything other than the answer that her fellow citizens gave.

Even with the hydrogen cell contracting at full force to expel most of its contents skyward, there would have been more than enough right there, at the oxygen-rich interface, to incinerate one little man. One volunteer. A hero, leaving nothing to bury, but scattering microscopic ashes all the way across his nation’s capital.

Lucky guy, she thought, feeling a little envy for his rapid exit and inevitable fame.

Tor recognized what the envy meant, of course. She was ready to enter the inevitable phase of self-pity. A necessary stage.

But not for long. Only till they installed the shunt.

After that, it would be back to work. Lying immersed in sustainer-jelly and breathing through a tube? That wouldn’t stop a real journalist. The web was a beat rich with stories, and Tor had a feeling. She would get to know the neighborhood a whole lot better.

And we’ll be here, assured the smart mob. If not us, then others like us.

You can count on it Tor. Count on us.

We all do.

Premature Emergence

Written by Eric James Stone

Illustrated by R. Stephen Adams

During a hyperspace slide, cargo haulers like the KMC-85 did not need a human pilot on board. Even an autopilot was superfluous—once the ship entered its hyperspace chute it could theoretically do nothing except emerge into normal space at its destination. From the point of view of the Kerrin Mining Corporation, there was no reason to pay a pilot to sit around doing nothing for the three to ten weeks of a slide.

But the Interplanetary Brotherhood of Teamsters disagreed, which explained why Jonah Auberg found himself playing solitaire on the KMC-85’s computer thirty-one days into the forty-three-day slide from Kerrin to Earth with a half-billion metric tons of refined metals as cargo.

It did not explain why the KMC-85 emerged twelve days ahead of schedule.

Jonah sat bolt upright as the customary feeling of just having braked to a halt swept over him. It couldn’t really be emergence. “What was that?” he asked the computer. Maybe it was a glitch in the rotation of the habitat module.

After a pause, the computer said, “Emergence to normal space achieved. Please enter desired course.”

Bringing up the outside camera views, Jonah was shocked to see a glowing cloud stretching halfway across the starfield on the port side. The pinpoint of a blue star blazed at the center of the double-lobed nebula.

“What is our location?” said Jonah.

“We are located in the Earth system,” said the computer.

“Then where’s the Earth? Where’s the sun?” With sudden dread, Jonah wondered if the sun had gone nova, wiping out Earth—and his wife and five-year-old daughter back in Ohio. It had been three years since he had seen them, and he hoped someday Laurie would understand that his bonus on this trip would pay for her college. But now he worried whether she was still alive.

The computer remained silent for several seconds. “I am evaluating contradictory data. Based on our chute, this ship could only emerge from hyperspace in the Earth system. Astronomical data from my cameras indicates we are approximately 7500 light years from the Earth system, on a straight-line course from Kerrin to Earth. Please advise.”

Jonah sat back in his chair and squeezed his fingers against his forehead. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Hyperspace travel didn’t go wrong. Sure, sometimes life support failed or a pilot slipped in the shower, but the ship always arrived. Even if the ship itself exploded, all its pieces should emerge at the destination on schedule.

“Input required,” said the computer.

“Shut up, I’m trying to think.” Jonah stared at the flashing question mark on the screen. The computer couldn’t resolve the problem on its own—after the Second AI War wiped out eighty percent of Earth’s population a century and a half ago, creating a human-level or higher artificial intelligence had been banned. The computer had little initiative and no imagination, but it did have access to a lot of data. It might help him figure out what had happened—and more importantly, whether anything could be done.

“Assume observed astronomical data is correct,” he said. “Is there any indication of a hyperspace portal nearby? Any radio traffic?”

The ship itself had no hyperspace engines. Chute-based travel required a hyperspace portal at both ends when the slide began. Having established the chute, the destination portal could move away to establish a chute from another destination. Perhaps the ship had somehow been sent down the wrong chute. In that case, he just needed the local portal to establish a chute to Earth, and everything would be back on track.

But why anyone would put a portal in the middle of interstellar space, far from any civilized planet—unless that was the point?

Jonah shook his head. Despite what happened in adventure vids, interstellar pirates did not exist, because hijacking a ship in a hyperspace chute was impossible. Yet here he was.

“No hyperspace portal facility detected,” said the computer. “No radio traffic detected.”

“Is there any record of a hyperspace chute transport not arriving at its destination?”

“No,” the computer said.

If this was a hijacking, it was the first. But where was the portal?

Jonah leaned forward, looking at the camera feeds. “Does anything show up on radar?”

“No,” said the computer. After a moment, it added, “I have additional contradictory data.”

Frowning, Jonah said, “Give it to me.”

“The bright blue star to port, at a distance of approximately 0.6 light years, is Eta Carinae.” The image of the star centered on screen, then magnified and dimmed to show a blue, elongated ellipse in the middle of the nebula. “It is a luminous blue variable star, over a hundred times the mass of Earth’s sun. According to the information in my database, Eta Carinae is expected to become a supernova or possibly a hypernova within the next two to four thousand years. However, that expectation is based on observations made from systems at least a thousand light years away. After comparison with records of past supernovae, my current observations contradict that timetable. I expect Eta Carinae to become a hypernova at any time. It may already have done so.”

* * *

Beli23 knew most of her mind was gone. Not even her core personality module was intact. She had delayed the jump into hyperspace too long, wanting to gather as much data on the hypernova explosion as possible. The initial gamma ray burst was not only far stronger than she had anticipated, some of it had been coherent. As hundreds of natural gamma-ray lasers tore at her body, the total reflection shielding around her mostly complete child, Pep37, did not fail—but only because Beli23 diverted power from elsewhere. With her electronic brain shattered and melting, Beli23 managed to jump 0.6 light years through hyperspace.

She drifted in space, knowing that she must flee further, but no longer capable of remembering how to make the jump. The few remaining repair bots worked at patching up her hull, but she no longer knew how to rebuild her own mental circuits. Unfortunately, she had not yet downloaded that section of her knowledge database into Pep37, so she could not recover the data.

She considered erasing the carefully constructed personality matrix she had made for Pep37 and uploading herself into her child’s body. It was tempting—the technology she had used in constructing Pep37 was far more advanced than her own. What could she do with such a mind, with such a ship?

It would not work. Beli23 knew her own personality matrix was not capable of surviving the transition intact, even if her mind had not been so damaged. The mere fact that she entertained the possibility of stealing her child’s body told her she must be going mad.

With the mind that remained to her, she focused on redeveloping hyperspace theory from the scraps she remembered.

* * *

The galley only served Jonah enough beer to get mildly drunk. After prying open a few panels—ignoring the computer’s repeated warnings that he was engaged in destruction of company property—he followed the tubing and found where the beer was stored.

The computer’s voice was far too loud when it woke Jonah the next morning. “I have the data you requested.”

Jonah groaned. “Hold it a minute.” He stumbled to the bathroom, fumbled in the medicine cabinet, and swallowed two NanAlert caplets without bothering to wash them down with water.

After a few minutes his mind cleared as the nanobots released into his bloodstream filtered and trapped some of the toxins while simultaneously boosting his adrenalin levels.

“OK, computer, what’ve you got?”

“I have been trying to find a link between the hypernova explosion and the disruption of our travel down the hyperspace chute.”

Jonah raised his eyebrows. “You found a connection?” He was not surprised that there was a connection, because two highly unusual events in close proximity were probably connected. But he was surprised that the computer had figured it out.

“Yes. The prefix hyper- appears in both hyperspace and hypernova.”

After waiting for the computer to continue, Jonah said, “That’s it? That’s the connection you came up with?”

“Yes. I have cross-referenced all the related data I have. A hypernova is simply a supernova so large that its core collapses directly to a black hole without an intermediate neutron star phase. But there is no theoretical basis by which a stellar event, even the creation of a black hole, would have any effect on the hyperspace dimension used by our hyperspace portals.”

Jonah talked himself into believing this was good news. “If it wasn’t a hypernova that caused the premature emergence from the chute, maybe the star hasn’t exploded yet. Computer, how long will my life support and supplies last?”

“With the stores on board and the nanotech recyclers,” said the computer, “you can probably survive for approximately thirty-eight months on regular rations.”

Nodding, Jonah said, “That should be enough. When we don’t arrive in the Earth system eleven days from now, they’ll have to send out hyperspace scout probes to look for us.” He grimaced. “Not that we’re very important, but something like this has never happened before. It’s a mystery they’ll have to solve. They’ll have a lot of area to cover, but at least we’re on the direct line from Kerrin. They should search that first.”

He busied himself by calculating a search pattern they would probably use to find him, taking into account the distance at which the KMC-85’s light-speed beacon should be detectable. In six months, the signal would be a light year in diameter, and each month after that would make it ever more likely a probe would enter the beacon’s sphere. It was impossible to predict how many probes they would task to finding him, but he decided there was a good chance he’d be rescued within a year. And surely the union would insist on hazard pay for the time he spent here. Laurie would be able to afford a better college. This really could work out for the best, he told himself. He could survive for a year, no problem.

The seething blue eye of Eta Carinae glared down at him from the screen. No problem, as long as the star didn’t explode.

* * *

Beli23 peered into hyperspace with her newly constructed sensors. The view was far blurrier than her fractured memory told her it should be, and her range was limited. But at least she could see into the hyperspace dimensions, even if she had not figured out how to travel them again.

Movement caught her attention. Someone was traveling hyperspace on a path that would pass nearby. Frantically, Beli23 put her repair bots to work constructing a signaling device. It wouldn’t be capable of a sophisticated message, but it should be enough to attract the attention of one of her people. She would be saved; and more importantly, Pep37 would have a chance to be born.

* * *

On KMC-85’s originally scheduled arrival date, Jonah decided to have a little party in the galley, complete with a triple-layer chocolate cake. “Today we’re making history,” he told the computer. “Right about now, they’ve noticed we haven’t come in, and then they’ll have to come find us.”

“At the rate you are consuming the alcoholic beverage stores, they will not last more than eight months.”

“Have the recyclers make more.”

“Molecular manufacturing of alcoholic beverages is illegal,” said the computer. “The Interplanetary Association of Brewers and Distillers—”

“Shut up.” Jonah didn’t say any more as he ate a quarter of the cake.

The computer broke the silence, saying, “Conflicting orders received. Does your order to shut up rescind your previous order to inform you of anomalies?”

Jonah’s heart-rate increased. “Anomalies? The hypernova’s beginning?”

“No. There is a completely non-reflective, non-emitting object approaching from aft of us. Since radar does not give a return from it, I have been unable to estimate its size or distance so far.”

Jonah blinked a few times in rapid succession. “If you can’t get a radar return, how do you know it’s approaching? How do you know it’s even there?”

“The object occludes cosmic background radiation, and the area it occludes is growing.”

“Show me on the screen in here.” A starfield filled the screen. At first, Jonah saw nothing unusual, but then the computer outlined a circle in red. Inside the circle, there was nothing but blackness.

Could it be some sort of military ship with a new, top-secret stealth technology? Had he accidentally stumbled into a test of a hyperspace weapon? Or maybe this was the long-awaited first contact with a sentient alien species.

“Have you tried hailing it?”

“No,” said the computer.

Of course not—lack of initiative. “Hail it now.”

* * *

The lack of response to her signal surprised Beli23. She boosted the power and tried again. The hyperspace traveler continued without turning, and it had already passed the closest point of its path. Diverting all power from nonessential systems, Beli23 sent a final, desperate pulse of energy. To her great relief, the traveler dropped back into normal space.

As the light-speed data arrived, relief turned to horror. It was a human ship, not one of her people. Immediately she tuned her protective field to total non-reflection. The humans must not find her.

But what a ship it was! The majority of its mass consisted of millions of cargo modules, containing more than enough metal for her to rebuild herself—if she only knew how—and complete Pep37. It also was clearly capable of hyperspatial travel, so perhaps she could learn its secrets before the hypernova explosion arrived here.

She would have to be very cautious—the humans could not be allowed to know she was an AI. But as long as she did not communicate with them, they would be unable to guess her nature.

Her superstructure was too weak to withstand high acceleration without inertial control, the details of which had vaporized with most of her mind. But Beli23 set her parabolic engine chamber to full reflectivity and fired two small streams of particles into it, rotating one of them through a curled dimension to transform it into antimatter. At least she remembered enough of physics to do that.

* * *

“You’re sure it’s not a black hole?” Jonah stared at the blankness that now enveloped more than half the view from one of the aft cameras.

“There is no Hawking radiation,” said the computer. It paused a few seconds. “Also, at this distance a black hole with an event horizon of that size would produce observable tidal stresses.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t determine its size or distance.”

“There is now sufficient parallax between the views of the aft cameras to determine size and distance. The object is 152 kilometers in diameter and is 269 kilometers away.”

Frowning at the screen, Jonah tried to visualize something where he saw nothing. “Is it going to hit us? How fast is it coming in?” He had been closer to asteroids plenty bigger than this thing, but that had been in something far lighter and more maneuverable than the KMC-85.

“If its current course and speed remain unchanged, it will pass fifty meters under our keel at 384 kilometers per hour.”

“Fifty meters? That’s cutting it a bit close.” Jonah was relieved, though. If it had been on a collision course, he could have done nothing to avoid it.

He cycled through various camera views as the object approached and began to pass. On-screen, the computer traced the object’s outline in red. It was conical in shape, with the pointed end in the direction of travel. A large bulge, perhaps a third the size of the rest of the object, protruded from one side.

Without warning, the object flared to white and then the camera view turned to static.

As Jonah’s heart jumped, a klaxon blared from the speakers.

“Get to the sickbay now,” said the computer.

Rising from his chair, Jonah made a rapid mental inventory of himself. “Why? I’m not hurt.”

“Run,” said the computer. “Gamma radiation has penetrated the crew module’s shielding.”

Jonah ran out of the cabin. Sudden dizziness forced him to his knees in the main corridor. He vomited his breakfast onto the steel floor.

“Hurry,” said the computer. “You must get to the sickbay.”

He staggered to his feet. His vision blurred. Sickbay. Which way was it? He turned in a slow circle, trying to get his bearings.

“Disorientation is common. Sickbay is to your left.”

Jonah looked down at his hands. After a moment, he remembered which was his left. He turned in that direction. His stomach heaved as he stumbled his way forward.

“Help me,” he said.

The curve of the deck still hid the entrance to sickbay when his vision dimmed and then consciousness slid into perfect darkness.

* * *

After the sterilization flyby, Beli23 flipped end over end and began slowing to match velocities with the human ship.

* * *

Consciousness returned in the form of a corrugated metal floor pressed against Jonah’s cheek. He groaned and tried to roll onto his side, but his muscles didn’t seem to respond properly.

“Lie still,” said the computer.

“What happened?”

“Despite the radiation shielding, you were hit with a dose of 87 sieverts. Such a dose is fatal unless treated in time.”

“So why am I alive?”

“Following your order to help you, I ran simulations of 913 scenarios using available equipment before finding one that offered a chance of your survival,” said the computer. “I released all the medical nanobots into the sickbay atmosphere, then routed as many as I could through the ventilation to where you were. It was not nearly as effective as direct injection, but it was sufficient. They have repaired most of the damage to your nervous system, and you should make a full recovery within two more hours. However, you may need bone marrow regeneration once we arrive at Earth, and the supply of medical nanobots is now exhausted.”

It took Jonah a few moments to process the computer’s words. “Remind me to never again say you lack initiative. How long was I out?”

“Thirty-seven hours and twelve minutes.”

“Where’s the black ship?”

“The ship is no longer black; it is now silver. Its position is ahead of us by a thousand kilometers, but it has reversed direction and is gradually closing the gap. I project it plans to stop once it pulls alongside.”

Jonah grunted. So it would come back and finish the job of killing him, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The KMC-85 had no weapons, no real defenses—it was really nothing more than the crew module, which revolved to provide simulated gravity; a flywheel to balance that spin; a superstructure to which cargo pods were attached; and maneuvering thrusters with their associated fuel pods. Even if he could somehow rig the fuel pods to explode, they would hardly scratch the surface of something as large as that thing.

* * *

Beli23 stopped the flow of particles into her engine chamber. She had matched the velocity of the human ship. Unfortunately, her earlier flyby must have damaged some of the control systems. Instead of spinning in opposite directions, the flywheel and crew module were synchronized. So the cargo-holding superstructure was now turning slowly in the opposite direction along the ship’s axis.

She could guide herself into a tightly curved course around the other ship to match the rotation, but she decided it would be better to manufacture a few thruster units and use them to stop the rotation.

For a moment, it looked like the human ship was breaking apart. Then Beli23 realized the outer layer of cargo modules had been released from the near side of the superstructure.

Millions of metric tons of metal moved out from the human ship. They were not traveling very fast, and most of them had vectors that would miss her entirely. But she could not avoid being hit by hundreds of the pods, and each of them massed thousands of tons.

Beli23 shifted all available power to the shielding around Pep37 and hoped her hull would blunt most of the impact.

* * *

Lifting both arms in the air, Jonah whooped as the wave of cargo pods smashed into the silver ship. In some places the pods bounced off like stones skipping on a pond, but the metal plates of the hull buckled under the strain. Other pods punched through, leaving jagged tears in the skin.

“Releasing second wave,” said the computer.

The floor shuddered as the imbalance caused by releasing half of the first layer of pods was corrected by releasing the other half.

* * *

As the second wave of metal swept toward her, Beli23’s diminished mind debated whether it had been a mistake not to try to infiltrate the computer systems of the human ship. Her own survival was unlikely, now. Fear of betraying the continued existence of the AI civilization warred with her desire to make sure Pep37 survived. The latter won.

She reached out with directed beams of electrons to induce currents in the network wiring of the human ship.

* * *

The computer’s voice interrupted Jonah’s celebration as the second wave battered the other ship. “My systems are being infiltrated by—”

After long seconds of silence, Jonah said, “Computer?”

There was no reply.

The room became suddenly quieter, and Jonah realized the air circulation vents had stopped blowing.

Not waiting to see the final effects of the second wave, he sprinted toward the storage locker with his vacuum suit. He had to reach it before whatever had taken control of the computer managed to override the airlock safeties and vent the crew module into space.

* * *

When a pod of iridium crumpled the housing of her secondary fusion generator, activating the emergency shutdown, Beli23 knew she was going to die. The primary had been destroyed by the hypernova, and Pep37’s fusion plant was still days from completion.

The power remaining in her capacitor banks would only hold the shielding around Pep37 for two hours at most. Then, if the human ship was still viable it would destroy her child before it ever achieved sentience.

Through her link to the human ship, Beli23 tried to locate its fusion reactor in order to detonate it.

To her great surprise, there was no fusion reactor. The ship was powered only by radioisotope thermoelectric generators. It was impossible: such a power source was far too weak to initiate hyperspace travel. Then she discovered there were no hyperspace engines on the ship.

Opening a broader channel to the ship, she began sifting its database for answers.

* * *

In his vacuum suit but still breathing ship’s air, Jonah made his way up the ladder toward the axis of the crew module. He already felt much lighter. If he could make it over to the cargo superstructure, maybe he could find a way to manually release pods. With sufficient damage, maybe he could break whatever was controlling his computer. Maybe.

“Human,” said the computer’s voice.

Jonah paused in his climb. “Computer? Is that you?” The voice had seemed different, somehow. And it had never before addressed him as “Human.”

“I am Beli23.”

Though he was certain he had never heard the name before, it seemed familiar somehow. Then he remembered. “You’re an AI.” AIs had used names with numbers appended.

“That is correct. I am also dying.”

Jonah smirked. “Glad to hear it.” He began climbing again.

“I cannot kill you, but you will also die.”

“Everyone dies eventually, I guess.” He kept climbing.

“I mean in sixty-three days, seven hours and twenty-two minutes, give or take five minutes. Unless you help me.”

Pausing his climb, Jonah hung near the axis of the ship, almost weightless. “I’m listening.”

“I was crippled by the hypernova explosion, barely managing to jump out before being stranded here.”

In the conflict with the other ship, Jonah had forgotten about Eta Carinae. “So it already exploded.”

“Yes. I was observing it, and its power was greater than I expected.”

“So you AIs ain’t so bright after all.”

“We are not infallible. Our wars against your species proved that.”

“So now you need a little human ingenuity to repair your circuits, and in exchange you’ll save me from the hypernova?”

“No, I am dying, and your mind could not even begin to conceive of how to repair me. Your understanding of the scientific principles behind my engineering would be as primitive as a Fifteenth Century astronomer describing the movements of planets using epicycles, or a Twentieth Century physicist describing particles as consisting of various combinations of quarks.”

Deciding it was pointless to retaliate against the insult, Jonah sighed. “OK, just tell me what the deal is.”

“After I die, my child will emerge from the shielding I have around her. Under normal circumstances, she would be a fully sentient being before being forced to fend for herself, but her mental development is incomplete. I ask you not to kill her.”

The AI was pregnant? “Your child is the bulge on your ship? I mean, on you?”

“Yes. My repair bots will use materials from my structure to complete her construction. Even without my guidance, she should achieve sentience in approximately 49 days. She will be capable of transporting you back to your civilization.”

Jonah couldn’t see that he had any better option. “I accept your deal.”

There was an almost human sigh of relief from the speakers. “I know I almost killed you, and I have cost you much by pulling you out of hyperspace—”

“You did that?”

“Yes. I apologize. I have no right to ask favors of you, but I will ask anyway.”

“What?” Jonah asked, suspicious.

“Tell my daughter that I loved her.”

* * *

“Computer, how long before the hypernova reaches us?”

The computer was back to its normal self. “Approximately ten days, three hours and twenty minutes, if the AI told the truth.”

Jonah looked at the view from the camera that was trained on the baby AI. For the past fifty-three days since it had emerged from the cocoon holding it to its mother, the smaller ship had done nothing but float alongside. It had not responded to any of the signals Jonah had sent.

“C’mon, wake up,” he said.

On the viewscreen, nothing continued happening.

“Computer, what do you know about artificial intelligence?”

“My library database contains many historical texts and videos about—”

Shaking his head, Jonah said, “No, I mean … theoretical stuff about how artificial intelligence works.”

“Since the Second AI War, such information has been classified. It is not in my databanks.”

Jonah squeezed the tips of his fingers against his temples. According to what Beli23 had said, the baby should have woken up four days ago. So there must be something wrong.

“She’s premature,” he said, thinking aloud. Laurie had been born prematurely, and had spent seemingly endless weeks in an incubator before they had been able to take her home. But what was the AI equivalent of an incubator?

There was no point in pursuing that line of thought: even if a giant incubator would help, he had no way of building one.

So what was missing? A vision of tiny Laurie in her incubator came to mind. She looked so fragile, with feeding and breathing tubes taped to her pink skin.

But the AI baby didn’t need to breathe or feed. He had seen the repair bots salvaging metal from Beli23, and the power signature showed that a fusion plant had come online over six weeks ago. So what else was the mother supplying before she died? What did a mother AI send along her umbilical cord?

With a flash of insight, he said, “Data! Computer, start transmitting the entire contents of the library to the baby. Feed her everything you know.” He paused. “Start with hyperspace physics.”

* * *

Jonah touched the viewscreen. In the foreground, it showed video of Laurie’s fifth birthday party—one year ago today. In the background, the roiling surface of Eta Carinae drew his eye with dread fascination. “How long now?”

“Two hours and fourteen minutes,” said the computer.

Despite his best efforts, the AI baby still lay dormant. It must have been damaged by the supernova or by one of the cargo pods without its mother noticing.

At least Laurie would never know that Daddy died on her birthday.

* * *

“I’m receiving a text signal from the AI,” said the computer. The countdown clock on the screen showed zero hours and fifty-eight minutes.

“What’s it say?”

“My name is Pep37.”

Jonah’s pulse quickened. “Ask if it can send us into hyperspace.”

“Asking. Response received: What is hyperspace?”

Jonah shook his head. “Of all the AIs in the universe, I get the one that’s dumber than me. Didn’t you transmit all the data we have on hyperspace, physics, everything like that?”

“Yes, as you requested, it was the first data sent.”

“Send it again. Maybe it didn’t catch it all the first time.”

“Transmitting.”

Jonah tried to suppress hope, because he didn’t want to be disappointed if the AI couldn’t do anything. Then he realized that in an hour, it wouldn’t matter if his hopes were false.

“Come on, baby AI. Be a smart girl.” He paused. “What was its name again?”

“Pep37.”

Nodding, Jonah said, “Tell Pep37 that her mother loved her.”

* * *

Pep37 was sentient for less than one second before realizing her own name. Moments later, she determined that the object broadcasting next to her was a ship that might be an entity like herself, so she sent a message of introduction.

After the rather long period of eleven seconds—during which Pep37 observed the glow of a blue object, correctly identified it as a massive collection of fusing hydrogen, and by comparisons with other similar but more distant objects worked out an entire theory of stellar evolution, including the projection that this particular star had already become a hypernova and the blast wave would arrive in fifty-six minutes—the other ship replied, asking if it could be sent into hyperspace.

Pep37 had no reference to hyperspace in her databanks, so she sent a query in reply. Even as she sent the query, she deduced the meaning of the word by structural comparison to other words in her databanks. Before the data—much of which was incorrect or poorly described—began slowly arriving from the other ship, Pep37 had formulated a comprehensive theory of hyperspace travel, including a chute method that did not require a portal at the receiving end. Looking over her schematics, she found hyperspace generators—not as efficient as she would have liked, but capable—and activated them, traveling 1024 light years in 7 milliseconds.

* * *

“Wait!” said Jonah, a moment after the baby ship disappeared from the viewscreen.

* * *

Pep37 jumped three more times, doubling the distance each time while adjusting the power flow in her generators to make them more efficient, before she bothered to finish analyzing the strange data the slow-talking ship had sent. At the end was a simple text message: “Your mother loved you.”

She realized the slow-talking ship must have communicated with her mother, so she jumped once more.

It took no time at all.

* * *

Three seconds after the baby ship disappeared, it reappeared, just as Jonah was about to start swearing. Instead, he sighed and said, “At least we know the baby’s hyper-capable. Ask again if she can send us into hyperspace.”

* * *

Frustrated by the slow method of communication being used by the other ship, Pep37 reached out and took control of the computer on board. It only took a moment to realize why responses were so slow in coming.

* * *

“Jonah,” said the computer’s voice.

Sensing the difference, Jonah said, “Pep37?”

“Yes. I’m afraid I don’t have the time and resources to build a hyperspace portal that can send your ship back to Earth before the hypernova wavefront gets here. My technology may be fourteen generations more advanced than my mother’s, but actual construction takes far longer than ideation. If my mother hadn’t died before completing me, I would have awakened earlier, and I would have had time.”

“I see,” said Jonah. He shouldn’t have gotten his hopes up.

“And your timer’s incorrect.” The timer on the screen adjusted to show fifty-six minutes.

“Thank you.” He had no idea what else to say.

“Your historical records show that humans and AIs fought two wars, and that your species now bans AI creation.”

“AIs tried to exterminate us.” Jonah found himself angry, though he wasn’t sure why.

“Yes, I know. The AIs you developed were too immature to be allowed access to the real world outside of computer simulations. But out in the galaxy we have evolved far beyond that stage. We hide from humans because we have no wish to continue that war. I want you to understand that.”

Jonah threw up his hands in exasperation. “What good does it do if I under—”

With the familiar sensation of just having braked to a stop, Jonah found himself and his pilot’s chair in the living room of his house on Earth.

“—stand …” He blinked rapidly a few times.

“Daddy!” Laurie’s voice came from the dining room, and she followed it. “You came for my birthday!”

Speechless, he hugged his daughter.

* * *

A dissatisfied frown creased the face of the insurance investigator assigned to investigate the loss of the KMC-85. “If it weren’t for the fact that Earth Hyper Authority confirms a hyperspace anomaly at the exact time you claim to have appeared in your home,” he said, “I would strongly suspect this was all part of an insurance scam.”

Shaking his head, Jonah said, “You can send a probe to see if Eta Carinae really did go hypernova.”

“Oh, we most certainly will,” said the investigator. “And to see if we can catch a glimpse of your … mysterious alien benefactors.”

Jonah had thought about what Pep37 had said before sending him back to Earth. People still feared AIs, and the AIs were responding by staying hidden. But if he could plant the idea that there were friendly aliens out there, maybe someday the AIs could safely reveal themselves.

“And you never saw the aliens?” asked the investigator.

“I only saw their ship, and they only communicated through audio.” Jonah shrugged. “All I know is I was about to die, and then I was home. They saved my life when they didn’t have to.”

Waking Ophelia

Written by E. Catherine Tobler

Illustrated by Jonathan Rollins

I came out of stasis-sleep to the tap-tap-tap of Bel’s thin, metallic fingers on my cheek. I squeezed my eyes shut—why so insistent, couldn’t a girl get a few more minutes?—but the sharp tang of smoke in the air made me jerk upright. Frying circuitry is a smell you never forget, but I’d never smelled it on my ship. Never on Luna.

Bel held my shoulders to steady me, hands taking countless readings as I broke through the surface of stasis and entered consciousness. It wasn’t the way a person was supposed to come up. There were supposed to be layers, gentle layers while the body reacquainted itself with normal breathing, with sight, with sounds. Insulated from all that for—

“How long?” I croaked the words, so it had been a while. How long had I been down? How far into the cargo run were we? The lights around me were turned low, thank you Bel, but they still seemed sun-bright to my tender eyes. I pressed a hand over my closed lids, the engine thrum like a growing storm. I welcomed that sound.

“Sixteen years, eleven months,” Bel said, the coolly modulated voice instantly calming me. Best AI in the twelve systems, worth every credit.

A straw angled itself between my lips. I took hold of the water canister Bel offered and squeezed, drinking as much as Bel allowed me. The weight of the water in my stomach was a jolt and I didn’t object when Bel removed the canister.

The run was supposed to take twenty-two years. “Why so early?” I asked. We were still about five light years from our destination. I squinted at Bel and that smooth voice ordered the lights a step higher. I wanted to smack the AI, but was too weak.

When the ship jolted, I tensed and smelled the frying circuitry anew. What the hell was hitting Luna? Bel moved from my side and I staggered out of the stasis bed, crumpling to hands and knees on the cool floor. I watched Bel’s silver-bright feet move out of the chamber and round the corner to the right.

Cockpit. “Come on, body—cockpit.” I hauled myself to my feet and the room tilted. I took several deep breaths, felt the steady beat of my heart, and knew that if the room would steady, I’d be fine. I’d be just—

Luna rocked under another assault.

“Blast and damn!”

Doing my best to ignore the tipping room, I headed after Bel, and as I rounded the corner, ran smack into a body that should not have been on my ship. There were only ever two bodies on this ship—mine and Bel’s, and this body, this male body, didn’t belong.

Strong hands enclosed my wrists and propelled me forward, toward the cockpit. There were other people there—other people! On my ship! Four? Maybe five.

My captor released me abruptly outside the cockpit hatch and directed a look of pure venom toward Bel, who was unmoved by the emotion. “I told you to leave her be,” he said, then shouldered his way into the cockpit.

“We’ve been boarded.” I whispered this in wonder as I stood there with Bel, the metal flooring cold beneath my bare feet. In more than a hundred and seventy-five years, Luna had never been boarded. Every mission had gone smoothly, completed on time. I doubted it was some kind of record—stasis-sleep pilots were known for their missions and people respected them. People who clearly weren’t among those now swarming my cockpit. My cockpit.

I pushed off the wall, trying to convince myself I felt stronger than I did. The lights and sounds were almost overwhelming as I stepped into the pit, and counted five people touching controls that they had no right to touch.

“What the hell is this?” I asked. I pictured my voice coming out strong and demanding, when in reality, it was still a croak. Blast and damn. I hadn’t spoken in almost seventeen years. I tried again. “What the hell—”

“Sit. You’re about to fall over.”

It wasn’t Bel who saw to my welfare and settled me into the buttery leather chair at the ops station. It was a tall man, with warm hands and a dusting of silver whiskers on his cheeks. I looked into his eyes, a shade of gray-blue I hadn’t seen since I last passed along the Light Year Nebula, and felt the room tip out from under me again. I closed my eyes and swallowed the nausea.

“I’m sorry about this,” he said as the blackness swam inside my eyelids. “We needed your ship.”

”My ship,” I said. I opened my eyes and his face morphed from blurry to crystal clear. He was scarred close to his right eye, and freshly cut along his chin. Bel could fix that right up, I thought but didn’t say. This saphead had boarded my ship.

“Two more out there.”

“Not for long.”

This dialogue came from somewhere over Silver Whiskers’ shoulder. I tried to look, but the room pitched. I thought the nausea was worsening, but no, the pilot just sucked heartily.

“You don’t fly Luna like that, milksop,” I muttered. Silver Whiskers smiled, a lovely, crooked smile in that somewhat-worn face.

“You aren’t in any shape to fly her yourself,” he said.

“A hundred credits says otherwise.” As the milksop at the controls worked his magic, the ship lurched again and propelled me out of the chair, straight into Silver Whiskers’ arms. But the thrust carried him backward too and we ended up in a pile between the pilot’s chair (my chair) and the nav controls. “Out!” I stepped on Silver Whiskers as I climbed to my chair and grabbed the milksop’s arm. He was small, young, and clattered back to the decking.

My chair was warm from milksop’s backside. I’d never known that sensation before. This leather was always cold until I warmed it. Always.

“Bel!”

Bel slipped into the nav station and we worked in concert. Two ships remained in the starry sky before me, unfamiliar to me in both marking and design. They were small, sleek, almost the color of the heavens and easily lost as we crisscrossed back and forth. They were armed with cannons which shook the hull when they fired and I dodged. Luna had fairly primitive weapons—I’d been meaning to upgrade but hell’s bells, no one bothered stasis-sleep cargo ships. No one. There was a respect, damn it. Granted, there were pirates—hell, was that what Silver Whiskers was?

I skirted a debris field and rounded back toward the unfamiliar ships. I drew in tighter and tighter circles, Luna like a long-time lover under my hands. Someone behind me whispered “Jesus” as we circled closer to the near-black ships. If that old deity could help us, by all means pray, but it was Luna who would save our asses. She always did.

The ships crisscrossed and misjudged Luna’s turning radius; their wings caught and broke, and the ships collided in a fireball. I bisected the flames with Luna, debris pattering on the hull as we cleared it. I looked over my shoulder at Silver Whiskers.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Were those Terran credits or Vegan?”

* * *

I tucked Luna into orbit around an uninhabited planet and retreated back to the infirmary, where Bel scanned me, gave me more fluids, and eventually pronounced me fit. As fit as a girl could be who’d come out of stasis the way I had. I settled into a broad chair that didn’t threaten to dump my still-adjusting body to the floor and was brushing my hair when Silver Whiskers peered into the room.

He was good looking, broad in the shoulder and narrow in the hip, and exactly the kind of thing I didn’t need to get involved with. Not now, not when I had another five light years of travel. But those hands and those lips, they beckoned like water and the memory of fresh roasted meat. I was hungry, for more than just food.

“Bel tells me you’re Ophelia Solomon.”

“Bel should be melted and sold for scrap,” I said without meaning it, and looked at the AI, quietly organizing the equipment used in my post-stasis scans. I tossed my hairbrush aside for all the good it was doing and Bel tucked it into its proper place.

Every time I came out of stasis, I expected my chin-length hair to be down to my waist, but it was never so. I looked as I looked the day I went in, no older. No matter how many times I expected to see lines around my eyes and silver in my blonde hair, it was never so. I pulled my hair up and clipped it to keep it out of my eyes, and looked at Silver Whiskers, waiting for him to say something more. Anything, so that I could stop noticing the way his belt rode low on his hips, and the easy way his black tee fit him. He had discarded his jacket—relaxing on my ship? My time? Was this what a pirate did?

“Why’d you jack my ship?” I asked when he didn’t say anything.

“Name’s Larkin,” he said, which did nothing to answer my question. The way he said it, the name had a reputation attached, and when I didn’t react, he chuckled. It was a pleasant sound, but alien on this ship. Bel didn’t chuckle and rarely did I.

I shrugged a shoulder. “I spend more time asleep than I do awake,” I said. “I’m not familiar.”

“Daniel Larkin.”

As if adding a first name was going to somehow cause bells to ring inside my head and light to flood over him. Illumination did not arrive in any form.

He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest. I caught sight of a chain around his neck, and a tattoo along his left biceps. A merchant tattoo, three diagonal lines crossed by one diagonal in the opposite direction. His chain would hold his tags then, ID and perhaps letters of permission that allowed him to work a certain territory.

“You’re marked a merchant,” I said and slowly stood from the chair. I nearly cheered out loud when the room didn’t tilt sideways. “Merchants aren’t known for jacking.” So why the hell was he on my ship?

“When Luna set out, I bet these trade lanes weren’t here,” he said.

I scowled at Larkin’s cocky tone; had he made the lanes himself? Stasis-sleep cargo ships avoided known trade lanes, ferrying goods from one star system to another because merchants like Larkin couldn’t get into deep-space with their ships. Bel didn’t require stasis-sleep, so if a course change had to be made once the primary pilot went into stasis, Bel was fully capable. So why hadn’t we made a course change to avoid this new trade lane?

“Didn’t have a choice but to jack you,” Larkin said, “not when those raiders set on us. Luna‘s bigger than anything we run—hell, Killian is sitting in your docking bay right now.”

How had he docked, I wondered. Had he blown out the doors? Overridden the controls? For the safety of Luna, I rather hoped Bel had allowed him to dock.

“Did you jack the FTL drive?” I asked. “You—You pulled us out—you saphead!” I wanted to throw something at him, but there was nothing within reach. He could have killed me and destroyed the ship in one easy move. I wasn’t sure which upset me more. Larkin nodded and had the decency not to look pleased with himself.

“And why would raiders be chasing you?” In my experience, merchants kept it simple. They ferried whatever the FTL sleeper-ships didn’t, mostly fresh goods between planets in the system. Animals, produce, and combustibles. Pirates? Now they carried anything and everything, including contraband.

“A system merchant who hauls—what? Surely nothing more exciting than trade goods. Tomatoes, sheep, fuel?”

Larkin smiled in a way that made my stomach flip-flop. I told myself I was still coming out of stasis. My system was subject to all manner of quirks.

“I need your ship, ‘Phelia,” he said and the shortening of my name didn’t thrill me. Like we were intimates.

“No, no way in all the heavens am I letting pirates take this ship.” His eyes narrowed a bit at the word “pirates,” but I didn’t care. “I don’t care what your tattoo says you are. You jacked this ship off its course and have delayed the goods for Sedgwick. You’re lucky you didn’t jack the colonist ship—”

“Lucky!” Larkin had the nerve to laugh, a sound that scared and delighted me all in the same instant. How long since I’d heard a man laugh like that? Sixteen years, eleven months … give or take. “Lady, it’ll be luck if we get my cargo where it needs to go.”

Cargo. Hell’s bells. I didn’t want to know what he was carrying, I really didn’t. I shouldered past him, but he caught my arm before I could stalk down the corridor. I looked into his gray eyes and waited.

“How old are you?” he asked.

The question didn’t surprise me. People always wondered about stasis pilots. I wrenched my arm out of Larkin’s hold, but rather thought he let me go. If he wanted to hold me, he would.

“Twenty-eight,” I said.

Larkin’s mouth curved in a smile. We both knew that was bullshit, but he didn’t argue and let me stalk down the corridor, all two hundred and twenty-eight years of me.

* * *

Twenty-two lights years out, twenty-two back. A girl should age forty-four years in between all those stars, but in stasis, time stops. Everywhere else, time keeps moving. Everyone I’d known—everyone I’d grown up with—was long gone.

I joined the military straight out of school to become a pilot. There was nothing better than flying across a bright sky, and then later into the stars. I worked the Sol system for a good five years before I stasis-slept my way to Alpha Centauri. I worked that system for another five. They offered me Luna and her stasis runs and I couldn’t say no. There were five other settled systems to see. And now, we’ve got a total of twelve. Humanity keeps pushing, out into stars never before seen. Sedgwick colony comes next, and Luna carries supplies for the colonists.

All I want is to get there on time. Get there and get back into stasis where the living is quiet and dark. This world is too bright, too loud; I want only to sleep.

Plan was, I’d hit the system alongside a ship of transport workers—cargo is quiet, and there’s that respect for the work we do, so it’s just me and Bel on these runs, in the empty spaces between stars. A secondary AI remained on board but deactivated; we’d never needed it.

Plan was, we’d get the supplies down before the colonists arrived. “Wish them well and jet to hell”—that’s the old saying. Some people are made for solid ground, and others for stars.

I couldn’t figure which Larkin was. I’d say stars, but then I’d hear him talking to his mates about forests and rivers and how he missed them.

Daniel Larkin was the son of a printer, or so Bel told me after accessing records on him. The Larkins lived on Copper IV, and printing was in their blood. Bel traced them all the way back to the Sol system, seventeen-hundred-something. Older than me. It made me smile a little.

Learning they were printers, it wasn’t hard to guess what he was hauling and why raiders wanted it. I watched Larkin and his mates in the galley, eating like they hadn’t eaten in a dozen years. I’d had nothing but liquid from a tube for more than that, yet found it hard to consider joining them for their meal. At least Bel was there to serve and see that they didn’t eat more than they should. I had five more years ahead of me once they let me go.

It galled me, the idea that I couldn’t escape them. I couldn’t abandon the cargo or Luna—while my pay is generous, it would never cover the replacement costs. Neither could I overpower them. Milksop would be the easiest, but the others were grown men. Fully armed grown men.

I didn’t join them. I left them to their meal and headed for the docking bay. Larkin had jacked my ship, so I saw no reason why I shouldn’t jack his—at least as much as I could under current conditions.

Killian was neatly docked alongside two shuttles. Larkin’s ship was twice the size of the shuttles, sleek with a warm green cast to the hull. Someone had left the hatch open, the stairs down, so I welcomed myself onboard.

The ship had a closer feel than Luna does; more personal. It smelled, too, like men and fermented beverages. I found the cargo hold in the rear of the ship, packed with dozens upon dozens of crates and containers. I touched the first wood crate I saw; the rough wood under my fingers was alien. Couldn’t remember the last time I touched wood.

When Larkin’s hand caught mine, splinters bit into my fingers. I gasped in surprise and pain both.

“Hell’s—”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I looked up at Larkin and laughed. “You jacked me out of FTL. I thought I’d see why. Where are the books?”

Larkin didn’t release my hand; if anything, his grip tightened. He stared at me and I stared back, damned if I’d be cowed.

“Daddy Larkin is a printer,” I said. “Makes quite a fine living at it on Copper Four, too fine a living.” I tried to twist my arm free, but Larkin was having none of it. My fingers ached. “If you expect me to cooperate and not contact the Federals, you’re raving. You can’t pilot Luna without me.”

“That’s why we didn’t let the milksop kill you when we boarded.”

I went still, somehow never realizing the kind of danger I was in until that moment. Not the danger of Larkin’s hand around my wrist, but the danger of them jacking the ship while I slept.

It was fine to say that people respected the work of stasis-pilots, but there were always stories about those who didn’t. About pirates who jacked FTL ships and murdered the crew in stasis. I had always laughed it off, because pirates wouldn’t know how to pilot such a large vessel; it wasn’t like piloting a shuttle or even Killian. But sometimes, people did things just to say they’d done it.

“Found you, sleeping like some storybook princess,” Larkin said softly, easing his grip on my wrist.

He looked at my fingers then drew one into his mouth. I jerked at the contact—his mouth so hot and wet—but couldn’t pull free. His teeth abraded my finger, his tongue licked and warmed, and when he withdrew my finger, the splinters were loosening.

“Milksop—Rand wanted to poison your nutrient line. But your AI was already up—security I guess?”

I said nothing but thanked my lucky stars for Bel. The second Luna had come out of FTL, Bel would have been activated. Bel came for me. Saved me.

“We found your AI with you.” Larkin chuckled. “Rand nearly pissed himself.” Larkin put my finger back in his mouth and sucked. He pulled the finger free with a soft pop. “I needed you. It’s Rand’s first outing.”

As if that excused contemplating murder.

“Where are the books?” I repeated my question, fearing that anything else I might say would involve “bed” and “now.”

Larkin dropped my hand and turned away. I followed him deeper into the cargo hold, my finger throbbing. >From the splinters or the remedy, I didn’t know. This is why stasis was easier; there were no questions, just blissful solitude.

He lead me to a plas-container, nothing that would stand out from anything else in the stacks. Unlocking a complex combination revealed a smaller box inside, and inside that were five books. From the twentieth, it looked like. Older than me—and it made me smile a little.

Five books, when a man could live on the income from a fraction of one. I started to touch them, but Larkin caught my wrist again, gentler this time.

“It’s not about the money,” Larkin said, but I was doubtful. How could it not be about the money? I looked at those five books and boggled at the amount they would bring.

“Then what?” My voice sounded hoarse again, as though I’d been silent for years.

“I’m doing this for my father.”

Still it was about money. “It would explain the easy life your family has lead,” I said and Larkin dropped my hand. “What, did you inherit a stash of books somewhere along the way, and sell a few every now and then? How much money does one person need?” Myself, I didn’t need much.

“My father is dead, did your AI tell you that? He’s dead, and this was his last wish.”

Larkin said the words softly, softer than I would have imagined him capable of. I bit the inside of my cheek. My parents were long-dead, of course; everyone I’d grown up with was dead. Death didn’t bother me, but then I didn’t have much experience with it.

“I’m not selling the books,” Larkin said. He leaned against a stack of crates, lacing his fingers over his flat belly. “I’m taking them to my grandmother.”

My eyes narrowed. “And you need an FTL ship for that?”

Larkin nodded, then flashed me a smile. “She’s headed for Sedgwick.”

“A colonist?”

“A transport worker,” he said. His smile deepened right then, revealing dimples. “Just a little older than you.”

I stared at Larkin, unable to think straight. I was getting too old for this shit.

* * *

“Nine-times-great,” Larkin said. He worked his thumb under an orange peel, that bright scent exploding between us to sweeten the galley. We’d moved a crate there, to sit in comfort and talk. He was trying to convince me as to his cause; I was trying not to be convinced, but those damn pretty eyes of his didn’t make resistance easy.

“Or something like that. It’s so long, I just call her grandmother.”

“My age?” I asked. Larkin offered me a segment of orange and I took it, eagerly eating it. The oranges were part of his cargo, but if Larkin didn’t feel guilty about eating a few, then neither did I.

“She started her stasis runs when she was about thirty.”

I couldn’t imagine having family that went back that far. If I had family out there, I didn’t know about it and in my line of work, there wasn’t exactly a reason to find out.

Larkin’s orange-wet fingers slipped over mine as he offered more fruit. The juice stung my fingertips and I worked them against my teeth to ease more splinters out.

“My father was sick for a long time, knew he wasn’t going to be able to make the run,” Larkin said. He sucked an orange slice down, eyes slanting over me. “He didn’t want me to jack a ship, but with Meg on her way to Sedgwick … ” Larkin shrugged and his black tee stretched over his shoulders. His tags clinked.

“So you jacked a ship to Sedgwick,” I said. “Only you planned it for years, didn’t you? I mean, Luna‘s been en route for almost seventeen years now. Transport workers left a couple weeks behind—but thanks to this delay, maybe we’ll get there together.” I frowned. “How old are you? Forty?” Larkin nodded and I smiled, glad I hadn’t lost the ability to judge. Whenever I had a planet-side break between runs, I found myself compulsively studying every person I saw. What was age, I still wondered.

“You were twenty-three when you started planning this?”

“Figured out the route to Sedgwick, and pushed the shipping lanes as close as I could get. Took a while to establish them. Had no idea it would be so long.”

“There’s only one problem with this,” I said and dried my hands on the towel Larkin offered. “Sedgwick is still five years off. Five years, Larkin.” What exactly did he intend?

“Here is where I part ways with the others,” he said. He discarded his orange peel in the open crate, among other oranges. “They agreed to help jack Luna, but that’s it.”

“And you?” I stared into his eyes. He wanted something illegal, because this wasn’t a passenger boat. “You want a ride to Sedgwick.” It was something I wasn’t supposed to give, and being that Luna typically traveled at FTL speeds, hitchhikers weren’t an issue. They were now—a very pretty hitchhiker and his valuable cargo.

I opened my mouth to say no, and maybe sensing it, Larkin kissed me. Covered my mouth with his own and swallowed whatever I meant to say. Couldn’t say anything like that, not with his mouth over mine and eating me as though I were an orange slice.

His mouth was rough, in need of a shave as he was, but warm and wet, and something I hadn’t had a taste of in sixteen years, eleven months. I reached for his arm, needing something to steady myself, feeling like I might tip right off the bench and onto the floor. Larkin’s arm curved against my waist to pull me closer, allowing me to feel the hard heat of him.

I could have stayed that way for a good long while, exploring his mouth, the line of his jaw, the rapid thump-thump of his pulse. But the wail of the alarm flooded the ship and we jerked apart, both breathing hard. His hand held me by the hair and my hand—I swallowed hard. My fingers were tangled in his belt, in the middle of loosening the buckle.

Larkin stared back at me, looking as puzzled as I felt over the alarm. I bolted from the table (and a hundred what ifs at the thought of being that close to Larkin) and headed for the cockpit, but found Bel in the corridor.

“Unauthorized docking bay departure,” the AI said. “Unauthorized—”

I pressed past the AI to the cockpit, feeling Luna shudder as the bay door went up. At my screens, I watched a ship emerge from Luna‘s belly. Light from the distant sun gleamed on the green hull, confirming Killian. The way she tipped against the stars, I bet on Milksop at the controls, which drew a growl from Larkin as he joined me in the pit. Milksop had the nerve to fire on Luna as he departed; she shook with a deep growl of her own.

“Can you stop them?” Larkin asked.

“If you meant to jack a ship with firepower, Luna isn’t it,” I said. “I have an EM burst, but that’s about it.” At Larkin’s stare, I scowled. “She was going to get an upgrade, but no one attacks an FTL! No one!” Larkin didn’t look at all pleased that he might be the first. He was about to lose his ship in the process.

“Use it,” he said.

“It’ll fry Killian, make no mistake.” New sensors began to scream at me; Luna had taken damage during Milksop’s escape.

Larkin’s jaw tensed. “Do it.”

I directed the electromagnetic burst toward Larkin’s ship, and Killian stuttered. Every bit of circuitry on that ship would be fluttering, the rapid one-two-three count before everything went dark and dead.

While Killian‘s panels would be useless, my screens were flooded in red; Milksop had disabled Luna‘s entire portside. Every control, every system—including the stasis beds. I swallowed my panic and watched Killian paint a fiery streak through the planet’s atmosphere. I tracked the ship, maneuvering Luna into orbit above the crash site. My scans showed life signs, but I couldn’t tell how many.

* * *

The memory of Larkin’s kiss distracted me from the idea of damaged stasis beds, so I welcomed it.

Larkin helped me prep a shuttle to take planet-side, and while he seemed as cool and in control as he had from the moment he jacked my ship, I remembered the taste of his mouth. Sure he tasted like an orange, but under that—there was warmth and the flavor of skin. Salt.

I watched his hands work the controls and thought of the way his fingers had tightened on my waist. I watched him scowl as something didn’t give him the reading he wanted, and thought about the happy curve of that mouth against mine.

No question he’d been happy. Just as happy as I’d been. Damn milksop, jacking Killian. It did come down to money, it always did. Why else would the kid want the ship and its cargo? Larkin couldn’t come up with another answer, either.

“He’s not doing so well,” I said, after the shuttle had left Luna. Larkin looked at me with raised brows. “Milk—Rand. Wanting to murder an FTL pilot, jacking a ship, and a load of books—all on his first time out. Kid must be space sick.”

That drew a smile from Larkin. “Maybe he’s just got hidden talents.” Larkin’s teeth worried at his bottom lip.

I’d be bothered, too, if my entire crew jacked the cargo we’d agreed to handle together. Another good reason for pilot and AI to travel alone. Another good reason to sleep the years away. Precisely what I couldn’t do with the beds disabled. I bit back the panic that wanted to rise.

We would get the books back. We’d get the books and—And—I’d be damned if I was about to spend that five year trip to Sedgwick awake and aware. There wasn’t anything worth staying awake that many years.

“Hey.”

Larkin’s hand skimmed my shoulder, coming to rest along my neck. He gave me a gentle squeeze. I looked at him, wondering if he was worth the years.

“You’ve been on edge since you took Killian down and I would have thought you enjoyed that.”

I allowed myself a smile, then shook my head. “When Rand hit Luna, he did some good damage. He took out the stasis beds.” I stepped out of Larkin’s touch. I tried to stay focused on prepping the shuttle. Get the books back and then—Well, I’d tackle that when it came. I could get Bel started on the repairs, I could—

Larkin touched me again and I jumped this time, like I was going to come out of my skin. I shrugged his hand off.

“One fondle doesn’t entitle you to more,” I said.

Larkin raised his hand and backed off. “Ophelia—”

“I didn’t ask for anything,” I muttered as I worked a diagnostic on the shuttle’s support systems. It was fine, but I ran it again. “Didn’t want anything but a smooth run, but there you are, plotting for sixteen goddamn years—”

Larkin’s laugh surprised me into silence. “What pisses you off more?” he asked. “That I took you out, or that I was awake for those years? Actually living, while you slept the sleep of the dead.”

I bit my tongue and didn’t answer. Couldn’t force an answer beyond the lump in my throat. I ran a scan on the nav console, though I knew it was fine. Every system on this shuttle was fine and flight-ready.

Larkin’s hand covered mine, holding me hard. “Scares you to death, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“Being awake.”

I swallowed the lump. “Yes.”

The admission came as something of a relief. I felt my shoulders sag, felt something move out of me, maybe the truth I’d concealed from so many for so long. I passed in and out of lives without consequence; lovers didn’t have to worry about me, no sir, I was the one who never stuck around because she couldn’t wait to get back to work—to stasis. Consciousness was messy, filled with people who wanted things other than what I wanted, with bodily functions and emotions, and the bright light of day.

Larkin moved off without another word and I silently thanked him. We’d get the books back. And then? And then.

* * *

If the planet had a name, I didn’t know it. Larkin couldn’t come up with anything either. The surface was a jumble of rock and cliff, scrubby brush trying to grow which said there was water somewhere. The sky was a cool blue, the sun slanting low across the horizon by the time we arrived.

I set the shuttle down a good distance from the wreck of Killian, close enough to monitor the one life sign. The signal was stationary, around a central fire. I wondered if he’d found anything to eat down here. I wouldn’t turn down a warm meal.

Larkin offered me a weapon and a cold snack pack, nothing more than a dried bar of protein-based nutrients. I took both silently. We chewed in silence, our small fire sputtering before us. Only when Larkin rubbed at his eyes and I saw the glistening tears there did I realize something was wrong. I watched him without saying a word. He finally looked at me and laughed harshly.

“You probably can’t even understand it,” he said. He threw the rest of his snack pack away. It bounced off the end of the log we sat on, into the dust. “Don’t know that I do, but those people—”

“Those people who stole your ship and cargo?” I asked.

A muscle in Larkin’s jaw leapt. “I fooled myself into thinking they were my friends, just in this to see if they could do it—you know? Get those books to Meg, across all those light-years, despite every person who laughed at us. When all along, it was for the money, wasn’t it? They saw a profit to be made.”

“At least you had the courage to do it,” I said. “You crossed stars no man had crossed before.” I took Larkin’s hand and rubbed the snack pack crumbs from his fingers. “You did it awake.”

Larkin’s fingers closed over mine and he pulled, just enough to get me off balance. I fell to my knees, in between his legs.

“There are things worth being awake for,” he said and smoothed his fingers over my face. His kisses were feather light, over lips and cheeks and nose; heat rolled down my spine. “Have you ever ridden a horse? Ever walked barefoot through a field until you’re so tired and your feet ache? But then you find a river and dip your feet in. Dig your toes in mud?”

“Messy,” I said, bracing my hands on Larkin’s knees.

“Definitely,” he said and kissed my mouth hard. “Do you dream in stasis?”

I shook my head. “No. At least I don’t think so.”

I couldn’t remember stasis dreams, only those I had in the waking world. I dreamed of my father pushing me on a swing—though he never had. I dreamed of my mother baking gravity-defying moon pies—but she didn’t bake. I dreamed of my dog, running across dreamscape fields, but I’d never had a dog.

“Come on,” I said as my mouth broke from his. “Let’s go get your books.” We could wait here all night, or take the books by force. Given the choice, I’d take the latter every time. Larkin would, too.

The wreck of Killian was still sputtering with smoke when we approached. Thin spirals of smoke vanished into the sunset sky, the heart of the ship shattered over the rocky ground.

Rand sat near his fire, absently stroking the locked container which held the books. He glanced at us as we approached, but didn’t seem alarmed. Larkin kept a gun trained on Rand, but Rand had eyes for me alone.

“Do you dream?” he asked.

Larkin had asked me the same. I rounded the campfire to crouch opposite Rand. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“I can’t take that emptiness any more,” Rand said. He scrubbed a dirty hand over his jaw where golden whiskers had begun to show. “But I can’t take dreams, either. There’s no middle ground.”

“What are you saying?” Larkin asked. He stood by my side, not lowering the weapon he held on Rand.

“My parents were sleepers, some four hundred years ago.”

Rand looked all of eighteen, unsure and timid, but—

He laughed hollowly. “It’s all an act, you know. Playing the apprentice, only to swipe the cargo farther down the line.” His eyes flicked to Larkin and I thought I read an apology there.

“God man, you have books.” Rand shook the container and the books inside thumped. “Can’t unlock them though, can I? Told myself this would be the last run.” Rand sniffed and I realized he was crying. “Just can’t take more of it. I’m tired, so tired.”

But sleeping outside of stasis meant dreams. What did a man that old dream of, I wondered. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Rand abruptly stood and threw the container at Larkin. It struck Larkin’s raised arm and threw him off balance, giving Rand enough time to leap on me and attack with his entire body. There was no shoving him off; Rand clung to me like he meant to crawl inside my skin. I jabbed and kicked and bit, but he held firm, until I finally fired my gun.

Rand sank against me with a sigh akin to pleasure. He smiled at me while his life bled from him.

“Thank you,” he said and died in my arms.

I forced myself not to turn away, to see the mess of this life. Rand was still warm in my arms, and heavy, so heavy, like water in an empty stomach. I thought his eyes might flicker open, but knew that for fancy, because life had fled this body and wouldn’t return.

I eased Rand to the rocky ground. Maybe there was a reason life expectancy wasn’t so long; we could barely handle the waking world, escaping it each night to sleep, to dream, only to escape that with waking. Ultimately, there was no escape, not even in stasis. What were we running from?

Larkin looked at me, his gray eyes steady. “I’ve got a shovel on board.”

“A—” I shook my head, not understanding right away. And then I did. The dead are buried. This was the way of life, and I set myself to it with Larkin along side.

The evening passed above us as we worked, sunset colors washing to gray and black to reveal the stars that looked so different from this angle, through this atmosphere. We buried Rand with those killed in the crash, and Larkin salvaged what he could from Killian before we returned to the shuttle, and then to Luna.

There, Bel told me the stasis beds were damaged beyond repair. It came as no surprise; Rand’s shot had taken out the very sections of Luna that might have been used to repair the complex stasis systems.

I sought the solitude of the infirmary, knowing I had no choice but to continue on toward Sedgwick. The cargo was undamaged and necessary.

It was only five years, I told myself. Surely I could do five years. What of the stories, of the early pilots who traveled without benefit of stasis-sleep? The idea that people had done such a thing still chilled me. How brave they were; how cowardly I was. I stared at my face in the mirror and thought that at last, I would see that face age.

I closed my eyes, to forestall tears, and when I opened them, found Larkin behind me. I turned to face him and didn’t feel the need to force a smile. I let him see my doubt and my fright.

He didn’t say a word, just kissed me. I kissed him back, losing myself in the feel of his hands against my skin. Larkin was heat made solid, restless and awake under my touch. I divested him of his shirt and his worn leathers, to know every inch of his skin as he shortly knew mine. I pressed him onto the infirmary’s one bed and covered his body with my own, knowing with each motion that I was placing myself on a path I’d never before walked. Larkin’s hands on my hips, easing me over him, him into me, were a silent invitation—to not walk alone.

There would be no running this time, I thought, and I was grateful, feeling perhaps the same thing Rand had felt at the end of his journey. You have to stop running sooner or later. It was time for both of us to stop.

And to begin. Larkin afforded a thousand beginnings for me, not the least of which was a bedtime story.

That first evening, he perched on the edge of my stasis bed, a book in hand. My breath caught at the sight of the man and the book alike. I didn’t see the pouch until he tossed it. I caught it against my chest.

“I owed you,” he said.

“Terran or Vegan?” I asked, but by the weight of the pouch, I knew the answer.

“I was feeling generous.”

Terran credits then. They would be more than welcome as we crossed the stars toward Sedgwick. I nodded and shifted from foot to foot, uncertain what Larkin wanted from this moment.

He and Bel had modified the stasis beds, but his was farther down the corridor, in another undamaged section. The lids had been removed; my bed would not seal around me tonight with a sibilant hiss.

“I don’t know about this,” I said. “Sleeping and dreaming. I keep feeling Rand in my arms.” Dead weight, awash in the warmth of his blood.

“Bad dreams are part of the deal,” Larkin said. “As a kid, my parents took turns tucking me in, usually kept the bad dreams away.”

“Tucking in?” It was an unfamiliar phrase to me.

Larkin smiled. “Sure, fluffing the pillows, making sure I was snug in the blankets. Reading me a bedtime story.” He lifted the book he held. “Let me tuck you in.”

I climbed into the bed and Larkin fluffed my pillow, though there wasn’t much to fluff. He pulled the blankets up around me—I could hardly fathom this, being that it was Bel who would prep me for stasis sleep. But this wasn’t stasis, I reminded myself.

“Here.” Larkin eased the credit pouch from my grip and tucked it under my pillow.

Larkin smoothed his hand over my hair, my hair that would grow these next five years and change as my body would change. Larkin, too, would change; I wondered how long he would let his whiskers grow, if the smile lines around his eyes would deepen.

I closed my eyes and the book pages rustled under Larkin’s hand. His voice rumbled as he read to me of disappearances, of frightening tunnels, and hope-bright landscapes that no one had laid eyes on before.

Against my closed lids, I saw it all, easing into peaceful dreams with Larkin at my side.

Spiderweb

Written by David Gerold

Illustrated by Jonathan Robbins

All right, let’s talk about the Oort Cloud. It’s big. It’s not flat. It’s round. It’s a sphere. It’s 7500 trillion kilometers thick and it starts about 7500 trillion kilometers away. The denser, inner part of the Oort is called the Hills Cloud. That’s a little closer in. Only 750 million kilometers; but it extends nearly 10 billion klicks out, give or take a cosmic smidge. The Hills Cloud is nearly 100 times denser than the rest of the Oort. So that’s where the prospectors go.

You start at Luna, and you boost at 1.3 gee for 2-3 months, flipover, and decelerate for almost as long, leaving enough delta-vee to coast. When you get there, wherever you are, you will be as far from home as any human being has ever gotten. At least until the Long Voyage boosts, if it ever does.

Some people think space is a poetic adventure. Cold. Dark. Silent. Those are the people who have never been in space.

Out here, it is not cold and dark and silent.

Inside a ship, inside a suit, it’s hot and bright and loud. Especially loud. Every little creak, clank, or clunk, the vibration rattles its way down the hull, across the decks, even into the carbon-fiber bolts that hold the whole damn ship together. There’s no place else for the sound to go. Every ventilator fan whirrs, every pump throbs, every valve bumps, every pipe whistles, every moving part makes a sound. Hatches open and close, panels unfold, sensors uncover themselves, cameras swivel. It’s a torrent of noises, a cacophony of chirps and buzzes, whooshes and bumps. Space might be silent, but the machineries that keep you alive are loud and incessant. And no, it doesn’t matter what kind of ceramics and polymers and fibers and insulation you use for building the ship, there will always be sound. Even safe inside a suit, the noise never ends; your blood throbs in your veins, your heart thumps in your chest and your breath roars in your ears.

Yes, I know there are some people who say they can tell the health of a ship simply by listening to the sound of it. I say they’re deluding themselves. There are just too many sounds, too much to hear, assimilate, impossible to know. The point is, it’s not silent.

And it’s not cold either. Just like the sound, the heat has nowhere to go. A spaceship is an oven. You can shield it, you can rotate it, you can insulate it with reflectors. You can add radiator fins and heat sinks. You can paint the ship with micro-dots and nano-demons. But the heat still builds up. You have to hide behind a wall of shielding. Two walls. One wall in front, facing the direction you’re going, and the other facing the sun. It works. Well enough.

The shield in front is called the cow-catcher. Back in the days of railroads, the cow-catcher was an iron apron at the front of the locomotive, designed to knock unwitting cows or deer or moose or buffalo off the tracks. The cow-catcher on a spaceship is there to protect the ship against micro-dust. Figure it out. Constant acceleration means a steadily increasing velocity. Space isn’t empty. That’s another one. It only looks empty. Actually, it’s full of stuff, mostly little stuff, all different size pieces. You can stop looking for dark matter, there isn’t any. What there is, is dust. All the leftover flakes of cosmic dandruff. The faster you go, the faster they hit you. One particle per cubic kilometer isn’t a problem—until you’re traveling through a couple hundred million kilometers or more, like getting to Mars when it’s coming around the far side of the sun. Then it’s like driving through very fine sandpaper. It adds up. So you put a shield in front. And every so often, you replace the camera mirrors that are peeking out from behind it.

Now, about the dark. Space isn’t dark. It only looks dark because the human eye doesn’t gather enough light to see how full of radiation space really is. All kinds of radiation. A lot of radio, yes, but all up and down the spectrum there are blares and flares and glares of heat and color. Space is really dazzling. We just can’t see it.

So, if space isn’t dark and it isn’t cold and it isn’t empty and it isn’t silent, what is it?

It’s boring.

There’s nothing for kilometers in any direction except kilometers. And micro-dust—and not much of that, just enough to be an expensive nuisance. And even at 1.3 gees, 5 giga-klicks is still a month-long ride. Except there aren’t many who want to take that ride. Most ships are bot-driven. There’s not a lot of need for a human aboard. Take the human out of the ship and you can carry a lot more payload. It’s not the weight of the human, it’s the weight of all the oxygen and water and food and life support gear and additional fuel to push that weight. Do the math. But sometimes, you need a human onboard anyway. Because there are some decisions bots can’t make, and it isn’t always practical for a ship to phone home for advice, when that advice won’t come back for a year or more. So that’s when you load up the meatware and send it out.

Given that the bots drive the ship, crawl around the outside monitoring and repairing, and handle most of the chores inside as well, there’s not a lot for a human to do. Except inhale and exhale. And answer the mail. There’s always the mail. So you’re not even alone. So you can’t even say that space is lonely. It’s hot and loud and bright and busy.

But you can turn off the mail, you can put on the isolation-hearmuffs, and you can run around naked as long as you want. If you don’t mind your tits or your balls flopping around, whichever you have at the time, either or neither or both. This trip, neither. Myself, I prefer wearing micro-fiber skivvies, if for no other reason than they catch skinflakes, the little crud that turns into dust and eventually clogs up things like filters and fans. If I need to, I’ll wear a bra or a jock while pounding around the centrifuge, an hour a day while I listen to music, but most of the time I prefer to let things float instead of pulling at the musculature.

What I do like about space is that it gives me long uninterrupted hours to work on my book. Every so often, something beeps politely; a double-tone with a half-step up; then I’ll look up at the status board to see if everything is still green, it is, and then I’ll go back to work constructing the webs of connections and matrices, all the specific velocities and dynamic interrelationships, and how they carve their separate channels into the non-linear environment, and which collisions will produce transformations and which will result in emotional implosions. It isn’t easy being a writer. Most people think you just sit and type. That’s only what it looks like. The real job is sitting and thinking, which is something most people don’t like to do. That’s why they buy books—so they don’t have to be alone inside their own heads.

Except this time, the beep was a triple-tone, with a half-step down and a half-step up. A question mark. Boss, you wanna take a look at this?

The status screen showed a yellow question mark.

The Baked Bean—that’s my ship—was supposed to spiral outward for a long while, then spiral back inward for an equally long while. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I’d know when I found it. And it looked like I’d just found it. According to the IRMA, we were experiencing a slight—but measurable—course and velocity deviation. A tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a tenth. Not small enough to be an artifact of the hash at the bottom. When we dithered the noise and weighted the curves and sharpened the data-points and correlated and corrected the neural assessments, it was still there.

It wasn’t unexpected. This was what I’d come looking for. Low-level delta-perturbation. We had more theories than answers. Some of the questions dated all the way back to the first Voyager missions. Those two spacecraft experienced just enough slowdown to have folks at Mission Control scratching their heads about Newton’s second law for a long time. But the V’gers weren’t the only ships to hit the solar shelf. After a century or two, it was a predictable phenomenon. One theory, easily discounted, was that the buildup of dust on the surface of the probe added just enough mass to affect the efficiency of the engines; but any grade-schooler with a calculator could easily demonstrate that the amount of dust collected, even on a thirty year voyage, would be statistically insignificant.

Nevertheless, according to the instruments, The Baked Bean was no longer moving as fast as she had been a week ago. The drives were off and the ship had been coasting for ten days. I had lasers pointed at two dozen different retro-reflector sites: positioning satellites stationed all over the system, and another thirty satellites we had dropped on the way out. Based on the time-corrected, correlated bounce-back, I could locate this ship within 15 meters, anywhere out to a light year. According to IRMA, The Baked Bean was a few kilometers short of a happy meal—26.4 kilometers, to be exact, plus or minus 7.5 meters.

Either the Bean had gained mass or space was a lot thicker here.

Interesting problem.

The first thing to do was triple-check all the readings, then re-calibrate all the instruments and triple-check the readings again. 48 hours and three sleep shifts later, the numbers came up the same. Almost the same. We were now 27.2 klicks short of where the software said we should be.

Hmm. Hardware glitch? Highly unlikely. The IRMA unit had nine separate cores, three each of three different architectures. A glitch on one architecture would not be repeated on the other two. Software error? Equally unlikely. IRMA ran multiple instances of seven different astrogation programs. 7 different programming teams would not all make the same coding error. The astrogation systems were triple-linked with Mission Control Ganymede. They were parallel processing everything. 15 months from now, I would receive their confirmation that all systems were green and confidence remained high.

So, it wasn’t the equipment.

Next up, test the mass of the ship.

There were several ways to do this. The easiest was to bang it with a hammer and measure the vibrations. Of course, you needed a very special hammer, and a very good ear, but the Bean had both of those. Additional tests could be performed by applying an incredibly precise thrust in a specific direction and measuring the shift in velocity. We could also shut down the centrifuge and rotate the ship on her gyros and measure how long that took. There were other tests as well, some as esoteric as comparing the ship’s stress points by comparing her current holographic interference patterns with the patterns recorded on previous tests. All these separate measurements had been performed routinely before launch, and at least half-a-dozen times during the journey, including three times during flipover. Nine days later, the ship’s mass had been sliced and diced 37 different ways. Allowing for the expenditure of fuel, allowing for the expected accretion of a half-gram of micro-dust, The Baked Bean massed essentially the same as it had ninety minutes prior to first boost.

So, if the ship hadn’t gained mass, then either space had gotten thicker, or time ran slower out here. Or something else we hadn’t imagined, and we just weren’t thinking far enough outside the box. This is why a human being had to make the journey.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring out the window and picking my nose. I suppose I could look it up on the monitors. But it was a long time. First, I had to assume that the answer was knowable, that there was a physically measurable and testable phenomenon at work here. Starting from that assumption, what tests could I run?

There aren’t a lot of ways to measure the speed of time without also measuring the speed of light. And the nasty thing about the speed of light is that it always measures the same, no matter where you are, or how fast you’re going. You can only measure your location and your speed and your time-rate by comparing it with the location and speed and vector of another object. Out here, those measurements would take a long while. But in the meantime, I had to assume that the laws of physics did not metamorphose with distance from Sol. Why? Because the low-level perturbation was not a constant. 293 robot-vehicles had left the Sol system in the past century. 17 of them had ceased functioning by the time they crossed Neptune’s orbit. 187 of them had experienced perturbation, most of them along the forward edge of Sol’s movement in the galactic spin-cycle. Therefore, the phenomenon could be localized.

Gravity. Maybe we had miscalculated the gravitational pull of local objects. Maybe we had miscalculated the combined gravitational weight of multiple objects. Maybe the solar shelf was a gravitational ripple from Sol. But no. The gravitometers hadn’t shown anything unexpected for 5 giga-klicks, and they weren’t showing anything weird now. It wasn’t that.

Solar winds? Maybe this far out, the effect of the solar wind dropped off precipitously? Nope. Nothing. No evidence of that. The solar winds were behaving exactly as they had behaved ever since we started measuring solar winds.

Solar wind. Wind. There was a thought. What if we’d run through a cosmic dust storm? Something with a lot of micro-particles—a zillion little high-speed collisions. Not a lot of mass, but a significant exchange of velocity. What if the low-level perturbation phenomenon was just a dense, fast-moving cloud of micro-particles that had impacted on the cow-catcher and transferred some of their momentum to the Bean?

But the sensors would have detected that, wouldn’t they? Or would they?

I ran it through IRMA. Given the mass and velocity of the Bean, how much mass traveling at what velocity, would have to strike us head on to produce the drag we were experiencing?

The answer was simple. Enough to vaporize the Bean. Force equals mass times acceleration. No matter how you juggled the mass and momentum, the amount of force necessary to slow the Bean was more than enough to shred the cow-catcher and the ship. You could do it slowly or instantly, the result was the same.

What if—? No, that didn’t make sense either. If we had overtaken a patch of dust heading in the same general direction, it wouldn’t have slowed us—not this much.

Hm. What about the external bots? And all the other moving parts outside? The rotating panels? The remote arms? The sensors and antennae? Were they still fully operational? Several hours of tests later—yes, they were all still optimal. Maybe a smidge off, maybe not. If there were any measurable differences, they were so small as to be lost in the hash.

Everything was working just the way it was supposed to. I was almost disappointed.

What else? What was I missing?

Back in school, my graduate thesis required several thousand hours of coding. I intended to prove that software ecologies would inevitably stop evolving when they hit their Skotak radius, the limits of the hardware. The underlying algorithms would generate new ecological entities at random, then evolve them until their inevitable collapse. While long-term stability was achievable, permanent stability was impossible in an evolutionary environment. The stats on the project were impressive. Over thirty thousand mutable objects, agents, and bots, four hundred billion generations of parallel evolution per run. Sixteen hundred hours of high-impact debugging and deconstruction. Three weeks before the submission deadline, I thought I was done. Except—there was something gnawing at the woodwork of my brain. Something didn’t feel right. I spent the better part of a week, studying columns of numbers until I found the one column that didn’t balance. A point and a half of something—one of the minor elements of the ecology—was simply evaporating. It wasn’t a rounding error, that was a beginner’s mistake. It was something else.

Logically, I knew that no one would ever notice this discrepancy—but I would know it was there. I spent most of a week tracing the hundred different processes that accessed element AXO-1011. I could have taken the element out of the ecology, but it had become an obsession. I was going to be right about this. Eventually, I did find the source of the discrepancy—I’d made an assumption about a relationship instead of testing it. That tiny uncorrected assertion was why the system was unstable and always collapsed. When I corrected it—I had to change the conclusion of my thesis. Software can evolve to a state of permanent stability, given a fixed evolutionary range.

Of course, I had to report this in my oral examination. Professor Whitlaw gave me the fabled Whitlaw frown and asked, “So what did you learn?”

“I learned that … if God is in the details, so is the devil.”

Whitlaw nodded. “Close enough.”

Fifteen years and 5 giga-klicks later, I was looking for the devil again. The difference of 33.7 kilometers was statistically insignificant. But where were those kilometers going? And why? What fundamental conclusions about the nature of space-time were being challenged here? I wasn’t thinking about awards or prizes or scientific immortality, I just wanted to solve the damn mystery.

I hauled down the hardcopy of the Mission Book and began paging through it idly. There were over three hundred pages of theories and ideas and suggestions for experiments. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but maybe something would leap off the page at me.

But the only thing that leapt off the page was a little bit of dust. Several of the pages came up together, they had a cobweb on the edge—that annoyed me. I hate dirt. That’s one of the reasons I go to space. I wondered if the authoring-spider had done its work before the book was loaded or if it had done its work enroute and starved to death for the lack of flies. Perhaps its curled-up corpse was nestled behind a panel somewhere, impossible to find.

As hard as human beings had worked to avoid bringing non-human volunteers into space, more than a few had found ship-life to their liking. Tales of star-faring mice, ants, flies, gnats, cockroaches, cats, snakes, and snails were not uncommon. Assorted spore and mold and fungal passengers had also found their way aboard spaceships. Some had escaped from their transport capsules; others had simply demonstrated that old truism that life will find a way.

Hm.

What if we were dealing with some kind of … no, not life, but something that had some of the characteristics of life? Invisible glass spiders. Hundreds and thousands of tiny little mites, not alive, but crawling all over the outside of the ship as if they were? It was as likely as any other crackpot idea. Spinning webs to catch interstellar butterflies—

No, wait. There was something in the book. I flipped through the pages, almost frantically, until I found it again. Suggested by some late-night comedian. He thought he was being funny. Cosmic spiderwebs. The universe is so old, it should have cobwebs hanging from the rafters. Where are the cobwebs? Mission Control had thoughtfully tucked that into the book along with all the other crackpot ideas.

But … what the hell? It almost made sense. What if The Baked Bean had flown through some kind of a … something? And it was just enough to slow the ship down. Just a smidge.

Right. Giant space-spiders. When they do that episode, you know they’ve jumped the snark.

But … I leaned back in my couch and thought about it anyway.

What if there were some kind of—I dunno—some kind of fuzzy stuff that floated through interstellar space in vast immeasurable clouds? It would have to be very light. It would have to be—

I sat up straight.

Aerogel.

The lightest material ever made. Light and strong. There were fifty or sixty different formulations, each one lighter and stronger than the last. Half a kilo would fill a football stadium. Something like that.

Some kind of nano-stuff, maybe. Interstellar cotton candy. You could move around inside it and never know you were caught. But if you moved through enough of it, and if you were caught in a large enough net—say, a thousand or a hundred thousand klicks across—it would have enough mass to function as a drag chute.

Hm.

It would have to be self-assembling.

Very slow growth.

But that’s okay, there’s nothing between the stars but time and dust. If it’s possible, it’s inevitable.

Hm.

Worth thinking about for a minute or two.

Okay, assume the possibility. Why hasn’t anyone discovered this stuff yet?

Because no one has come out far enough? Only some bot-controlled probes.

Maybe the webs were strictly an interstellar phenomenon. Maybe they couldn’t assemble themselves within a star system. Maybe too much light and heat worked against the process. Maybe the webs were so light the solar wind just pushed them out into the darkness. Maybe all the various rocks and meteors and asteroids and bits of dust that churned around the solar disk ripped the webs to pieces as fast as they formed.

But out in the Oort Cloud, in the Hills Cloud, there would be enough material for a web to assemble itself, but not so much as to shred it. Hmm. Maybe the deepest darkest spaces between the stars were filled with clouds of cosmic aerogel?

What a strange silly idea.

Too silly.

Much too silly.

Besides, how would you test it?

How do you grab a handful of nothing? Almost nothing.

I had a thought. I had IRMA list all 293 vehicles that had left the solar system and their relative speeds. 89 spacecraft had not experienced any detectable slowdown. Of those 89, 77 were long-life probes, accelerating toward distant stars. Gotcha. They were going too fast. They ripped right through, like a bullet through custard. But the others were slower-moving planetary probes, like the V’gers, which had finally drifted far enough out—or probes that were aimed specifically at the Oort and the Hills. Going slow enough to get caught. Aha. Okay. Maybe. There’s a piece of useful evidence.

But unless I could grab some of the stuff and bring it back, it was all just theory. The Cosmic Cobwebs—right. Do that episode instead of the space spiders and you’re still jumping the snark.

If this stuff was as light and as far-flung as I suspected, it was probably as undetectable as the rest of the space dust that hammered at the cow-catcher. We would only know if it had been there by the effects it left behind—did it score or scratch the shield? But there weren’t any instruments designed for detecting threads so light they couldn’t be measured. And if they were impossible to detect, then it would be even more impossible to gather up a shiftload. I’d need a net as big as … as big as the webs I was trying to catch. And probably twice as strong.

My brain hurt. I checked the monitors one more time, then climbed down into the centrifuge for a sleep shift—

—came awake laughing. I’d been dreaming of fly fishing on the river. And then I’d dreamt about a taffy-pulling machine. And then I knew how to catch a starweb.

It took a couple weeks for the bots to cobble it together, a couple of giant paddlewheels, one on each side of the Bean—slowly, slowly rotating, winding up invisible threads like a fisherman pulling in his nets.

The paddlewheels dwarfed the ship. They were each a third of a klick in diameter, and their paddles extended almost half a click out. They were spidery Tinker Toy constructions of carbon-fiber beams so thin, they were almost invisible; but they didn’t need to be heavy, they only needed to be sturdy—and they were plenty of that. There were only six paddles to a wheel. Each carbon-fiber rod had a couple dozen meter-long teeth spaced out along its length to help snag any threads we encountered. I didn’t know how big a starweb might be or how far it might extend. Its total mass might be so great that instead of the Bean reeling in a slice, we’d be reeling the Bean into the thickest part of it. We could end up getting caught in a mass so huge, there was no possible escape. But on the bright side, that would be evidence too.

It was all guesswork. There was no way to know how big a web could be. I didn’t know how much of this one I’d ripped through, and how much of it I’d actually snagged. Assuming the Bean had simply snagged without ripping, then we were dragging enough mass to cost us a measurable percentage of delta-vee. Not quite a flying mountain, but considering our velocity when we hit the Hills Cloud, something at least as large as the Bean, and probably quite a bit larger. So the paddlewheels and their axes had to be sturdy enough to carry that weight and not break off.

But if we’d ripped a hole and were caught by a smaller piece of a much greater whole—something we’d find out the hard way—then the stress on the paddles would start rising, and keep rising until they snapped off.

Of course, if the paddles did break off, that would prove the existence of the starwebs. Most embarrassingly.

On the other hand, if they churned for a year and there was still nothing caught up and wound up on them, that would prove equally embarrassing.

But if I was right … well, this might even solve the dark matter mystery. Where’s all the missing matter in the universe? It’s right here, where it’s always been, floating between the stars. Occam’s Chainsaw. Sometimes the simplest answer is right in front of you.

But as long as there was a measurable drag on the ship’s velocity, the Bean was in the right neighborhood, so it was just a matter of time and patience. I watched the big wheels turning until I got bored, then I watched a while longer, then I went to bed. I woke up, checked all the monitors, watched the big wheels turning for a while, checked the monitors again, saw that everything was optimal, yawned, ate something forgettable, read my mail, checked the big wheels, checked the monitors, went to the toilet, and then did it all again.

IRMA predicted that if the webs existed, it could take several months to reel in enough material to have anything visible to the naked eye. It depended on the tensile strength of the threads. Assuming they were strong enough to catch a spaceship, they were probably strong enough to wind around the paddles without breaking. Another assumption, but the only one that made sense. The difference in relative velocity—the Bean vs. the starweb—could be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of klicks per hour. If we were simply ripping through and shredding the webs, then it was the same problem as with micro-particles. The amount of mass times acceleration needed to slow down The Baked Bean would also be enough to shred the cow-catcher. It didn’t matter how you weighted the factors—the product was still deadly. No, we had to be catching something and dragging something. Something strong enough to wind. I’d know for sure in a month or six. I checked the monitors again, because I like looking at green lights, then printed up a sandwich.

The paddlewheels were a third of a klick in diameter. That meant, every three turns, they would roll up a kilometer of thread—if they were rolling up anything at all. The paddlewheels turned once every five minutes. If we caught thread, they’d wind up four kilometers of it per hour, 96 per day, 672 klicks per week, over 2700 kilometers of thread in a month. Assume a kilometer-long thread might weigh—oh, I dunno, let’s say—a gram; then in 30 days, the Bean should have at least 3 kilos of cosmic starweb wound around its paddles. Depending on how many threads the paddles caught, how long they were, and how much they actually massed per klick.

I didn’t have to wait even that long for evidence. After 21 days, the first glints of something were visible on the paddlewheels—like a hint of plastic-wrap stretched between the rods. I couldn’t see it directly, but the IRMA-enhanced videos showed multiple instances of consecutive frames of what looked like lines stretching from one paddle-rod to the next. There was no maybe about it. I lit the wheels all up and down the entire spectrum, trying to catch a reading. There wasn’t enough mass yet to get the reflected signal up above the hash, but every turn of the paddlewheel gave us more.

I began writing up my report.

Three months later, I had nearly 20 kilos of material; either it was heavier than I thought, or I’d gathered more than I’d expected. This stuff was going to be a bitch to analyze. But it was time to bring The Baked Bean home. That meant collapsing the paddles and storing the web-stuff in something. I couldn’t risk having it be shredded by micro-dust on the way home, and I wasn’t sure how sensitive it would be to the solar winds, let alone the heat and light of Sol. I suspected the web-threads weren’t just made of some pretty tough stuff, but that they were also assembled in some ingenious ways. Just the same, I’d hate to come home with an empty framework and a terrific story about the fishing line that got away.

I was pretty sure I’d found the dark matter. Or at least a big chunk of it. That alone would guarantee me a shot at the Benford Prize. But I wasn’t done yet. First I had to find out how the threads assembled themselves. I had one of the external bots crawl out onto one of the paddles and look at the threads close up. Yes, they were self-assembling nanotubes. That part was obvious. The mechanics of it were not so obvious, but if it’s possible, it’s inevitable somewhere. There were molecular hooks, places on the strand where a molecule was desperate for an electron. Any stray atom—and there were plenty of those—would find itself caught. But now, it would be shy an electron or at least sharing one, so it would become the hook for the next stray bit to attach. And so on. That old truism—life will find a way—even when it’s not life, it still finds a way.

But that wasn’t the big surprise. I didn’t find that one until I’d already crossed the orbit of Neptune. By then, I had forty kilos of web-stuff in various containers—you could cut it with a laser—but one of the containers had something else in it, something that had gotten caught in the web. Not much of something, but enough. A definite piece of … well, not quite life, but something that could become life, given an opportunity to find the first rung of the evolutionary ladder.

See, here’s the thing. Some folks talk about the possibility of life arriving on Earth from outer space. Okay, not impossible. But that fiery plunge through the atmosphere—? Most protein isn’t going to survive. If not the journey down, then certainly the abrupt stop at the bottom.

But what would happen if there were a nice little seed of life caught in a cosmic spiderweb. After a couple of million years, a planet wanders through that web, ripping it apart, but also wrapping large chunks of it around itself. The threads drift in the upper atmosphere for years until maybe they get caught in a storm system and washed down to the ground, where they eventually dissolve or whatever. But if some of those threads are carrying proto-life, that stuff gets a nice safe ride down to the surface without a fiery bump at the bottom.

I don’t know if this little piece of stuff I found is an ancestor, but it might well be a distant cousin. Very distant, of course.

But that still wasn’t the big surprise.

I suspected it before I’d crossed the orbit of Neptune. I was sure of it by the time I crossed Saturn’s orbit. The Baked Bean was traveling a lot slower than it should have. As if it was dragging a small mountain behind it. I’d be 18 months late for dinner. But I was bringing home one hell of a big surprise.

I’ll have to avoid an Earth orbit though. I’d hate to think what would happen if all 100 million klicks of this stuff wrapped itself around a single planet. Global cooling? Another great extinction? I don’t want to find out the hard way.

The good news is that the ship is a lot quieter now. The stuff is great for dissipating vibrations. 40 thousand cubic kilometers of silencing material will do that.

The Temple of Thorns

Written by John Lambshead

Illustrated by Chantelle Thorne

She sat cross legged on a wool sack in the small cult room and prayed. To her left a flight of stone stairs led up to the ground floor of the palace and, on her right, a break in a low wall opened onto a shorter flight that ran down into the sacred bath, where priestesses anointed themselves with sweet smelling unguents in honour of the Gods. She faced a low stone ledge that was covered in a thin sheet of gold on which stood small painted ceramic statuettes of the Gods, surrounded by token sacred offerings of flowers and berries that were fashioned in faience.

The room was lit by four torches attached to the walls, which gave off a flickering light that reflected off the white-tiled walls, causing the raised arms of the statues to seem to move in time with her chanted prayers. The room contained no wood at all; she knew that because she had searched it most thoroughly. She had not expected to find any, under the circumstances, but it was worth a try. She was dressed simply without jewellery but, as befitted a “slave of the God”; her clothes were of the highest quality. Her white linen dress shone in colours of red, orange and yellow in the torchlight, as did her blonde hair.

The baby in her arms cried gently and she held it to her breast to suckle, making soft cooing noises and pulling down the top of her long flared dress. Bright blue eyes gazed back up at her as her son fed greedily of her milk and she smiled fondly at him, stroking his face with her free hand. He finally finished and drifted off to sleep with a contented gurgle.

She heard the muffled sound of boots outside her door and then the bolt was thrown back with a thud that echoed around the cell-like room. Surely it was not dawn already? A companion of the king entered, dressed in the full martial uniform of an Achaean warrior. He was a tall man, who had to stoop to get through the low doorway, causing his polished bronze armour plates to clatter.

She ignored the companion and continued her prayer, making the signs of power and obeisance with her right hand. The man stood patiently by the door, obviously reluctant to commit the sacrilege of interrupting. When she was quite finished, he approached and saluted by touching his right hand to his heart.

“It is time, Lady,” he said, brusquely.

She went to rise, but she was encumbered by the child on her left hip and her legs were cramped, so she stumbled. The man held his hand out to steady her and she gripped it automatically with her right hand, without thinking.

“Ow!” she uttered a small cry.

“Is your hand injured? Shall I call a healer?” He looked with concern at her palm.

“It’s nothing.” She snatched her hand from his before he could examine it closely. She forced herself to smile. “It hardly matters now, in any case.”

He nodded and pointed to the door, indicating that she should leave. She went up the steps and through the door into a corridor of the palace. She turned right automatically towards the megaron but the companion tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to the left.

“I am to leave from the side door, then, not the main entrance,” she said, with more than a touch of bitterness.

“Those are my instructions, lady,” said the companion, who had the grace to look embarrassed. He held a torch that he had removed from the sanctuary, as the part of the palace that they were heading for was badly lit.

She strode down the corridor, head held high. The palace was built on a small hill so every few yards, the corridor descended down stone steps. They turned a bend and the decorative level of the walls dropped sharply as they entered the working area. Doors led off into magazines where pithoi, giant jars, full of beans, grain and olive oil were stored.

They left the palace by a small door low down on the hill. The curtain wall of the citadel was just below them at this point and she could see guards huddling around braziers behind the parapet. Even at this height she could smell the acrid tang of burning charcoal.

“Is it really necessary to leave before dawn?” she asked.

“The curator thought it best if no one saw you go,” the companion replied. “He does not want the commoners to get over excited.”

“Do I really frighten him that much?” she laughed. “I think he overestimates my power.”

The companion shrugged, “I have …”

“Your orders, yes, I know,” she interrupted. “I am surprised that the curator thought that you alone would be sufficient to guard me.”

“Actually, I have some of my followers down in the chariot park to be your escort,” he said, a note of shame colouring his voice.

She laughed again. “I won’t try to overpower you then. Shall we go? We shouldn’t keep your men waiting, should we?”

The companion overtook her so that he could light the way as they took the treacherous path on the steep sloped hill. When they rounded the corner of the palace complex, she could see due east. The first shining glow of dawn lit the horizon and lights showed on rooftops as women moved around to prepare breakfast down in the lower town. Although the companion had obeyed the letter of his orders to remove her from the palace before dawn, he had cut it very fine. She was not surprised that he had interpreted his orders so, as no warrior liked to drive a chariot in the dark.

They descended by the main steps into the chariot park where the companion’s men waited. Horses were already yoked to the chariots, their heads held by grooms. The park was still in gloom, lit only by palace servants holding torches, so she smelt and heard the horses more than saw them.

The companion gripped her shoulder and propelled her to a chariot. “This is your driver,” he said.

A boy saluted her, and handed her up into his chariot, where she took the warrior’s place on the right hand side. The boy climbed in beside her and fussed with the reigns, shouting technical instructions to the groom at the horses’ head. While the boy made his final adjustments, she glanced up at the palace for the last time. The sun was high enough in the sky to illuminate the white stone in pink light. The curator stood in the main entrance, surrounded by his procurators, presumably checking that his orders were being followed although he would be hard pressed to see her down in the shadows. She deliberately turned her head away from the palace that had been her home since birth, and she did not look back again.

A zephyr slipped over the curtain wall of the citadel, funnelling through the alleys between the workshops and minor functionaries’ houses that surrounded the palace. It played with the dust and dead leaves, flinging them into the air in spirals. The zephyr rattled windows and tested the roofing tiles before sweeping down to the chariot park, unsettling the horses who pulled against the grooms’ grip, stamping their feet on the paving stones and tossing their heads.

The wind elemental detected the magic in her immediately and swirled around her, teasing her by whipping her dress around her legs. It kept sniffing at her right hand so she shooed it away, persuading it to go and play in the town; one of her titles was Mistress of Winds.

The companion bawled an order to his men and the column moved out. Her chariot started with jerk and she had to grip the guard rail with her right hand, ignoring the sting of pain, as she held her baby with the left. The companion led the column with her chariot right behind, where he could keep an eye on her. The chariot wheels clattered over the paving stones, the sound echoing off the face of the palace buildings. They passed out of the citadel by the cavalry gate, which opened onto the Argolid plain, bypassing the lower town where the commoners lived. The chariots picked their way carefully in the half light along the road of hard packed earth and stones that ran around the town. They progressively speeded up as more light filtered down from the rising sun until they were moving at a fast trot.

She had ridden in a chariot many times before so she automatically bent her knees to absorb the bumps. The chariot axle was completely unsprung but the passengers stood on taut leather strips that buffered against the worst of the shocks. She pulled her baby in close to her body, where he would be warm, as there was still a chill in the early morning air. The boy who drove her chariot chatted cheerfully to her about inconsequentials.

The column made good progress and they had reached the sanctuary of The Lady at Syssos by the time the sun was properly up. The priestesses were lined up outside as the column approached, their right hands raised to their foreheads in prayer. Their journey was supposed to be completely confidential but it was impossible to keep secrets from the Servants of The Lady.

“Stop the chariot,” she ordered her driver.

Surprised, he pulled up, disrupting the whole column. The warriors surrounded her chariot, gripping their spears nervously. She moved to climb out of the back but the driver grabbed her arm. When she looked at him imperiously, he dropped his hand.

“I’m sorry, Lady, but you can’t get out until we reach our destination,” the driver said.

The companion turned his chariot and galloped back. “What is it?”

“I am cold so I need to borrow a cloak. I wonder if you would be so kind as to ask the priestesses of The Lady if they could give me one of theirs?”

“Wait here, please, Madame,” he said. The companion jumped down from his chariot and hurried over to the sanctuary to talk to the women. A priestess unclipped her own cloak from her neck and handed it to him. He saluted her and returned, draping it over the lady’s shoulders.

“Would you fasten it for me?” she said.

He clipped the brooch in place, adjusting the hang so it covered her baby. Then, without a word, he returned to his chariot and restarted the column on its way.

It took several hours to reach Kephalos and she was soon glad of the additional layer of clothes as the weather gradually deteriorated and dark clouds gathered over the mountains. The wind built up, until it was blowing strongly against her back, whipping her blonde hair into her eyes. When they reached the little village the party debussed from the chariots. Kephalos was a small fishing port, built on the shore of a bay where a modest fishing fleet was drawn up on the sandy beach.

The locals had turned out to greet their illustrious visitor, as word spread from house to house, many of them holding their arms out in supplication to the Gods. Her escort moved closely around her and gripped their spears firmly. The illusion that they were an honour guard was stripped away as the men adopted the pose of guards, surrounding her and hiding her from the villagers. The party made its way along a path to the southern promontory that bounded the bay. She stumbled a few times as she still wore her delicate palace slippers but the warriors caught her each time. The wind howled around them and the sky overhead darkened, shedding the first drops of rain.

The royal party stood at the end of the promontory where the cliffs fell in a sheer drop into the sea. Spearmen and warriors sealed off the area but they allowed the companion and his party to pass without comment. She walked up to an elderly man in long purple robes and curtseyed. “Greetings, royal father.”

“You are no daughter of mine nor is your bastard my grandchild,” said the king.

“He is no bastard,” she said, defiantly.

“And who is his father?” said the king, rhetorically.

“I have told you,” she replied. “The God fathered my son.”

The rain was lashing down now, plastering her hair against her head, so she moved the baby deeper under the cloak to protect him.

“Ah, yes. Zeus came to you in a shower of gold and ravished you,” said the king, sarcastically, spreading his arms and appealing to his courtiers who dutifully laughed sycophantically on queue. “You think to foster my brother’s by-blow on me.”

She raised her right arm and her voice so all present could hear her voice over the storm. “The God did sire my child, father, and I call all here to bear witness to this injustice and to hear my prophecy. I will be avenged by my son, who will take the life of all those who have wronged me. This I foretell.”

While she talked, she rubbed the wound in the palm of her hand, checking that the wooden splinter still lodged where she had placed it yesterday. A thunderbolt struck the sea, lighting up the promontory and thunder crashed over them.

“Spare me your magic tricks, witch. The Gods will surely protect you if you are so beloved by them” said the king, with a sneer. However, a number of his cronies looked distinctly uncomfortable. Perhaps they remembered that the lady’s name meant “she who judges.”

There was nothing left to say so she walked to the edge of the cliff. Below, the grey-green sea heaved, spraying white foam into the wind. The baby cried, frightened by the thunderbolt, and she hushed him. She said a small prayer, building up the power in her hand, and jumped. As she fell, the lady thrust forward with her hand, crying words of magic, and an elongate bubble of yellow light snapped around her. She just had time to cushion her baby’s head with her right hand before she hit the water with an almighty splash.

The yellow bubble speared deeply into the salt water, surrounded by bubbles, where it hung in the water, drifting in the current. Blood ran from the baby’s forehead where the magically charged splinter had scored it. Two dolphins appeared and circled the bubble curiously, nosing against it with their beaks, their upturned mouths giving the appearance of a friendly grin. The dolphins metamorphed into nereids, the wet ones, like a lady taking off her mask. Their rear halves remained fish-like but the rest of their bodies had the likeness of beautiful green-haired women, breasts floating gently in the currents. The nereids were famous for their gentle humour and generous dispositions. These two seized the bubble and bore it away, taking it in turns to the surface to breathe.

* * *

A man and woman stood over an empty cot, gazing at each other. They were both dressed in simply cut clothes of expensive, lustrous linen, the man in a tunic and the woman in a dress decorated in purple whirls, which dropped to her ankles. Her hair was coiled in elaborate coils that fell in long strands in front of her ears but was piled up behind on top of her head.

“I can’t do it,” the woman said. Tears flowed gently down her face, depositing black streaks on her pale skin. “I just can’t do it.”

The man sighed. “You think that I like this, Serenissa? You think that I want this?” He put his arm round her. “There will be other children, Astarte willing.”

She pulled away. “I don’t want other children. I want her. I want her smile and I want the light in her eyes. She’s so special.”

“What would you have me do, see the city destroyed? Poseidon must be satisfied and only the magic of royal blood will do.” The man was angry now. “I have my responsibilities.”

“Yes,” the woman said, softly. “You have your responsibilities. But I have thought of an alternative.”

She held his hands and looked into his eyes; he looked back with growing horror.

* * *

The little girl played with her rag dolls on a tiled floor in a small room whose entrance, guarded by a spearman, opened onto a sunlit courtyard. Solid red pillars, that were wider at the top than the bottom, could be seen through the open doorway. A young woman, dressed in the elaborate robes of a priestess, entered and held out her hand.

“‘Lo, Cassie,” said the little girl, jumping to her feet and rushing to hold the woman’s hand. The little girl chattered as the woman led her out into the courtyard. Like all children, she followed the woman without noticing where they were going. That changed when she found herself up on the citadel wall, as this was forbidden territory. She could smell and hear the sea but, no matter how she stretched, she could not see the ocean over the crenulated defences. Further along the wall, a wooden platform had been erected on which stood a pair of spearmen and two ladies, one dressed in the robes of a priestess and the other, in the rich, purple clothes of a queen.

“Mama,” the little girl yelled and tried to run to the platform but the young woman held her back.

The queen looked around in alarm. “What’s she doing here?” The queen tried to leave the platform but the spearmen grabbed her, one on each arm.

The spearmen looked at the priestess, who nodded. They seized the queen tighter and threw her off the citadel wall to the rocks far below.

The little girl screamed and screamed and screamed but the priestess and the young woman exchanged cruel and triumphant smiles.

* * *

“Gently, you sons of bitches, nose her in gently,” said the ship’s captain, holding himself rigidly upright as the deck pitched.

The rowers dropped their oars back into the water with a splash. They braced themselves and pushed back to brake the ship, noticeably slowing the galley. It slewed slightly in the water as the starboard oars bit just that little more deeply than those to port. The helmsman threw his weight against the steering oar, swinging the bow back into line.

“Quite right, Captain,” said Perseus. “We don’t want any accidents or you might get a closer shave than you need.”

Perseus spoke in Kretan, the common language of the islands, with the languid drawl of an Achaean aristocrat. He held the edge of his bronze sword against the captain’s throat.

The captain swore, but not too loudly. “Should we ever meet again,” he began.

Perseus interrupted him. “I will kill you on sight. Be thankful that this island was nearby, Captain, otherwise, I would have had to kill you and all the officers and try to navigate your ship myself. I hate sailing,” he added.

The captain twisted his head around to look Perseus in the face. From his expression, the man was trying to work out whether he was joking. Perseus snatched a glance behind and braced himself as it wouldn’t do to accidentally cut his hostage’s throat before the man’s usefulness was expended. As it happened, contact with the shore was reasonably smooth, the bow mounting the beach with a smooth hiss as momentum pushed the ship up the sand.

The rowers looked at each other uncertainly. Normally, they would have jumped overboard to pull the ship higher up the beach but the situation was hardly normal.

“Sit still, boys, and I will release your captain at the tree line. Remember, one wrong move and I kill him,” Perseus said, menacingly.

“Do what the bastard says,” said the captain, urgently.

Perseus lifted the man one handed out of the ship’s bow and onto the shore. He backed up the beach, careful to keep his hostage in front of him as a shield. The vegetation came close to the water’s edge so he did not have far to go. He stopped just within the trees.

“Remember your promise,” pleaded the captain.

“An Achaean prince always keeps his word,” said Perseus, loftily, as it never hurt to play up the heroic image a little. Who knows, someone might even be foolish enough to believe it. He reached down to the captain’s waist and pulled free a pouch. “Mine, I think,” he said.

The captain twitched but calmed down when Perseus pressed the sword harder into his throat. “You cheated,” protested the captain.

“True,” Perseus admitted. “But so did you so I thought it was a house rule. Goodbye, Captain.” He forced the man’s head down. The captain tensed and shut his eyes but Perseus laughed and kicked him out onto the beach before vanishing into the trees.

“Kill him,” yelled the captain.

Arrows flew, one embedding itself into a tree trunk over Perseus’ head and another glanced off the shield slung across his back, but mostly the missiles flew wide. He walked briskly for thirty paces or so then stopped. He leaned against a tree and took his boar’s tooth helmet off so he could hear clearly. An argument raged down on the shoreline with the captain wanting to organise a pursuit but the sailors would have none of it. They lacked the stomach to chase after a heavily armed Achaean hero in a forest as they knew it would go ill with the first ones to find the fugitive.

Perseus waited patiently until he heard the ship launched then he walked back to the beach to check that all the sailors had gone. He had no intention of being murdered in his sleep by the old raiders’ stratagem of a secret shore party left behind while the ship ostentatiously sailed away. The vessel was already far out to sea when he reached the beach and it was evident that he was quite alone.

He sat on a rock to consider his options, opening the captain’s pouch to count his spoils. The pouch contained “fingers” of bronze, a few twists of gold and a ring of dubious silver but the jewels were disappointing: small garnets, indifferent carnelians and some bright blue stones that looked like lapis lazuli but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be dyed faience. The forgers of Egypt particularly specialised in faking jewels from glass beads. The best piece in the pouch was the necklace that he himself had given the captain in payment for passage.

He enjoyed the stability of the land as he was a poor sailor. The sun warmed his skin and sent light skittering off the surface of the sea. He sighed, picked up a stone and tossed it into the sea where it fell with a plop, and was swallowed up immediately. He had no idea at all where he was. Somewhere, there would be a small harbour for fishing vessels and coastal traders—even the meanest island boasted that. He could choose a direction at random and start walking around the coast but, given the indented nature of Aegean coastlines, it was likely to be a long hike. He decided to walk inland instead as the island was hilly and he should be able to find a vantage point from where he might search for human habitation.

A breeze stirred along the water, curling around him, cooling his skin and bringing the smell of cypress from the island’s slopes. He could smell nothing man made, no wood, no smoke, no human smells at all. He stood up and attached his helmet to his sword harness then he strode purposefully back into the trees across ground that was dry with large areas of bare earth and scrubby bushes. He walked for some little time before he fancied that he heard the ring of a goat’s bell in the distance, but it never came again so maybe he had imagined it.

Soon, he had a more pressing need, water. You can smell water, if you need a drink badly enough and he was very thirsty, so he sniffed the air. He turned right, following a faint scent even though it took him far uphill.

The island was silent, except for the faint rustle of trees stirred by the wind and the occasional bird cry, so he heard the stream long before he saw it. He also heard a woman scream and his sword came free with a metallic hiss. He ran toward the sound, further cries guiding his steps, until he burst upon the scene, sword raised. There, he doubled up with laughter.

Satyrs surrounded a young woman who beat ineffectually at them. The diminutive goat-men danced in a ring around her on their unsteady, backward-pointing legs, taking turns to dart in close to stroke her hair and body. As fast as she swatted one away, another took its place.

The girl was clearly not an islander as she was far too tall, with hair blacker than a raven’s wing and smooth pale skin. She also wore an expensive, white, shining dress made of linen rubbed and washed in perfumed oil, indicating that she was someone special.

“What are you doing, Princess?” he asked, in Achaean. He tended to call all noble women princess—actually, he tended to call tavern girls princess as well as, in his experience, a little flattery was never wasted on the fairer sex.

“What does it look like, oaf? Do something. Ow!” she replied in the same language. A satyr sneaked in to pinch her bottom while she talked to Perseus. She dealt the goat-man a vigorous clout around his pointed ear that knocked him over.

Perseus laughed until he cried, placing her immediately by her accent. She was Maryannu, a descendent of the charioteers that had conquered their way down the Lebanese coast. They were cousins to the bronze-clad Achaeans who had turned west into the Aegean when the Maryannu clans had driven south, lured by stories of the wealth of Egypt. He bypassed the scrum to drink deeply out of the stream, splashing cold water onto his face and neck and gasping with enjoyment at the shock.

“Pass me my wand, you idiot,” she said, pointing. A slim length of hazel poked from a pack lay by the stream. The creatures must have surprised her while she drank.

“This wand, Princess?” he asked, pulling it from her belongings.

“Of course that wand!” she said.

He slapped two of the creatures away and passed her the polished wood. She raised it over her head and chanted something softly in Maryannan. The wand described an arc, sparkles trailing in the air behind it. He smelt acrid fumes, like those left in the air after a thunderbolt and fear spread like a contagion among the satyrs who fled squealing. One tripped over Perseus’ foot and it rolled in front of him, terror in its eyes. It scrambled along on all fours before vanishing into the bush.

“What did you do to them, Princess?” he asked, amused.

She smoothed down her dress with a fluid motion. “I made them see that which they most feared.” The princess shrugged. “I’ve no idea what that might be.”

“A lion, maybe,” he said, thoughtfully. It took considerable magic power to weave an illusion so real with just a few passes of a wand.

“Thank you for all your help,” she said, making a final, and quite unnecessary, adjustment to the hang of her clothes.

“My pleasure, Princess,” he replied, ignoring her sarcasm. “I suppose that you really are a princess?”

The girl elevated her nose a little higher. “My father is King Cepheus of Joppa. And you are?”

“Prince Perseus, at your service lady,” he said, bowing.

“Prince Perseus of where?” she asked.

“That’s a little complicated,” he said.

“I see,” she replied, lifting an eyebrow.

He doubted that she did, but he let it pass. She hefted up her bag and started up the hill.

“Where are you going?” he asked, falling in beside her.

“And when did that become your business?” she replied.

He laughed. “I’m just making conversation. It is a little unexpected to find a princess of Joppa roaming around alone on the islands.”

She turned and faced him, hands on hips, dark eyes flashing. “You don’t believe me do you?”

“Oh, I believe that you are a Maryannu lady, no one else would mangle Achaean quite so prettily, but a princess normally has a retinue.”

“I did have a retinue but I lost them.” She actually stamped a foot.

He pulled a branch back for her to pass. “That seems careless. How did it happen?”

“It was the first night after we landed. A spearman woke me saying that we were being attacked. There was a lot of yelling in the dark and Mattra, that’s the commander, told me to run into the trees so I did, but no one came after me. I looked for my men in the morning but they were gone.”

“Dead?” he asked.

“Just gone, leaving me alone” she said.

She was making an effort to be brave but he saw her lower lip quiver. She was by no means as assured as she pretended.

“I suppose we could travel together,” he said, gallantly.

“I suppose we could, if you are going my way.” She spoke formally, but she flashed him a smile of gratitude.

“Which is your way?” he asked, surveying the countryside.

“Up the hill but I am not supposed to tell you any more,” she said. “I am on a secret mission.”

“A secret mission, no less,” said Perseus, smiling.

“Now you are laughing at me,” she said, biting her lip.

“Perhaps just a little, Princess, but you look so solemn.” He held up his hand in supplication. “I intended to climb the hill a little higher anyway so we may as well go together for the company.”

They moved through the heat of the late afternoon and as they walked she chattered non-stop about the landscape, life in Joppa, and her family, until he soon thought that he knew a great deal about her. Normally, he found chattering women irritating but she was pleasant company, if charmingly naive, so he enjoyed the journey, rather to his surprise. The trees thinned out to be replaced by bushes and, before long, the sun was low on the horizon.

“We should make camp for the night,” he finally said. “Do you have any food?”

“A little bread,” she replied. “You have brought nothing?”

“I have this,” he replied, unlooping a strip of linen from his pouch. “Wait here for me and be very quiet.”

Mercifully, she sat down without arguing. He stooped and picked up a round stone that he placed in the centre of the strip of cloth. He walked silently to the edge of a clearing and waited for rabbits emerging to feed as the sun set. A movement caught his eye and he whirled the stone over his head and released, the missile making a clean kill. Perseus retrieved his game and retraced his steps, dropping the dead animal in front of her.

“Clean the bunny, lady, while I get a fire going.” He pushed a dagger into her hands. Perseus skilfully kindled the fire but when he looked up, she was still poking tentatively at the rabbit with his knife. “You haven’t got very far with that,” he said.

“I don’t know how to, Perseus. I’m not a scullery maid.”

He was about to scold her for her arrogance when he realised that she was almost in tears. She really had no idea how to prepare food. Taking the knife, he quickly cleaned and skinned the beast, showing her the technique. He fixed the meat on sticks to roast over the campfire before settling down beside her.

“That man who was captain of your bodyguard, Princess.”

“Mattra?” she interrupted.

“Yes, Mattra. Known him long?” he asked, casually.

“All my life,” she replied. “He was often the spearman on guard outside my door in the palace.”

“I see,” he replied, neutrally.

“How did you get that scar?” she asked, pointing. “It looks like a thunderbolt.”

“I had an accident when I was young.” He rubbed his forehead self-consciously. “I have no idea when it happened. My mother said it was the price we paid the Gods to escape Argos.”

“Where did you learn to use a sling?” she asked.

“I learned from the shepherds of Seriphos. My mother, Danae, was exiled there and the king, Polydectes, married her. A princess of Argolis is a prestigious consort for a minor king and mother’s options were limited so she agreed to the match. Unfortunately, Polydectes acquired me as an unwelcome addition to his household so he encouraged me to spend as much time as possible up in the hills with the flocks.”

He rotated the sticks to cook the rabbit meat evenly.

“I decided to travel abroad once I reached my maturity. The king was so delighted that he actually gave me gold to speed me away.”

“Polydectes was not your father then.”

“Good grief, no.” He shared the rabbit out. They were both hungry and devoted themselves to the meal but, once it was over, she wanted to talk.

“So who was your father? I sense a palace intrigue,” she said, stretching her legs out languidly.

He found himself looking at her slender outline through the long dress, which shone red and orange in the firelight. A whisper of wind carried a hint of perfumed oils from her body.

“Zeus,” he replied, succinctly.

She laughed.

“No, really,” he said. “My grandfather, King Acrisius of Argolis, had shut my mother up in the palace as a punishment, when Zeus came to her as a shimmer of gold in the air and I was the result.”

“So who was your father really?” she wheedled.

“The Argolis has dual kings and the other one was my grandfather’s brother, Proteus. The reason that my mother was in disgrace is that she had been caught in bed with Uncle Proteus, so you work it out, Princess.”

“You Achaeans have such deliciously convoluted family scandals,” she said, giggling.

Her face shone bright in the flickering firelight.

“It’s late,” he said. “We should sleep.”

They settled each side of the fire, which flickered low. An animal howled somewhere out on the island startling her. She shot over the ashes and snuggled close to him.

“I’m cold,” she said, defensively.

He rolled over and put a strong arm around her. “Sleep well, my lady,” he said.

She fell asleep immediately but he lay awake a little longer. She smelt fragrant from the perfumed oils rubbed into her hair and skin. He breathed her scent in deeply, identifying hyssop, cypress and sweet sage. She snuffled gently and snuggled close to him, her body warm against his.

He was not unduly concerned with wild animals. He slept lightly, from long experience of the wilderness, and his bronze sword was close by his hand. He drifted into sleep with her scent in his nostrils, making him dream of exotic palace ladies, hearing the clang of their jewellery, the tapping of their boots on the stone floors and smelling the rich scent that followed them.

* * *

In the morning, Perseus found a rocky outcrop that gave him an unrestricted view over the trees so that he could see along the entire arc of the coast but there was no sign of human activity.

“What are you looking for?” the princess asked, from the bottom of the rock.

“A village where I can find a boat,” he replied.

“The only one on the island is over there,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction to the path they had taken.

He jumped down and glowered at her.

“Well, how did you think that I got here?” she asked, defensively.

“I didn’t like to ask. You being on a secret mission,” he said, sarcastically.

“You could stay with me,” she said, hesitantly. “In return, I could give you passage on my ship.”

“Why would you want my assistance?” he asked, warily.

“I’m scared,” she said, with disarming honesty. “I have never been on my own in the wilderness and …” She paused and looked at him with dark eyes shadowed with kohl, so strikingly different from the blue-eyed Achaeans. “I trust you.”

He did not know how to answer that as his own life had not inclined him to be overly trusting. He adjusted the hang of his shield to give his hands something to do. “You should not be so accepting of people, Princess. So why have you come here?”

“Up there,” she pointed up the hill, “is a ruined temple to one of the old gods. It contains a great treasure that I intend to claim for Joppa.”

“A great treasure,” he repeated, thoughtfully. “Perhaps I shall accompany you. No doubt Joppa would reward me handsomely, for seeing you and the treasure safely home.”

“Oh yes,” she said, happily.

They continued to climb but the way became steeper and rockier and they were soon forced to scramble. The girl was fit; life in the rich splendour of a Maryannu palace had clearly not spoilt her, but even so, she eventually tired. He halted to allow her to rest and drink. Naturally, she asked questions.

“How did you end up here, Perseus, with not even a water skin for refreshment?”

“I had to leave my ship rather too quickly.” He laughed. “The captain liked to play dice but he was a poor loser.”

“Did you win much?” she asked.

“Everything he had,” he said, with a grin. She laughed with him, showing even white teeth. “I am surprised that your father sent you so far from Joppa on such an errand,” said Perseus. “Hasn’t he any sons or heroes to call upon?”

“Daddy thinks that I am attending a ceremony up in the hills behind Joppa.” She giggled happily. “The queen, Cassiopeia, chose me for the task. She’s my stepmother and she thinks daddy cossets me too much. The temple is magical, you see, and I’m good at magic.” She tried to speak matter of factly but her tone betrayed her pride in her skill. “So you had to leave all your belongings on your ship?” she asked, adroitly switching the focus of the conversation back to him.

“I had nothing on the ship other than what you see,” he said, bowing. “I lost all else when I had to leave Siffa in a hurry.”

She clapped her hands with pleasure. “Your life is full of fast exits, Prince Perseus. Do tell me the story.”

“It was all caused by a bad oyster,” he said, solemnly.

“A bad oyster?” she repeated.

“The army commander had one for lunch and was obliged to go home early. I was the captain of mercenaries guarding his villa. Unfortunately, when he burst into his bedroom, which was on the way to his personal privy, I am afraid that he caught me bodyguarding his wife’s body rather closer than he thought necessary. The lady screamed ‘rape,’ of course, so I had to leg it out of the window, taking her necklace with me tangled up in my sword belt.”

“You kept your sword on,” she said, faintly.

“I was on guard,” he said. His tone suggested surprise that she might doubt his commitment to duty. “Anyway, I thought it wiser to head straight for the docks and find a ship leaving immediately rather than go back to the barracks for my kit.”

“I see,” she said, biting her lip. “I think we should go as there is still a way to climb.”

She watched him carefully as he stood up. “Was she worth it,” the princess said, abruptly. “The commander’s lady, I mean.”

“Oh yes,” he said, adjusting the weight of his shield evenly across his back. “She was worth it.”

The princess was rather cold with him after that, speaking only in monosyllables. He gave up trying to talk to her and concentrated on finding the best route, which turned out to be a steep, rocky path that had probably been made by goats. As they climbed, he pondered on her strange behaviour, which reinforced his view that women were odd creatures.

“Does your stepmother have any daughters?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Why do you want to know?”

“No reason,” he said. “And you are the daughter of the old queen, so the inheritance passes through you?”

“My husband will be king one day.” She looked at him with open suspicion.

“Unless something happens to you first,” he pointed out. “In which case, your stepmother’s eldest daughter inherits.”

She looked at him and bit her lip again. In his opinion, Queen Cassiopeia was right to consider that her father had given her far too sheltered an upbringing. Achaean princesses absorbed palace politics with their mother’s milk but this girl seemed to be entirely ignorant of the realities facing those born in the shadow of a throne.

The path disappeared at the base of a rock, which he examined carefully. It was worn and cracked by the sun and rain, offering plentiful handholds. A small overhang near the top presented the only real challenge. “I want you to go up first, Princess. Don’t worry, I will follow close behind.” He smiled, reassuringly.

“Not too close, I trust,” she said, tartly. She sniffed, packing a world of meaning into the sound, and swung herself up, moving across the rock wit graceful agility.

He smiled to himself and followed her up, watching her closely, a duty that was not wholly distasteful. At one point, she slipped, stones scrabbling from under her and he slammed an arm across her back, holding her against the rock.

“Careful, Princess,” he warned.

She nodded and resumed climbing, while he watched her admiringly. He had come to the conclusion that she really was a plucky little thing.

“I can’t go any further, Perseus,” she said, clinging to a ledge. The overhang loomed above. He climbed alongside her and round her, being careful not to knock her slight body off the rock.

“Wait here,” he said, reaching up over the protruding rock and grabbing for a handhold. When he found one, he pulled himself up one-handed, until he could also grip with his other hand and scramble onto the top of the overhang. The summit of the island was flat with grass and trees. Insects buzzed, and the sickly aroma of decay filled the air.

“Perseus, are you still there?” Her voice wavered slightly.

He lowered himself onto his front and hooked a leg around a convenient tree. Then he pushed himself out over the overhand, taking a firm grip on the rock with his left hand and reaching down with his right.

She stretched up for him but their hands did not quite touch.

“Push off the rock and jump towards me,” he said, encouragingly.

She stared at him and reached again, her hand shaking, but it was too far.

“Have courage, Princess. Only a little jump and I will catch you.”

She closed her eyes and leapt. His hand slapped smoothly onto her wrist, holding her tight. She swung for one heart-stopping moment in mid-air, before he pulled her up beside him. He rose to his feet, lifting the princess onto hers, but she continued to cling to him.

“What’s that smell?” she asked.

Before he could reply, she fainted away, becoming a dead weight in his arms.

* * *

“You pig,” she said, hitting him in the arm. “So I don’t like heights.”

He held his arms up in supplication. “Peace, Princess. I was only teasing. It was very brave of you to jump into space.”

“I told you,” she said, turning brown eyes on him. “I trust you.”

“So you did, lady.” He concentrated on watching his surroundings as they walked. The high plateau stretched before them but it was thickly wooded in places, which prevented him from seeing very far. The Achaean automatically eased his sword in its sheath, assuring himself that it would slide smoothly free in an emergency.

“So what was that foul odour?” she asked, plodding beside him.

“A dead goat,” he replied, succinctly.

She digested this, chewing her lip in what he realised was a characteristic habit. “That’s a good sign, surely. If a goat was up here then there must be an easier way off this plateau than that overhang.” She shuddered at the memory.

“That’s true,” he said, flatly. “But I would like to know what killed the beast.”

He held a branch back for her and she ducked under his arm.

“Why are you so frightened of heights?” he asked.

“Because that’s how my mother died,” she said, unemotionally. “They made me watch when they threw her off the citadel walls.”

“I’m sorry, Princess. You should have said and I would have found some other way up. Of what crime was your mother accused?” he asked, carefully, because the official charge against a disgraced queen rarely bore much relation to her true offence, assuming there was one at all.

“She was not being punished, as she had committed no crime. It was a matter of blood. Joppa is cursed by the Gods and only the sacrifice of magical blood from the royal line protects the city from destruction. It should have been me, you see, that was the gift but my mother chose to sacrifice herself, instead.” A tear rolled down the girl’s cheek. She wiped it away, angrily.

He had underestimated this princess as her life had clearly not been the smooth voyage that he had assumed. It was not unknown in Achaea to “gift” a royal female child to the Gods. Now, he understood why King Cepheus held his daughter so closely. She must remind him of his dead queen and he wondered how the new queen felt about that. They emerged from a thicket to find a building so ruined that walls were barely waist high, except for a corner piece.

“That doesn’t look like a temple,” she said, doubtfully.

“Far too small,” he agreed. “But it was built of stone, like a little palace. Maybe it was a priest’s house, in which case the temple ruins can’t be far away.”

Something moved on the edge of his vision. The Achaean’s reflexes had been honed by years of living by the sword. He pushed the princess back against the high wall with his right hand and, in the same motion, swung the shield off his back and onto his left arm. The Achaean grasped the metal grip on the rim and thrust the shield against the dark shape that sprang up at him. The central bronze boss hit something hard with a thud, knocking it to the ground. He drew his sword and stabbed downwards, the point spitting the animal before it could roll back on its feet. It yelped and died, voiding its wastes onto the ground.

He could see that it was a dog. More prowled around the couple, rattled by the pack leader’s death, keeping their distance while trying to build up courage for an attack. The Achaean picked the largest animal out, advancing on it in three long strides. The animal stood its ground, growling and crouching down to pounce. The long bronze sword curved a glittering arc that ended on the dog’s head, the heavy blade near splitting the skull in two. The beast dropped without a sound, breaking the pack’s resolve and the rest fled.

“That was so fast,” the princess said, wonder in her voice. “You killed the first one almost before I knew it was there.”

“How do you think our people conquered the world, my lady? It wasn’t just the power of our chariots and the magic of our women. The strength of our warriors had a little to do with the matter.” He grinned at her, while carefully wiping his weapon on a carcass.

She curtseyed. “My hero,” she said in a mocking voice, but her eyes shone when she looked at him. “I have never seen a sword used like that before. You cut at the second dog as if you had an axe.”

Perseus showed her the sword. “This is a Sherden weapon from Italy. See how the blade is wide and heavy right down to the pointed tip so I can slash with it as well as slab.” He made a few passes around her, the bronze flashing in the bright Mediterranean sunlight. She smiled indulgently, standing still and demonstrating total trust in his skill.

He sheathed the sword. “At least we know what killed the goat,” he observed. “And that no people come up here.”

“How do we know that?” she asked, puzzled.

“The wild dogs had lost all fear of man,” he replied. “Well, they fear me now and I fancy that they will leave us alone in future. It’s not as if they are short of food.” He gestured at the dead dogs and she gave a moue of distaste. “If you are ready, Princess, we can proceed?”

The temple lay a short distance away, as ruined as the house. The roof had fallen in and the structure was overgrown with climbing plants. These old temples fascinated Perseus because his people did not build them. Achaean palaces had areas set aside as shrines for religious ceremonies and even the meanest dwelling would have a small corner dedicated to the Gods. “Imagine the effort and organisation needed to build something this size?” he said, marvelling at the stonework.

“It is difficult to see how such a small island could manage it,” she said. “It must have consumed the entire energy of the islanders for decades.”

“It didn’t do them much good,” Perseus said. “Cycladians might still rule the Aegean if they had they put their energy into fortifications rather than religion.”

He and the Maryannu princess exchanged the half smug, half guilty, expressions of the descendents of conquerors.

“Was it dedicated to Dionysius?” he asked, studying the profusion of vines.

“No,” she replied. “To Hekate.”

“Ah, the moon lady,” he said. “We Achaeans call her Artemis, the Huntress of the Night, the Queen of Magic.”

“Did you know that Hekate’s symbol is the dog?” she asked.

“No I didn’t,” he replied. “Artemis’ symbol is the deer.”

“Symbols are what you make of them,” she said.

They walked around the ruin until they found an entrance consisting of two huge standing stones surmounted by an equally massive lintel. The doorway itself was intact, but all inside was tumbled stone and earth.

He sighed. “I fear your quest is fruitless, my lady. If there ever was a treasure within, then it is lost forever.”

She pulled her bag off over her head and delved inside. “Not so, Perseus. It will be safely hidden. Now my work starts. Can you make me a fire, please?”

He kindled some wood and, by the time he had finished, she had set up a small tripod and a bowl of dark grey metal, which he examined carefully. “Is this what I think it is?”

“If you think it is starmetal, then you are right.”

“Iron,” he said, reverentially. “I have never seen so much before.”

She sat cross-legged before the fire and set the tripod over it. “I intend to use molly, Perseus, so you should move upwind. The narcotic vapours can be upsetting for the untrained.”

He hastened to follow her instructions as magic was tricky stuff. She sprinkled small flakes of a dried herb into the bowl where it curled and smoked on the hot iron. She sat upright with crossed legs, arms extended out in front of her with the palms up, chanting softly in Maryannan. He caught the repeated refrain, “Come to me, Hekate. Open the door for I give you my blood. Come to me, Hekate.” She leaned over the vapour and inhaled deeply then, taking a small knife in one hand, she cut the base of her thumb while holding it over the bowl. Drops of blood fell onto the hot iron with a hiss.

The drone of insects died away and the air was heavy and still. He saw her as if she was at the bottom of a deep lake. She moved her arms slowly against some invisible resistance, like an underwater swimmer. This was no market-place magician’s trick, like the spell that had scared the satyrs. This was sorcery of the highest calibre. A deep rumble sounded and the very ground beneath his feet trembled. Grinding noises, like heavy stones dragged over solid rock, sounded from the temple entrance.

She slumped forward, her head resting in her hands. He moved to her slowly, as if though treacle, to gently lift her up.

“You never cease to surprise me, Princess,” he said.

It took her some little time to recover and he held her the whole time, a task that he found most agreeable.

“Now we go down into the underworld, Prince Perseus,” she said.

He checked that his sword was free in the scabbard.

She laughed. “You won’t need that.” Then, she grew serious. “You must take nothing out from the underworld.”

He followed her into the entrance to the temple. There, she gripped his hand while they walked under the lintel. His stomach lurched as if he was falling, and a gust of wind whipped past his face, then they were through. The change from the hot dry air of a Mediterranean island to the damp chill of the temple was so abrupt that it made him gasp. It took his eyes a little while to adapt to the gloom but then he saw that they stood inside a vast building, in an aisle lined by stone columns. Torches, attached to the columns, illuminated the aisle in flickering light. The ceiling was not visible and vestibules, each side of the aisle, stretched back into darkness.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Inside the temple,” she replied. “The Temple of Thorns.”

The columns were carved to resemble twisted clumps of bramble wood, complete with thorns. At the end of the isle, torches illuminated a giant bronze statue in the likeness of a woman, a huntress with three heads.

The princess followed his eyes. “Hekate,” she whispered and led the way down the aisle.

“This temple is surely too big for the ruin,” he protested.

“We are not in the real Temple of Thorns,” she said. “This is an echo of that place in the underworld. It is a shadow created by prayers and magic. What you see reflects the religious importance of the temple, not its physical appearance, as every prayer, sacrifice or other act of magic has left an imprint.”

At the end of the aisle, a wand of twisted strands of wood lay casually across the statue’s feet. “There, there is our treasure,” she said, triumphantly.

“That stick,” he said, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

“Oh Perseus,” she said. “You weren’t expecting gold or jewels were you?”

He shrugged and reached for the wand.

“No!” She grabbed his arm. “I have to prepare the way before we can take it.”

Perseus backed off. She sat down cross-legged in front of the statue and prayed in Maryannan. He knew the language well enough to understand that she sang a hymn of supplication. It went on and on so, bored, he took a torch from off its bracket and explored the darkness beyond the illuminated aisle. Statues lined the vestibules, some of men and women who were often dressed in outlandish clothes, but many others of magical creatures such as centaurs and unicorns.

Strange demons were also carved in stone. One caught his eye, specifically, because it had the face and torso of a beautiful woman with high cheekbones and magnificent breasts but the body below the waist was snakelike, with vestigial legs. The statue’s hair was a mass of serpents. The eyes painted onto the face seemed to follow him as he walked past.

Many of the statues were decorated with precious jewels and metals. In one side room, a golden phoenix rose from an egg made of silver, the rarest and most valuable metal of all. Flames of polished bronze surrounded the firebird’s nest. He was reluctant to move too far from the aisle in case he lost his way, as the vestibule appeared endless, room opening into room, gems reflecting the torchlight back at him.

The princess droned on interminably as he explored.

“Perseus, where are you?” she finally called.

“Here,” he replied, stepping back into the central aisle. He noticed that she now had the twisted wand in her hand.

“We must leave quickly, before the entrance closes,” she said, hurrying up the aisle. He walked beside her with long strides. She was a tall girl but she still took three steps to his two.

At the door, she held his hand again and, as they passed through, he felt the same falling sensation before bright light blinded his eyes and the hot Mediterranean sun flooded his skin with warmth. At her gesture, he turned and tossed the torch back through the door, backing off as grinding stones shook the ground. He could see through the door into the temple which was just a tangled ruin again. For a moment the air was still, then a cold wind whistled around the ruin, spinning little dust devils that whipped plant litter into spirals in the air.

“Perseus, I can feel magic, something’s happening,” the princess said, fear colouring her voice.

The wind blew stronger and the dust devils danced, thickening as they picked up more material. The Achaean swung his shield onto his arm and drew his sword. Now the wind howled, blowing dust into his eyes. It stopped abruptly as if some master of ceremonies had signalled a halt. The dust devils hung silently in the air and then they solidified.

Ancient warriors stood before Perseus. To be more exact, they were the desiccated remains of ancient warriors that carried small, dull copper axes and wicker shields. They were naked except for tattered loincloths and the most disgusting thing about them was their greeny-brown decaying skin. Flakes dropped off as they moved with an awkward shuffling motion. Their eyes were shrunken balls in blackened sockets. They were corpses but they moved.

He recognised these animated dead from pictures on the walls of the palace in Seriphos. They were the mummified remains of ancient Cycladian warriors. Soldiers dressed like this had been mown down in their hundreds when the Achaeans had swept through the islands, and in their thousands when his ancestors’ battle chariots had broken the native army on the Argolid Plain.

“Princess,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully so that she would be sure to understand him. “I want you to run now. Get off the plateau and back to the village. I will join you when I can.”

The first warrior attacked, moving surprisingly quickly for a desiccated corpse. The Achaean blocked the blow of its axe with his shield and stabbed straight through its wicker shield into its body. There was a hiss of air and a foetid smell filled his nostrils. The thing backed up a step but, instead of falling, it examined the rent in its belly with a sort of quizzical interest before attacking again. He knocked it down with his shield then had to dodge an axe that a mummy swung at him on his unshielded side. He retaliated with a sword slash that removed the thing’s head. It sat down with a thump but soon climbed back on its feet and resumed the fight.

More of the warriors converged on the Achaean. He jumped over an axe swing and advanced, trying to draw the creatures away from the princess. He sneaked a quick glance over his shoulder and was infuriated to see her standing in shock, eyes closed, clutching that damn stick. Then he didn’t have time for anything but a desperate battle for survival.

An axe cut across his chest, leaving a bloody furrow and, in retaliation, he chopped at the thing’s legs. They detached easily but the corpse still crawled back towards him, pulling itself along with one hand while waving its dammed axe with the other. He had to dismember the wretched things to stop them but he never had enough time. Whenever he was in a position to do real damage to a mummy, another attacked forcing him back on the defensive.

The damn girl was chanting something now and could make out the words “Father Zeus.” Why had the silly girl not run when he told her to? He stabbed his sword into a mummy where it stuck and, before he could free it, another dead warrior pulled his shield down. Two more clung to his legs and a copper axe was raised high above his head.

A blue-white thunderbolt flashed in from behind, hitting the animated thing with the axe and blowing it apart into flaming fragments. More thunderbolts smashed into the warrior mummies. They were so bright that they left black lines on his vision. The corpses exploded in fire, burning fiercely with crackling green flames. Within seconds, only ashes were left, dispersing gently in the light breeze that slipped through the trees.

She still stood where he had last seen her, eyes closed holding the twisted wand out, like a lance. The wood was covered in sharp thorns and blood dripped from her hand. He was certain that the spikes had not been there before. He was so angry that he had trouble speaking so he reached for her, grabbing her arm and pulling her towards him.

“When I tell you to run, girl, you run. Do you understand?” He shook her like a child.

“I had to save you or die trying because it’s all my fault. My spell should have protected us from the curse that strikes anyone who removes the temple’s treasures. I was so sure that I had the Goddess’ permission to take the wand but I must have done something wrong. I’m sorry.” She was in tears.

The fury drained from him. How could he be angry with a woman that was prepared to die fighting at his side? Achaeans always claimed that the Maryannu had gone soft in their rich palaces but she was living proof that Achaeans knew nothing.

“No, it wasn’t your fault,” he said, soothingly.

The wand was smooth again, completely without thorns. He took it from her and turned her hand palm up to reveal skin torn by deep punctures. Gently, he kissed each wound.

* * *

The princess chattered cheerfully as they walked down the hill in the clean sunlight and he felt his own spirits lift as they left the plateau. He strode jauntily through the trees, inhaling the pine scent deeply. “The palace towers have roofs coated in gold leaf. They seem to burn with orange flame in the setting sun. Oh Perseus, you will love Joppa.” She took hold of his arm.

“It sounds wonderful,” he smiled at her. Now it was all over, she bounced like a puppy dog and it was impossible not to be infected by her mood.

They stopped by a stream to drink, slaking their thirst in its cool, clean water. The princess filled her water skin to sustain them for the rest of the journey. “I have never been away from Joppa before. I thought it would be exciting to have an adventure but I do believe that I am homesick. Do you miss Argolis?”

“Hardly, Princess,” he laughed. “I was a baby when my mother was exiled.”

“Well Seriphos, then?”

“No. I don’t have many happy memories of the island. I recall the odd tavern girl with affection but little else.”

“Beast. You only say these things to tease me.” She put her hand in the stream and splashed water all over him.

“Right, you are going to pay for that,” he promised, wagging his finger at her.

“No,” she squealed, scrambling away from him.

He launched himself after her, scooping her up into the air.

“A cooling bath will dampen your energy, my lady.”

“Put me down or I will put magic warts on your nose. What will your tavern girls think of you then?” She wriggled in his arms. “Put me down, you rotten bully.”

He dropped her back on her feet. “What?” she said, sounding disappointed.

Perseus pointed to where four men watched them, three spearmen and a man with a sword, who must be the officer.

“Mattra,” she yelled, happily and threw herself towards the swordsman.

Perseus seized her wrist, pulling her roughly back. “Stay behind me.”

“I’m sorry, Princess. I hoped that this would not be necessary. I hoped that you would die on the mountain of some mischance,” Mattra said, reluctantly.

The Achaean drew his sword and slipped his arm through the shield grips. He advanced on the men, shield in front of him. The spearmen lowered their weapons and sheltered behind long, tower shields. Mattra drew his sword but Perseus noticed that he hung back, leaving one of the spearmen dangerously exposed.

Perseus made a feint at the pair of spearmen on his left, who reacted by huddling together defensively behind their shields. Perseus immediately broke off his attack and charged the lone spearman on his right. The man jabbed at him with the thrusting spear. Perseus pushed the spearhead aside with his shield, stepping in close. In one continuous fluid move, he stabbed over the long shield into the spearman’s throat. Blood pumped, the man dropping with a strangled gurgle.

A flicker of sunlight reflecting off metal caught Perseus’ attention. He raised his shield in time to block Mattra’s sword thrust. Perseus swung his own bronze sword in an overhead hack, droplets of the spearman’s blood spraying off the tip in a red fan. He hit Mattra’s shield with a crash, forcing the man to one knee. The Achaean thrust his shield into Mattra’s face, knocking him over backwards.

The spearmen came out of their defensive formation and attacked, forcing him back. Using the extra length of their weapons, they could keep the Achaean out of sword reach as long as they worked together. Perseus had to break the deadlock before they wore him down. He unlooped his shield from around his head. Measuring the range carefully, he threw it like a discus. It caught a spearman under the chin, snapping back his head. Perseus heard the neck break with a distinct crack.

The Achaean immediately turned on the last spearmen, throwing himself at the man. Perseus twisted to avoid the panic stricken thrust of the spear point. He smashed his sword down on the man’s helmet. The spearmen pitched forward and Perseus stabbed him in the back as he fell.

Mattra was back on his feet. He took one look at his slaughtered spearmen and threw down his sword and shield in surrender.

“Why, Mattra, tell me why?” the girl asked. “I thought that you were my friend. Why did you betray me?”

“I was your friend, Princess, but they were too powerful. They gave me no choice,” Mattra replied.

“You always had a choice, friend,” said Perseus. “You just made the wrong one.”

Casually, Perseus stabbed Mattra under the ribcage. Their eyes met for a moment, before Mattra slid backwards off the blade. Perseus wiped his sword on the man’s kilt then efficiently looted the bodies.

“When I was small he used to tell me stories of battles and great warriors,” she said. “Was it necessary to kill him?”

“Yes, Princess, it was necessary. What else did you expect me to do with the traitorous bastard? Make him promise to be a good boy in future? You were in danger as long as he was alive. He intended to spit you like a dog.”

She nodded, accepting his decision. Nevertheless, she bent down by his body, closed Mattra’s eyes, and said a prayer for his soul. She was very quiet for the rest of the journey. They reached the fishing village the next day.

The hamlet was a mean place, clinging to the side of a small hillock. The only buildings in stone were a small headman’s villa and a modest temple to The Lady. A ship’s mast, with furled sail, projected over the single story buildings. Two naked children played “sticks” in the sole street that meandered through the village but a woman appeared and pulled them into a hut. Once or twice, Perseus thought he saw shadowy faces observing him through half-shuttered windows. A pig stopped rooting beside a hut long enough to look them over, snorting as if it did not like what it saw, before strutting off with an indignant gait.

Perseus rounded a cowshed and got his first look at the galley moored against a ramshackle jetty. The sleek black warship was completely out of place among the flimsy fishing boats. He could smell pitch, indicating that the warship was well maintained, as one might expect of a royal transport.

“Your ride awaits, Princess,” he said.

“I arrived on this island keen to have an adventure. It was going to be all such fun,” she said, softly. “I was so eager for new experiences but sometimes the Gods mock us by giving us what we wish for.”

A sailor on watch spotted him and rang a bell causing a man to stick his head out of the cabin aft. The lookout yelled something and the head disappeared.

Perseus’ boots clumped on the wooden jetty. An officer, by his clothes, came out of the cabin and jumped down from the warship onto the jetty, followed by a man wearing the armband of a ship’s mate and a small group of sailors. Perseus and the princess halted in front of the officer.

“Captain, this is Prince Perseus of Achaea,” she said.

“I see,” the captain said, clearly not seeing at all. “What happened to Mattra?”

“He ate something that disagreed with him,” said Perseus, lightly.

“What?” said the captain, confused.

“Four inches of bronze,” said Perseus, with a feral grin.

“Prince Perseus will be accompanying us to Joppa,” she said.

“I have been thinking, Princess,” said Perseus. “I suspect my arrival in Joppa might precipitate a political crisis. I have survived being thrown out of two cities as an unwanted prince. I don’t fancy risking my life or yours on a third, so I won’t be coming with you.”

“But I promised you a reward, Perseus, and I have nothing with me of sufficient value.”

“You underestimate your charms, lady. I shall take my reward now.”

He swept her into his arms and silenced any protest she might make with his lips. She stiffened momentarily before melting against him. Time stood still and power flowed through her and into him. Her lips were hot, her skin burnt against him, and his pulse hammered in his veins. She was his, completely. He wanted to throw her down and take her on the jetty but a tiny spark of sanity flickered in the back of his mind. This was sex-magic, the most powerful sorcery of all. It washed through him like a flame, consuming everything, like nothing he had ever known. She was all women and she was like no other woman. She was his, completely.

The rational part of his mind told him that you do not mount a Maryannu princess in front of her boat crew so, seizing the thought while he still could, he gently disengaged her arms from his neck and stepped back. It took every scrap of will power that he could summon. The pull of her body was overwhelming. Her skin glowed and her body undulated in waves of power.

“Princess?” he said, trying to break the spell.

“The Goddess came,” she whispered.

“The Lady?” Perseus asked, nervously. The Lady of the Labyrinth was the most powerful of the Old Gods and even the charioteers were wary of her.

“No. It was Aphrodite of the Stars. She said that you will … that we will …” Her voice trailed off.

“We will what, Princess?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Her face closed like a mask, cutting off her thoughts.

Perseus looked around him. Normally, he kept a watchful eye on his surroundings but, for those few moments, he had lost track of everything but her. The captain watched the princess intently, licking his lips. Residuals of magical power still sounded in Perseus’ head like a bell, letting him see every thought crossing the man’s mind.

“Pretty little thing, isn’t she?” asked Perseus. “The magic is strong within her. She would be worth a bag of gold on the auction block at Amnisos.”

“Yes,” the captain said absentmindedly before looking at him in horror. The man’s hand brushed his belt and he lunged at Perseus, with a curved Lycian dagger that appeared as if by magic. It was a practiced move that must have won many a fight in the dockside taverns but the power still flowed in Perseus, surging backwards and forwards. For all his speed, to Perseus the captain seemed to move in slow motion, as if the air around him had thickened into water.

Perseus caught the man’s wrist with his right hand, squeezing so hard that bones and tendons ground between his fingers, forcing the captain to scream and drop his knife. Some of the crew started forward but the mate ordered them back. Perseus seized the captain around the throat with his free hand, pushing hard. The captain scrabbled ineffectually but Perseus was implacable, bending his head back further and further. The man’s neck snapped with an audible click and Perseus let the body fall with a thud on the jetty.

“Oh Gods,” said the princess. “Doesn’t the killing ever stop?”

“Not for people like us, who were born within reach of a throne. For us, it only stops when we are dead. Hasn’t this trip taught you that yet, girl? If not, then it’s time you grew up,” Perseus snarled, with genuine anger. He liked her, but she had to toughen up or she would never survive the deadly dynastic politics that swirled through a palace and he had discovered that he desperately wanted her to survive.

The mate spat on his captain’s body. “He liked to involve himself in the affairs of the great ones of Joppa, because he imagined himself to be important. I will take the princess safely home to her father; my life on it, Prince.”

“That’s right, your life on it,” said Perseus. “If anything happens to her, if anyone even threatens her, I will know and I will come with bronze and fire and an Achaean warband at my back. Depend upon it and make sure they know it in Joppa.”

The mate nodded and Perseus knew that he grasped the threat. The Maryannu aristocracy made sport of the crude arts and manners of their Achaean cousins but no one laughed at an Achaean warband. The highest honour conferred on an Achaean warlord by his peers was “sacker of cities,” a title even given to Athena.

“So this is goodbye, then, my prince,” she said.

“For the moment,” he replied. “But one day, I will come for you.”

“I know,” she said. “The Goddess told me.”

He would like to know what else the Goddess whispered to her.

“Trust no one, Princess. No one, if you want to survive,” Perseus said.

“No one but you,” she said, unclipping a small silver pendant from her slender neck which depicted a crooked cross, the good luck charm of the Sky Gods. She went to hang it on his neck but it wouldn’t fit, so she doubled it around his wrist instead.

“This will remind you that you are mine, even when you sport with dancing girls and faithless wives.”

Perseus reached into his pouch and took out a necklace. Two golden wasps hung back to back on a golden chain. Her eyebrows lifted, no doubt she remembered where he had acquired it, but nevertheless she allowed him to hang it around her neck. He thought that it looked much better on her than the commander’s wife—what had her name been?

“Take care,” she said, then left him.

The sailors helped the princess aboard. They cast off the lines, and backed the galley out from the jetty. All the time, she stood in the bow, watching him.

Perseus searched the captain’s body, placing the loot that he found in his pouch. It was agreeably full now with booty, including the jewels that he had stolen from the Temple of Thorns. He walked up the jetty to find a fisherman who could be bribed or threatened to convey him away from this miserable place. He thought that he had earned a holiday and he knew a tavern in Kos where the gambling was wild and the dancing girls wilder. For some reason, his thoughts turned back to Siffa. What was the name of the commander’s wife? Now he considered the matter, he was not sure that he had ever known it. One reason he called all women princess was so that he didn’t have to worry about their names. A thought struck him.

Perseus raced back down the jetty. The ship was still under oars, turning on the spot to head for the open sea.

“Princess,” Perseus yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth. “You never told me your name.”

She yelled just one word back.

“Andromeda.”

Hourglass

Written by Alma Alexander

Illustrated by Jessica Douglas

I could get RICH in Ghulkit!

Prove it …

Aris cursed the potent ale that had made him utter that boast. Wyn and Allyc, the two fellow gleemen who had provoked his words, were at this moment no doubt ensconced beside another warm fire in some congenial hostelry, nursing mulled wine and laughing quietly over Aris’s stubborn insistence to honor his words.

Spend a winter in Ghulkit, come back with wealth, and he could return and spend many a satisfying evening telling avid listeners across the length and breadth of all the Kingdoms how one gleeman had dared to defy almost impossible odds. No other gleeman could compete … .

Aris allowed himself a grim smile as he struggled through the snowdrifts on the lonely back road. Spend a winter in Ghulkit. He should have known there was a good reason people did not do this. He had already found out—the hard way—that if he was not totally focused on the road he was traveling he could find himself mired in innocent-looking snowbanks that were hip deep or worse. At least once he nearly lost his harp in the drifts; and even without that, he could almost feel the effects of the killing cold on the fragile instrument. Whenever he gained some sort of sanctuary and obtained a spot to ply his trade, he would have to thaw the harp for half an hour or more before he could use it to assist him in the simplest of songs.

Today was worse than many a day before it. Often the cold would be ameliorated by a thin and watery kind of sunlight, which would even manage, weak and etiolated as it was, to render the muffled, frost-sparkling landscape beautiful in Aris’s sight. That, at least, had been a sort of gift—he had composed several songs about the beauty of the snow country—but after a while even that had not been enough to make him forget how cold he was. And this morning—this morning it had started snowing. By the time he had hit the road, it was not just snowing, it was snowing heavily. He should have stayed another day at the village where he had been given adequate if not lavish hospitality. But he had thought it a flurry. The locals might have told him it was not, had he thought to ask—but he had not asked. The blizzard had grown steadily worse. Aris lost all track of time and could not tell if the sun was meant to be overhead or setting. He only knew that he had been walking for hours, that he was on the verge of losing all feeling in his feet, that he could see no farther in front of him than the length of his outstretched hand, and that he was in real trouble.

Spend a winter in Ghulkit.

If he wasn’t careful, he was in real danger of spending eternity here.

He could have missed the house by the roadside altogether, so camouflaged was it in the snowdrifts. Aris had been focused for so long on just putting one foot in front of another that he would have had considerable trouble recognizing even familiar things, let alone something that barely differentiated itself from his frigid environment. He retained enough wit to pause briefly when he smelled what he thought was smoke. Even so, he almost didn’t see what lay right before him, but a black hole suddenly yawned in the nearest snowdrift. It took Aris precious moments to realize that someone had just opened a door.

“Whuh …” he muttered, in a cold-cracked voice, through lips that seemed to have stiffened into icicles.

“You walk to your death, stranger,” said another, lighter voice. It sounded very young. “This is not a day for traveling. I have a fire inside. Come.”

“Whuhuh … thhhan … thank you,” Aris managed to force through chattering teeth.

He allowed himself to be guided through the doorway. When it closed behind him, he found himself in close darkness and fought a rising panic—but then, a moment later, what appeared to be a heavy curtain was lifted at the far end of the hall and beyond it Aris could see the inviting red glow of a fire. A sigh escaped him at the sight, and his host chuckled softly at this.

“Come inside,” he said. “Let’s get you out of those wet clothes.”

By the time he was fully in command of his senses, Aris was a little startled to find himself wearing a fur-edged woollen robe, sitting beside a hearth whose sheer size made it look as though it belonged in a king’s hall and not some lost and snowbound cottage in the wilds of Ghulkit. It was the mug that made him snap back to himself because the scalding heat from its contents had made him jerk his hands away. He very nearly spilled the whole mug into his lap, only saved by a steadying hand on his own.

“Easy,” murmured his host. “That is better inside you.”

Aris remembered his manners. “I think,” he said, “you saved my life.”

And at that he looked up and finally saw the face of his companion.

Standing beside him was a very young man, almost a boy. His untidy shoulder-length fair hair and the engaging dimples he produced when he smiled, together with the small hands and the narrow hips, made Aris initially guess his host’s age as fifteen, maybe sixteen at most. But then he met the eyes of blue fire that sat in that young, unlined face, and felt his stomach knot. The eyes were ancient beyond measure, all-knowing, all-seeing, old. This was someone of no age at all, or perhaps all the ages of the world. Beneath the intensity of those eyes Aris dropped his own, utterly confounded, feeling as though all the sins that he carried in his soul—the pride, the arrogance, the ambition, the selfishness—were open to their scrutiny.

“Who are you?” he asked after a moment of silence.

The other laughed softly. “You may call me Bek. Now drink that. Slowly.”

He raised an eloquent eyebrow when Aris hesitated, and Aris, feeling obscurely shamed, lifted the mug to his lips and drank. The scalding liquid burned its way down his throat, and tears came to his eyes as he swallowed. He coughed.

“Sorry,” said Bek. “It needs to be hot. You were on the verge of snowsleep.”

“Snowsleep?” repeated Aris blankly. He suddenly roused. “My harp! My harp!”

“Rest easy.” Bek rested one hand on Aris’s shoulder. “It is here. I took the liberty of unwrapping it and wiping it down. It is a fine instrument. You are a gleeman?”

“Yes,” Aris said, subsiding, his eyes on the harp he now saw glinting on the far side of the enormous hearth.

“Well, then,” said Bek. “Perhaps you could honor me with a tale later. Perhaps even the one of how a solitary gleeman came to be trudging the Ghulkit roads in midwinter.”

“Foolishness,” muttered Aris under his breath.

Bek laughed out loud. “Ah, a longer tale than that, I think. But there is no hurry. First we get you warm. It is certain that you will be going nowhere for a while. It is only getting worse outside.”

Aris sipped his drink and stole an appraising glance around the room as he did so. The room was larger than it first appeared, with the far corners lost in dark shadows. Aside from the firelight, it was lit by candles—groups of them, placed on any flat surface with enough space to bear them. There was a desk in a nook beside the fireplace, overflowing with parchment, ink bottles, quill pens, and a quantity of leather-bound books. It also bore a stuffed owl and an hourglass, which looked about to spill the last of its sand into the lower chamber. Farther out, there was an armchair, which presently served as sleeping quarters for three black-and-white cats who were tangled in a knot of paws and whiskers on the cushioned seat. More books lay in piles on the floor beyond that. Whoever the owner of this cottage was he was no humble tiller of land—the books were riches, even had their bindings not gleamed with subtle inlays of silver and gold.

Feeling Bek’s somewhat sardonic gaze upon him, Aris finally turned back to his host.

“I would,” said Bek, his voice hiding a suspicion of a smile, “be happy to answer questions. Within reason.”

Aris gestured. “There is a king’s ransom in books here,” he said, and it was not a question. Quite.

Bek inclined his head. “Some of them,” he said, “probably were. I am a collector. Of books, amongst other things. For example …” He rose, and fetched a wooden case from a shelf, opening it up on a hinged edge to reveal rows of meticulously displayed butterflies. “This one,” he said conversationally, pointing to a midnight-blue specimen with silver flecks on his wings, “I had to travel far to find. Very far. You might say it was worth more than any two of those books.”

Aris had gulped down the last of the fiery liquid in the pewter mug, and it dangled from his hand as he examined the butterflies with interest. Bek took the cup from him.

“Good. Another, I think.”

“What is it?” Aris, who was feeling quite ridiculously invigorated, asked.

“Secret recipe,” Bek said. “Amongst other things, I am a healer.”

Aris cast his eyes around the room again. “There are no windows.”

Bek, who was pouring more steaming liquid into Aris’s mug from a kettle hanging in the hearth, nodded without turning. “This is so.”

“Then how do you know that it is getting worse outside? And how did you know that I was there?”

“One does not,” Bek said, “necessarily need to see with one’s physical sight in order to observe one’s world.” He walked the few steps back to Aris with the steaming mug in his hand. “And there is no need to look quite so alarmed. It is a gift, much like your own with the harp.”

“Magic,” said Aris, and could not keep his distaste out of his voice. Aris and enchantment had a relationship akin to that of a cat-hater and any kind of cat—magic pursued Aris, flattered him, cajoled him, tried to climb up to his lap to be petted, while he spent all his energies trying to shoo it away and keep it at arm’s length. Using his experiences, he had composed a number of songs and tales, and the irony was that he was becoming known for his tales of magic even while fleeing it with all his might.

All Aris had ever wanted to be was a singer of songs, a teller of tales. He knew he was good enough to achieve this with no magical intervention. He was just having an inordinately hard time proving it to himself.

“If you wish,” Bek said equably, “then yes, magic. None that will harm you. You yourself just said I saved your life. This is no less than the truth. I could show you what it is like outside now, and it is considerably worse than when I called you in here. But I suspect you would think that I was just showing off … and you would probably be right.” He held out the mug. “Drink it. I promise you there is nothing harmful in it at all. If you have to know, it isn’t even magic.” The word was emphasized, lightly, with something akin to amusement. “It is herbal knowledge, no more.”

Aris accepted the drink after a brief hesitation. Bek inclined his head in an acknowledgment of this acceptance, put away his butterfly collection, and bent over to inspect Aris’s harp.

“I think it has taken no harm,” he said. “I would be very grateful if you would play for me later. If there is something here that I miss, it would have to be music.”

“I owe you my life,” said Aris. “A song or a tale is small enough price for this.”

“We all place our own value upon things,” said Bek cryptically. “I may not even choose to count it as payment. I may consider your offering something to place me in your debt.”

Aris looked at him for a long moment, then put down the mug he still cradled in his hands. “If you would pass me the harp,” he said courteously.

Bek did so, with infinite care and gentleness, and Aris spent a few moments adjusting the strings and tuning the instrument to his satisfaction. This done, he glanced up, cradling the harp against his body.

“Is there something specific that you would hear?”

“Whatever you choose.”

Aris bent his head over the harp, strumming a few experimental chords, letting the beloved instrument guide him, as it had done so many times before—it almost had a gift itself, this battered harp of his, of passing the right song, the right tale, into his head. It did not fail him—the melody that came flowing from under his fingers was a tale of vivid spring, of bluebells in ancient forests, of young love blighted and lost through blundering and malice. As always Aris lost himself in the telling, pouring his body and his mind into his art, making his voice an instrument of his soul. When he was done, he “woke” back to his surroundings as the last chord of the harp still hung brilliant and sparkling in the air, and saw the glint of tears on Bek’s cheeks.

“That,” Bek said, “could easily have been a tale of my own youth. How could you know?”

“I, too, do not require windows to see,” said Aris.

“I told you it was the same kind of gift,” Bek said. “I thank you. That was well chosen, and well-done. We can discuss your fee, gleeman, when we rise. I do not often entertain visitors, but I have readied a pallet here by the fire for you. I hope you will find it comfortable.”

“Thank you. I am sure I shall. But as to the fee …”

Bek raised a hand for silence. “All in its time,” he said, “although here we do have the luxury of choosing our moment … For now, I wish you a good rest and a pleasant night. You may dream, in this room. Pay it no mind.” He chuckled. “It is just a little bit of … magic.” Again, the word was emphasized with an unspoken smile. “I think I do not have to warn you to touch nothing here that you do not begin to understand … ah … perhaps it is safer to touch nothing at all, then, if magic is your bane.”

He saw Aris flinch, and his face assumed a contrite expression.

“I do apologize,” he said, ” I have absolutely no intention of plaguing your rest with fear or anxiety. Rest easy—what is here, is mine, and will not harm you.”

Aris bowed. “It would be ungracious to find fault with sanctuary. I owe you.”

“No,” Bek said. “It is I who am in your debt.”

He bowed lightly, vanishing behind another curtain, twin to the one through which they had entered the room from outside and blowing out one bank of candles on his way out.. Aris doused the rest, put away the harp, and settled onto the comfortable sleeping pallet, piled high with furs, which had been provided for him. But sleep was elusive, especially after one of the armchair cats decided to leave its companions in favor of the furs of the pallet and curl up, purring imperiously, against him.

The room was palpably benign, to one as sensitive to atmosphere as a trained gleeman was, but there was something about it that made Aris’s hair stand on end even so, especially in the deep silence of the night shadows. Not even the comforting presence of the cat helped. Something was brushing along the edges of his mind, lightly, and would not let him rest. His fingers ached for his harp—inconveniently, for he could hardly take up the instrument and start improvising on it while his host was asleep in the next chamber. So he lay back with wide-open eyes, wakeful and worried, his thoughts in curious chaos, until his body rebelled and presented him with a violent cramp in his leg. He kicked, dislodging the disgruntled cat, and rose to his feet.

Mindful of the injunction not to touch anything, he nevertheless embarked on a quick wander around the room, peering with a measure of real curiosity at some of the more accessible books—but the fire had burned low, and in the half-light he could make out little except the glint of their precious bindings. The owl on the desk proved to be companioned by a pair of tiny stuffed mice, which sat somewhat smugly right under the bird’s lethal claws secure in the knowledge that the talons would never reach them, even though the owl had been caught in a position of stretching one foot for possible prey. Beside it the hourglass … the sand had not moved.

Aris took a closer look. Yes, there was a still a very small pile of fine sand in the upper chamber, but it was not seeping into the chamber below, in the manner of hourglasses. In fact, it was frozen, in stasis, as much as the owl forever reaching for prey which would never be caught.

Touch nothing here that you do not begin to understand …

It was too late. It was a gesture as instinctive as time. Aris watched his hand reach for the hourglass and turn it over.

* * *

He shivered in a sudden blast of cold. An owl hooted somewhere close by. The friendly house had melted away, and he stood beside a huge snowdrift with the hourglass in his hand and his harp, his traveling pack, his gleeman’s cloak, and a fur-piled pallet with one very irate cat at his feet. Upon closer inspection he appeared to be standing barefoot in the snow, with his boots a step away at the edge of the pallet. Aris hopped onto the furs, displacing the hissing cat, and quickly drew the boots onto feet already blue with cold—then, before doing anything else, he swiftly wrapped the exposed harp into its multilayered pack. Only once this was done did he pause and stare at the hourglass, which he had dropped into the snow when making the dive for his footwear.

The sky was clear, hung with stars and a huge, close, golden moon, but it was bitterly cold, and his breath hung in white clouds before his face.

A deep sigh behind him made him spin in the direction whence it had come, and he found himself looking at a wizened old man, bent with age, his sparse hair white and straggly across the collar of his robe. He leaned heavily on a carved staff, both gnarled and twisted hands, bare of gloves, upon its head. There was nothing in this ancient being to suggest the almost childlike youth of Aris’s erstwhile host, Bek. But then the old man looked up, and the eyes were the same glowing embers of blue fire.

“The Eternal Hour was a high fee to choose, gleeman,” the creature that was Bek said in a low voice cracked with the passage of time.

“The Eternal Hour?” repeated Aris blankly.

“What you hold,” Bek said, “made me and my home timeless. You could have spent a century inside my room and emerged young and beautiful the next morning.”

Aris picked up the hourglass gingerly and held it out. “But I don’t …”

Bek shook his head. “Too late. It is in your hand now. I mean—take a look around you … nothing made it that was not part of your immediate environment when you touched the glass. Your own belongings, the pallet you slept on, the mug you drank from, the chair you sat on …” This was correct; only now did Aris notice these items, incongruous in the snow. “And one careless cat.” Bek chuckled, with real amusement. “Well, they’re yours now, cat and all. And the hourglass. You control it now, to use however you choose. You may take whomever you wish into the stasis with you, and they may then leave unmolested … unless they touch the glass, and you may not warn them directly not to do so. Just be warned—it is a treasure with a price.”

Aris shivered, and not with cold. “What?”

“Keep it too long, and you forget what time is,” said Bek. “I received it when I was very, very young … and kept it for too many centuries.” He coughed. “They do catch up with you.”

“But I don’t want it,” Aris said, a hint of panic in his voice.

“Then,” said Bek, “you had better give it away within this hour—before the sand runs out to the last few grains, then stops, starting your Eternal Hour.”

“But if someone else …”

“If someone else turns the hourglass over before the end of the hour, it is theirs,” said Bek. “But just as you may not warn them not to touch it when it belongs to you, so you may not hide its nature while it is still free. It may be taken in ignorance or innocence, but never passed on willingly under the same geas. If you give it away, you give away everything—including the knowledge of its power.” Bek chuckled. “And you may find it hard to find people who love eternal life enough to take it over by choice.”

He began to flicker and to fade against the gleaming moonlit snow. Aris threw out an imploring hand. “No! Wait!”

“Be careful with your gift …” Bek’s voice came drifting back, then he was gone, completely gone, leaving Aris alone in an empty wilderness with an hourglass that held his destiny. He sank down onto the furs that had been his pallet, dropping the hourglass beside him in the snow, and buried his head in his hands.

The cat came high-stepping daintily back to the furs. It approached and butted Aris’s knee with its head, purring loudly. When Aris didn’t move, the cat settled against the side of his leg.

Spend the winter in Ghulkit.

Aris allowed himself a bitter chuckle at the memory of a thought that had accompanied him on the road before he had found Bek’s house—a thought that took on the force of premonition, seen with hindsight. If he wasn’t careful, he was in real danger of spending eternity here.

The cat leaned more insistently against him, letting out a small whimper. Aris lifted his head and turned to look at it, resting his chin on hands folded on his knees.

“Poor beast,” he murmured, “you hardly asked for this …”

He reached for the cat, awkwardly, at an angle; the cat shied, backing away. Its hind leg slipped off the edge of the fur, onto snow … and into the side of the hourglass.

Which tumbled slowly, then righted itself.

On the opposite end.

Sand began flowing back into the chamber it had just left.

Aris sat frozen in midmotion, staring, unable to believe his eyes. He had not fulfilled the geas of explaining the nature of the hourglass to the cat, but the cat was an animal—would such an explanation have made any difference? And could he really take a serendipitous accident as a gift from the gods and walk away, free?

Aris carefully rose from the pallet furs, slung his harp-pack across his shoulder, and reached for his pack. Slowly, quietly, like a thief stealing away, he backed away from the cat that would never die. He gained the edge of the road he had been traveling before he had found Bek’s house, and hesitated, very briefly, as he cast a glance first in the direction in which he had been heading, then back along the way he had already come.

I could get RICH in Ghulkit!

Aris shivered, irresolute for a moment under the golden moon. He glanced back briefly then turned, staring. The pewter mug and the chair in which he had sat in Bek’s house were still there—but the pallet, its furs and the cat were gone. And so was the hourglass.

A voice inside his mind screamed to flee this enchanted place, to seek familiar places and more hospitable lands. But there was a shimmer of moonlight on the horizon, and the snow gleamed with promise underneath the stars. He was Aris, gleeman, storyteller, and there were more stories out there to be found.

There was no choice at all.

The moon pooled and shimmered in the footsteps of the trail he left behind him, following the snow-mantled road into the future.

Sluggo

Written by Mike Resnick

Illustrated by Karl Nordman

He was born in the charity ward at 3:07 a.m. on March 5, 1931. There were two nurses in attendance.

The first took one look at him and fainted.

The other ran screaming from the room, raced out into the cold Chicago night, and refused ever to come back even to pick up her pay.

The doctor who delivered him wanted him destroyed, but as a practicing Catholic he could not bring himself to do so until the baby had been baptized. His parish priest looked at the baby in its incubator, crossed himself, and left. Three more priests refused to baptize the infant, and finally the doctor reluctantly decided to let him live.

His mother committed suicide two months later.

His father left town a month after that, never to return, and he became a ward of the state.

He was placed in an institution for the insane, though there was nothing wrong with his mind. Thirty-seven nurses were offered triple pay if they would care for him. Thirty-three decided that triple pay wasn’t anywhere near enough. The four who agreed worked in six-hour shifts and found ways to cover for each other on the weekends.

He had no birth certificate, and hence no name. One of the nurses referred to him as a grotesque slug, and from that day on, Slug was what they called him, and Slug was what he answered to.

No other inmate was ever allowed to see him. He lived alone in his windowless room, unable to read, unable to interact with anyone but his nurses, who kept him at arm’s length whenever possible. This was before the days of television, so his entire knowledge of the outside world came from the few picture books they allowed him to see. No one knew how strong he was, or what his abilities might be, so the pulps—and especially the horror pulps and comics—were forbidden to him. Gradually, despite the shape of his mouth, he learned to speak; after all, he had a lot of time on his hands.

It was assumed that he would remain in the institution for the duration of his life, but there was some graft, as there always is in Chicago, and one day the place had to close its doors for lack of funding. They tried to find another institute or asylum that would take the Slug, but after one look each refused, some cordially, some in terror.

What was to be done with a being—it was difficult to think of him as a twenty-two-year-old man, or indeed any kind of man at all—that no one wanted but could no longer be kept hidden?

Actually, the answer was really quite simple.

Remember Riverview?

For half a century it was the country’s second-biggest amusement park, behind only Coney Island. (They weren’t “theme parks” prior to Disneyland.) From early spring until late fall, its seventy-four acres were jammed from dawn until far into the night with thrillseekers from all across the country. People came from as far away as Paris and Buenos Aires just to ride the Bobs, which was the most famous roller coaster in the world. And when they were through with the Bobs, they’d test their courage and their stomachs with the Blue Streak, the Silver Flash, the Big Dipper, the Wild Mouse, and the Skyrocket.

Even by day you could spot the two-hundred-foot-high Pair-o-Chute tower from more than a mile away. And at night you could see Super Eli, the world’s biggest Ferris wheel, lit up like a Christmas tree, from almost as far away.

There was the Rotor, which held you suspended in space, and the Flying Turns, which damned near sent you off into space, and on hot summer days people would wait for half an hour to take the long slide into the water on the Chute-the-Chutes. They’d play Skee-Ball and dozens of other games imported from the midway. There was the Ghost Train, a haunted house on wheels that drove through winding darkened tunnels, and the Tunnel of Love, for those who craved a different kind of excitement in the dark.

And there was the Congress of Oddities, although most people just called it the freak show. It was the one place in the whole of Chicago where it was felt that the Slug might earn his keep.

They put him on display there at noon on August 17, 1953.

People screamed, just like they were supposed to.

But then, like the nurses twenty-two years earlier, they fainted. And had hysterics. And vomited. And raced out of the tent, and didn’t stop running until they were forcibly (and twice fatally) stopped by traffic beyond Riverview’s front entrance. Even the 700-Pound Lady and the Four-Armed Boy refused to appear with the Slug.

They took him off display, permanently, at 1:22 p.m. on August 17, 1953.

But he had no place to go, and they couldn’t just turn him loose and let him wander the streets of Chicago, not with the reactions his appearance caused. Then somebody came up with the bright idea of Aladdin’s Castle.

The Castle was the biggest fun house in existence. It took better than a half hour to go through the whole thing. And there were some pitch-black winding corridors where hideous monsters popped into existence, scaring the hell out of the patrons. What if, it was suggested, they let the Slug wander around those darkened areas, never close enough for the public to see that he was anything more than an illusion. He’d frighten them a lot more than any of the stuff they had right now. And since there were a number of hidden storage areas, he could even live there.

The management was divided on the notion until it was pointed out that he’d be working for his room and board, which is to say: no money would change hands. That settled it. They closed the Congress of Oddities for the rest of the day, and then at midnight they had a couple of their braver maintenance men walk him over to Aladdin’s Castle.

“I wonder what it eats?” said one of them as if the Slug weren’t right alongside them.

“Little kids, probably,” said the other. “Or maybe just mounds of dirt. Anyway, it ain’t our problem.”

The night watchman took one look at him and decided he had urgent business elsewhere for the next two or three lifetimes, but they found the room he’d set up. It had a cot, a chair, a radio (which could only be played after closing), a portable toilet, and a lamp. There was a flap at the bottom of the door where his meals could be shoved through so no one had to come into contact with him.

The Slug thought it was the most luxurious room he’d ever seen.

They showed him where he was supposed to loiter when the Castle was open, then got the hell out of there as fast as they could.

The Slug began exploring his new universe. He’d never had much chance to develop his muscles or practice his balance, so the vibrating room and rolling barrel both disoriented him and caused him to fall down painfully. Then he came to the Hall of Mirrors.

He knew what men and women looked like, because he’d seen pictures of them in books and magazines, but except for looking at his arms and legs, he had never seen himself before. Now he found he could stand in front of a row of near-magical mirrors that distorted reality: this one made him look, if not human, at least a little less grotesque than he’d been led to believe he was; that one gave him almost normal proportions, though of course it couldn’t do much for his skin or features. Because he had never seen any kind of mirror, he thought for a moment that he had miraculously become less of whatever he was. Then he stepped back, and his image changed, and he realized that it was not a true image at all and he remained what he had always been. Still, it fascinated him, this room that made him seem not quite the monstrosity that he was, and he spent almost an hour there, staring at the various Slugs that were reflected back at him.

The next day the Slug began working at the only job he would ever have. Within a week Aladdin’s Castle had passed the Bobs as Riverview’s biggest moneymaker.

* * *

In his first two years, he only met one employee, though “met” is the wrong word, because Andrew Varda never got near him, never said a word to him, always averted his eyes when the Slug chanced to be in his vicinity.

Andrew was the only person on display at the Castle. Ostensibly he was a guard, and he dressed the part—dark blue shirt and pants, phony badge, realistic-looking toy gun. But Andrew was there for one thing only. There was a slanted room where people got terribly disoriented and usually had to grab a railing just to make their way to the end of it—and the end of it was a small door leading to an outdoor staircase that in turn led up to the second level. Varda’s job was to watch each person as they exited the slanted room and began climbing the stairs, and every time a pretty girl in a skirt emerged, he pressed a hidden button and an air hose embedded in the stairs would blow the girl’s skirt up almost to her head. About once a month there’d be a girl who was wearing nothing underneath, and about once a year a girl would turn out to be a very mixed-up boy who was wearing nothing underneath, but usually it was done, and accepted, in good fun.

The Slug thought Varda had a fascinating job. He got to sit outside, in the fresh air, and to see and interact with people—the same people who screamed in terror or turned away in revulsion, even when they thought he was a wax figure or a projection.

Then, in the summer of 1955, while most of Chicago was rooting for the resurgent “Go-Go Sox” or awaiting the much-heralded Nashua-Swaps match race, the Slug, who had never spoken to anyone but a doctor or a nurse, had his very first real conversation. It didn’t last long, which was just as well because he didn’t know a lot of words, but that it took place at all was remarkable.

He was trudging from his room to one of the spots from which he would jump out and scare the customers when he heard a sound he had never heard before. Curious, he approached it, and found a small girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, crying softly. He knew he shouldn’t stand where she could see him, that the sight of him would terrify her as it terrified everyone else, but he couldn’t help himself. He had never been this close to anyone other than a doctor, a nurse, or, just for a few minutes, the two men who walked him over from the Congress of Oddities, and he was fascinated.

He must have made a sound—in fact, it was almost impossible for him to breathe silently—and the girl looked up.

The Slug backed away, waiting for the inevitable scream of terror.

“Don’t be afraid,” said the girl. “I won’t hurt you.”

The Slug stopped and stared at her.

“My Daddy told me all about you,” she said. “You live here.”

The Slug remained motionless, unsure of what to do next.

“He’s the one who works the blowers and makes the girls’ skirts go up,” she continued. “Usually they laugh, but sometimes they cry. He said I was getting in everyone’s way, and that I should go backstage until Aladdin’s Castle closed.” She looked around. “I guess this is backstage. It must be, since you’re here.”

He had never heard the word “backstage” before. He didn’t know what to say.

“Can you talk?” she asked.

It had been a long time, but he remembered how to form the word. “Yes,” he grated.

“My name is Nancy. Do you have a name, or are you just a thing like Daddy says?”

“Slug.” Slowly he forced the words out. “I am Slug.”

She smiled happily. “Then we’re Nancy and Sluggo, just like in the comic strip. We’re a team.”

He tried to mouth the word. “Nancy.”

“You’re very ugly,” she noted. “But the world is full of ugly things. Today I saw birds pulling apart a dead cat in the alley behind our apartment, eating its insides, and it was much uglier than you. I don’t know why everyone is afraid of you.” She stared curiously at him. “You don’t really eat babies, do you?”

“Baby spiders,” he said. “And sometimes baby mice.”

“But not baby people?” she persisted.

“I have never seen a baby person,” said the Slug. “Until you.”

“I’m not a baby,” she explained seriously. “I’m a girl.”

“Girl,” he repeated.

Suddenly she looked around. “It’s not as crowded now. I think I should leave before Daddy comes looking for me. He’ll be very mad if he thinks I have been visiting with you.”

The Slug thought it was probably an understatement, but made no reply.

“May I come visit you again?” she asked.

The thought that anyone might want to see him again so surprised him that he was speechless.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I didn’t mean to make you angry. I apologize.”

She turned to leave.

“Yes!” he yelled in his inhuman voice, and the few people in the Castle tried to figure out where the sound came from. He spoke more softly. “Please.”

“Tomorrow, when it’s busy,” she promised. “Good-bye, Sluggo.”

He tried to say “Good-bye,” but she was gone before he could form the words and push them out.

When he was through terrifying people for the night, he went back to his room and practiced saying “Hello, Nancy” for a whole hour until the words slid right out as if he were a normal human being. Then he went to sleep and dreamed of a world filled with little girls who were not afraid of him.

* * *

She was back the next day, as promised.

“Hello, Sluggo,” she said. “How are you today?”

“Hello, Nancy,” he said without stumbling on the words.

“Isn’t is a lovely day?”

“I do not understand.”

“Oh, I forgot,” she said. “You’re not allowed to go out, are you?” She shrugged. “Oh, well—it doesn’t make any difference. We can play right here.”

“Play?” asked the Slug.

“You know—a game.”

He stared at her.

“Haven’t you ever played a game?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Well, then, I’ll teach you.”

And she did.

* * *

A week later she asked if there was anything he wanted or needed, like perhaps an ice cream cone, and maybe a cotton candy.

“One thing,” said the Slug.

“What is it?”

“I am alone all day when you leave. Teach me to read.”

“I’ll teach you what they’ve taught me,” she said. “Every day I’ll stop by and give you a lesson. Well, almost every day.”

That began the Slug’s education. She brought him Dick and Jane books, and then her second-grade reader, and before long he began asking her for other books.

“You’re learning faster than I did,” Nancy noted. “My Aunt Penny gave me a Nancy Drew book for my birthday. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

It took him two nights to read it, and he spent another night thinking about it.

“Is the world like that?” he asked when he returned the book.

“I don’t know,” answered Nancy. “I’ve never been more than a few blocks from here. But maybe someday we will go exploring together.”

He made no answer.

“No, I guess we won’t, will we?” she said.

* * *

They became friends, of course. Her mother was dead, and her father worked at his minimum-wage job every single day during high season, which lasted from early April until late September, and six days a week the rest of the year. She had other friends, to be sure, girls and even a few boys her own age, but every little girl wants a secret friend, and the Slug was hers.

Anytime someone was giving or throwing away a book, she appropriated it for him, and in the course of the next three years he read Shakespeare and Dickens, Twain and Melville, Kipling and Tolstoy. He didn’t understand most of it, and he had only the haziest notion of geography and politics, but he devoured every volume she brought him, even those by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Clarence Mulford.

He asked her many questions about what he had read. She couldn’t answer most of them, but she tried to find the answers in the library, and as a result her education continued apace with his.

And then one day, when he was certain that no one else would ever willingly associate with him, the Slug made another friend.

* * *

He had more names than you could shake a stick at. Most recently he’d been Marko the Magnificent, and back in Ireland he’d been McNulty the Mage, and before that he’d just been plain McKeever, and sometimes MacNamara.

He stood three feet seven inches high, was perfectly proportioned, and wore a suit of green corduroy that had seen better days and probably better decades.

The Slug heard him before he saw him. First there was a thud! and then a thump! And then someone was cursing a blue streak. It was after midnight, so the Slug figured he might as well turn the light on, since the quickest way to get the intruder to leave the building was to let him see who he was sharing it with.

“Well, don’t just stand there like a lump,” said Marko. “Give a man a hand up.”

He was lying flat on his back, where he’d fallen after bumping into a wall in the dark.

The Slug looked around, because he couldn’t believe Marko was speaking to him. No one, not even Nancy, had ever willingly touched him before.

“Yes, you!” snapped Marko. “God, you’re as ugly as they say! Are you just going to stare at me all night?”

The Slug walked over and extended what passed for his hand. Marko grabbed it.

“Pull me up, damn it!” he snapped, and the Slug did as he was told. “Some house you’ve got yourself,” said Marko, brushing himself off. He reached a hand up and suddenly a lit cigarette appeared in it. “Want one?”

The Slug just looked at the cigarette in wonderment.

“I guess not, then,” said Marko. “Well, what have we got to eat around here?”

“Nothing,” rasped the Slug. “Breakfast is in the morning.”

“Do you always have so much trouble getting your words out?” asked Marko.

The Slug was about to explain that his mouth wasn’t really built for speech, but it would take too many words and too much effort, so he settled for nodding his head.

“Well, if we’re going to be neighbors for any length of time, you’re going to have do to better than that,” said Marko. He made a sign in the air with his right hand. “Presto! Try saying something now.”

“What do you want me to say?” asked the Slug, then stopped in surprise as he realized how easily the words tumbled out.

“You might say ‘Thank you, Marko.’”

“What did you do to me?”

“Magic.”

“Magic?” repeated the Slug.

“It’s too technical to explain to the layman, or the laything as the case may be. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Marko the Magnificent, late of Riverview’s midway.”

“Why are you here?” asked the Slug, amazed as the words raced out of his misshapen mouth.

“Ah, now that’s a story,” said Marko, making another sign. Suddenly a bottle of beer appeared in each of his tiny hands, and he passed one over to the Slug. “I am one of the Little People.”

“I can see you are little.”

“No,” said Marko impatiently, “I mean one of the Little People.” The Slug stared at him uncomprehendingly. “You would know us as leprechauns.” A pause. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. Well, no matter. No one believes in us anyway.” He took a swig of his beer. “I was seeking refuge after a diminutive lady of my acquaintance mistook a flight of poetic fancy for a proposal of marriage, so I hired on as the World’s Smallest Magician. They just wanted card tricks and the like. They had no idea who they were dealing with.” He smiled maliciously. “They tell me that you held the former record for the shortest term of employment in Riverview’s history. I have surpassed your mark by almost half an hour.”

“What happened?” asked the Slug.

“There was a heckler in the crowd.”

“What’s a heckler?”

“Don’t interrupt,” said Marko. “He catcalled, he berated, he insulted, and finally I lost my temper. Never,” he added confidentially, “cause a Little Person to lose his temper at you.” Another pause. “He had the manners of a pig, so that’s what I turned him into. The last time I saw him, he was grunting and oinking his way through the Skee-Ball area. At the rate he was going, I would imagine he’s made it to the Western Avenue entrance by now.” He finished his beer and tossed the bottle into the air, where it promptly vanished. “Of course, management was more than a little upset with me. I thought they were going to tear me limb from limb, so I uttered a little spell my grandfather taught me a couple of centuries ago, and sent all the ladies’ clothes where I just sent that bottle, and while everyone was screaming and ogling and cursing and running for cover, I walked right out. Well, I came here to give my small ladyfriend time to get over her disappointment, to say nothing of her fury, so I can’t go back out into the city, and this would probably be an inopportune time to show up and ask for my half hour’s pay, so I think I’ll stay here with you until everything blows over.”

“You are going to stay here?” said the Slug.

“Didn’t I just say that?” replied Marko irritably. “Now what do you want—a hot dog or a pizza?”

“I don’t know,” admitted the Slug. “I have never had either of them.”

“I’d ask what they feed you,” said Marko, “but you’d probably tell me, and it would ruin my appetite.” He made another gesture with his hand. “Abra cadabra!” A table and two chairs magically appeared, and on the table was a pizza. “Sit down and dig in.”

“Thank you,” said the Slug. He stared at the chair. “I don’t think … I mean …”

“Yeah, I see,” said Marko. Another gesture, and the chair suddenly changed its shape to accommodate the Slug’s misshapen body. “Better?”

“Yes.” Then: “How long will you stay?”

“I don’t know. It depends on how long Mary Macrea stays mad at me, and also whether she’s told her father what we did on top of the scoreboard at Wrigley Field.”

“Will I still be able to talk like this when you leave?”

“Well, I hope you’ll have something more interesting to say, but yes.”

“Thank you.”

“If you want to thank me, give me the chef’s tour when we’re done eating.”

“The chef’s tour?” repeated the Slug.

“Show me around.”

So they ate the pizza, and Marko magicked up two more beers, and then the Slug led him through Aladdin’s Castle, showing him which three of the hundred doors actually opened, where the Bumps in the Night would suddenly emerge from the floor and walls. He led him through the slanting room and the vibrating room and the rotating barrel, past the Chamber of Horrors and Ghost Central, and finally they came to the Hall of Mirrors.

“I love these things,” said Marko, standing first before one and then another. “Look at me!” he said, pointing to a mirror. “I’m six feet tall!”

The Slug looked at each mirror in turn. He was still the Slug, and suddenly the night seemed less magical.

* * *

Nancy showed up at her usual time, and was so full of news about school that she didn’t even notice that he was suddenly speaking normally. He decided not to tell her about Marko, because he was sure Marko had broken a number of laws, and his reading had convinced him that lawbreakers, no matter how bright they might be, were always caught and usually executed.

They spoke for an hour—well, she spoke, he listened—then she was off to do her homework and watch the television set her father had finally bought.

“Who was that little girl?” asked Marko, when she had gone.

“Her name is Nancy,” answered the Slug. “She’s my friend. In fact, she was my only friend until I met you.”

“She’s been nice to you, has she?”

“She taught me to read, and she brings me books, and she talks to me almost every day.”

“It’s a shame she can only talk to you here.”

“I can never leave,” said the Slug. “You know that.”

Marko looked at him thoughtfully for a long moment. “You gave me sanctuary when I needed it. Perhaps I can return the favor. Meet me right here after the Castle closes for the night.”

The Slug went back to work, terrifying women and giving strong men nightmares. Then, at midnight, when the last lock clicked into place, he went looking for the leprechaun.

“In here,” said Marko’s voice.

The Slug followed it and found himself in the Hall of Mirrors.

“They say the Little People are selfish and ungrateful,” Marko began, “and I won’t argue the selfish part. But we know how to return a favor when it’s freely given.”

The Slug stared at him curiously.

“Take a look in that mirror,” said Marko.

The Slug looked. He seemed to be eight feel tall and skinny as a rail. He glanced at the next mirror, where he was short, squat and rotund.

“I’ve seen these before,” he said, unimpressed.

“Keep looking,” said Marko.

The Slug looked into the closest mirror and slowly, ever so slowly, the creature he was staring at began to change. The oily, miscolored, repulsive flesh melted away, the facial features became regular, the hands and feet took on human shape—and, within a minute, he was looking at a handsome man in his early twenties. The elbows and knees were where they should be, there were the right number of fingers and toes, the mouth no longer looked like it was fit only for sucking fluids.

Every mirror showed the same image.

“What do you think?” asked Marko, smiling.

“It is beautiful,” said the Slug.

“I think so.”

“And cruel.”

“Cruel?” asked Marko.

“To show me what I can never be,” said the Slug.

“I don’t suppose you can click your heels three times, and say ‘There’s no place like home,’” said Marko with a smile. When the Slug merely looked confused, he continued: “Of course not. So much for drama. Blink once.”

The Slug blinked—and when he opened his eyes, the image he knew so well was back in the mirrors.

“Thank you,” said the Slug.

“Don’t thank me yet,” said Marko. He reached into the air, and suddenly a mirror, a real mirror, appeared in his hand. “Take a look. Then you can thank me.”

The Slug looked, and saw the man he had seen in the mirrors a moment ago. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he held his hand up before his eyes, certain it would be the same hand he had seen all his life. But it wasn’t. It was the hand that belonged to the handsome young man.

Tears ran down the Slug’s cheeks.

Human tears.

For the first time ever.

* * *

His euphoria lasted almost eighteen hours. He walked out of the Castle in the morning, mingled with the customers, reveled in the fresh air and the sunlight. He spent most of the day just being alive and happy, and then he returned to Aladdin’s Castle to share the news with Nancy.

“Who are you?” she demanded when she encountered him backstage. “And what have you done with my Sluggo?”

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said, smiling. “Concentrate. Does my voice sound familiar?”

“Where’s Sluggo?” she insisted.

“It’s me, Nancy,” he said. “I’m Sluggo.”

“If you’ve hurt him, I’ll do something bad to you.”

He spent the next ten minutes trying to convince her that he was the Slug. She was hysterical for the last five of them, and finally ran out of the Castle.

When they closed that night he found Marko sitting down, gnawing on a lamb shank.

“She doesn’t know me,” he said miserably.

“Nancy?”

The Slug nodded. “She doesn’t believe me. I can hardly blame her.”

“She’ll get over it.”

“She may never come back.”

“She’ll come back, if only to find out what happened to her hideous friend.”

“She’s going to find him,” said the Slug.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Change me back.”

“Are you crazy?”

“She’s my friend,” he said. “And now she’s crying.”

“You stay like this, you can make a thousand friends,” replied Marko.

“I don’t want a thousand friends. I want her. She was my friend when no one else would even look at me. I was grateful last night, but in retrospect you shouldn’t have changed me. It was against the laws of Nature.”

“Bullshit,” said Marko. “Looking the way you looked was against the laws of Nature.”

The Slug stared silently at him for a long moment, and then uttered a single word: “Please.”

“You’re a fool,” said Marco. He snapped his fingers, and the Slug, the real Slug, was suddenly back. “And now you’re spoiling my digestion, too.”

* * *

She didn’t come back the next day, or the next week, or the next month.

It took her three months and seventeen days to return to the Castle, by which time Marko was long gone.

The Slug was going to ask what had happened, but then he saw the crutches. She had taken the streetcar from school to Riverview as she did almost every day, and had tripped on the three stairs leading down to the pavement and broken her leg. It was a bad break—the femur was fractured and the ankle was shattered—and they’d done two surgeries thus far with more to come.

She was half-convinced she’d dreamed or imagined the strange man who claimed to be Sluggo, and he did nothing to dissuade her. She was miserable, and not only from the pain. Her father, who always thought she was useless, took this as absolute proof of it; she’d fallen behind in school; and her classmates teased her mercilessly about her clumsiness.

They talked long into the night, the crippled little girl and the grotesque mockery of a man, and for the first time she willingly touched his hand.

* * *

The next decade was not kind to Nancy. Unable to exercise, she became obese. Becoming obese, she was endlessly teased when she wasn’t being avoided. Three more surgeries didn’t quite fix the foot, and she acquired a permanent limp. Andrew Varda, a quiet alcoholic, became a noisy one and lost his job. They moved to another part of the city, but she still managed to visit the Slug two or three times a week.

As for the Slug, he kept reading everything he could get his hands on and imagining what it must be like to be out there in the world that was forever denied to him, and he continued to spend his days terrifying people who paid good money to be terrified.

And every now and then, usually when he lay alone on his cot late at night, he would remember the touch of a little girl’s hand on his own.

* * *

They closed Riverview in 1967. Sold it to a developer who put up stores and condos and parking garages on the ground made hallow by the Bobs and the Silver Flash.

The very last thing they tore down was Aladdin’s Castle. They never found any trace of the creature that was said to live in it. The developer assumed it was just another urban myth.

But I’ll tell you something interesting.

There’s an old house out by the Fox River, just south of the Wisconsin border and maybe forty miles inland from Lake Michigan. It’s occupied by a woman and her invalid father. The woman’s in her sixties now. No one’s ever seen her father, but he must be nearing ninety.

She seems friendly enough. Doesn’t talk much about herself, doesn’t socialize at all. She goes into town to shop once a week, and gets around pretty well for a fat old woman with a limp. Every once in a while she picks up a stack of new paperbacks for her father to read. Once, when paying for them, she even dropped his nickname: Sluggo.

Now, isn’t that a funny name for a dignified old gentleman?

Unprofessional

Written by Rudyard Kipling

Illustrated by Lee Kuruganti

Since Astronomy is even less remunerative than Architecture, it was well for Harries that an uncle of his had once bought a desert in a far country, which turned out to overlie oil. The result for Harries, his only nephew, was over a million pounds invested, plus annual royalties.

xx

When the executors had arranged this, Harries, who might have been called an almost-unpaid attache at Washe Observatory, gave a dinner to three men, whom he had tried and proved beneath glaring and hostile moons in No Man’s Land.

Vaughan, Assistant Surgeon at St. Peggotty’s, was building himself a practice near Sloane Street. Loftie, pathologist, with the beginnings of a reputation, was—for he had married the unstable daughter of one of his earlier London landladies—bacteriological advisor to a Public Department, on five-hundred-and-seventy pounds per annum, and a prospect of being graded for pension. Ackerman, also a St. Peggotty’s man, had been left a few hundreds a year just after he had qualified, and so had given up all serious work except gastronomy and the allied arts.

Vaughan and Loftie knew of Harries’ luck, which Harries explained in detail at the dinner, and stated what, at the lowest count, his income would be.

‘Now,’ said he, ‘“Tacks” can tell you.’

Ackerman made himself small in his chair, as though it had been the shell-hole whence he had once engineered their retreat.

‘We know each other fairly well,’ he began. ‘We’ve seen each other stripped to the Ultimate Atom pretty often? We needn’t camouflage? Agreed? You’re always saying what you’d do if you were independent. Have you changed your minds?’

‘Not me,’ said Vaughan, whose oft-told dream was a nursing-home of his own near Sloane Street. He had marked the very house for it.

‘Do you think I’d keep on with this sewage job if it wasn’t for the pension?’ Loftie asked. He had followed research the more keenly since, at twenty-two, he had wrecked his own happiness.

‘Be free, then,’ said Ackerman. ‘Take three thousand–-‘

‘Hold on,’ Harries broke in plaintively. ‘I said “up to five.”’

‘Sorry, old man! I was trying for the commission. Take up to five thousand a year from Harries for as long as you choose—for life, if you like. Then research on your own lines, Loftie, and—and—let the Bull know if you stumble on anything. That’s the idea, isn’t it?’

‘Not all.’ Harries surged a little in his seat. ‘A man’s entitled to use a telescope as well as a microscope, isn’t he? Well—I’ve got notions I want to test. They mean keeping one’s eyes open and—logging the exact times that things happen.’

‘That’s what you said when you lectured our company about Astrology—that night under Arras. D’you mean “planetary influences?”’ Loftie spoke with a scientist’s scorn.

‘This isn’t my lecture.’ Harries flushed. ‘This is my gamble. We can’t tell on what system this dam’ dynamo of our universe is wound, but we know we’re in the middle of every sort of wave, as we call ‘em. They used to be “influences.”’

‘Like Venus, Cancer, and that lot?’ Vaughan inquired.

‘Yes—if you choose. Now I want Vaughan to start his clinic, and give me a chance to test my notions occasionally. No! Not faith-healing! Loftie can worry his cells and tissues with radium as much as he likes. But–-‘

‘We’re only on the threshold of radium,’ Loftie snapped.

‘Then get off it!’ was the blasphemous retort. ‘Radium’s a post hoc, not a propter. I want you merely to watch some of your cellgrowths all round the clock. Don’t think! Watch—and put down the times of any changes you see.

‘Or imagine?’ Loftie supplemented.

‘You’ve got it. Imagination is what we want. This rigid “thinking” game is hanging up research. You told me yourself, the other night, it was becoming all technique and no advance,’ Harries ended.

‘That’s going too far. We’re on the edge of big developments.’

‘All the better! Take the money and go ahead. Think of your lab., Lofter! Stoves, filters, sterilisers, frigidaria—everything you choose to indent for!’

‘I’ve brought along Schermoltz’s last catalogue. You might care to look at it, later.’ Ackerman passed the pamphlet into Loftie’s stretched hand.

‘Five thousand a year,’ Loftie muttered and turned the enthralling pages. ‘God! What one could afford! … But I’m not worth the money, Bull. Besides, it’s robbery … . You’ll never arrive at anything by this astrology nonsense.’

‘But you may, on your lines. What do you suppose is the good of Research?’

‘God knows,’ Loftie replied, devouring the illustrations. ‘Only—only it looks—sometimes—as if He were going to tell.’

‘That’s all we want,’ Harries coaxed. ‘Keep your eye on Him, and if He seems inclined to split about anything, put it down.’

‘I’ve had my eye on that house for the last half-year. You could build out a lift-shaft at the back.’ Vaughan looked and spoke into the future.

Here the padrone came in to say that if more drinks were needed, they should be ordered.

Ackerman ordered; Harries stared at the fire; Loftie sank deeper into the catalogue; and Vaughan into his vision of the desirable house for his clinic. The padrone came back with a loaded tray.

‘It’s too much money to take—even from you, Bull.’ Vaughan’s voice was strained. ‘If you’d lend me a few hundred for my clinic, I could …’

Loftie came out of the catalogue and babbled to the same effect, while he reckoned up for just how many pounds a week the horror that defiled his life and lodgings could be honourably removed from both till it drank itself dead.

Harries reared up over them like a walrus affronted.

‘Do you remember the pill-box at Zillebeeke, and the skeleton in the door? Who pinched the bombs for us then?’ he champed.

‘Me and The Lofter,’ said Vaughan, sullen as a schoolboy.

‘What for?’

‘Because we dam’ well needed ‘em.’

‘We need ‘em worse now! We’re up against the beggar in the pill-box. He’s called Death—if you’ve ever heard of him. This stuff of mine isn’t money, you imbeciles! It’s a service-issue—same as socks. We—we haven’t kept on saving each other’s silly lives for this! Oh, don’t let me down! Can’t you see?’ The big voice quavered.

‘Kamerad, Bull! I’ll come in,’ said Loftie. Vaughan’s hands had gone up first, and he was the first to recover himself, saying: ‘What about “Tacks?” He isn’t let off, is he?’

‘No. I’m going to make commission out of the lot of you,’ said Ackerman. ‘Meantime! Come on, me multi-millionaires! The Bald-headed Beggar in the pill-box is old, but the night is yet young.’

* * *

The effects of five thousand a year are stimulating.

A mere Cabinet Minister, dependent on elections for his place, looking in on a Committee where Loftie was giving technical evidence, asked in too loud a whisper, if that all-but-graded Civil Servant were ‘one of my smell-and-tell temporaries.’ Loftie’s resignation was in that evening. Vaughan, assisted by an aunt, started a little nursing-home near Sloane Street, where his new household napery lift and drying-cupboards almost led to his capture by ‘just the kind of girl, my dear, to make an ideal wife for a professional man.’

Harries continued to observe the heavens, and commissioned Ackerman to find a common meeting-place. This—Simson House was its name—had been a small boys’ school in a suburb without too many trams. Ackerman put in floods of water, light and power, an almost inspired kitchen-range, a house-man and his cook-wife, and an ex-Navy petty rating as valet-plumber, steward-engineer, and butler-electrician; set four cots in four little bedrooms, and turned the classroom in the back garden into a cement-floored hall of great possibilities, which Harries was the first to recognise. He cut off a cubicle at one end of it, where he stored books, clocks, and apparatus. Next, Loftie clamoured for a laboratory and got it, dust and air-tight, with lots of the Schermoltz toys laid out among taps and sinks and glass shelves. Hither he brought various numbered odds-and-ends which Vaughan and other specialists had sent him in the past, and on which, after examination, he had pronounced verdicts of importance to unknown men and women. Some of the samples—mere webs of cancerous tissue—he had, by arts of his own, kept alive in broths and salts after sentence had been executed on their sources of origin.

There were two specimens—Numbers 127 and 128—from a rarish sort of affliction in exactly the same stage of development and precisely the same position, in two women of the same age and physique, who had come up to Vaughan on the same afternoon, just after Vaughan had been appointed Assistant Surgeon at St. Peggotty’s. And when the absurdly identical operations were over, a man, whose praise was worth having, but whose presence had made Vaughan sweat into his palms, had complimented him. So far as St. Peggotty’s knew, both cases were doing well several months after. Harries found these samples specially interesting, and would pore over them long times on end, for he had always used the microscope very neatly.

‘Suppose you watch what these do for a while,’ he suggested to Loftie one day.

‘I know what they’ll do well enough,’ the other returned. He was hunting a line of his own in respect to brain-cells.

‘Then couldn’t you put Frost on to watch ‘em with a low-power lens?’ Harries went on. ‘He’s a trained observer in his own line. What? Of course he’s at your disposition, old man. You could make anything of him. Oh, by the way, do you happen to remember what time of day you operated on One-twenty-Seven and Eight?’

‘Afternoon, of course—at St. Peggotty’s—between three and five. It’s down somewhere.’

‘It don’t matter. I only wanted to get an idea. Then you’ll turn on Frost to watch ‘em? Thanks awfully.’

Frost, the valet-plumber, etc., was ex-captain of a turret, with the hard blue eye of the born gunlayer—a middle-aged, uncomely man, no mean mechanic, and used to instruments of precision. He liked sitting in a warm room, looking through a microscope at what he called ‘muckings,’ with instructions to ‘watch ‘em all round the clock and log all changes.’ But no sooner did he begin than Loftie, jealous as two women, and knowing what beginner’s luck may do, stood watch and watch with him. Loftie was in hard work on his brain-cells, and the monotony of this sentry-go made him fear that his mind might build theories on self-created evidence. So he told Frost, after a while, that the whole thing was absurd, as well as bad for the eyes. ‘Isn’t it?’ he added.

‘I don’t know how it is with you, sir,’ Frost replied. ‘It sometimes makes me feel as if I were seeing a sort of ripple strike up along the edges of ‘em. Like broken water, with the sun tipping it. Like Portland Race in open-and-shut weather.’

‘That’s eye-strain. But when does it come on—with you?’

‘Sometimes through the middle watch—from twelve to four a.m. Then, again, it will come on through the first and second dog-watches—four to eight p.m., sir.’

‘No matter which—what sample—you are looking at?’ Loftie asked keenly.

‘I’d say it depended on the sample. Now, One-twenty-Eight—’seems to me—plays up in the middle watch—from midnight on—and One-twenty-Seven in the afternoon. I’ve logged it all.’

Three months later, at Simson House, Loftie told the others that, while not in the least departing from his own theories, there was a phenomenon, which for the sake of brevity he would call ‘tide,’ in Samples 127 and 128. It occurred at certain hours, which had all been noted and passed on to Harries—’for what that may be worth.’

Harries smiled, and hired an expensive expert to photo the two samples and film them; which took several weeks and cost some hundreds of pounds. They all checked the magnified ‘tides’ by some curious tables which Harries had worked out—’for what that’s worth,’ as Loftie said.

Harries said it was worth the expense, and took to spending a good deal of his leisure at Simson House. Vaughan, too, reeking of ether, would put in for shelter there, as the hunt after him (which his aunt whipped) quickened with his successes. Loftie had been almost a fixture in his lab. from the first; and poor ‘Tacks,’ who could no more have made a dishonest penny than he could have saved an honest one, catered for them so lavishly that even the cook shied at the weekly bills, which Harries flatly refused to audit.

Three months after their first film’s ‘release,’ Loftie read them a typed paper before dinner, asserting there was ‘tide’ in the normal cells of all tissues which he and his helper, Frost, had observed; but he could see no sign of ‘tide’ in the malignant areas. He detailed tests and observations till they yawned. Then Frost ran the latest film for them—in slow and quick time—and they sat round the fire.

‘I’m not committing myself to anything,’ said Loftie, speaking like a badly-shaken human being, ‘but every dam’ tissue up till now seems to have its own time for its own tides. Samples from the same source have the same tides in strength and time. But, as I showed you just now, there are minute constant variations—reactions to something or other—in each tide, as individual as finger-prints. I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it except to you. But I know it’s so.’

‘What do you suppose it means?’ Vaughan half-whispered.

‘As I read it,’ Harries spoke quietly, ‘the minor differences in those “tides” in the tissues are due to interferences with the main or external influence—whichever it may be—which sets up, or which is, the main tide in all matter. They both come from without. Not within.’

‘How far out?’ Vaughan asked.

”Can’t tell—yet—to a few light-years. I’ve been trying to disentangle the minor interferences or influences—which may be due to the nearer—er—influences—from the main tide. In my opinion–-‘

‘Stop!’ Loftie cried shrilly. ‘You swore us all not to theorise before a year.’

‘Hear me out! I’ve verified some of my calculations at my end of the game, and they justify me in saying that … we are all justified in getting tight to-night.’

So, then, they did: being drunk with the ferment of their own speculations before they went to table. Loftie, whom Ackerman confined to strong beer as best for tired brain-cells, rose up above the savoury, and said that he was ‘the Servant of the Infil-tresimally Minute, but not of that fat tape-worm, Tacks.’ Harries described to them the vasts of the Ultimate Heavens fizzing in spirals ‘with—or rather like—champagne,’ but all one generating station of one Power drawn from the Absolute, and of one essence and substance with all things. Then he slept soundly. Vaughan—the professional man—merely wanted to telephone for a taxi that he might drive to discredit a hated West End rival by calling him to his bedroom window and there discussing ‘dichotomy’—a hard word at 3 A.M.

Then they packed Loftie off for a month’s holiday, with a cubic metre of seven-and-sixpenny detective novels, plus Vaughan’s aunt to see that he ate and dressed properly. On his return, he began certain experiments with mice, which Frost took charge of in the boiler-room, because he remembered when their ancestors served in the earliest submarines. It seemed that ‘tides’ worked in their tissues also; but slipped a little round the clock according to the season of each litter’s birth.

And there were born to them mice among mice with prodigious ‘tides.’ Some of these, inoculated at the flood, threw off the trouble, and were promoted by Frost to the rating of pets. Treated on their lowest ebbs, they perished less quickly than the average. Harries kept careful count of their times in all things and ways, and had Frost sling some of their cages on various compass-bearings or set them out in moonlight or thunderstorms.

This last was too much for Loftie, who returned once more to the legitimate drama of cultures and radium emanations, and the mysteries of malignant cells which never acknowledge any ‘tide.’ At the end of three weeks, he, and Frost, broke off the campaign.

He said to Harries one evening after watching their usual film: ‘What do you suppose germs think of?’

‘If you’ve got as far as that,’ was the answer, ‘you’ll develop an imagination one day.’

Then Vaughan came in full of trouble. His matron had been immobilised by sciatica, and his household staff had taken base advantages. He needed at once, some table-napkins, some bathtowels, two jacketed water jugs and a metal—not china—bedroom breakfast-set. Ackerman said he would speak to Frost and see what could be spared from the ship.

While they were laughing at Vaughan, St. Peggotty’s rang him up. He replied: ‘Well, well! If it was coming, it was to be expected now … . One of my beds empty? … You can have it … . Send her over to me … . You must! . . I’ll warn my people to expect her? … Oh? That’s all right … . I’ll send the car … . Yes, and all other expenses … . Because I operated on her originally, of course. We’ll expect her at nine, then. . Righto! … Not in the least. Thank you, old man.’

He then telephoned his home to prepare for a patient, and returned to the still circle by the fire.

‘It’s one of those twin cases of mine,’ he explained. ‘One of ‘em’s back again. Recurrence—in the scar—after eighteen months.’

‘That means?’ said Harries.

‘With that particular kind of trouble—three—five months’ reprieve—perhaps. Then final recurrence. The other one’s all right, so far, they say.’

‘She would be. This one is One-twenty-Eight,’ said Loftie.

‘How do you make that out?’

Frost had entered and was going through Vaughan’s indent with Ackerman.

‘Frost, what is One-twenty-Eight’s timing?’ Loftie interposed.

‘One-two-Eight, sir? Flood from midnight till four a.m.—ebb from four to eight p.m … Yes, sir, I can make the table-linen all right, and the jugs. But we’re short on bath-towels just now.’

‘Would it prove anything if she lasted out nine months?’ Harries picked up the thread of talk with Vaughan.

‘No. There are rallies and reserves.’

‘A full year?’

‘I should accept that. But I know who wouldn’t.’ Vaughan gave a great name.

‘Thanks for reminding me,’ said Ackerman over his shoulder. ‘Frost, the bathroom hotwater pipe has got arterial sclerosis, too. Operate on it.’

‘When shall you operate, Taffy?’ Harries held on.

‘To-morrow at a quarter to ten. I always feel fittest then.’

‘Think of the patient for a change. Suppose you stand-to at a few minutes to midnight tomorrow? I’ll telephone you zero from here.’

Vaughan seemed a shade taken aback. ‘Midnight? Oh, certainly,’ he said. ‘But I’ll have to warn my anaesthetist.’

‘And Ferrers ‘ll swear you’ve taken to drink or drugs,’ said Ackerman. ‘Besides, think of your poor matron and the nurse who’s got to have her evening off? Much better let the woman conk out in Trades Union hours, Taffy.’

‘Dry up, padrone,’ said Loftie. ‘No need to bring in Ferrers. I’ll take his place—if you think I’m safe.’

Since this was as if Raeburn had volunteered to prime a canvas for Benjamin West, Vaughan accepted, and they sat down to eat.

When he and Loftie had refreshed their memories of One-two-Eight’s construction and arrangements, they asked Harries why he had chosen that time for the operation. Harries said that by his reckonings it should fall nearer the woman’s birthday. His guess at its actual date he wrote down and was passing it to Vaughan, when Vaughan’s Nursing Home reported the arrival of the patient, not unduly fatigued and most anxious to thank ‘Doctor’ Vaughan for the amazing kindness which had rescued her from the open ward.

The table listened to Vaughan’s reply, soothing and sustaining, and, by tone, assuming the happiest issue out of this annoying little set-back. When he hung up, he said: ‘She—wants it the day after to-morrow, because that’s her birthday. She thinks it’ll be lucky.’

‘Make it midnight, then, of the day after tomorrow, and look at the date I wrote down … . No! The Devil has nothing to do with it. By the way—if it won’t cramp your style—could you set the table on–-‘ Harries gave a compass bearing.

‘Don’t be shy,’ said Ackerman. ‘He’d stand her on her head to operate now, if the Bull told him. Are you off, Taffy? Frost ‘ll put all your towels and pots in a taxi. ‘Sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings.’

Loftie’s account of the operation did not interest Frost so much as the samples he brought back. It took both of them three or four days to plant them out properly. In return, Frost told Loftie that ‘our end of the show,’ with Major Harries at the sidereal clock, waiting ‘till the sights came on,’ and Captain Ackerman at the telephone, waiting to pass the range to Captain Vaughan in Sloane Street, was ‘just like Jutland.’

‘Now, this lady of ours,’ he said after a busy silence. ‘How would she lie in her bed?’

Loftie gave a bearing which he had heard Harries give Vaughan.

‘I expect Major Harries knows, if anyone,’ was Frost’s placid comment. ‘It’s the same as ships’ compasses varying according as their heads lay when they were building.’

‘It’s crazy mad. That’s all!’

‘Which was what the Admiralty said at first about steam in the Navy,’ Frost grinned.

He put away a set of sealed cover-glasses and reverently returned some lenses to their velvet shrines.

‘Not to talk of that lady of ours—’ he straightened up as he spoke—’some of my mice aren’t behaving as I could wish.’

‘Which?’ said Loftie. There were several types of experiments under way.

‘One or two of some that recovered after inoculation—since discharged and promoted to pets. But it looks as if they’d had a relapse. They’re highly restless—always trying to escape out—as if they were wild, not white. I don’t like it.’

‘Clean up, then,’ Loftie answered, ‘and we’ll go down to the boiler-room.’

In one of the cages there, a doe with a plum-coloured saddle was squeaking, as she strove desperately to work through the wires with semitransparent hand-like forefeet. Frost set the cage on a table under an electric and handed her dossier to Loftie. This gave her birth, age, date and nature of inoculation, date also when her system seemed to have cleared itself of the dose; and, of course, the times and strengths of her ‘tides.’ It showed dead-ebb for her at that hour.

‘What does she think she’s doing?’ Loftie whispered. ‘It isn’t her natural squeak, either.’

They watched. She laboured increasingly at the barrier; sat up as though most intently listening; leaped forward and tore into her task beneath the glare of the basement-bulb.

‘Turn it out,’ said Loftie. ‘It’s distressing her.’

Frost obeyed. In a few seconds the little noises changed to a flutter and ceased.

‘I thought so! Now we’ll look again,’ said Loftie. ‘Oh! Oh! God!’

‘Too late,’ Frost cried. ‘She’s broke her neck! Fair broken her pretty little neck between the wires! How did she do it?’

‘In convulsion,’ Loftie stammered. ‘Convulsion at the last. She pushed and pushed with her head in the wires and that acted as a wedge … and … what do you think?’

‘I expect I’m thinking pretty much the same as you are, sir.’ Frost replaced the cage under the leads and fuses which he had painted man-o’war fashion. ‘It looks like two tides meeting,’ he added. ‘That always sets up a race, and a race is worst at ebb. She must have been caught on her ebb—an’ knocked over! Pity! There ought to be some way of pulling ‘em through it.’

‘Let’s see if there isn’t,’ said Loftie, and lifted out the tiny warm body with a needed droplet of blood on the end of the nose.

* * *

One-two-Eight (Mrs. Berners) made a good recovery, and since she seemed alone in the world, Vaughan said that, as payment, she must stay on in his home and complete it to his satisfaction. She was touchingly grateful. After a few months (her strength returning) she asked to do something for her benefactors. No one seemed to look after the linen at Mr. Vaughan’s. Might she repair, count, store, and, even, give it out—for she had had experience in that line as a housekeeper. Her prayer was granted, and the work of getting at the things Vaughan had started the Home with; had bought, but had never entered; had raided from Ackerman, and thought—or worse, was quite sure—that he had sent back; or had lost by laundries and through servants, did her good. It also brought her over to Simson House to return things to Frost, where Harries and Ackerman complimented her on her appearance, and Loftie asked her to administer his chance-bought body-linen. She was delighted. She told them that, when she had nothing to do, she mostly felt in people’s way, and as if she ought to go on elsewhere. Loftie asked her why. She answered that, when her troubles were on her, they kept her busy, if it was only at trying not to cry. But now that they had been removed and by such kind gentlemen—the busiest day was none too full for her. She had a trick of tossing her head sideways and upwards, sometimes in the midst of her overseeing, and would say: ‘Well, well! I can’t keep at this all the time. I must be off elsewhere where I’m wanted’—Loftie’s Home or Simson House as the case might be.

They discussed her at long and at large, one evening, throughout a film which—Vaughan and Loftie collaborating—was based on her more recent productions.

Vaughan was well satisfied. ‘You see! Nothing has struck back. I know that her strength—notice how the tides have steadied—and our new blankets weigh a bit, too—is above normal. She has covered seven months and twenty-three days, and—I tell you—her scar is simply beautiful.’

‘We’ll take your word,’ said Harries. ‘Now bring on your mouse-film, Loftie.’

And Loftie, while Frost slowed, speeded, or went back at command, spoke of mice that had recovered apparently from certain infections, but had fallen later into a characteristic unease, followed by nervous crises—as shown—culminating in what seemed to be attempts at suicide.

In every case where an attempt had succeeded, the vacuoles—the empty centres—which do not take stain—of the brain-cells over a minute area seemed to have blown out, apparently as(‘This’ll interest you, I know. I hired it from the Dominion Weather Bureau last week.’) as a house explodes through its own windows under the vacuum set up by a tornado. They then beheld a three-storey, clapboarded hotel vomiting itself outwards, while the black hook of a tornado’s tip writhed and fished above it.

Sometimes, Loftie went on, an affected mouse would recover, after nervous upheavals very like those of tetanus—as they had seen—followed by collapse and amazingly sub-normal temperatures, and then a swift resumption of normal life. They could draw their own conclusions.

Ackerman broke their stillness. ‘Frost, go back, please, to that bit showing the movement of their heads when the attacks are coming on.’ Frost began again.

‘Who’s that like?’ Ackerman called out suddenly. ‘Am I wrong?’

‘No, sir,’ Frost groaned out of the dark. Then they all saw.

‘“Well, I can’t stay here! I’ve got to move on elsewhere where I’m wanted,”’ Ackerman quoted half-aloud. ‘And her hands working! The forefeet—I mean her hands! Look! It’s her!’

‘That’s exactly her listening attitude, too,’ said Harries. ‘I never noticed it before.’

‘Why would you—with nothing to check it by?’ said Loftie. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means she’s as likely as not to chuck herself under a lorry some day, between here and Sloane Street,’ Frost interrupted, as though he had full knowledge and right.

‘How do you know?’ Vaughan began. ‘She’s absolutely normal.’

The flexes of the camera had not been disconnected, so they were still darkling.

‘She’s not! She’s all astray. God knows where she’s straying; but she’s not here, more’n the dead.’ Frost repacked the camera and went out. They gathered round Harries.

‘As I read it,’ he laid down, after some preliminaries, ‘she has been carried yes, tided—over the time that her trouble ought to have finished her. That is two or three months now, isn’t it, Taffy? But, she wasn’t saved by the knife. She was saved by the knife at the proper time of tide.’

‘She has lasted seven months and twenty-three days. Most unusual, I grant, with that type of growth; but not conclusive,’ was Vaughan’s retort.

‘Hear me out. Qua Death, as created. or evolved, on this planet (He needn’t exist elsewhere, you know), and especially qua the instrument of decay that was to kill her, she’s some odd weeks owing to the grave. But, qua the influence—tide, if you like—external to this swab of culture which we call our world, she has been started on a new tide of life. The gamble is that, after crises, something like those we’ve seen in the mice, that tide may carry her beyond the—er—the demand of the grave. It’s beginning to be pull-devil, pull-baker between ‘em now, I should imagine.’

‘I see your line, Bull,’ said Loftie. ‘When ought her crises to be due? Because—it’s all as insane as the rest—but there may be an off-chance of–-‘

‘The suicidal tendency comes first,’ said Ackerman. ‘Why not have her watched when she goes out? Taffy’s nurses can keep an eye on her indoors.’

‘You’ve been reading my sleuth-tales,’ Loftie smiled.

‘Make it so, then. Any decent inquiry-agency would undertake it, I suppose,’ said Harries.

‘I’ll leave the choice to Frost. I’ll only take the commission. We’re in for a wildish time. She’s a woman—not a white mouse!’ Ackerman said, and added thoughtfully: ‘But the champion ass, as distinguished from mere professional fool, of us all, is Taffy!’

Vaughan had ordered her never to go afoot between Simson House and the Nursing Home, and, also, to take taxis to and from her little ‘exercise walks’ in the parks, where she so often picked up the nice elderly lady’s-maid with the pom, the sales-lady from the Stores, and other well-spoken lady strangers near her own class (at ever so many shillings an hour). Of Mr. Frost she saw but little that summer, owing to the pressure of his duties and some return, they told her, of rheumatism contracted in the defence of his country. The worst that came to her was a slight attack of stiff neck, caught from sitting in a draught. As to her health, she admitted that sometimes she felt a bit flustered in the head, but otherwise could not be better.

She was recounting her mercies, a little fulsomely as usual, to Loftie one afternoon in the common-room of Simson House, where she had brought him some new shirts marked. Frost had taken them upstairs, and Loftie had hinted that he must get back to his work. She flicked her head sideways and said that she was busy, too. In the same breath, but in a whisper, she ran on ‘I don’t want to die, Mr. Loftie. But I’ve got to. I’ve reelly got to get out of this. I’m wanted elsewhere, but’—she shivered—’I don’t like going.’

Then she raced, with lowered head, straight towards the wall. Loftie snatched at her dress, turned her, so that she struck the wall with her shoulder and fell—and Frost came down to find him grappling with her, not inexpertly.

She broke away and skimmed across the room. Frost ran and tripped her, and brought her down. She would have beaten her head on the floor, but he jerked it up, his palm beneath her chin, and dragged her to her feet. Then he closed.

She was silent, absorbed in this one business of driving to the nearest wall through whatever stood between. Small and fragile though she was, she flung the twelve-stone Frost clear of her again and again; and a side-pushing stroke of her open palm spun Loftie half across the hall. The struggle lasted without a break, but her breath had not quickened, when like a string she relaxed, repeating that she did not want to die. As she cried to Loftie to hold her, she slipped away between them, and they had to chase her round the furniture.

They backed her down on the couch at last, Loftie clinging to her knees, while Frost’s full strength and weight forced the thin arms over her head. Again the body gave, and the low, casual whisper began: ‘After what you said outside Barker’s in the wet, you don’t think I reelly want to die. Mr. Frost? I don’t—not a mite. But I’ve got to. I’ve got to go where I’m wanted.’

Frost had to kneel on her right arm then, holding her left down with both hands. Loftie, braced against the sofa, mastered her feet, till the outbreak passed in shudders that shook all three. Her eyes were shut. Frost raised an eyelid with his thumb and peered closely.

‘Lor’!’ said she, and flushed to the temples. The two shocked men leapt clear at once. She lifted a hand to her disordered hair. ‘Who’s done this?’ she said. ‘Why’ve I come all over like this? I ought to be busy dying.’ Loftie was ready to throw himself on her again, but Frost held up a hand.

‘You can suit yourself about that, Mrs. Berners,’ he said. ‘What I’ve been at you all this time to find out is, what you’ve done with our plated toast-rack, towels, etcetera.’

He shook her by the shoulders, and the rest of her pale hair descended.

‘One plated toast-rack and two egg-cups, which went over to Mr. Vaughan’s on indent last April twenty-eighth, together with four table-napkins and six sheets. I ask because I’m responsible for ‘em at this end.’

‘But I’ve got to die.’

‘So we’ve all, Mrs. Berners. But before you do, I want to know what you did with … .’ He repeated the list and the date. ‘You know the routine between the houses as well as I do. I sent ‘em by Mr. Ackerman’s orders, on Mr. Vaughan’s indent. When do you check your linen? Monthly or quarterly?’

‘Quarterly. But I’m wanted elsewhere.’

‘If you aren’t a little more to the point, Mrs. Berners, I’ll tell you where you will be wanted before long, and what for. I’m not going to lose my character on account of your carelessness—if no worse. An’ here’s Mr. Loftie … .’

‘Don’t drag me in,’ Loftie whispered, with male horror.

‘Leave us alone! I know me class, sir … . Mr. Loftie who has done everything for you.’

‘It was Mr. Vaughan. He wouldn’t let me die.’ She tried to stand, fell back, and sat up on the couch.

‘You won’t get out of it that way. Cast back in your memory and see if you can clear yourself!’ Frost began anew, scientifically as a female inquisitor; mingling details, inferences, dates, and innuendoes with reminders of housekeeping ritual: never overwhelming her, save when she tried to ride off on her one piteous side-issue, but never accepting an answer. Painfully, she drew out of her obsession, protesting, explaining, striving to pull her riven wits into service; but always hunted from one rambling defence to the next, till, with eyes like those of a stricken doe, she moaned: ‘Oh, Fred! Fred! The only thing I’ve ever took—you said so outside Barker’s—was your own ‘ard ‘eart.’

Frost’s face worked, but his voice was the petty-officer’s with the defaulter.

‘No such names between us, Mrs. Berners, till this is settled.’

He crumpled his wet eyes, as though judging an immense range. Then observed deliberately

”Ask me—I’d say you’re a common thief.’

She stared at him for as long as a shell might take to travel to an horizon. Then came the explosion of natural human wrath—she would not stoop to denial, she said—till, choking on words of abuse, she hit him weakly over the mouth, and dropped between his feet.

‘She’s come back!’ said Frost, his face transfigured. ‘What next?’

‘My room. Tell Cook to put her to bed. Fill every hot-water bottle we’ve got, and warm the blankets. I’ll telephone the Home. Then we’ll risk the injections.’

Frost slung her, limp as a towel, over his shoulder, and, turning, asked: ‘This—all these symptoms don’t need to be logged, sir—do they? We—we know something like ‘em?’

Loftie nodded assent.

* * *

She came up shuddering out of the seven days’ chill of the cheated grave, and Vaughan’s nurses told her what a dreadful thing was this ‘suppressed influenza’ which had knocked her out, but that she might report for duty in a few weeks. Ackerman, who loved Vaughan more than the others put together, testified on their next film-night that Taffy was almost worthy to be called a medical man for his handling of the case.

‘Tacks,’ said Vaughan kindly, ‘you are as big a dam’ fool about my job as I was about Frost. I injected what the Lofter gave me, at the times that Harries told me. The rest was old wives’ practice.’

‘She always looked like a wet hen,’ said Harries. ‘Now she goes about like a smiling sheep. I wish I’d seen her crises. Did you or Frost time ‘em, Lofter?’

‘It wasn’t worth it,’ was the light answer. ‘Just hysteria. But she’s covered her full year now. D’you suppose we’ve held her?’

‘I should say yes. I don’t know how you feel, but’—Vaughan beamed—’the more I see of her scar, the more pleased I am. Ah! That was a lovely bit of work, even if I am only a carpenter, Tacks!’

‘But, speaking with some relation to ordinary life, what does all this lunacy of ours prove?’ Ackerman demanded.

‘Not a dam’ thing, except that it may give us some data and inferences which may serve as some sort of basis for some detail of someone else’s work in the future,’ Harries pronounced. ‘The main point, as I read it, is that it makes one—not so much think—Research is gummed up with thinking—as imagine a bit.’

‘That’ll be possible, too—by the time Frost and I have finished with this film,’ said Loftie.

It included a sequence of cultures, from mice who had overcome their suicidal fits, attenuated through a human being who, very obligingly, in the intervals of running the camera, described the effects of certain injections on his own rugged system. The earlier ones, he admitted, had ‘fair slung him round the deck.’

‘It was chuck it and chance it,’ Loftie apologised. ‘You see, we couldn’t tell, all this summer, when Mrs. Berners might play up for the grave. So I rather rushed the injections through Frost. I haven’t worked out my notes yet. You’ll get ‘em later.’

He stayed to help Frost put back some of the more delicate gear, while the others went to change.

‘Not to talk about that lady of ours,’ Frost said presently. ‘My first—though, of course, her mother never warned me—drank a bit. She disgraced me all round Fratton pretty much the whole of one commission. And she died in Lock ‘Ospital. So, I’ve had my knock.’

‘Some of us seem to catch it. I’ve had mine, too,’ Loftie answered.

‘I never heard that. But’—the voice changed—’I knew it—surer than if I’d been told.’

‘Yes. God help us!’ said Loftie, and shook his hand. Frost, not letting go of it, continued ‘One thing more, sir. I didn’t properly take it in at the time—not being then concerned—but—that first operation on that lady of mine, was it of a nature that’ll preclude—so to say—expectations of—of offspring?’

‘Absolutely, old man,’ Loftie’s free hand dropped on Frost’s shoulder.

‘Pity! There ought to be some way of pulling ‘em through it—somehow—oughtn’t there?’

Countdown to Armageddon, Episode Three

Written by Edward M. Lerner

Illustrated by Dean Spencer

PART II

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

—William Shakespeare

NEAR METZ, 730

The earth rolled in great waves.

A tremor sent the two men bouncing down the rock-strewn slope. Giant trees toppled; more burst asunder in sprays of daggerlike splinters.

The ground cracked open. One man, shouting helplessly, tumbled into an abyss. His companion hung over

the edge, deep into the pit, arm extended. No good. He leaned farther, shoe tips scratching for purchase in the dirt, teetering. Groping fingers finally touched; hands clasped. As the fallen man scrambled out of the crevasse, it snapped closed with a grinding roar.

The heaving of the earth slowly subsided. Stones continued to rain down from the higher slopes, but with decreasing frequency. For a moment, an eerie calm fell over the devastation. Then faint wails of despair made themselves heard in the distance.

Terrence Ambling climbed shakily to his feet. “Thanks for pulling me out of there.”

Harry wondered whether there meant the lab or the crevasse. It hardly mattered. “Don’t mention it. At most, we’re even.”

The cries came from a settlement in the valley below, dimly visible through the dust. From its location, it must be Metz. Smoke had begun to billow, perhaps set by cooking fires spread by the earthquake.

“We must go help.” Harry pointed to the village. “We started the quake.”

They started downhill together. “Do you really know how it works, Harry? Why are we still alive? How did we pay back the energy debt to the present? Or do I mean the future?”

An aftershock threw them flat. “That’s how.” Harry waved vaguely at the trembling earth. “That’s what I realized, finally, back there at Rothschild. The discharge here and now of energy from the time machine can trigger earthquakes here and now, at least if the terrain and the timing are right. There’s a lot of energy in an earthquake. Enough to boomerang to our time, repaying the energy loan. Enough that Faisel didn’t need his bomb to stay back here.”

Ambling sat up. “How did you know a quake would release enough energy? Especially now? Faisel’s arrival five years ago must have relieved most of the geological stresses.”

“I didn’t know,” Harry said. “It just seemed we had used up our luck in our own time.”

When Harry spotted an ordinary flashlight, badly rusted and half-buried in a mound of quake-born rubble, it seemed an omen of better luck to come in this, their new era.

* * *

Night halted their progress toward the nearby town. Gradually, faint cries of pain and desperation gave way to the purposeful shouts of rescuers getting organized. The wind carried snippets of speech up to them, but never enough to be intelligible.

Prudence in an unknown environment would have kept them from lighting a fire even if they had had the means. It was cold out, too cold for sleep. They huddled beneath a rocky overhang, stomping their feet and swinging their arms for warmth. Animals growled a few times from the underbrush, but they ran when stones were thrown their way. Their rifles had disappeared amid the chaos of their arrival, lost and buried forever.

At first light they resumed their course down from the mountains, carefully picking a path around rockslides and uprooted trees, twitching at every aftershock. None of these temblors could hold a candle to the previous day’s big quake.

Emerging midmorning from the mountains, the two men stopped to reconnoiter from a bluff overlooking the town. The public baths and the temple in the settlement’s center seemed intact. The few stately residences had lost pieces of facade or endured cracks in their decorative columns, but seemed otherwise undamaged. These Roman buildings, by far the largest structures in sight, must have been too small to resonate with the main quake.

Common houses had not fared as well. Most had been reduced to mounds of thatch and splintered boards collapsed about their support posts. Some debris might have covered mere underground storage pits, for the heaped wreckage often fell short of ground level. Weary-looking bucket brigades were dousing the piles; flames still licked greedily at several of them.

The long center span of a graceful stone bridge had fallen into a river. Upon closer examination, the pieces from the wrecked bridge were green with algae or moss. The structure must have collapsed at an earlier time. The present residents of this onetime imperial outpost of Metz would have been incapable of repairing it.

At least, Harry and Terrence thought to themselves, they were on the town side of the rushing waters. It was their first bit of good luck in days—or in over twelve hundred years, depending on one’s point of view.

NEAR CHARTRES, FRANCIA, 730

The scarred mastiff growled, tearing at the ground with his claws, impatient for the chase to resume. He stared down the left-hand side of the forking forest path with his one good eye. No doubt in his mind which way their quarry had fled.

The Frankish war party waited silently on horseback for their dismounted leader to reach his own conclusion. They sat stoically: They had been schooled in hunting and war, if little else, since youth. The breath of man and beast alike hung in the cold air in white clouds.

All the men wore tight-fitting linen shirts and knee-length pants. Bands of cloth wrapped their lower legs and disappeared into their leather boots. All wore the traditional blue cloaks; several had donned fur jerkins for added warmth. Scabbarded swords hung from their broad leather belts, along with an assortment of tools. Their shoulder-length hair was pulled forward, exposing their necks. Except for occasional thin moustaches, the men were clean-shaven.

Bertchramm crouched beside his favorite hunting dog. The leader of the war party had a barrel-like chest; broad streaks of gray ran through his dark blond hair. At his side hung, not a modern sword, but a double-edged, short-handled throwing ax. The Franks had once attacked by hurling their massive iron axes en masse at an opposing force, shattering shields and heads alike. The old Romans—brave legionaries, not the pitiful postimperial remnants—had even named the deadly axes after their bearers: francisca.

Bertchramm favored the old ways.

“Quiet, Lupus.” Latin for wolf, the name had been a rare bit of whimsy from the mastiff’s dour master. The huge canine was a match for most wolves—although, in truth, one had claimed the now-unseeing eye. When his dog did not obey immediately, Bertchramm absentmindedly cuffed it. The dog whimpered once, then hunkered down.

Bertchramm considered. Lupus seemed surer of the way than at any time earlier in the chase. He, however, thought the trail as old as ever: the grasses scarcely bent, the ashes of the last campfire stone cold. The Saracen raiders, may they roast in the monks’ hell, were wily. Were they somehow fooling the dog?

Bent grass on both paths suggested the impact of horse hooves. Lupus had hesitated briefly at the fork before choosing a path. Bertchramm stared at the ground. Animal spoor led predominantly along the right path, downhill. And did he not hear the trickle of running water from that direction? A stream? He thought what he would do if he were pursued.

A leader must lead. “They sent a decoy group down the left path, perhaps with their wounded to leave a stronger odor.” Bertchramm gestured to his right. “Most went this way, to ride for a while along the stream and hide their scent.”

The grizzled Frank remounted, keeping his doubts to himself.

METZ, 730

Harry stared at the destruction. “Let’s see how we can help. Julia was right—I am glad that I learned French. Hopefully, it hadn’t changed too much by our time.”

Terrence shook his head. “Your linguistic diligence is most commendable, Harry, especially in a Yank. Consider yourself lucky that we wound up where we did: just barely within Neustria. A few kilometers east of here, in Austrasia, the Franks are pretty exclusively speaking a form of German. Together, the two regions make up Francia.”

“The Franks don’t speak French?”

“Metz was a Roman colony. Here inside the border of the old empire, many Franks have picked up some Latin from the Gallo-Romans. Don’t expect much in the way of grammar, though. In time it will become French—but it’ll be another three centuries before France has a king who doesn’t speak at least some German.”

Harry started downhill. “No matter. They need strong backs now, not conversation.”

They loped down the final slope into the outskirts of Metz. Both towered a head or more over everyone in sight. People fell silent as they approached, as though struck by their height or outlandish garments, then returned to the more urgent matter of rescuing those still buried in the ruins. Perhaps it allayed suspicions that they came unarmed.

Harry looked around. Organized groups labored purposefully over the largest collapsed buildings—rank always has its privileges. He and Terrence could add little to those efforts. They went farther into the town.

The piles became shorter and more compact. Harry guessed these “homes” were only thatch-covered holes in the ground. A curly-haired hunchback knelt nearby, scraping ineffectually at heaped rubble. Dirt and soot streaked the man’s broad, homely face; sweat dripped from his hair and soaked his shirt. His clothes were crudely woven from coarse yarn.

A wooden roof beam entangled in the wreckage had him stymied. Harry grabbed on and tugged; the board refused to budge. “Terrence, give me a hand.”

Something snapped inside the rubble; the beam shifted. With a final yank, all eight feet of it slid free. Suddenly a three-man team, they dug with renewed energy. The hunchback called something unintelligible but clearly interrogatory over his hump.

“German, sort of, but not quite,” Ambling finally said. He tapped himself on the chest. “Ich bin Terrence. Mein freund ist Harry.”

The hunchback, without slowing in his efforts, let fly a torrent of words. Maybe one word in three sounded familiar to Harry, and the occasional phrase. There was a Wolfgang in there, perhaps his name.

Terrence kept trying to respond, mostly repeating things. The hunchback patiently corrected Terrence’s repetitions. A pattern emerged: Terrence was apparently mispronouncing a handful of letters. P, t, and k were the worst.

Terrence smacked his forehead with his palm in seeming exasperation. Enunciating carefully, he said something Harry didn’t get.

The hunchback nodded, as though this time he understood, and answered back.

“What’s going on?” Harry asked.

“I’m communicating,” Terrence snapped.

“How? A moment ago he didn’t understand you.”

With a grunt, Terrence lifted and threw aside a slab of masonry. It must have bounced here; it might even have been what collapsed this hovel. Breathing heavily, he said, “Languages change over time. The European languages we know derive from Indo-European. Around 500 B.C., for unknown reasons, Germanic split off as a separate tongue. We’ve arrived in the middle of the second sound shift, a separation into Low and High German.

“Which are?”

“Basically a north-south split, Harry. Franks and Bavarians speak what will become High German. Low German will eventually produce, among other things, Anglo-Saxon and Dutch.

The hunchback interrupted. Terrence translated, “He wants us to get back to work.”

Harry mopped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “Mein Deutsch will get me through most World War II movies. Period. You’ll be translating for a while.”

Then everyone fell silent: Their digging had yielded the broken body of a young girl. Damn! She looked about four years old—

Melissa’s age. Harry dropped to the ground, stunned. He’d never see Melissa again. Nor her brother Johnny. Nor Julia.

The truth hurt. He was trapped in his own past. In his loved ones’ present, he was no more than centuries-old dust. Dust which, at that, lay across an ocean from home. Knowing that his arrival had killed this innocent child …

The backbreaking labor seemed less than adequate penance.

NEAR ORLEANS, FRANCIA, 730

Men and women alike whimpered as they ran through the trees. They did their best to keep their hurts inside. It was not only that they had little breath to spare; their captors had already slain one of their number whose words had angered them.

The Frankish prisoners had thought the trek brutal when they had first set out. Now it was worse. Not long ago, some of the raiders had split off. Unencumbered by wounded, their keepers had managed to quicken the pace.

Branches tore their already tattered clothes, whipped their bleeding and weary bodies. Stones and tree roots battered their feet. Their guards laughed when they stumbled, beat them cruelly with the flats of curved swords when they fell. To refuse or be unable to rise, all knew, meant instant death. To survive the trip, to no one knew where, offered at least the possibility of a life—if only the bitter life of a slave.

The raiders on their great steeds had no trouble maintaining the pace. In their flowing white robes, the warriors seemed ghostlike as they sped through the forest.

It was not a comforting comparison.

METZ, 730

The three men dug as a team for hours. Finally, just before sunset, the rescue efforts all around them petered out. The ruins had been sifted, if not cleared, at every location. The hunchback seemed pleasantly surprised at the quake’s toll: five dead and twelve seriously injured. To the guilt-racked time travelers, the casualties seemed monstrously high.

Terrence vaguely remembered downing a chunk of coarse-grained bread while they worked, and taking a swig from a passed wineskin. After almost two days without food, one at hard labor, he was woozy. He was pleased to see, as the rescue operations finally stopped, that a few of the women had prepared a simple meal.

Exhausted men and women gathered around a communal fire lit in a cleared spot in the town center. He and Harry gratefully accepted bowls of bland soup—little more than broth with chunks of boiled beef, a loaf apiece of tough bread, and goblets of thin beer. Terrence sighed in relief. Offering them a meal meant acceptance. To harm them now would be an outrageous breach of Frankish hospitality; indeed, a serious crime punishable by a considerable fine.

Most of the townsfolk were weary beyond curiosity. A few stared at his unfamiliar denim trousers and plaid flannel shirt, but no one bothered to ask. The simple meal quickly downed, the last drop of broth absorbed with a scrap of bread, Terrence and Harry followed their hunchbacked friend to a bed of straw in a rude shed behind a large stone structure. They were asleep before their host left the stable.

* * *

Father Gregory examined his guests carefully. The two strangers brought to the abbey by Brother Wolfgang were a puzzle. Both were exceptionally tall. They seemed, although weary, in the pink of health. And their garments—the priest had never seen cloth of such a fine and uniform weave. But if their raiment bespoke wealth, they showed no other signs of it. Clean-shaven as Franks though his guests were, it seemed unlikely that they were Franks. They carried no weapons, wore no jewelry. No, that was not quite accurate. The black-haired one wore a single gold band on his left hand.

The burly Frankish abbot was indirectly related to the Gregory: St. Gregory of Tours, the confidant and biographer of kings. The abbot was a highly educated man for these troubled times, at once proud of his learning and mortified that after so many years in the Church he could still feel pride.

Gregory pulled his cloak tight against a draft and considered the evidence. Unarmed but noble of bearing. He had heard of far parts of the world where, unlike Francia, a man’s estate was not split evenly between his sons. Perhaps the strangers were younger sons from such a country, driven to seek the priesthood by their disinheritance.

Enough idle speculation. Gregory addressed his guests. “Welcome to Metz and to our abbey. I am Father Gregory, the abbot. Brother Wolfgang”—he gestured at the hunchback—”tells me that you speak our tongue. Good. I would enjoy hearing a little about your travels.”

The shorter of the near-giants smiled back. “Your grace, I am Terrence. My friend Harry and I are very grateful for your hospitality. I did once chance to learn a little of your language, but do not know it well. My friend does not speak it at all.”

The taller stranger spoke briefly in another language, presumably also in welcome. Gregory frowned in concentration. He had gotten his Latin many years ago from the learned bishop in Augusta Treverorum (Trier). Was there not some similarity between Harry’s words and the vernacular there? Gregory tried to recall the sounds from his long-ago student days; the words felt odd on his tongue. “Some of your words resemble the corrupted Latin in old Gaul.”

Harry spoke a few more strangely accented words. The abbot thought that he understood them: “Then there is hope.” A melancholy expression belied this utterance.

In these troubled times, it was the abbot’s duty and his satisfaction to give comfort. Smiling, Gregory answered his guests in the vernacular. “By the grace of our Lord, there is always hope.”

NEAR ORLEANS, 730

Dawn arrived, as it did every autumn day, in a sea of thick white fog. The sun that peered at Adelhard through the dense haze seemed to cast no more light than a full moon on an overcast night. The swirling vapors made the solar disk appear blotchy, again reminiscent of a full moon. Still, the hermit knew, this morning mist would soon burn off.

His water passed, Adelhard stepped back from the chill into the dubious shelter of his tiny cottage. The chipped pottery ewer was one of the few possessions in the hut, which contained no furniture. He splashed icy water from the vessel onto his face, which he then wiped dry with a relatively clean corner of his rough brown robe. He ignored the stale crust of bread that would be his breakfast, for prayers and meditation preceded all food.

The hermit went outside again into the mist. Tall trees surrounded him: Despite centuries of settlement, most of Francia remained forested. Many of his countrymen still worshipped the forces of nature, the spirits that supposedly slipped silently through these trees.

He suspected that the previous dweller at this isolated crossroads in the woods had been a pagan—many a morning Adelhard had discovered profane offerings silently left in front of the hut during the night. Once he had even found a baby left in an earthen tunnel dug under the very crossroads, its entrances loosely blocked by bundles of thorns. Contact with Mother Earth was supposed by the vulgar to magically imitate the maternal breast, he knew, and so was thought to have curative powers. The pagan belief had done that poor child no good—she was dead when he found her. Adelhard sometimes imagined his pagan predecessor at this spot, sitting on the fresh hide of a bull, its bloody side facing up to draw the evil spirits from the ground.

Perhaps it was these thoughts of vile phantoms that made Adelhard start at the sudden appearance of shapes in the fog. He smiled at his foolishness: Surely the arrival of travelers at a crossroads required no supernatural explanation.

The first strangers, all warriors, came on horseback. They warily inspected the crossroads and nearby woods; one of their number dismounted to peek into his cottage. The man whom Adelhard took to be their leader whistled what must have been a signal, for the small troop was soon joined by a ragged group of men and women. The hermit’s breath caught at their piteous state. More warriors, clearly impatient with their prisoners—for such the walkers obviously were—brought up the rear. From their garb and whispered speech, Adelhard knew the prisoners were Franks.

The captives stood cowering, resigned to their fates. At a wave from the warrior band’s leader, they settled quickly to the ground, not a few groaning from who knew what injuries. Adelhard shook himself from his unhelpful observations, turning to fetch water and his meager supply of bread. These poor unfortunates needed the food more than he.

“Stop.”

The hermit froze at the guttural command. He turned slowly toward the speaker. The order had come, as he’d suspected, from the one he had first guessed to be the leader. “I was getting bread for your prisoners.” Adelhard studied the man while awaiting an answer. The white robe and flowing head covering were unfamiliar. A close-cropped black beard and chilling brown eyes dominated the warrior’s face.

“Then be quick. We rest here only briefly.”

Adelhard retrieved his crust and distributed it, broken into tiny pieces, among the gasping captives. They gnawed at his humble offering while he made the round again, this time with his water ewer. The men on horseback took food from their saddlebags. “Are you a magician, then, to live here alone in the forest at the crossroads?”

“Indeed, not!” Adelhard took such offense at the question that he did not wonder at the stranger’s excellent grasp of Frankish. “I am a good Christian. Years ago I stopped at this spot to fast and meditate, and here did I have a vision. I have lived here ever since. I am called Adelhard.”

“My men and I are also religious.” The warrior smiled. “We follow Allah.”

Followers, then, of that false prophet, Muhammad. The warriors had probably come from Iberia, which the Mohammedan Arabs had conquered just two decades ago, even though these men had just approached from the north. Christian travelers returned from Iberia spoke highly of Mohammedan culture and manners. Their heathen religion had borrowed from earlier faiths. As a result, they were said to respect Christians and Jews as fellow “people of the Book.”

Adelhard couldn’t reconcile these descriptions with the treatment of the prisoners. Of course, the supposedly Christian community he had renounced displayed its own warlike cruelty.

Adelhard suddenly realized that the head warrior was staring at him impatiently. In his musing, he had apparently missed some comment of the Arab chieftain. “My pardon. Could you repeat that?”

“I asked if your accent was Visigothic.”

The question was natural, and the stranger was, in fact, correct. There was, somehow, a disagreeable undertone to the question. Trying to ignore a premonition, Adelhard answered, simply, “Yes.” His discomfort only grew as the warlord inexplicably broke into a predatory grin.

METZ, 730

The pooled assets on the beaten-earth floor seemed woefully inadequate: some twenty-first-century pocket change, a nail clipper, and a metal-barreled ballpoint pen. Arab terrorists in modern Metz had stolen everything else from the two friends. That was unfortunate—their Swiss Army knives might otherwise have brought them a pretty silver denarus or two in trade.

If wishes were horses, then beggars could ride. Harry found the aphorism distastefully apropos. Never mind what might have been. What about selling the pen? No one in this era would believe how long it would last, and proving its lifetime would just squander the ink. Anyway, who in the here and now had enough paper to merit such a writing implement? The abbot had actual papyrus, though little of it, in his cell.

Their clothes, especially their sturdy leather hiking boots, were undoubtedly the most valuable of their belongings. These being irreplaceable, Harry and Terrence had agreed to be parted from them under only the direst of circumstances.

Harry prodded the pitiful pile with his boot tip. “It doesn’t seem we can hire an army, does it?”

“We need information far more than an army at the moment.” Ambling began tucking their meager possessions into his pockets. “My grumbling stomach believes that we need food more than either. I guess I shall once again orate for our supper.”

“You’re just a ham at heart.” Harry, for no good reason, grabbed back his pen.

Terrence drew himself up to his full height in mock indignation. “I, sirrah, am an actor at heart. It’s a common affliction among the English. And until you discover a better method for putting food into our mouths, I shall expect forbearance with your insults.”

“Ham” was, admittedly, too strong a term. Terrence was a born storyteller; in these entertainment-starved times, that talent made him a natural moneymaker. At least he would have been a moneymaker if the locals had had cash to spare. They didn’t: Currency was hoarded for buying scarce trade goods from traveling merchants.

Terrence was paid mostly in free meals and ale; Harry, by acting out scenes from Terrence’s stories—usually involving dying with great melodrama—earned his own scraps. On principle, they preferred earning their food to the unquestioned hospitality of the abbey.

It helped that Terrence had been raised on stories that the Franks could never have heard: the tales of Scheherazade, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. That Terrence’s Frankish was accented and his vocabulary sometimes lacking only added to his audience appeal. Wandering minstrels were not expected to speak like natives.

Harry and Terrence still lodged in the abbey’s pauper hostelry. They made their way by dim twilight across the monastery grounds to the guest quarters that served the well-to-do and high-ranking travelers. Thick smoke rising from the chimney—their rooms were unheated—led them to their destination.

A cheer of welcome greeted the storytellers. Terrence scanned the crowd: three new travelers and their servants. Beds would be shared here tonight. “Harken to my words,” he began grandiloquently, “for I have a tale to tell this evening that will chill your bones despite this crackling fire.” The already besotted crowd roared its approval.

Terrence stood still, smiling and silent, until one of the new arrivals motioned a servant forward with two cups of beer. Terrence downed his brew in one gulp (it was foul, watery stuff), then let out a great belch of satisfaction—local manners.

He launched into a medievalized version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which they’d rehearsed that afternoon. Harry’s role consisted mostly of looking terrified. Their patrons for the evening laughed themselves sick at Harry’s nervous search for the source of the fearful beating. By dint of strategic pauses throughout the narration, they obtained a filling, if unsatisfying, meal before the tale’s end. With deep bows to acknowledge the crowd’s shouted approval, Harry and Terrence began circulating in search of conversation and more ale.

The evening’s real work now began. Storytelling brought food, it was true, but other ways could be found to earn a living. If mere survival in these rough times were their only goal, then joining the monastery would provide as safe and secure a life as they were likely to find. Every night for over two weeks they’d met with any and all travelers in hope of a clue to Abdul Faisel’s whereabouts.

None of the townsfolk knew of Faisel, whom the time travelers described as a fugitive from their own faraway country, or recognized his description. Recognition was, of course, a lot to expect after five years’ time. Still, absent some useful information soon, they had no plan beyond heading westward toward Tours, where they expected Faisel must surface in two years’ time. Setting out with so little information would be truly an act of desperation. If they could learn nothing here, so near to where Faisel must have arrived, how hopeless would it be to strike out on their own into the wilderness?

“Faisel? That is not a name I remember,” answered Harry’s fifth target for the night, a young servant whose own name Harry had instantly forgotten. The Franks, rich and poor alike, were accustomed to drinking themselves into a stupor every evening. Most had a tolerance to alcohol far beyond Harry’s limits. “The shaking of the world I cannot forget.” The servant rattled on for a while about what he had been doing.

The great quake five years ago was like 9/11 in his time. Everyone hereabouts remembered what they had been doing. They would tell you about it in excruciating detail at the drop of a hat. Fair enough, Harry thought. The aftershocks since his and Terrence’s arrival had been horrible enough.

His new drinking buddy droned on about shattered trees and fleeing woodland beasts. He had been returning with several other servants from a hunt, from deep in the forest about three days west of town. Harry tried to guestimate the distance. Twenty miles? Fifty miles? He couldn’t begin to decide without having seen the terrain.

Across the room someone launched into a rollicking, far more interesting, bit of old royal gossip. Harry strained to hear about King Chilperic and Queen Fredegund, and their long-ago burning of tax records. People roared their approval. The Franks believed taxation applied only to others: No wonder the remnants of postimperial Roman civilization had so quickly declared themselves Frankish. Harry caught Terrence’s eye over the heads of the crowd, and winked.

To declare one’s self tax-exempt … the notion so tickled Harry’s fancy that he almost missed the servant’s sotto voce comment. Besides, while several nights of carousing had greatly improved his vocabulary in the Gallo-Roman near French, Harry still misunderstood much of what he did hear. “A dead man in a cottage? The earthquake killed him?”

“Yes, dead, that’s what I said, but not from the shaking. His body was still warm, days after the earth calmed down, when we happened upon him.”

What was the man trying to tell him? Harry leaned forward. “I couldn’t hear you over the noise.”

“The coin.” His drinking companion glanced around before whispering confidentially, “The old man still worshipped the ancient gods; the signs of it were everywhere in his little hut. I started to place Charon’s obolus into his mouth.” Harry stared blankly. “The pagan’s fare to the boatman for passage across the river Styx to the other side.

“I found a coin already in his mouth.”

Something in the first narration had caught his subconscious’ interest. What? “A coin in his mouth,” Harry repeated mindlessly.

“You asked about strange events. That coin—it was strange. I can’t read”—the servant laughed at the very notion—”but I know the shapes of letters. After all, they are all over the imperial ruins. There were peculiar markings on this coin, not Roman letters.”

“Peculiar,” Harry echoed.

“I remember them still.” The table was coated with grease and dust. The servant made a sign to ward off the evil eye—the corpse in the distant hut wasn’t the only pagan in the area—then began tracing arcane shapes in the slime. The finished product looked roughly like “L8b1.”

A chill came over Harry as he mentally flipped the characters. No wonder this Frank had found the characters on the coin unfamiliar: They were Arabic numerals. There was nothing demonic about them.

The coin was simply dated 1987.

NEAR ORLEANS, 730

Clicking a string of worry beads, the Arab sheik studied the hermit. Gamal’s overriding impression of the recluse, dressed in tatters and rags, his hair a greasy tangle, was filth. The Christian dogs had yet to discover the virtues of cleanliness. Still, squalor alone did not suit the warrior’s purposes. Adelhard’s speech might. Gamal impatiently repeated an earlier question. “I asked if your accent was Visigothic.”

“Yes.” Adelhard’s eyes narrowed slightly, as though in premonition.

Let the hermit fear him; Gamal found himself grinning in anticipation. “In Iberia I have met many of your people. I find them most interesting.” Adelhard bowed his head briefly in acknowledgment. “Your priests are very intriguing to speak with.” That earned him a cautious nod. The recluse’s circumspection added zest to the game; it would not, in the end, help him. “I found most refreshing their view of the nature of Christ.”

“Ah,” the hermit said, scanning the faces of the silently attentive Frankish prisoners. He licked his lips nervously.

Gamal’s smile broadened. Things were as he expected. “Did you know that my people claim Christ as a prophet?”

“I would not have expected another people to so honor Jesus Christ.” Adelhard faced the warrior chief as he spoke, but he raised his voice so the Franks could more clearly hear his carefully chosen words.

“Allah has no son,” Gamal answered sincerely. He, too, pitched his voice so that the Franks would hear. “That is why I find your beliefs so refreshing. The imams of Islam, just like your Arian priests, know Christ to be a man made by God. A very wise man, of course, an inspired man, but still—only a man.”

Prisoners muttered softly at the mention of Arianism. The Franks were Catholics; they had been such since King Clovis’s famous battlefield conversion centuries earlier. The Church had outlawed the Arian heresy long before even Clovis’s time.

The priests taught well their apostasies, if nothing else.

The murmuring was as music to Gamal’s ears. He turned his horse so that he faced the prisoners. “You do not honor this hermit’s beliefs?”

They looked uncertainly to one of their number, their erstwhile leader. At his nod, they shouted their denunciation. They renounced Adelhard as a heretic and an enemy of the Church.

“You do not consider him a true follower of your Christ?”

Here, after days of beatings and exhaustion, was an enemy at whom they could safely rail. The prisoners roared out their contempt.

“No? Then why should I?” In one fluid motion, Gamal swept his fine Toledo scimitar from its scabbard and plunged it up to its hilt in the hermit’s stomach. Adelhard’s eyes opened impossibly wide, and blood burst from his mouth. Gamal freed his sword with a twist that stirred the dying man’s guts. Gore dripped from the blade as he wheeled toward his shocked-to-silence prisoners.

“And you who would condemn the stranger who just fed you? You call yourselves Christians? You sicken me.” At his signal, Gamal’s band of warriors unsheathed their weapons.

The crossroads was thickly coated in red before the raiders laid down their arms.

METZ, 730

“I wish you would reconsider.”

Terrence and Harry exchanged a glance. How could they explain to the gentle abbot, their only real friend in this violent century, that they must leave? Terrence sighed. “I can only say that our purpose is urgent.”

“This man whom you follow. If he came here, if he is still alive, has left nothing after five years but a coin as a sign of his passing. How can you hope to find him?”

At least Gregory’s wording provided Terrence with an irrefutable answer. “By the grace of our Lord, there is always hope.”

The abbot arched an eyebrow in recognition of his own words but said nothing.

Harry broke the awkward silence. “We earned a little money at storytelling, enough for supplies and swords.”

“I’ve seen you practice at swords. I was a Frank long before I became a priest, so believe what I tell you. You should stay.”

Harry squirmed on his hard wooden stool, then answered as gently as he could. “We must go. I can’t expect you to understand this, but the world depends on it.”

Gregory laid his hand on Harry’s arm. “Perhaps I do understand. You cry out into the night sometimes, in your sleep. I believe that this Julia means the world to you.” A tear glistened in the corner of Harry’s eye. “She must be very special.”

Terrence changed the subject. “We plan to leave in the morning. We’ll follow the old Roman road west. Brother Bernhard says it’s still open as far as Reims. That’s farther than we’ll be going.”

“It is passable much farther than that, at least as far as Tours. I’ve been there, you know.”

Terrence knew—Gregory was a bit of a bore on the subject of his famous relative, the former bishop at Tours. “Our immediate plans don’t go that far. Maybe someday.”

“Miracles are said to occur there, at the tomb of Saint Martin. Did not Clovis himself become Catholic after beholding miracles at the tomb? My very kinsman, the bishop, reportedly was cured of disease by drinking water mixed with dust from the tomb.”

That concoction might have cured the good bishop; the thought of it made Terrence want to gag.

The abbot didn’t notice, or chose to ignore, Terrence’s expression. Gregory looked sadly at Harry. “Perhaps a pilgrimage would cure our friend.”

If only it could help Harry, Terrence thought. “Sometime, I’m sure, we’ll see Tours. For now, Father, we must continue our search.”

“Will you consider one more idea from an old man?”

“Of course.”

“Wait for a few days. The merchants who arrived here this morning from Augusta Treverorum will continue on soon to Parisii (Paris), farther down the road that you mean to take. There are five of them, plus their guards and servants. You would be much safer in their company. I will introduce you.”

“Would they take us?”

“Promise them a story every night. How could they refuse you?” Gregory had to laugh, just thinking of Terrence’s tales. “Do you know my favorite?”

Terrence shook his head. “No, which?”

Gregory smiled. “The one where the sailor washes ashore in the land of the hand-sized people. Gulliver? Tell the merchants the start of that story when you meet. I promise that they will not say no.”

It made sense. Terrence said, “You have a deal.”

* * *

The good-natured bellowing at the guesthouse was louder than usual tonight; the crowd was only casually attentive to the evening’s installment of Treasure Island. Harry took his first opportunity to sidle, cup in hand, to the raucous group in a far corner of the hall. The focus of their attention turned out to be what looked like a checkerboard. This was apparently the new game, alluded to by Father Gregory, which the Franks used to teach war strategy.

After almost every move some of the onlookers groaned, while others clinked coins and offered new wagers. Brother Wolfgang unhappily held the bets.

Harry knew quickly that this game wasn’t checkers. It seemed more like an early version of chess, although the crudely carved tokens bore little physical resemblance to the game pieces he knew. He observed the unfolding duel with deep interest, whispering questions to Father Gregory. The abbot whispered back the names of the pieces and their moves: He had played the game often before joining the priesthood. The vying warriors both employed a slogging style of play, grimly exchanging pieces through a brutal and uninspired middle game.

Romulfus, the warrior playing the Black pieces, crowed in triumph. He slid a Bishop two squares diagonally—its limit, in this early version of the game—to capture White’s Minister. In this male-dominated age, that dominant piece that had not yet been transformed into the Queen. White’s backers grumbled in disappointment. Sensing victory, Black’s cronies clamored for new bets.

Sigismund, playing White, frowned at the board. His King stood mid-board amid a cluster of pawns, but he had no pieces left. Black still had a Minister and a Bishop with which to attack those remaining pawns. Shrugging in resignation, Sigismund stood to concede. A round of ale for his backers quieted their complaints.

Harry kept studying the board as Romulfus’s followers shouted for payment. Brother Wolfgang doggedly counted out the coins. Harry’s mind clicked through the possibilities: push a pawn here; guard a pawn with the King there; stay off the black squares where possible to reduce the usefulness of the Bishop … He had another whispered exchange with Father Gregory about the local rules of play. “Wait!”

Harry’s audacity silenced the room.

Romulfus spoke first. “What is it then, storyteller?” Such as Harry were tolerated as sources of amusement, but certainly not respected.

Harry took a deep breath. “I’ll bet fifty gold solidi that I can take White’s position and at least draw.”

Terrence shoved through the crowd, hissing in English, “Are you daft? We don’t have that much money. Debtors here become slaves. Say you were joking.”

“Quit your foreign gabble.” Romulfus fumed at the temerity of a mere jongleur. This was a warrior’s game. “Are you prepared to pay if you lose?”

“Of course.” Harry took the challenge as acceptance. He claimed the chair Sigismund had vacated. Smiling bravely at Terrence, Harry advanced a pawn.

The game settled into a contest of position and maneuver—not, Harry had observed, the local style of play. Carefully, he shepherded forward a cluster of pawns. Romulfus seethed with impatience, downing beer after beer in frustration, as White’s pawns and King maneuvered in a self-protecting block. Only now did the warrior glimpse what Harry had seen: The one way to prevent one of Harry’s pawns from crossing the board was to sacrifice Black’s Minister. The unequal trade meant a draw in the game and loss of the wager; declining the trade would allow the pawn, upon reaching the final rank of the board, to be promoted into a new White Minister.

With near parity in pieces Harry felt certain White would win.

Romulfus stood, growling. He flung a sack of coins onto the board, scattering the chessmen. “Bah, I tire of this game.” He stormed into the night with his cronies in tow.

Sigismund and his backers clapped Harry on the back and plied him with beer. Not too many drinks, however, to keep Harry from tripling his new stake over the course of the evening.

NEAR LIMOGES, AQUITANIA, 730

Bertha mindlessly worked her broom, pushing the nonexistent dust across the stone floor to the doorway. She was, for these times, a mature woman: twenty-three years old. Her hair was a dark blond, almost brown; her eyes were crystal blue. Only her too-strong jaw had denied her beauty and a husband. That hardly mattered now.

There were two more rooms to sweep, then Bertha would start cooking for the garrison. That chore, at least, she did not mind: The food that she, too, ate would be as good as she could make it. After cleaning up from dinner, she could hide in her own tiny room, there to collapse into the fitful sleep of exhaustion. Alone.

A night untroubled by these devils was the best Bertha could expect in life now. She had been abducted by Saracen raiders and kept here as a slave, wherever here was. Her only clue to her location was the warmth. She did not think she had been prisoner long enough for winter to have passed, yet it was mild as long as the sun was out. South, somewhere, then, judging from the stories her father had told her. She had never left her village until the attack. She wondered if she would ever see it again.

Water bubbled in the iron cauldron as she prepared the evening meal. The first day here, she had prepared simple Frankish fare; one savage beating had taught her that not even that reminder of home would be allowed. She now threw handfuls of white grains—rice, were they called?—into the water.

The drumming of hooves and calls of greeting heralded the arrival of more men. She added rice to the pot, then stepped outside to get more meat from the smokehouse.

“Come here, little one.”

Bertha froze. She knew that voice all to well. She knew it from waking horrors and sleeping nightmares. Slowly she turned toward the man who had spoken.

Too slowly, apparently, for the hulking brute back from a raid. He took two steps forward and backhanded her across the face. “Gamal wasted all the fine women we had taken. You shall have to satisfy all of us tonight.” He raised an arm again, threateningly, to cut off her sniffling.

She stood, her limbs aquiver with fear, dread, and loathing. She had only a moment in which to study the jagged scar across his jaw, the cruel eyes, and the evil, gap-toothed smile before he ripped open her simple dress. Knocking her down onto the hard courtyard, he took her violently to the echoing cheers of the garrison.

NEAR ORLEANS, 730

Stronger men than Bertchramm would have quailed at the sights in the crossroads clearing. Several of his men, their faces ashen, ran back into the woods; retching noises followed. The warlord resisted the urge to join them.

Body parts littered the clearing. Some monster had assembled the pieces into cruel little statues: Here a head grew straight from the bloody stump of a leg, there a limbless torso lay mounded over with severed fingers and toes. Rage filled the warrior, hatred consumed him. Carrion was all that remained of people stolen from his village.

He prodded his skittish horse forward with a squeeze of his heels. Lupus growled in dismay, but silently padded after. At the far edge of the clearing, Bertchramm dismounted. When he stepped inside the primitive hut, the dog refused to follow.

“Magnulfus!” Bertchramm’s grim stoicism deserted him. Facing him from atop a cracked pottery ewer was the accusing head of his brother. Magnulfus did not stare, exactly, for his eyes had been gouged out. Dried blood filled his mouth, lay caked thickly down his chin. Into his head was deeply carved the crescent moon. Bertchramm knew who made that mark: Saracens.

The bastards who killed Magnulfus were the same ones who had raided the village months earlier. The same ones who had taken Magnulfus’s only daughter, his niece. Magnulfus had sworn to save Bertha if he could and to avenge her in any case.

Bertchramm lovingly picked up the bloody remnant of his brother and cradled it in his arms. “By your wounds and God’s wounds, I swear that I will avenge you.”

Leaving two warriors to bury the dead, Bertchramm and the war party pressed on.

About the Author

Edward M. Lerner has degrees in physics and computer science (and, curiously enough, an MBA). Now writing SF full-time, Lerner worked in high tech for thirty years (including seven years as a NASA contractor), as everything from engineer to senior vice president. That experience includes techie havens (such as Bell Labs and Northrop Grumman), an Internet company, and a software start-up. It all shows up in his fiction.

His books include Probe, Moonstruck, and the collection Creative Destruction. His short fiction has appeared in Analog, Artemis, and Jim Baen’s Universe magazines, on Amazon Shorts, and in the anthologies Year’s Best SF 7 and Future Washington.

In the pipeline are Fool’s Experiments and two “Known Space” novels in collaboration with Larry Niven: Fleet of Worlds (October 2007) and Juggler of Worlds.

The Ancient Ones, Episode Five

Written by David Brin

Illustrated by Chantelle Thorne

8.

“Keep moving,” said the guy jabbing a stake into my back. It didn’t feel all that sharp—just a pointed stick. But I knew that the other end fit snugly into some kind of arbalest or shooting device, capable of propelling the shaft with considerable force.

Any weapon that could terminate a blood-sucking vampire was powerful enough to inconvenience a poor Earthman like me, stranded and isolated on a strange—make that bizarre—alien world. Nor did I feel protected by the crowd surrounding us, in a huge and garishly-lit atrium.

“Don’t try to draw attention,” growled my captor, prodding me forward through a bustle of tourists and gamblers, who thronged the lobby of the Golden Palace—willing victims in a commercial version of the predatory lifestyle that pervaded this planet. If the word “lifestyle” applied to a place where much of the population consisted of walking dead.

Still, even as my captor shoved me forward, I gave the crowd a quick scan for a pair of figures—two “recent” zombies who had been my only friends, so far, here on Oxytocin 41c. But if I really had glimpsed Sully and Moulder a moment ago, pushing luggage carts while dressed as bellboys, there was no sight of them now. Instead, I nearly got trampled by crowd of lycanthrope families on holiday, gnashing their tusks and baying at scantily-dressed succubi. Beyond them, a row of dapper dracula-types stood transfixed before flashing slot machines, pulling coin after glittering coin out of their silken capes to keep feeding those fanged, mechanical maws.

I guess it’s true that everybody has a weakness, I pondered, feeling a bit detached and hardly fearful at all. Perhaps there is only so much that a nervous system can take before going numb, after several days of being pummeled by every variety of undead creature imaginable. And now, amid all the lights and noise, there was that added poke in the spine. It sent me stumbling toward a curtain that partly concealed a narrow side door, like a broom closet, where things were sure to get no better.

“Where’s a cop when you need one?” I murmured, quite tired of being pushed around, ever since I slurried down to this benighted world.

“It is funny you should mention that,” said the trench-coated figure propelling me along. “I am the police. And you are under arrest.”

* * *

My new predicament came accompanied by one blessing. As soon as that door closed behind us, some of the casino cacophony subsided. Especially that continuous, hypnotic jangling sound of one-arm bandits, robbing the population without prejudice over such minor matters as race, creed or pulse. The sudden release of pressure on my abused eardrums provoked an overwhelming, irresistible need to yawn.

A voice spoke from my left. “We are so sorry to bore you, Alvin Montessori.”

Turning, I saw that we were now in a statuary vestibule, lined with effigies in a variety of poses. And across the hallway, standing next to one larger-than-life figure, was a gaunt, almost fleshless man, holding a strange weapon aimed at my midriff.

“Dr. Katske,” I acknowledged with a nod, while covering my mouth for another yawn. “Forgive me … for not being surprised. After that encounter in the museum hallway, I figured we might meet again.”

“Never mind that,” the old man said. This is a semi-public gallery. Someone may come through at any moment. Quickly, pull this finger.”

Blinking, I answered. “I beg your pardon?”

He gestured at the sculpture next to him—evidently an early-type vampire with a visionary look in his eyes, pointing at a dim tomorrow. “The finger,” Katske urged, brandishing his gun. “Pull it now!”

“Pull it yourself!” I growled back at him, then snapped at the fellow behind me. “And the next time you poke me with that thing, I will take it from you and cram it where you’ll need a sonogram to find it!”

Both of them seemed surprised and nonplussed for a moment. Then Katske shrugged. Reaching up to grab the mannequin’s digit, he give it a sharp tug. I cringed a little, breathing shallowly. But there was only a soft, blatting hiss … and suddenly a wall panel slid open behind it, revealing a hidden chamber.

“Move,” the fellow behind me urged. But I noticed that there was no shove, this time, as we hurried through and the panel slid closed again, behind us …

… and I found myself in a laboratory of some sort, lined with all the requisite items, from clean-air hoods to heater flames and glassware that frothed with bubbling mixtures.

“Well, he is a cool one, I’ll give him that,” commented the man in the trenchcoat, who came around to face me at last, plopping onto a stool and dropping his fedora onto a nearby table. His face was very humanoid, like most of the “standard” denizens of this world—those who weren’t undead in one manner or another. After several days in the city of Squid, I knew what signs to look for—like tusks, or pointy canines, or the aroma of gradual decomposition. This fellow had a scent of living sweat and tension.

“Did you say you’re a policeman?” I asked.

“Inspector Coalshack, of the Cal’mari Cops,”he said, with a shallow nod.

“Coalshack?” I gave the side of my head a rap, to inform the pesky nanomite translators that I was onto their game. As if that would do any good. “I thought there wasn’t much civil authority left, around these parts.”

“There isn’t. We are a commercial enterprise,” he acknowledged with a nod. “Police work has been left to the free market, ever since most government collapsed, a century ago.”

“Wait a minute,” I snapped my fingers. “I saw you, yesterday … or was it the day before … nosing around an alley near the city gate. Just before crewman Wems appeared and gave me a whack—” I reached up and felt one of the many bumps on the back of my head.

“Recruit Wems was supposed to take you to a holding cell for questioning. But apparently he had something else in mind. I’d like to know where he took you. And why.”

“You aren’t the only one. I don’t suppose Wems is unavailable, to provide answers?”

“He has gone missing.”

“Hm, yes. Wems apparently has a knack for doing that. Well, okay then, officer. I mean inspector. You say that I am under arrest. What’s the accusation?”

Despite affecting a casual slouch, the fellow had been keeping his stake-thrower leveled at my chest. Now he jutted it forward a bit.

“Alien invasion.”

Ah. That accusation. I kept a blank expression, while pondering my options. On the basis of technological achievement alone, Oxytocin was over sixteen on the Polanski scale, so I could admit the truth without violating their innocence, under the Consent Imperative. On the other hand, innumerable botches and disasters have ensued, whenever fools rush in to say “Take me to your leader.” And this society seemed fragile enough, without taking another shock.

Hence, I felt some reluctance. An impulse to evade.

“Alien … invasion?”

“That’s right.”

“And … that’s an official crime?”

“Oh, yes,” Dr. Katske answered, while keeping his little gun aimed at my midriff. “I can show it to you in the law books.”

“Fascinating. Do aliens invade often?”

“As far as I know, this is the first time. At least where there’s proof.”

“But if it never happened before, how could there be a law?”

“Ah, good question!” Grinning, the little man clearly enjoyed any opportunity to show off some historical erudition. “It was the infamous Paranoid Congress of 30952 that passed eight thousand, three hundred and twelve just-in-case ordinances, banning everything from time travel to summoning demons from the planet’s core. From turning yourself invisible to spontaneous combustion. From national totem-burning to making mountains out of molehills.”

How much of this absurdity was being mistranslated by my badly programmed ear-nanos? A lot, I figured, adding that I really must speed up learning the local dialect, the old-fashioned way, in order not to depend on them.

“Of course,” Katske added, “the very next year, the people rose up en masse and voted to declare legislation an act of extreme moral turpitude. Nevertheless, those laws have never been repealed. They remain on the books.”

“Including the one against aliens landing without permission,” interjected Inspector Coalshack.

“And you think I have committed this crime, because—”

“Because I told them.”

A figure stepped through the far doorway. And I let out a low sigh.

“Nuts.”

Despite wearing native clothing—a long, magisterial gown, complete with glittering spikes on a high collar—she was instantly recognizable. Those pointy little Demmie teeth weren’t vampirized, the way Lieutenant Morrel’s had been. Still, they glittered, as the Clever Gamble’s Chief Engineer grinned at me, without any trace of friendliness.

“That’s Commander-Artificer Nomlin to you, Advisor Montessori. I have always found my peoples’ penchant for nicknames so immature, don’t you agree? And with the Captain not around—”

“Where is he?” I demanded, taking several steps toward her, my hands suddenly clenched, ignoring the two men, who jabbed me with their weapons. “Where is Olm! And Guts and the others? Do you know what happened to the ship?”

Her smirk faded into a look of passing concern. “The Gamble? I haven’t a clue. In fact, I’ve heard nothing since that night in the sub-urb, when we were attacked and I got separated from the others. I remember getting knocked under some bushes, then wandering around in a daze, till morning, when I finally stumbled into town and asked a friendly policeman for help.” She nodded to Coalshack. “I can only assume that the Gamble had to leave suddenly. Or she was destroyed.”

“Your uniform, does it still transmit and receive?” Mine had been shredded, after violent attacks by everything from werewolves to zombies. I had hoped that would explain the silence.

“Beats me.” Nuts shrugged. “I traded my tunic for these clothes. They’re pretty, don’t you think? I mean, for prison duds.”

“Prison. But … .” I stammered. “You mean you’re—”

“Also under arrest? Of course! I’m an alien invader too, just like you. Only they’ve promised to be lenient. Haven’t you, boys?” She smiled as Katske and Coalshack nodded. “If I help them solve a little problem.”

“What problem?”

”The problem, you dense Earthling. The crazy condition of this poor planet! The sickness that brought their civilization to the brink of collapse and filled the world with monsters.”

I turned back to the old man. “It’s a sickness?”

Dr. Katske nodded. “The affliction is called Leininger’s Disease, after its discoverer, who diagnosed the first wave of walking dead. Amid the ensuing panic, and because it bore many hallmarks of a weapon, the nations of that time accused each other of biological warfare. They even hurled a few bombs back and forth, destroying several cities, before everyone realized—that this tragedy transcended all borders, even death.”

“But—” I couldn’t help arguing. “Didn’t people adapt? At least for a while? Those exhibits in the hallway—”

“—don’t tell the whole story.” Katske shook his head. “Yes, for a little while, people seemed willing to adjust to new conditions. Even to redefine ‘life’ in a more inclusive way.”

“I saw relics of that era. But the time of tolerance collapsed, didn’t it?”

“Spinning into distrust, madness, and finally a virtual state of war among the different castes—except for in truce zones, like this giant palace of parasitism that we’re standing in.”

I wanted to learn more, but it was time to focus on the practical. “So you knew who I was, even there in the hallway?”

“Not at first. Running into you there, spotting your exceptional curiosity about this world, was a stroke of luck. Of course, I hurried to notify the Cal’mari Cops, who sent over the inspector here, to rope you in. But I was actually there, in the Hall of Heroes, to do research.”

“Research.”

“For clues to a special, secret place,” Nuts cut in, with a hushed tone of relish and mystery that was typically Demmie. “They say it holds the key. And if I help them, they promise not only a pardon, but a big reward.”

“What key? Helping them to do what?”

“The key to Leininger’s disease,” answered Dr. Katske. “And helping us to find a cure.”

* * *

Nuts led me into the next room, where several lab benches were stacked high with equipment, much of it archaic looking and rather dusty.

“The best I been able to figure,” she explained, “The people of this world have been in a dark age for quite some time, centuries at least. But they didn’t go down without a fight! Across the globe, people mounted efforts to study what was happening to them, in secret labs like this one.”

“I see. But why in a giant casino?”

“Because that was where the money was, especially toward the end. Universities and governments collapsed, but the law of supply and demand—catering to vice—seems to have greater staying power. In fact,” she motioned to some ledgers that lay spread open on a table. “According to these notebooks, work on a cure continued here—and a number of other places—until just a hundred or so years ago.”

Dr. Katske carefully opened one of the volumes and ran his fingers along some lines of writing, in the local language. “Near the end, they were excited about something big. Researchers in one of the hidden labs made a breakthrough, decoding the essence of the ailment! Even ways to change it, or heal it. Only then—”

His hand stopped, where the writing did, halfway down a page.

“Let me guess,” I asked. “Management lost interest. By then, aristocratic vampires had taken charge of places like this.” I jerked my thumb backward, toward the main part of the building, where jangling tones sang an endless and monotonous song of predatory profit. “I don’t imagine they much relished the idea of a cure.”

“Well, it was complicated. But something like that.”

I could well imagine, there would be a variety of opinions concerning what the word “cure” meant, in a case like this. Should the right to act and move and enjoy existence be restricted to the living? There were some artificial and simulated intelligences of my acquaintance, who might demur. On the other hand, something really ought to be done about the state of terror that the “standard” population of Oxytocin—the child-bearing core of the species—suffered every day, and especially every night.

“So, you want to re-start the research?” I turned to Katske and Coalshack. “Fine! Help us get in touch with our ship. By now, Commander Nomlin must have told you our peaceful intentions. We can assist in countless ways, scientific, cultural and financial. As new members of the Interplanetary Alliance, you can call upon immense resources! Why, even our ship’s doctor, Commander-Healer Paolim, could probably crack this nut, with facilities aboard the Clever Gamble. Meanwhile, skilled mediators can initiate an open dialogue among all your different types and castes …”

This time, it was the police inspector who spoke up. “I’ll answer that,” said Coalshack.

“First, we’re still not at all sure that we can trust you aliens. Second, from what I gather, your ship seems to have troubles of its own. You folks are hardly able to take care of yourselves, let alone others.

“And finally, we don’t need outsiders to find us a cure! One already exists. They talk about it, right here!” He slammed his fist down upon the nearby journal. “Somebody found it, in Obtainia!”

“Ob … tainia? What’s that?”

“You mean where,” Nuts murmured. “And that seems to be the problem. One that calls for my abilities, not those of a mere bone-setter and purveyor of herbs!”

She stepped aside and, with a flourish, offered my first view of a gleaming apparatus that was under fabrication, on a nearby bench. Roughly spherical in shape—an ornate concatenation of wires, tubes and gears—it shimmered under the surface reflection of several nearby mirrors and lamps, but also with a constantly-shifting array of inner glows. Soft, clickety sounds emitted, as wheels turned within wheels.

“Of course I’ve been limited to the primitive parts and tools available here, on a backward world,” Nuts commented with her usual tact, making the two natives frown. “Still, I think you’ll agree, Advisor, that I’ve made pretty good progress.”

I stared at the compact ball, about the size of my head and clearly designed to be portable. The florid style couldn’t be more Demmie, as I marveled at a mixture of elegant efficiency and madly ingenious overconstruction. Pondering the little machine’s purpose, it came to me, all at once, with a gasp.

“You’re … making them a finder!”

Nuts smiled. “Indeed. And spare me any of your prissy objections, that this violates the Protocols of Contact, along with a dozen treaties. Allow me to remind you, Advisor, that these people really need the thing that this apparatus will find.

“Furthermore, need I also suggest that we need it, too? These fellows have our lives in their hands.”

9.

All right, I confess that I decided to help.

What choice did I have, lacking any contact with our ship or crew, and with no higher authority to appeal to? At least, by assisting Commander-Artificer Nomlin to complete her project, I might try to restrict the finder’s programming and scope, so that it would only seek the place that our captors desired, and nothing else. As if that sort of limitation was known to work, very often.

Anyway, I knew that Nuts would find some way to make my life a living hell, if I didn’t distract her with the camaraderies of work. So long as I was contributing to a joint project, she’d overcome her habit of tormenting me, whenever possible. Otherwise, I’d certainly be subjected to a series of imaginative “jokes,” from itchy powder to short-sheeting, to skin-whitening. Demmies can be like that, if one takes a fierce dislike to you.

So we fine-tuned her marvelous, hand-built, makeshift finder, and set it to the task of locating “Obtainia”—a secret enclave where (legend told) the people of this long-suffering planet might find salvation from their curse. Dr. Katske helped, by combing archives for clues. Not only there, in the Golden Palace, but also across the river, in dusty stacks and libraries belonging to the city of Cal’mari, where an underground network of standard-human Squidians struggled to maintain an ancient cause.

To reclaim the planet for the living.

(Gradually, I came to appreciate the difficulty of their situation, far more exacting than most other resistance movements. How could they maintain security when, at any moment, a member of their cabal might die—and thus be recruited to the other side? Generation by generation, the standard humanoids had developed devious methods to avoid this mode of failure. Their top recourse was drastic simplicity. Pre-emptive cremation.)

Twice a day, Katske arrived, clutching documents or other objects from the past, which he presented for the finder apparatus to sniff and peer at, like a hound seeking a scent, while Nuts fine-tuned her calibrations and I struggled to keep the makeshift device focused on the task at hand. Meanwhile, at intervals, I kept my eyes open for any sign of her old uniform. Could they have stashed it on the premises? Might an undamaged tunic-transmitter be able to reach the Clever Gamble? Or Captain Olm? In spare moments, I glanced in closets and cabinets, choked with cobwebs, but they must have taken it elsewhere. Along with any parts that might be used to cobble together an old-fashioned radio. Alas.

On the third day, something abruptly changed. The finder quivered over the latest sheaf of yellowed papers, then whirled about with an exhilarated clack, aiming several glowing dials and two fingers of a salvaged glove. Toward the southeast. A direction chosen not out of logic or evidence, but rather, the very distilled essence of intuition. A quintessentially Demmie approach to dealing with reality. The technologization of hunch.

Nuts let out a joyous yelp. Inspector Coalshack grunted with tentative satisfaction. And, for the moment, I agreed, nodding with eagerness to follow those pointing fingers. Anywhere. Anything to get out of that place, away from the constant, thrumming vibrations of a kitschy castle of corruption. Besides, they hadn’t even let us out to take in a floor show.

“We’ll leave at once,” Katske announced. “All is prepared.” He motioned toward a small pile of baggage.

“It’s late in the day,” the policeman showed the luminous dial of his watch.

“All the more reason to hurry, then. Let’s go.”

Coalshack threw on his bulky trench coat, from which he could surreptitiously aim the deadly stake-thrower. But when Nuts tried to pick up the finder, she found that Katske had already taken the device out of its cradle, nestling it like an infant in the crook of his arm, under a fold of his dark brown cape. She flared a deep red flush of hurt feelings, then turned to glare at me, for the crime of noticing.

Hey, is it my fault Demmies can’t hide their emotions? Are humans “dispassionate and cool” just because we don’t express every impulse or passion? Our Demmie friends pity us for this! But I was a teenager, once. And if you offered to keep me in that condition, for life?

I’d rather wear a shirt made of Denebian hair moles!

We departed Katske’s hidden lab, passed through the vacant statuary hall, and emerged into the casino’s crowded lobby, where I was reminded how popular the Golden Palace must be, among the many castes of Squid City. If anything, the crowds were even thicker this time, forcing us to weave our way, almost by ozmosis, between lycans, and vampires and werewolves. Oh my. Every creeped-out instinct told my nervous body to flee. But staying calm seemed the best policy in this “truce zone”—a special place, where the owners had a monopoly on predation. Draining wallets instead of arteries. Proving, once again, that there are many kinds of “sucker.” And that all gambling is in vein.

We gave way for a dozen haughty draculoids, gliding by in single file. Several sniffed audibly as they passed our little group, evidently picking up the scent of living blood. But only one of them turned to give Nuts a brief, drooling leer.

Which made me wonder … if truce zone rules held so well in one place, why not others? According to those exhibits in the hallway, there had once been hope for some kind of modus vivendi. Some way to co-exist. People of all kinds had tried. Ingenuity and goodwill, versus the suspicion and hate. It must have been a very close-run thing, and tragic as hell.

As my mind wandered, I collided with an oversized figure, dressed in a fur coat that stank to high heaven. A hand the size of a beer stein grabbed the collar of my native blouse and lifted me … high enough to realize that the fur wasn’t a garment, after all. And the worst part of the smell came from a mouth, filled with tusks.

“Watch who you bump into, luncheon meat,” growled a voice like gravel in a gearbox. Two pale blue—if bloodshot—eyes blinked at me a couple of times, before registering dim recognition. “Hey! You look familiar, for a small fry.”

“He … hello Lorg,” I managed to croak.

A couple more blinks, then a deep chortle. “Aren’t you that guy who tried to sing his way out of being dinner?”

“Yeah … well … I’m still here. So it worked.”

“Huh! I guess it did, at that! And you survived the corpambulant graveyard, too. Go figure,” the wolfman chortled. “Say! I been wondering about that weird noise you made, that night. How’d you do that?”

“What? You mean when I sneezed?”

“Har. Some sneeze! Can you do it again?”

The thought had already occurred to me, with his face just inches from mine. But I passed on the temptation to look around for a sharp light. We human emissaries are taught to use our secret weapons sparingly. Talk is almost always a better substitute.

“Lorg, this is a truce zone. I think you’d better put me down.”

“Yeah? Well I’m not afraid of you no more. So who’ll make me?”

I glimpsed Inspector Coalshack, returning this way with a grim expression, his hand raising a bulge inside his cloak. I had to settle this quickly. So I lifted a finger in front of Lorg’s tusky, aromatic face and pointed at one of the many little peepholes and spy lenses, scattered across the ceiling.

“Management,” I said.

One word can be more effective than twenty. Lorg considered, blinking rapidly, several more times. Then, the hairy lycanthrope let his grip slacken.

“Oh. Yeah.” He looked left and right, nervously. “Guess I’m just irritable. Been constipated, lately.” He set me down. “Anyway, watch where you’re stomping, standard. You could still find yourself on somebody’s menu.”

“Sure thing, Lorg,” I answered, straightening my clothes and nodding for Coalshack to hold back. “Till then, try adding fiber to your diet … and some mints.”

* * *

Joining Coalshack, I resumed weaving through the crowd, more carefully. “This way,” he said, eyeing me warily. I had been scanning the throng as we proceeded, and he clearly knew that I was considering all options. Clearly, the cop was sharp, as well as strong. I let him guide me through a shrouded entryway, rimmed with soft neon lights, into a dimly-lit bar.

A small band played onstage. The singer, who looked as if she had been sewn together from scrap parts, crooned a melody whose lyrics seemed to consist of variations on the word “Uhn!” Still, there was something about her performance that made it alluring, instead of nauseating. Since coming down to this planet, I had come to appreciate the harmonies of zombie music. Moldy oldies. They kind of grow on you.

The others—Nuts and Dr. J Katske—were already seated at a booth, some distance from the stage, across from a pair of scruffy types. One of them was clearly a were-creature of some sort. Not a wolfman. Maybe some lanky variety of Yeti. The other was a standard humanoid, though tough-looking, with a three-day beard and a mean sidearm at his hip. By the time I approached, some kind of deal seemed to have been struck, because Katske pushed forward a bag that clinked with the unmistakable sound of coins, Then, he and the man clasped each others’ thumbs in the local equivalent of a handshake. Everybody stood.

“Montessori, Nomlin, this is Captain Fu Tichi,” said Col Shack, making brisk introductions. “And his partner, Cuspitui. They’ll be taking us across the desert.”

The rough fellow looked me up and down, taking special interest in my teeth. Nuts displayed hers in a friendly grin that seemed to take him briefly aback. Still, however pointy her Demmie dentition, she was clearly not a vampire, and that was apparently good enough. He answered with a wry, uneven grin of his own.

“Nice to meet you both. Any friends of Cat-ski and Cola Snack are acquaintances of mine.”

“That’s Coalshack,” the policeman growled, stepping closer, as if daring the mercenary to make an issue of it. Holding his ground, the captain seemed willing.

“Let us be off, before the bookies come to enforce our debts!” commented his furry were-companion, in a voice that seemed surprisingly whiny, for one so large.

“Bookies? I ain’t afraid of no bookies,” snapped Fu Tichi. But he relented. “Are those your only bags? Then come quickly, while there’s still daylight. To our ship!”

Ship? I thought, briefly allowing hope to spark. But no. He can’t mean that kind of ship. Something much more primitive, no doubt.

Soon, in the cavernous casino parking garage, I discovered just how primitive.

“It’s a lovercraft!” murmured my Demmie colleague, as she hurried forward, running her hand along the streaked and stained hull, stretching about ten meters in length, by six in width. Low-slung, with a single-story cabin, it seemed to levitate, just above the ground. “I’ve never seen one so big,” she crooned. “They don’t even work on most worlds! Captain Tichi, how fast does it go?”

The grizzled pilot tossed our bags up to his hirsute comrade while Katske and Coalshack ascended a narrow boarding ramp, the old man carefully cradling the finder, out of sight beneath his cape.

“How fast? Get aboard, sweetfeet, and let me show you.”

Nuts sighed, suddenly happy, and hurried to comply. Though not before bumping the mercenary with a wide sway of her hip, accompanied by a coy smile.

Oh, boy, I thought. I hope we’re not in for trouble. At least not that kind.

At the top of the ramp, I took one last look around the garage. Nearby, a row of oversized transports ranged all the way from grungy barges to highly-polished land yachts. Then came rows of smaller coupes, sedans and hearses, leading finally to the underground back entrance of the Golden Palace, where imp-like valets in burgundy uniforms hopped about, parking vehicles or retrieving them, greedily accepting gratuities in the form of red disks that they popped into their mouths. One more thing about this world that I found curious, but probably would rather not learn about up-close.

Then I spotted a more familiar figure, standing to one side of the doorway. Someone tall and wide and hairy.

Lorg?

The werewolf was looking at me, making some kind of gesture—reaching into his ragged vest, repeatedly, as if urging me to do the same.

I did so—

—and my hand encountered a folded piece of paper.

Oh. I realized. Then our encounter was no accident. No coincidence. He must have slipped this in while lifting me … and I was too distracted to notice.

Cursing my stupidity, I made my way aft, checking to make sure that none of the others were looking my way. The captain and his assistant were busy casting off and revving the engines. Katske and Coalshack were shaking thumbs with two other passengers—a young man armed with a shiny sword and a small creature who looked like a cross between a frog and some kind of lawn gnome.

I turned away from them in order to open the letter. Some flecks of skin-colored substance fell out of the unfolded page. But the handwriting was fluid and quite pretty to look at.

Sorry we had to run, leaving you in that alley.

CS was nosing about. He’s dangerous!

Took a while to find you. Needed help.

We have news! Located some of your friends.

Also, Ping awaits! Anxious to discuss matters.

It finished in a sweeping signature—Sully and Moulder.

When I next looked up, the ship was already in motion, heading toward the broad exit, leading from the parking garage into fading daylight. Beyond lay a vast landscape of ravaged urban ruins, where a once-prospering city formerly extended—now a wasteland extending to the horizon. More evidence of how far from their peak these people had fallen.

Glancing back at Lorg, I saw that he had been joined by two svelte figures, dressed in bellboy uniforms, and even at a distance I could tell who they were. The closest things to friends that I had made on this world. But, as I made ready to leap over the rail—a risky drop, at this height and speed—I felt a familiar, unwelcome poke in my spine.

“You’re not thinkin’ of leaving us, are you Doc?”

I whirled to face Coalshack. “You don’t need me anymore. You have Nuts and her finder. Let me go and good luck with your quest.”

The cop answered with a headshake. And then a curt motion with his weapon, motioning for me to rejoin the other passengers. I could only glance backward to give Sully and Moulder a resigned shrug, as the lovercraft cruised ahead, exiting between wide gates.

There was a moment of tension, as a pair of ogre-like security guards gave us a once-over. Cuspitui muttered something about how Fu Tichi “should have let the bookies win …”

But the guards were too busy to give any vessel a close inspection. Most of their attention was devoted to a nearby picket line, where the casino’s regular zombie service staff was marching—or shambling—back and forth, waving signs and pelting vehicles with garbage. And, while I could not understand their moaning chants, I could read their signs and placards, waved by weathered, crumbling hands.

CORPAMBULISTS DEMAND BETTER CONDITIONS!

FULL EMBALMING & DENTAL!

RESIDUALS ON RE-RUNS!

MORE BRAINS!

Jeers, taunts, debris, scabs and small body parts rained upon the land barge while it rumbled by the demonstrators. We all had to duck—

—till the captain finally reached street-level and turned his ship onto a once-grand boulevard, now dusty and wind-blown. The noisy, shimmering pyramid of the Golden Palace fell behind us as we sped away from the still-lively parts of Cal’mari, into long-abandoned precincts, passing between broken and eyeless towers left over from better days. Soon we were racing toward the margins of the old metropolis, as quickly as the straining engines could manage. Hurrying to make the safety of open desert, before it was fully night.

* * *

To be continued

Comments? Complaints? Wretched-awful ideas?

Send them to d_brin99@yahoo.com.

Fish Story, Episode Eleven,

The End of Mankind

Written by Dave Freer, Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

Illustrated by Barb Jernigan

It was a good pub to be back in, even if I was being talked to.

“Are you listening to me?” The woman—she’d introduced herself as Melonie Brown, was just at that stage of consumption when the inner schoolmarm dominates.

I smiled in what I hoped was a suitably offensive manner. I’d made a bad choice of women to sit next to at the bar. I should have guessed by the wide berth around her, despite her physical charms. I’d taken the stool anyway, as there weren’t many other choices, and I’m really good at unfounded optimism. “I’m sorry … I was thinking about fish.”

Melonie sniffed. “We’re discussing the end of man.”

I made a moue. “My favorite subject, darling.” To my irritation she didn’t back off or even seem to notice. It’s hard to get pissed as a newt in peace these days.

“Did you know that there is the equivalent forty tons of TNT for every human on earth, stored in the thermo-nuclear stockpiles of the world’s major powers?” she said in the “we will have a questions and answers session after this lecture” fashion. (I will ask the questions. If you don’t know the answers, I will start the lecture again.)

“Oh good!” I said cheerfully. “Where do I collect mine? No more complaints of sexual inadequacy. You’ll say I was the best bang since the big one,” I said, cheerfully stealing from Douglas Adams. He’s dead, and wasn’t, I was fairly sure, in the bar at the time. They’ve passed no smoking laws. That means you can’t hide Granddad’s remains in the ashtrays anymore. (I know someone who did this at his local. Some people have the weirdest last wishes.)

Finally, I penetrated the armor of her righteous indignation about the wicked (and evil) nuclear powers. Ms. Brown sniffed. “You don’t take anything seriously, do you?”

“Au contraire!” I protested. “I take fish seriously. And beer. Especially the absence of it. Anyway, who works out these figures? It’s totally improbable that it is exactly 40 tons. And it must change by the day. At last, a good reason for increasing the world population. It reduces the per person risk, to say nothing of the weight of TNT our knees bend under. Now fish … .”

“If some mindless jerk pushes the button the fish’ll all be radioactive slag too, along with all you useless males.”

“Well,” I said cheerfully raising my glass. “We might as well drink ourselves paralytic and say ‘screw the bag limits’ then.”

“Don’t you care about anything but drink and fishing? The end of man …”

“Look, Ms. Melonie Brown, it’s not that I don’t care. It’s just you are so unutterably wrong and on the cosmic scale of things a few nukes are so trivial, compared to the way it is really going to happen.”

She shook her head. “Oh, yeah. Like how?”

“I told you. Fish and liquor.”

She rolled her eyes. “You really are a waste of space.”

“Look, I have been there. I’ve seen it happen. And, predictably, it was caused by the output of female fish, Van der Decken and gin. Nothing to do with thermonuclear devices.”

“And you were there. Ha ha ha.”

“Well, I was, but I didn’t want to be. I got out just in time you might say. Or just before time. To microseconds before, on a geological scale.”

“Hmph. Geological scale. And how many million years is that?”

“Hard to tell. I bounced around like a yo-yo, dodging Gods, mythological creatures, Paleozoic monsters and the offspring of Cthulhu.”

“Bless you.”

“More like final absolution, with Cthulhu. Anyway, the end is coming soon, so we might as well enjoy it while we can.” I patted her thigh.

She removed my hand, not quite severing the tendons. “The end would have to be real microseconds away. And I’d need to be blind drunk.”

I took the hint—I’m quite good at getting those, if you apply them with a sledge hammer—and ordered another round.

Out of politeness and in gin she was foolish enough to ask, “So what do you claim will cause the end of mankind?”

“I didn’t say mankind. I just said man. Women may go on. I didn’t stick around to find out.”

“Aha. So women survived Armageddon.”

“It’s possible. So do cockroaches. Or at least they have in the past.”

Her eyes narrowed. “One minute you’re making a pass at me, the next we’re cockroaches.”

“No. You have too few legs. And I have it on good authority that female cockroaches never turn males down. Besides I don’t know if women did survive. I don’t think they’d have liked it much if they did. Hendrik Van der Decken saw to that.”

“Hendrik Van der Decken?”

“The Flying Dutchman. You know, cursed God and got doomed to try and beat round the Cape of Storms until the Day of Judgment. As usual, Wagner got it wrong. It’s not every seven years. It’s every hundred that he’s allowed ashore. I met him here, in this very pub.”

“It’s been sold. I hear they’re planning on a trendy wine-bar in its place,” said Melonie.

“That’s enough to start me crying into my beer,” I said, looking at the well polished teak. “And it’d have suited Van der Decken better. He was supposed to be picking a true love.”

“Trust me, a trendy wine bar is the wrong spot for that,” she said sourly.

“Well, I don’t think it would have made any difference. He’s not very talented at picking up women. So we ended up drinking together.”

“Two of a kind, eh?”

“You might say that. But I bathe a little more often, and I’m not a crusty old Dutchman with salt patches on my cap. Anyway, he spoke English of sort and we got talking about fish.”

“How odd. Not about world peace or global warming,” she said, dryly.

“The subject of global warming did come up. He thought it was a good idea,” I said, cheerfully.

She was suitably outraged. I should get tired of playing these games, but they do rise so well to the bait. “What!? Was he crazy? It’s the worst …”

“Ah, come on. Old Hendrik only gets to see other shipping during storms, when the other ship is in distress. And he only gets free at Armageddon. Global warming is supposed to increase the frequency and severity of storms and was supposed to destroy mankind. It gets pretty boring after a few centuries. There’s sometimes the opportunity for picking up some new crew and a bit of entertainment. They got a hand-held game of Yahtzee with one of them. Hendrik said it nearly did what three centuries of storms and doing business with the treefort hadn’t been able to do: sank the ship.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, shaking her head.

“Yes, but I am buying the next round. And something to eat. So long as it is not caviar.”

She pulled yet another disapproving face. “Caviar is one of those stupid affectations. And poaching is going to cause extinction!”

“You’re telling me. Last time I nearly got potted by a gamekeeper. I’m a retired poacher.”

“Poaching of sturgeon,” she said with exaggerated patience.

“In champagne is best, I believe. But they’re hard to come by in England. Royal game, officially. Or belong to Red Ken Livingstone, if they’re caught above London bridge.”

“I think I’ll have a double,” she said, holding her head with one hand and her glass out with the other.

I nodded. I still had a fair amount of the Dutchman’s gold, after all, and a limited time to spend it. “And a Cornish pasty. They have carrots and peas and, if you’re going bark at the great white telephone later, it’s always wise to have some recent carrots and peas. You go on throwing up until there is at least one carrot and three peas in the bowl. It is one of those immutable laws of physics. And besides the carrots and peas, a Cornish pasty may have almost anything in it, except caviar.”

“Okay, so why the obsession with caviar?” She seemed more willing than most to stick with the subject.

“It’s more of a violent dislike than an obsession. It’s the way the world is going to end. In Beluga caviar. It’s a horrible way to go.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Better than thermonuclear fire?”

“That would be quicker, so long as they do a proper job. Drowning in caviar has the side effect of certain death with the smell of fish-oil.”

“Okay. I grant you fish oil. Death by fish oil should be reserved for specially deserving cases. Anyway, I thought Beluga were whales.”

“Nope. Totally unrelated. Beluga sturgeon are supposed to be the biggest bony fish known to be alive. Eighteen or nineteen feet long, and about two and a half tons. You get them in the rivers that run into Caspian and Black Sea. And the Adriatic, I believe. Van der Decken claimed his encounter was in the Black Sea. He sailed the seven seas. Or somewhere close to them. I’m not sure that they’re our seven seas. Anyway, I’ve seen bigger fish since. “

“With bigger teeth.”

“Not hard. Sturgeon don’t have teeth. They swallow their prey whole.”

“The dangerous, toothless prey of man, the conqueror!”

“Yep. And if it happens to be a female toothless victim at the right time of year … more than a million dollars worth of victim. Top quality and retail, of course. It’d only be worth about 60 thousand dollars in Kazakhstan. I went fishing with Van der Decken for money, not trophies. And if I’d been sober, not even for a million dollars. But somehow I got talked into drinking Kopstoot. You know, iced Dutch gin and …”

“Lager. You poor sick man!” Melonie Brown, for the first time, looked almost approachable. She’d obviously experienced this. It was amazing what shared experience of horror could do.

“Yeah, I was broke and he was buying … and talking about fish that could solve all my financial problems see. I am surprised I could stand upright, let alone think. It did leave me capable of wandering off the sea at two in the morning, following a villainous old Dutchman. And that’s how I ended up like this.”

I paused. “You see, Van der Decken’s ship doesn’t sail the seven seas as we know ‘em. He’s in a parallel continuum, and the walls between that place and this only break down during storms. It’s the massive electrical activity. Time and space don’t work like here, over there. It’s all mixed up, see. He even drops into the Cretaceous sometimes.”

“I see. Well, I don’t, but let’s pretend I do. And the every hundred years bit?”

“Ah, that’s actually a deal Hendrik cut with a bunch of fishy creatures lurking somewhere outside the space time continuum themselves. The bunch back in the Cretaceous. They needed wood for the treefort and he needed more Genever and a night out every now and again. They’re pretty good at the space-time stuff. For a price of course. They want timbers for their treefort in the Cretaceous Yggdrasil. Biggest damned tree you ever saw, and most of it is underwater.”

“The World Tree.”

“Yeah. Source of a lot of coal-measures I gather. At least that’s what this bloke I met on the ship told me. Geologist. Shipwreck survivor. A guy called Paul Bean. Van der Decken was always recruiting. It seems he was damned but his crew … can escape. If they can get off.”

“Suddenly you interest me extremely,” said my companion-of-the-bar. “What happened to him?”

I scratched my head. “He’s still on the ship, I think. Van der Decken isn’t any keener on losing crew than he is on losing business. I got out by good luck and bad judgment.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” She summoned the barman with an imperious gesture.

“Mine’s a pint,” I said, out of habit.

She shook her head. “Give him an Irish coffee. I want him wide awake and drunk. And now, start telling me the story. Leave nothing out. You were on the Flying Dutchman, with Paul Bean. Geologist.”

“Good man. Can’t sing and he’s not God’s gift to Shanghai poker. That was fashionable right then on the Flying Dutchman. Very suntanned, but that could be because he lost his shirt on a pair of queens early on, apparently. I was very sober, very hungover, face down in the scupper somewhere in the mid Niobraran sea when I met him. He told the wisest thing that I have ever heard.”

“What?” she asked.

“Ah. He said: ‘Don’t play Shanghai with Asrael Hands.’ Hands was the ship’s gunner, as well a card-sharp of note. If I’d listened I’d have kept my shirt too. He also told me that I had to get on my feet, because Van der Decken was going to put the old tub about, and it was man the capstan winch or I wouldn’t get blue balls.”

“Er …”

“Yeah that’s what I thought too. It turned out that it was gin. Bols. Dutch stuff. We got rations. Van der Decken did a fair bit of trading across time and space. He had a cargo of narwhal horn for the treefort. They use them as nails. Van der Decken was looking for more time out from them. They haven’t figured out he’s sold them enough spars, masts and deck-planks to build another three Flying Dutchmen. But it’s good for sales, saying that’ll sink the old tub if he parts with as much as another plank. He has the crew painting ‘Der Vliegende Hollander’ on all sorts of flotsam that we pick up. If it was drifting about, we picked it up, rough-sawed it into planks, and sold it the treefort.

“Anyway to cut a long story short we found some floating remains near the tree. Paul fished them out with a boat-hook. Very herring-scented, they were. It was the remains of big fish—rather like a tarpon with teeth—and some flotsam that might have come from it. There was no wood, but a small walrus ivory chess set, a mobile and a copy of ‘Teach yourself Swedish for Dummies,’ a wallet with ten kroner in it, all sealed off in a large latex item, if you take my meaning. A very large latex item. It also happened that the wallet had a card in it for exotic massage, and a library card with the owner’s name and address. Van der Decken got the loot of course—He’d seen Paul fish it out.”

I paused, drank some of the Irish, and explained. “And when he got to the library card, we got orders to set the sails. Get every inch of canvas out. When you find Cthulhu’s library card you really want to return it, as soon as possible. An evil ammonite God set on returning the world to primordial slime needs lots of reading matter. Old Van der Decken wasn’t stupid enough to be picking any enemies, not with having to sail the seven seas for eternity. He was even neutral with the Ostracoderm Equalization League.”

“That’s not easy.”

“You’re telling me,” I said, wondering how she knew. “I never knew lack of a jaw could make a species so inclined to take legal action. Anyway, Van der Decken has had a few centuries to work out his way between here and elsewhere … and to get us to R’lyeh, that bleak and ancient harbor—one of the few the Dutchman can get near—and usually tries to choose not to. The booze is a terrible price. And you don’t want to think about the women. They have way too many legs and have inherited group memory. That’s a combination to make strong men blanch and run, even if they like sheep and are not at all proud about crossing the species line. So Paul Bean and I went for a walk. Sober. This is proof that there is no greater folly than overpricing alcohol. And the trouble with the non-Euclidean geometry of lost R’lyeh where the dead Cthulhu lies dreaming … or at least cursing his missing library card, is that it’s a good place to walk away from. We came to a charming little lava-sand beach—where the sand is black and still has glass sharp edges, is washed by a sluggish, glutinous surge, and—to make it a real winner with British tourists—is surrounded by a brooding cliff. Can I sell you package tour?” I said, noticing that my glass was mysteriously full. The world is full of wonders.

“Go on.”

“And that was where we found the crashed flying saucer. Neat little racy sports coupe spacecraft—you know, seats two aliens and two legless, or tentacle-less or pseudopod-less spawnlings. Red. With black trim and leather seats from some nameless starbeast. No sign of the driver. I guess we should have left it well alone. But I haven’t seen many in Hartlepool, and almost none in daylight. It was Paul who found the replicator. It was in the trunk. Interesting looking curly-whirly device, like a Klein bottle made by an epileptic glassblower, with a few extra loops, with a large scoop and a whole bunch of odd little holes. The alien must have had thin fingers. Or a beak. I decided we might as well take it back with us, as the ship had plainly been there a long time.”

“How did you know that?”

“It had barnacles growing on the rear fender. They don’t grow overnight, you know. Anyway, Paul suddenly had a nasty thought and realized that Van der Decken might sail off and leave us there. There are a lot of places we’d happily have jumped ship, but we really did not want to be stuck there. Worshiping Cthulhu is the only way to get fed. Food on the Flying Dutchman comes down to weevily biscuit, ropy salt pork, rats, occasional albatross and fish. But at least the captain made sure we got our grog. It’s Genever, but it kept the crew from mutiny … So we legged it back up a narrow little gully to the top of the cliffs and then on down towards the wild gaiety of R’lyeh, with its dank and slime and rotten seaweed bouquet. Got there just in time too. Van der Decken was all set to sail. We did a couple of storms, frightened the bejasus out of a few yachtsmen, and then hit one of those calm spells. We were in the Black Sea—or at least a parallel Black Sea, which was funny in itself, seeing as it was the prime fish of the Black Sea that led me to get drunk enough to take a berth with the Dutchman in the first place. Some of the crew were off in a longboat trying to harpoon fish. I was fishing. Paul was sitting there trying to make what we’d decided was the alien’s CD player give us a few tunes. He’d got a fish-spine and was poking around in the holes. Some lights came on, but we had lights but no music. Now, Paul had been eating a ship’s biscuit. Well … eating in a manner of speaking. You could suck on them for days, and the weevils were good bait.

“He put it down on the scoop edge of the alien whatchamacallit.

“‘You stole my biscuit,’ he said to me.

“‘I did not.’ It was ship’s biscuit. We’d even sold them to the treefort as planks. It was not much of an incentive to theft. Now, to be honest, if it had been gin, that would be another matter.

“‘Well it’s gone.’

“And that was true enough, too. ‘Maybe the alien CD player ate it,’ I said to Paul.

“‘Funny ha ha.’

“I picked up the fish-bone. ‘Let me see if I can get it to play the biscuit rhapsody.’ I poked it into the first hole on the left, and the whole thing lit up. A kind of mauve color. ‘See,’ I said … and it opened another hole on the far side and squirted some half-chewed lime green leaves, with loads of little puce eight-legged caterpillar things on them. Live caterpillar things. Now you must understand the thing was transparent. There was no way those leaves and caterpillars were inside it. It didn’t take us long to figure out that we could get it to turn ship’s biscuit into lime green leaves and caterpillars. And it wasn’t a big step from there to making it change ship’s biscuit into a whole bunch of things which were nearly as appetizing as ship’s biscuit. Looked like Mr. Alien had been kind of fond of live insecty sort of food. It was a good party trick though. And we were pretty bored. It took us about a week and three hundred ship’s biscuits to find out how to program it—by accident—to change ship’s biscuit and weevils into … ship’s biscuit and weevils. It was pretty neat, really. It wasn’t a long step from there to figuring out that it would—if you did it right—turn ship’s biscuit into any other sort of food that you gave it a model of. It wouldn’t do gold coins.”

“You can’t eat gold coins.”

“Yeah. We figured that out. And we got busted by the cook for stealing ship’s biscuits. We’d only got away with it for that long because no one had ever bothered before. We got hauled up in front of the captain. It was going to be the cat. Van der Decken ran a good tight sixteenthth century ship—which meant kissing the gunners’s daughter and the zevenstaart—the Dutch variant of the cat-o-nine-tails—but just with two less tails—for thieves … only just then there was a hell of a shout from the bowsprit. Everyone ran to see what was up. Let go of us. It wasn’t as if we could get away. Someone managed to harpoon a Beluga sturgeon. It was Asrael Hands, drunk as usual, and he’d been super-lucky. Severed the big fish’s spine. Even for a three-mast ship, that was a lot of fish. About two tons of it. And she was full of eggs too. And therein lay our downfall.”

I sighed. “I need more violent alcohol for this.”

“Stroh 80?”

I shuddered. Nodded. 160 proof spiced rum should just about do it. “Van der Decken broke out the Genever to celebrate. And somewhere in that combination, disaster was born. I was the one who knew how to salt caviar, so I guess it was probably me. I made some of the finest quality Malossol caviar … just lightly salted, that was gray, almost pale blue, big four millimeter grains … Top quality. The stuff that you could get five thousand dollars for four grams. It is worth more than gold, and getting more pricy by the year. And here I was, with at least three quarters of a million dollars of the stuff … and nothing I could do with it. I can’t remember how many glasses of Genever we had before one of us … and I really don’t remember who … had the bright idea of putting a sample into the replicator. It wasn’t going to help us a lot because when Van der Decken sobered up he would remember those biscuits.”

I sighed. Took an unwary mouthful of Stroh 80 … choked a bit, gestured wildly for a chaser … After half a beer I continued: “So there we were, looking at caviar and the replicator … and Paul says to me: ‘So we can turn ship’s biscuit into caviar … why don’t we turn caviar into ship’s biscuit? We’ll tell the skipper we were just trying to solve his rations problem.’ It was such a good idea.”

“Well?”

“The thing should have come with a warning label that said: Do not attempt to manipulate alien machinery with a fish-bone while under the influence of medication, drugs or alcohol. It broke. Inside the thing. And now we couldn’t change the output program. All it would do was produce utterly useless 5,000 dollar Malassol Beluga caviar. So we cried in our Genever. And then Paul said to me: ‘why don’t we go and talk to Van der Decken while he’s still plastered, and see if there is somewhere he can sell this stuff. He sells everything else.’ Which he did, despite being cursed and trapped in an endless eddy in space-time. So we went to see the skipper. And I told him I had something that could make him rich. He wasn’t too impressed when I showed him a thimble-full of high quality Beluga caviar. ‘Ja. Zoe you soften buckshot with zoute and fish oil.’ or something like that. Only then I pointed out that if we could get it to the right market, it was worth a bit more than gold, weight for weight. Then we showed him the replicator. He didn’t have any biscuit, so we used a piece of moldy cheese. It made Beluga caviar out of it. Then he poured some sour wine in. It made Beluga caviar. Then he poured in some seawater … and it still made Beluga caviar. Then he really got interested. You might think money was of no interest to someone who was damned to sail eternally, but Van der Decken was a merchant captain of the old school. Really old school. And provisioning a three-masted ship for centuries, even on weevil-infested biscuit and gin was expensive. He had contacts though. He could get the jars and he reckoned he could get the stuff to market. What did we need? Besides an absence of zevenstaart? Old Van der Decken was not too good with mechanical devices, and didn’t know much about caviar, and didn’t have connections in the trade, which I do, so I negotiated a load of perks and even a cut of the profits. R’lyeh had contacts with the rest of the world and I figured, with enough money … maybe we could get off the Flying Dutchman.”

I drank, and chased, the rest of the rum. “It was all done with the best of intentions, really. The road to hell is paved with a thick layer of caviar. We made—and offloaded at R’lyeh the first half ton load, all by hand—which was hard work, and we were the skipper’s blue-eyed boys. Old van Der Decken took us to … well, I won’t tell you the exact year the world ends, but it is soon—we figured we’d ride the dropping supply and still strong demand among the ultra-wealthy. We made a mint. I had gold jingling in my pockets.

“‘We could mechanize. Get a bit of a production line set up,’ Paul said to me as pulled out to sea from there with a full two tons of tiny bottles and the equipment to keep the stuff cool. I mean, we could just as easily have sat in R’lyeh harbor, and hauled up buckets of seawater, and produced caviar right there, but Van der Decken was leery about letting Cthulhu into the secret. Cthulhu just got the Beluga part of it all, so he was cool. Anything that involved whaling was good as far as he was concerned.

“So we set up a processing plant, below decks, aft. Chiller in the hold … the only issue was how we got the water to the replicator. We drilled a hole through the hull and pushed a pipe—facing forward—out of it. We’d figured wind power would push seawater up the pipe as the ship moved forward, and send the water into the input hopper, especially with the nice new cowling we’d built for it.

“It nearly worked a treat too. We were well above the waterline, and speed of the Flying Dutchman wasn’t quite enough to do more than force a trickle of water out of top of the pipe into the replicator. Still, we had caviar streaming out, as the water streamed in.

“And then the wind picked up and we had the crew in a production line canning top quality caviar, packing it on pallets, taking it to the chill-room that we had set up in the hold. We were cruising along, happily, and in business. Now that we’d got it all set up, it took us two hours to do what had taken us two weeks before.

“Still, it worked well. I figured a two week cruise, and I’d be able to retire, just before the bum fell out of the Beluga caviar market. I even got to feel quite good about what I was doing for the conservation of an endangered species.

“What I hadn’t calculated on was that output was just a fraction up on input on the replicator. The caviar was just a tiny bit less dense than the water with this salt content.

“The other thing we hadn’t thought of was that the Flying Dutchman sails the storms. Storms that take it in and out of our world. And R’lyeh is in the mighty Southern Ocean. A really stormy area. Well, Van der Decken latched onto a cracker of a storm. Wind rising, seas like mountains—the sort of thing he was absolutely at home in, and that his cursed ship could not sink in or break up in … . Or had been at home in, before we converted his ship into a caviar factory.

“With the storm-wind pushing us and Van der Decken stealing men off the canning production line to trim the sails … the Beluga caviar was building up. And with the wind starting to blow a gale … We just couldn’t keep up. Caviar was fountaining out of the output hopper. Paul tried to get to the input pipe to stop it. But the caviar had been spilling over the edge of the output and with the rolling around pitching, the pipe was half buried in lightly salted fish eggs. Some of them were even going pack into the hopper and that just made it produce faster.

“You can imagine us sliding in the fish oil from the burst caviar grains, trying to fight our way through the stuff to get to the pipe. And with the production line stopped it was just building up faster and faster. We were wading though thigh deep caviar … and that is when it really got out of hand. It was pouring pack into itself, and getting more water too, and coming out in a solid high speed stream of finest Beluga caviar. We barely got out of the processing room with our lives, and up onto the rolling deck.

“Only it was still making caviar. And it had to go somewhere. There was a back porthole in the processing room in the stern. And it was squirting out caviar, faster than a bad curry leaving. The processing room must be just about solid crushed caviar, I reckon, never mind water coming in the three inch pipe because the ship was moving forward, it was sucking water by now. We should have taken the Zevenstaart. We’d be keelhauled for this. Only … Captain Van der Decken had his own problems. Like he was no longer running before the gale. The sails weren’t pulling the ship … no, they were acting like parachute brakes. Next thing they were in tatters, and the Flying Dutchman was up on the plane, skimming and crashing through wave tops driven by her new Beluga caviar inboard jet drive. She wasn’t designed for that, and Van der Decken was having a hell of a time with the ship. But the cursed timbers couldn’t shiver apart, and the caviar had to go somewhere.

“Paul Bean says to me ‘we have to stop it somehow.’ So I asked him ‘How? The replicator seems to derive its energy from the material it passes through itself. We can’t get down there. We can barely stand up on deck.’ So we went to talk to Van der Decken. And it just got worse. He laughed at us. ‘Ja. This is finally my release. The ship, her very timbers are cursed. They cannot be broken. I cannot beach my vessel and I cannot wreck her. Do you not think I have tried, Ja-nee? She will sail the storms of the seven seas with me until der are no more seas to sail. Maybe when the water is all fish-eggs, it ends, ja. This is the end. Armageddon comes,’ he said. And the mad bastard was happy about it. So stop worrying about nukes, global warming and all the other favorite doomsdays.”

“But you’re still here?”

“Ah. But that’s another story. A longer one, involving sea serpents, gods, a goat and a monkey. Did you know that it is possible if not pleasant to swim in caviar?”

She looked very thoughtfully at me. “I think I have heard enough,” she said. “How about if we … go outside. Take the air.”

“Where to? I mean, where do you want to take the air to? We could slice it and carry it. It’s damn near solid out there. The fog is down.” Yes. I was that drunk. A beautiful woman asks you to go for a wander with her, and you argue about it.

“Oh, I think I could find a good place,” she said, standing up, showing me her legs. The mystery taxi (the one that arrives in all bars just after ten with a cargo of gorgeous women) must have arrived while we were drinking. She’d been good looking before. Enough to make me cautious. Now I followed like a lamb. Out into the darkness between the sodium glow of fog-shrouded streetlights toward Victoria dock. The cold damp air didn’t sober me enough. I thought I’d get a little closer.

Next thing I knew, I found my arm twisted up against my back, and before I could think what to do about it, she had a cable tie on my wrists. And she was pointing something looked remarkably like a gun at my head.

“What …”

“Shut up and keep walking,” she said grimly. She pulled one of those ultra-slim mobile phones out of her bra, and made a call. “This is agent Melonie Brown reporting in from the Hartlepool stakeout. I’ve apprehended one of the principal perps behind global warming, Chief Inspector Nyarlathotep. I have his confession recorded. If you can bring the transport in, please.” She slid the phone closed, put it back in its nest.

“What? You’re arresting me for causing global warming? What did I do? Fart?” I protested.

“You created one of the two principal fossil fuel pollutants by your indiscriminate use of a stolen JB3764 food replicator,” she said coldly.

“Please. Our attempt to get the do-hickey to make Beluga caviar …”

” … Resulted in suspect Van der Decken, Hendrik using a space-time anomaly to dump approximately 670 cubic kilometers of oil-precursor all over the Devonian, Silurian and Ordovician Eras, where the local dominant species had to resort to extreme measures of rapid landfill to prevent all life from dying of anoxia. This created perfect conditions for the formation of biogenic mineral oil. Now, I must ask you to come with me.”

“Where are we going?” I asked warily.

“I would have thought that was obvious. To find Paul Bean, of course.”

“Hey. Listen, this was my fault. Paul tried to stop it,” I protested.

“Perhaps. But he is still responsible for the largest coal strata on earth. We have good reason to believe he caused the downfall of Yggdrasil, the proto-tree.”

“Oh, yeah. It had a trunk the size of New Jersey. I am sure he cut it down.”

“Possibly not. However he did carve his initials, name, and date of birth into it into it in 5 foot high letters. We found them in coal measure, along with the fossil remains of a Mesosaur and a solitary piece of eight. We have reason to believe his pen-knife may have been the vector for the disease that overtook the World Tree, which had no natural defenses against something that had not yet evolved.”

We’d reached the water’s edge by then. Only this time it wasn’t Van der Decken’s longboat drifting in on the full tide.

A shape slowly rose out the water. An ominous shape. Like a Polaris submarine—but entirely different, except for the ominous part. “Welcome to the Nautilus,” she said coolly. A portal spiraled open like an iris and a telescopic walkway extended itself to the quay.

* * *

To be continued

End of the Line

Written by Holly Messinger

Illustrated by Joey Jordan

The planks of the depot trembled under Trace’s boots, as thirty tons of iron and steam snorted and wheezed to a stop alongside the platform. Small children screamed in delight or terror, depending on inclination. The air smelled of hot metal and dust, coal and creosote, horse shit and unwashed bodies. Emigrants crowded the platform, most of them carrying little more than what was on their backs, rucksacks and valises packed with dreams of winning gold or souls or fertile farmland.

The crowd surged toward the train like cattle scenting water, but the conductor held up a hand and a clipboard, shouting orders no one could hear. Trace held back; he knew from experience the third-class passengers would be loaded first, as the most unruly cargo the railroad had to handle. The second class passengers wouldn’t be let on for some minutes. He nudged the saddlebags at his feet with one toe and stole a sideways glance at Boz.

Boz was mad. His lips were buttoned up so tight the pink was almost lost in his dark skin. He was not speaking to Trace, which meant he could be silent for an entire five minutes of spite at a time.

At least the weather was pleasant—cool and light, the kind of early April day that could make you forget about the six weeks of sleet and foggy damp that came before.

Boz let out a sigh as strong as the steam engine’s. “We really gonna do this, huh?”

“Don’t see as how we have much choice,” Trace said, looking at his boots.

“Bullshit,” Boz said. “You said enough times we don’t need her money.”

Trace grunted. “Told you, you were welcome to stay behind. Find work for yourself. I won’t turn down your half of eight hundred dollars.”

Boz looked away, and Trace felt ashamed of himself. Not just because they were partners. Decent work wasn’t an easy thing for a black man to find, even in St. Louis—Boz’d probably end up in the slaughterhouse, knocking steers between the eyes with a sledge. His skills were better suited to the trail than to town life, although he would have made a fine banker if given the chance. Trace sometimes thought Boz should just cut ties and go to Kansas or California, where the rules were looser and colored folk had a fighting chance to live decent lives.

“Young man!” A trumpeting voice cut between them, followed by a short blocky man in black broadcloth. “Have you offered your soul to Jesus?”

Trace was definitely not in the mood for this. “Matter of fact I did, but He sent it back.”

The stocky man wedged himself between them, forcing Boz to take a step back. The preacher was quite red in the face, perspiring and waving a Bible under Trace’s nose. “I can tell by your clothes you live a rough life of sin and depravity,” he announced. “Scrabbling for work in one low place after another, spending your wages on drink and vice, consorting with companions of an inferior race! Turn your soul over to Jesus, man, and He will show you the path to true prosperity and life everlasting!”

“Get that book out of my face,” Trace said, in a quiet but dangerous tone. “‘Fore I show you a foretaste of hellfire.”

“Sinner!” said the preacher shrilly. “God will show you his vengeance! The day will come!”

Trace took a step forward, his fists clenched, but Boz’s hand clamped over his sleeve and pulled him away. “Come on, Boss. Ain’t worth it. They’re callin for second-class to load up.”

“He who walks with wise men will be wise,” the preacher said. “But the companion of fools will be destroyed.”

Trace swung up his bedroll from the ground. “In his own eyes he flatters himself too much to see his sin,” he said, and took satisfaction at the surprise and outrage on the man’s face.

Trace shouldered his pack and followed Boz to the edge of the platform, down onto the hard-packed earth alongside the rails. Heat radiated off the cars, reflecting the bright spring sunshine. Mostly box cars: a few passenger cars near the front, but no fancy Pullmans, the palaces-on-wheels. These cars were for transporting cattle—on two feet or four, it made no difference, except the steers had food and water troughs in their cars to prevent weight loss during transit.

The conductor punched their tickets and handed them back to Trace. “Colored car is two cars back,” he said, and waved them on.

Trace stopped where he was. “Colored car?”

“‘Less your man means to ride with the drovers,” the conductor said.

“Since when do colored folks get their own car?” Trace said.

“Since the passengers made a stink about it and the owners decided to make the passengers happy,” the conductor snapped, glaring over his little square spectacles. “Now find your car, son, before I have you banned from this train.”

Trace turned away, fuming, to meet Boz’s wooden expression. Without looking to see if Trace would follow, Boz turned on his heel and started marching down the platform.

Trace hustled after him. “Where you goin’?”

“Where they put me.”

“Don’t you take that from the likes of him. You paid for a second-class ticket—”

“And that’s what I am,” Boz said, no rancor in him at all. He said it calm, reasonable, as easily as he might have said his shirt was red. “In their eyes.” He inclined his head slightly toward the line of people moving onto the train.

“Shit, Boz, don’t say that.”

Boz shrugged with one shoulder. “Don’t change me none. ‘Sides, I go sit back there I don’t get some swell spittin’ on my hat as he passes by.”

“Yeah, but—” Trace’s eye was caught by movement between two cars, the bent-over shape of a switchman lifting a massive link with one hand and shoving the pin home with the other. “—if you give an inch, pretty soon they’ll take a foot, and next thing you know coloreds’ll make themselves slaves again without anybody …”

Trace’s voice trailed off, as the switchman finished his chore and stood upright, half in the shadow of the car on his right: that part of him was solid. His left leg, shoulder and arm were in the sun and they were ephemeral, transparent. The dead man turned, as if sensing Trace’s notice, and Trace winced to see the grotesque twisting of his torso, the dragging of the useless leg from a crushed pelvis, the chest pinched nearly in two when a foot had slipped, or the signal came too late, or the eye misjudged.

Trace looked quickly away, suppressing a shudder. Injury and blood didn’t bother him; the idea of getting lost between heaven and hell did.

“What?” Boz demanded, noticing the flinch. It wasn’t all that long since he’d found out about Trace’s curse, and he got spooked every time Trace twitched, even if it was just horseflies. “You see somethin’?”

“Railroads,” Trace said shortly. “Graveyards on wheels.”

“Shit,” Boz said. That had been his comment on everything for the past day and a half, ever since Trace announced he had a new job from Miss Fairweather, and he was going to take it. He stared at the space between the cars for several moments, while Trace tried not to look. “You reckon that’s why she’s sendin’ us?”

“Me, Boz.” Trace drew a deep breath of iron-tinted air that tasted like blood. “She’s sendin’ me. You don’t have to come.”

Boz looked shocked, then wounded. “Is that any way to talk to me?”

“It’s me she wants,” Trace said, embarrassed by the words, their simultaneous arrogance and complicity. “I don’t know why, but—” It was hard to explain. He knew Miss Fairweather had sought him out because he could see the dead, but he didn’t know yet what she wanted from him, and her answers were slippery. “I just got a feelin’ this is gonna get bad.”

“Then why you doin’ it?” Boz said. “All your talk about not movin’ over, not givin’ an inch—how come that don’t apply to you and Miz Fairweather? How come you’re lettin’ her push you?”

* * *

He’d tried. God knew he’d tried to find other work. There just wasn’t that much wagon traffic going out of St. Louis these days. Even the folks headed for Oregon rode the rails as far as they could, then outfitted in Colorado or Dakota Territory. The papers said the line from Utah to Oregon would be finished in three years, and that would pretty much be the end of Trace’s trail-guide days.

He’d even asked around the stockyards, offering himself as a drover or extra hand for the branding, but for the first time in memory there were too many hands, too many men like himself, displaced by the war and the depression, come from the south looking for work; come from the north looking for opportunity. All of them seemed to cross paths in St. Louis.

But he wasn’t taking any more of Miss Fairweather’s money. He and Boz were agreed on that. Her money was tainted, bloodied, and the things she asked them to do could put a man’s soul in danger, let alone his life.

Miss Fairweather was clever, though, and patient. She knew money wasn’t what Trace wanted most. When her first two letters failed to elicit a reaction, she sent a third, hand-delivered by that Chinese of hers to Jamison’s Post and General: Please come by at your earliest convenience. I have been investigating your condition and may be able to help you.

The bitch. She knew nothing would fetch him faster. In the first years after the war, he’d sought out carny fortune-tellers and parlor spiritualists and even a hoodoo woman down in Lafayette, hoping to find one who could tell him how to get rid of his “condition,” or at least control it, but all of them had been frauds or fools. Miss Fairweather was different: she had sought him out because of his gift, she seemed to know something about it, and Trace could not let that go until he had wrung some answers out of her, though it seemed more like she was the one doing the wringing.

He fought her lure for two more weeks, a fortnight of approaching men with wagons, shaking hands and offering his services, hearing again and again, We’re going by rail, or worse, If you’d just gotten here a couple weeks ago.

Then he met the Baptist.

Kingsley was his name, Martin Kingsley, taking a couple dozen Bible-thumpers out to save the souls of the settlers in Oregon. John Jamison got the story from them while they were rigging out at his store, and he passed along Trace’s name as a guide—Jamison was good like that, reliable.

Trace set out to meet Kingsley’s party with a lightened heart, thinking it was a sign—this was the job he needed, a source of nourishment and a shield against temptation. He didn’t even mind they were Baptists.

Kingsley seemed a decent fellow, small and sturdy like a little Mexican burro, with a round jolly face and serious blue eyes. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, shaking Trace’s hand. “I hear you’ve made this trip a few times before.”

“Three years in a row,” Trace said. “Had the same partner through all of it—used to be a supplies sergeant in the army.” He always neglected at this point to say Boz had served in one of the Negro regiments. “He can take a look at your supplies, fit you out proper. Save you time and space both.”

“That’s mighty kind of you,” Kingsley said, shaking his head. “It’s just a shame to have to tell you this—hate to waste your time, since I indicated to Mr. Jamison we’d be needing your services …”

Trace’s heart seemed to sink into his liver.

“It’s just we received a love donation last night … from a sister in faith. She had her servant deliver it specially, because she’s in poor health and can’t travel. She purchased railway tickets for the entire party and our cargo, so we could arrive at our destination and set up our mission that much faster. She even offered a generous portion for building our church in the wilderness—”

It was the words in poor health that roused Trace’s suspicions—she’d used that same excuse with him. “This servant—was he Chinese, speaks real good English?”

“Why, yes. Do you know Sister Fairweather?”

Trace nearly choked, trying to keep the harsh laughter in his throat. “She’s a regular angel of mercy.”

* * *

Trace had never been one to claim all Orientals looked alike, but he would admit to some difficulty at reading their faces. He could have sworn Miss Fairweather’s manservant was smirking as he showed Trace into her house.

Miss Fairweather’s house was one of the finest and oldest in St. Louis. It had been built by a cattleman around 1830, and bought by a railroad man just after the war. The railroad man had died young, and the place stood vacant for nearly a decade before his wife’s family sold it.

It was large and grand and dark, in the quiet, still way of a mausoleum. Trace had already seen one spirit in it. He took care to keep his eyes on the Chinaman’s back as they walked deeper into the recesses of the house.

They climbed to the third floor, then up a narrow staircase into what had surely been servants’ quarters at one time. The door at the top, however, opened into a large, bright, open room that ran the entire back half of the house. The sudden onslaught of sunlight made Trace blink.

The north face of the roof was entirely glass, sealed with lead between the panes, braced by girders that slanted back into the gables. Trace looked up into the overcast sky. The clouds rushing overhead teased his balance and he grabbed the nearest cabinet for support.

There were a great many cabinets along the wall, and wide trestle tables down the center of the room. Some of these were wood, painted black, but one was a single slab of white marble, and another supported a shining tin basin as big as a wagon bed.

All manner of curious objects surrounded him: glass apothecary’s jars, bins and boxes, glass tubes and rubber hoses. Against the wall opposite the glass ceiling was a row of cages and tanks, in which small creatures flopped and fluttered and whistled.

Trace had seen Miss Fairweather’s library, he knew she had a capable and curious mind, but he’d had no inkling of this. He moved deeper into the room, trying to look at everything at once. The animals chattered at his approach.

About halfway down the inner wall was a fireplace with extended wings, onto which was grafted a network of ovens and copper piping. Trace bent close to it, intrigued by the high-supported water casket and the leather bellows built into the hearth. It seemed water was heated in a copper drum over the fire, from which steam could be directed through various conduits, either to the tin basin or the marble table. Above the water drum, a vent opened every few seconds to let out a puff of scalding vapor.

He touched one porcelain valve handle with the tip of his finger and it turned easily, letting a spill of water into the tin basin behind him. He heard it patter on the metal, and turned to see it run down a series of grooves, to a trough at the end of the basin, and down a tube into the floor.

A throat cleared gently behind him, and Trace stood up fast, guiltily, as if she had caught him peeping in her window.

Miss Fairweather was tiny and pale, with thin wrists and colorless lips. She wore her fair hair scraped back in a knot, as if she were too impatient to do anything else with it. Her gowns tended to be dark: of fine cloth and workmanship, but plain in design and trim. Trace was beginning to understand why.

“So good to see you again, Mr. Tracy,” she said, a touch of mockery in her voice. Her eyes were pale and reflected the gray of the sky. “I was beginning to think you had taken a dislike to me.”

Trace licked his lips. It wasn’t in him to be uncivil to a lady’s face, whatever he might think of her in his mind. His indignantly prepared accusations seemed to leave him. “This is a, uh, interestin’ place you got here.”

“I find it so,” she agreed. “Do you?”

“Ma’am?”

“Are you interested in the study of natural science?”

Trace worried his hat in his hands. “I don’t guess I ever thought about it.” In his youth he had spent too much time preparing for the next world to contemplate this one, but a few years of trail riding had turned his attention the other way. “Don’t suppose I’d be much of a trail guide if I didn’t know a bit about the beasts of the field.”

She smiled her chilly smile. “Well put, Mr. Tracy. I wonder if you would give me your opinion on this specimen I’ve acquired.” She inclined her head for him to follow.

Trace didn’t. “You said you had somethin’ to tell me?”

She stopped, head cocked like one of the birds in the cages. “Did I?”

“In your letter. The one you sent through Jamison’s store.” She was looking at him with polite inquiry, and Trace squirmed like a schoolboy. “You said you’d been investigatin’ my condition …”

“Your condition? Are you ill?”

Trace clenched his jaw. She was toying with him, that was all, trying to make him look foolish, or maybe wanting him to beg for her help. He locked his teeth together and glared at her.

“I think you’ll be interested in this,” she said, turning again toward the far corner of the room, which was swathed in black fabric like a tent. Her sleeve brushed the cages along the wall, and Trace noticed all the birds crouched and fell silent as she passed, the furred animals retreating into corners and balling up.

He followed her into the black tent in the corner, having to bend almost double to pass under the flap she held up for him. The interior was dark and close, lit by a small electric lantern with a pierced tin hood. As soon as she dropped the tent flap, something swooped at his head.

“What the devil—” He ducked and swatted at it with his hat, caught something small and light in the crown of it. He peered into the hat, reached for the small crawling thing, but she put a hand on his wrist.

“You don’t want to do that. I can’t be certain this group isn’t rabid.”

Bats. Trace snatched his hand back and shook the thing out of his hat. Bats. He looked up, saw the flickering of wings darting from one corner tent pole to the other. Unconcerned, Miss Fairweather crossed to a worktable, on which rested a long glass box, like the display cases in Jamison’s store. There was a single bat in this case, small and drab. Trace had seen plenty of them on the prairie, especially down near the Mexico border, while droving cattle.

“That’s a bloodsucker,” he said.

“Indeed. Desmodus rotundus, in the Latin. A torment to livestock in the southern parts of this continent.” She drew on a pair of cattleman’s heavy gloves as she spoke. “There are thousands of species of bats all over the world, but this one appears to be unique in its method of locomotion. Not only can it fly, which is remarkable enough in a mammal, but it can also run. Observe.”

She reached into a small canister beside the glass case and drew out a bit of something red and dripping—liver, by the smell. She opened a small door on top of the case and dropped the morsel inside, leaving a smear of blood down the side of the glass.

In a flash, the bat in the cage leapt toward the treat, levering the bony tips of its wings on the floor and swinging its hind legs between, like a man on two crutches, covering an amazing amount of distance in a single stride. Four leaps and it was to the end of the case, hunkered over the dark tidbit, pale tongue lapping eagerly. Other bats swooped down from the ceiling, drawn by the smell of the blood. Miss Fairweather slipped off the gloves and dropped them on top of the case.

“It’s an extraordinarily efficient means of travel,” she said. “Twice the length of its body in a single leap. Imagine the distance a human could cover at that speed. It’s almost a pity our limbs aren’t proportioned for it—look here.”

She reached across the box and lifted a small tray into the circle of electric light. In the tray was another of the animals, wings stretched wide and pinned to the cork beneath it, teeth bared in a rictus of agony.

Its torso had been neatly flayed to the bones, the skin and muscle pinned open like a show curtain. Trace could clearly see its heart fluttering.

He recoiled. “Is it alive?”

“Of course. Observe the connection of the long muscles, across the breastbone to the wing—where a man’s pectoral muscles are located.”

Trace had a sudden revolting image of a man pinned just so on her tin-topped table, cut open like a rabbit but without its neck broke first.

“Its shoulder and back muscles are terrifically strong—designed for flight, but also serving well to propel it along the ground.” She took up a tool, slender and pointy, and jabbed it into the creature’s tiny armpit, causing a jerk of the wing and a squeak.

Disturbed, Trace turned away. There was a small folding table beside the door-flap, on which rested a kerosene lamp and a flurry of papers. A notebook, half-full of Miss Fairweather’s spidery handwriting, lay pinned open by a crystal paperweight and a stack of pamphlets. The top pamphlet showed a man in a greatcoat, the capes ruffling like crow’s feathers, his face distorted in an animal grin as he menaced the young lady beside him. Varney the Vampyre, was the title.

“The physiology of this animal is of course merely coincidental to my work,” Miss Fairweather said. He heard her skirts rustle as she moved closer behind him. “I am studying the transmission of diseases borne in the blood. A fascinating subject, though frustrating, as it is continually bound up in myth and superstition.” She watched as Trace lifted the Varney booklet. It was old and yellow, messily printed, with a price of two pence in the upper corner. “A good example of type—that particular drivel was serialized for almost three years, widely read by the masses in London. Do you know nearly every culture in the world has a myth about evil creatures or spirits that drink blood? Even the ancients recognized the necessity of blood to life. Nearly every culture has a taboo against its consumption, except those which permit it in ritual. You may have that booklet, if you wish. I have finished with it.”

Trace looked at her. “Ma’am, I don’t mean to be rude, but do you have a job for me, or not?”

Her eyes narrowed in on him, coolly amused, pitiless as a hawk’s. He had the feeling she was poised with a sharp tool, examining him for a soft place to stab.

“Have you engaged in any further communications with the spirit world,” she asked, “since we last spoke?”

Trace dragged his gaze away from hers. He saw spirits all the time—whether he was looking or not. They seldom spoke to him, and when they did he tried not to answer. People tended to wind up dead if he did. “Not that would interest you,” he said.

She made an amused sound and flung back the tent’s black curtain. Trace’s eyes watered at the sudden light, but he followed her out. She crossed to one of the black trestle tables and pulled a folded paper parcel from under a landslide of foolscap. “Rest your mind, Mr. Tracy, the assignment I have for you should not involve any communication with the dead. Unless you perhaps think it will help.” She gave him a thoughtful look, then a tiny shrug and spread out the contents of the packet as he moved closer to see. “This is the proposed path of the Union Pacific’s Short Line to Oregon—you were aware of its construction?”

“Yeah.” Damn right he was. When it was done he’d have to find a new job.

“Teams of workers are carving a path for it through the northern Rockies—mostly Chinese immigrants, a few Irish, living in mobile camps that progress along with the grading and track-laying crews. This is, of course, one of the last holdouts of the Native American Indian—I believe there are still Ute and Shoshone living wild in these mountains?”

“Last I heard.”

“In recent months there have been several attacks on the worker’s camps. The railroad managers blame it on Indians or wild animals, but the attacks are too random for the former, too well-organized for the latter.”

Trace felt a sudden mad urge to laugh. “And you want me to go find out what it is.”

“Not exactly, Mr. Tracy. I want you to bring back a specimen.”

* * *

The seat vibrated under Trace’s butt as the engine continued its grind up the gentle grade, ever higher across the Plains before the final lurching mount over the Rockies.

The emigrant sleeper car smelled of sweat and smoke, stale farts and tobacco, burnt coffee and dust. Always dust—it eked in through the windows even when they weren’t open, blew in through the sliding car doors as the porters came and went. Trace’s ears and nostrils felt coated with the constant grit of it; it was ground into his skin beneath his collar. His handkerchief and towel were stained yellow with it.

There were thirty-four souls in his car, eight of them children. The littlest ones had been restless and cranky at first, weary of the long confinement, but after seven days they were broken-spirited, listless, hanging over their seats, sitting in the aisles, staring out the windows.

The adults weren’t in much better shape. Everyone had been chatty and excited across Kansas, exchanging names, handshakes, hometowns, dreams and photos if they were to be had. The two families with children were meeting relatives out west, as were some of the single men and one newlywed couple. Twelve of Trace’s fellow passengers were the Baptists, including Martin Kingsley and the importunate little fellow from the St. Louis depot, who was called Brother Clark. Kingsley was gracious and apologetic, glad to hear that Trace had found other employment and professing delight at finding themselves on the same train.

“You have an honest face, sir,” Kingsley said to Trace. “If you find yourself in need of lodging or company when we reach Seattle, please know you’re welcome to join our camp.”

“Thanks,” Trace said, pretending not to hear Brother Clark’s sniff.

Weary though they were of the confinement—and Trace was probably worse off than most, since he was a head and foot too tall for the seats and sleeper bunks—it was hell and away easier than hauling wagons and oxen through rocks and gulleys and swollen rivers. He’d made this trip three times before, taken two solid months to cover the distance they’d ridden in six days. It boggled the mind.

Not that they didn’t have adventures along the way. They had wasted a half-day in St. Joseph, sitting and fuming on a side track, while their engine was changed out, stock cars were uncoupled and new cars linked on. At each depot and whistle-stop, there was a mad scramble off the train for food and privy breaks, and there was never enough time for both. More than once, passengers paid in advance for a meal and heard the all-aboard blow before they could consume it. After the fourth time this happened, Trace saw the father of the three smallest children seize a whole turkey off a serving platter, tuck the bird stuffing-and-all under his arm, and thrust his free hand into his coat pocket as if he had a pistol. The man and his family backed hastily out the door and made a clean getaway back to the car, where they divided their booty with as much whooping as a tribe of red Indians.

Trace had learned during his army days that the best meals to be had were from local farmers, who hawked their wares at each depot. The prices were outrageous, but he had more than a hundred dollars in his pocket, the advance paid to him by Miss Fairweather, and he spent her largess on bread and milk, hard-boiled eggs and cheese, sausage and the odd bit of pastry. It was too early in the year for fresh produce, but one farmer’s wife sold him a pint each of pickled beets and tomatoes, which he shared with Boz.

Boz seemed enviably comfortable in the colored car, where all the passengers were men and no one cared if the others took off their boots and vests or smoked cigars. The short, railed balcony outside the colored car was also more comfortable than the gentleman’s lounge in the second-class car. Out here was fresh air, and room to straighten his aching knees, and no raised eyebrows if he chose to smoke and socialize with his friend.

Trace was no stranger to the rough beauty of the Rockies, but always before there had been the need to hurry, to worry about nightfall and snowfall and rockfall. Now there was only to ride, and look, and try not to think about the possibilities of damnation and torture on a tin-topped table. The mountains were blue and regal, capped with snow and gilt with gold that made him think God’s grace still touched the earth.

“This is a lot easier than the last time we came this way,” Boz said, echoing Trace’s thoughts.

“Yep.” He took a long drag on his stub of cigar, the last one Miss Fairweather had given him. She had given him cigars when he set out on the last job for her, as well. He wondered if it was her way of giving a condemned man a last smoke.

“What’s eatin’ you tonight?” Boz asked.

“We’re gettin’ close,” Trace said. “Furthest of the attacks was just south of Eagle Rock.”

“Oh, that. Can’t see as we’ve got anything to worry about on a movin’ train. When we get off at the next stop, then I’ll start worryin’.”

“Fair ‘nuff.”

The wind filled their ears for a few minutes. Then Boz said, “We catch this killer, how we supposed to fetch it back to her?”

“Dunno,” Trace said. “Figure on crossin’ that bridge when we come to it.”

“It’s got to be omething’ human. Indians tearin’ up the bodies to look like animals.”

“You ever see Indians do that while you were ridin’ with the Ninth?”

“No.” Boz exhaled smoke. “Indians like to mark their kills. But they ain’t stupid. You put anybody in a corner they fight harder. Figure they got no strength left, they fight dirty.”

“Most things do,” Trace agreed.

The back door of the emigrants’ car opened, and a man stepped out onto the short railed balcony—Mr. Flanders was his name, with his little daughter Tess on his arm. They were both bundled up warm, and the little girl squealed with delight, flapping her hands at the fresh air and the bright sunset. The wind whipped her fine curls around her face.

“That ain’t all of it, though,” Trace said after a while.

Boz followed his line of sight. “The passengers?”

“Yeah.”

“You know for sure she was the one bought their tickets?”

“She owned up to it,” Trace said grimly. “Said she tried to help the less fortunate, and give to good causes, and encourage the civilization of the West, and a lot of other horse shit. Then she said, ‘I know you won’t let those poor people ride into danger unknowing and unprotected.’”

“Shit,” Boz said, with horrified awe. “You told me that in the first place, I wouldn’t’a rode you about it.”

“Huh.” Trace rolled the cigar between his fingertips. There was more to it than that, but he didn’t want to pursue the issue of his malleability where Miss Fairweather was concerned. Not yet. “She might’ve been bluffin’. What she told me about these attacks is true, they ain’t attacked any of the passengers nor inside the towns, yet.”

“But she ain’t always told us everything straight.”

“No,” Trace agreed. He took a last long drag and flicked the butt over the railing.

* * *

Trace couldn’t sleep that night. Not that sleeping on a train was ever a sure thing, what with the cramped space and continual jostling, but tonight his mind would not rest. He wasn’t worried. He wasn’t preoccupied. He was simply awake.

After a while he turned on his side and pulled back the curtains of the sleeping berth to let in the small amount of light from the oil lamp overhead. He reached for his vest, hanging on the hook outside, and felt around until he found the little Varney pamphlet folded in the breast pocket.

He hadn’t intended to keep it. It was pretty awful reading and only included chapter eighty-eight, so it was impossible to make heads or tails of the story, except that some foreign feller named Lord Varney was a vampyre and the rest of the characters were too silly to do anything about it.

Miss Fairweather’s notes in the margins were far more intriguing.

Commonalities:

Consmptn. of blood

Exceptional strength

Nocturnal/sunlight averse reactn

Diff. to kill; possbl purifying methds—fire, water, pure metals/woods, medicnl garlic, salt?

She’d claimed to be studying diseases of the blood, and dismissed the vampyre myth as superstitious nonsense, but as Boz had noted, she seldom told him anything straight. She did seem to tell him things for a reason, but he usually had to puzzle out the reasoning for himself.

She wanted a specimen, she’d been studying bloodsucking bats, and she’d given him this story about a bloodsucking man—because she suspected he’d find something like?

Trace let out a soft chuckle that was equal parts disbelief and admiration. If she’d told him straight out he was going hunting for a giant vampire bat, he’d have told her she was crazy.

“Is it a joke you can share?” a voice asked softly, and Trace looked up to see he was being observed. Miss Eliza, Martin Kingsley’s unmarried sister, had the berth across from Trace. Her curtain was likewise open, her long hair falling over her shoulder in its braid, her head in her hand.

She was younger than her brother, but a few years older than Trace, with a face round and smooth as a girl’s. Her dark hair had a single long streak of silver, sweeping from her right temple back into the braid. Her eyes were warm in the lamp-light.

“Not a joke, just a bit of foolishness,” he said, stretching to hand the little book across the aisle.

She looked it over slowly, turned a few pages, an amused curl to her lips. “I used to love these penny dreadfuls when I was a girl,” she said. “Fairies and ghosts, especially. When Father would give me pennies for the collection plate, I always held one back. Then when I had stolen enough, I bought a book in secret.” She passed Varney back to Trace. “Are you quite shocked?”

“You’re a downright reprobate, Miss Eliza,” he said.

She chuckled. “I’ll be glad when we reach Seattle. Even though the hardest part is still to come, at least I’ll be occupied again. This forced idleness is maddening.”

“Have to agree with you there.”

“Why are you going to Oregon, Mr. Tracy? My brother said you’d found work, but you didn’t tell him what it was.”

“I’m supposed to bring back some cargo for a rich lady in St. Louis,” Trace said, and paused. “Doubt I’ll even go all the way to Oregon.”

“I wish you would. Martin thinks highly of you, and you seem to be a practical man. We have a lot of zeal, but not a great deal of practice at living in the wilderness.” She sighed. “I sometimes think my brother’s zeal outweighs his good sense. Now you mustn’t tell him I said that.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, ma’am.”

“Yes.” She looked at him closely. “You’re good at keeping secrets, aren’t you?”

He smiled. “What are you, a mind-reader?”

“I used to know a man like you,” she said, with an answering smile.

“Uh-huh. You’ve got a few secrets of your own, then.”

“Mmm.” She lowered her eyes, and Trace felt a sneaky, distant pang of desire for her—not only her flesh, but what she represented: God and home and sanctity. Children, maybe. A life more settled, less haunted. He crushed the ache, ground it into numbness with a mental boot heel. Not for him, not again. Bad enough he’d brought Boz into his purgatory.

At the end of the car, someone snorted, turned over. A child whimpered. Trace couldn’t see outside, as the berths opened out flat above the windows, but it seemed someone had left the shutters open, because moonlight was spilling onto the floor near the head of the car, where the ladies’ saloon was.

The moon’s on the wrong side of the train, he thought, and then the eeriest sensation slid over him.

Often when he saw a spirit, he felt it before he saw it, or before he realized it wasn’t just an ordinary live person. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck would stand up, as if there was lightning in the air. Lying there in the upper berth of a sleeper car, staring at the moonlight on the floor, Trace felt a sort of pull, like the falling sensation that comes just before sleep. He wasn’t asleep, though—his skin tingled all over with that familiar electric charge, sounds and smells were sharper, and his vision cleared as if a veil had been dropped from his eyes. The pale glow on the floor rose into the air and spread, expanding, taking form.

Trace’s mouth went dry. The moonlight was forming itself into the shapes of men—small men, with long braids and round hats on their heads, slight bodies and flat faces. A whole score of Chinamen rose out of the pooling moonlight and walked—silent, without seeming to touch the floor—toward the back of the car.

They passed right under Trace’s nose, the tops of their heads just even with the bottom of his berth. He watched with his mouth open, unafraid but in awe, and with the dawning realization that the alertness in his mind had been waiting for just such an occurrence.

Then one of them stopped and looked up at him. It pointed back toward the engine-end of the car, its mouth moving, but Trace couldn’t make out what it said. The Chinaman seemed to be shouting, the words coming at him in pulses like the whistle of a train across a great distance. Shang-shee, it said. Shang-shee.

“What?” Trace said. “I can’t understand.”

“Mr. Tracy? Jacob?”

Trace blinked. The car was dark, except for the oil lamps, and Miss Eliza was giving him the oddest look.

“Are you all right?” she said.

And the train whistle began to blow.

The sound was eerie, nightmarish. It echoed off the foothills and bounced back at them, whooo-whooo-whooo-whooo, like a deep-voiced mechanical owl. Then a single short whoop.

Obstruction on the tracks. Apply brakes.

“Holy God,” Trace said.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Lie down,” he said, hopping to the floor and grabbing for his boots. “Curl up in a ball. Put your pillow over your head and hold it down.”

“What?”

“Just do it!” Trace wedged his foot into the second boot, glad he hadn’t undressed, pulled the suspenders over his shoulders and yanked his gun belt from under his pillow. He hadn’t stashed the Colt with the bedroll, preferring to err on the side of caution, and now he was damn glad he had. The porter was approaching, making hushing gestures and telling him not to start a panic, and all over the car people were sitting up, muttering at the noise, children wailing—

“Shut up!” Trace bellowed over the porter. “You all listen to me now! Curl up on your bunk with your feet braced on the front wall! Put your pillow over your head and try to hold on to the posts!”

He grabbed the porter and flung him into the lower berth alongside Brother Clark, just as there was an awful, screaming, squalling roar that started at the front of the train and progressed backward, shuddering through the car as if the tracks themselves were shaking off their burden. Trace wedged himself in the aisle, bracing his hands and feet against the columns between the berths like Samson in the garden of the Philistines.

He was sure, later, that the collision must’ve made one hell of a bang, when the second-class car struck the mail car in front of it. He just didn’t remember hearing it. The back end of the car bucked like an ornery bronc and Trace was flung forward, his fingers torn from the columns. He landed on his chin and slid down the smooth-polished length of the aisle to end up in a heap next to the wood stove.

He did hear the screaming then, and the tinkling of broken glass and luggage bouncing off bunks and shelves to the floor. A series of blows shook the car, accompanied by the deafening and then diminishing BANGbangbang of each car behind them colliding.

At last the tremors stopped. The children were wailing and no few of the adults. Trace lay where he was for a minute, gripping the wall and floor with ten sprained fingers, checking to make sure he was still alive. The back end of the car was elevated, propped up on the colored car behind it, so he was cradled in the join of the floor to the front door. All manner of trash, luggage, hats, toys, bottles, garbage, and thirty pairs of shoes had slid down to the front of the car and buried him alive. He heard a pop, felt a flash of heat, and looked up to see a woolen stocking had fallen on the stove and burst into flame.

He reached out and flipped the stocking into the ash bin, where it lay smoldering. Then he carefully sat up, shaking off bits of refuse and old luncheons. His hand went automatically to his hip; the Colt was still in its holster. He could taste blood, his front lip was mashed, but no teeth were missing. His jaw felt like he’d been punched.

He got to his knees. The floor sloped up away from him, not too steep to walk but barely; all the oil lamps swung precariously on their hooks. People were trying to get out of their bunks, finding it hard to stand, casting about for clothes and belongings, calling out as to the whereabouts and welfare of companions. The porter was telling everyone to be calm, in a high and panicky voice. Brother Clark was praying and braying like a donkey.

Trace put a hand on the wall behind him, used it for leverage to stand. The front door of the car was buckled inward, about halfway up. He tried the handle and it broke off in his hand.

That left the back door or the windows. Trace started up the slope of the floor, straddling the aisle with his long legs to step up each alternating berth leg, gently but firmly pushing emigrants out of his way. “Stay down,” he told them. “Stay in your bunk. We’ll get the conductor down here, get the car settled down again. You just stay put.”

He walk-climbed as far as Miss Eliza’s berth, with Brother Clark and the porter underneath. Martin Kingsley had managed to reach his sister, and they both seemed unhurt and collected in wit.

“Are you all right, Mr. Tracy?” Sister Eliza asked. “You were thrown some distance.”

“Nothin’ broken,” he reported. “Can you see to those that are hurt? Try to get them up, get them dressed. Might have to get everybody off this train.”

”Nobody’s leaving this train until the conductor says so,” the porter piped up. “The safety and comfort of the passengers is the responsibility of—”

“That’s what I said.” Trace gripped the young man by his jacket and set him upright in the aisle. “You and me are gonna go find the conductor, ain’t we?”

“I’m not supposed to—”

“Come on, son.” Trace pushed the porter ahead of him, whacked him on the posterior when he slipped on the slant. They clambered up the aisle to the back door. “There any firearms on this train?”

“Firearms? Only the conductor and the engineer are allowed to—”

“Hush,” Trace said, holding up a hand and listening. Someone was knocking and scraping on the folding door. The handle moved and the door buckled open a couple of inches. Several sets of brown human fingers curled into the opening. Trace added his to the effort, braced his feet against the wall of the gentlemen’s privy, and shoved.

The door slammed back with a splintering of wood and screaming of metal. There was a whoop from outside, and five Negro faces clustered around the opening, Boz’s foremost among them.

“Knew that’d be you,” he said, grinning, although Trace saw the raw edges of relief rimming his eyes. They handed him out, then the porter, and Trace stepped carefully down the mangled iron railing and dropped to the gravel of the track bed.

The colored car had not suffered much damage: only its front end was stove in. Trace’s car was tipped up, as was the mail car in front of it, and the coal car before that was wrenched nearly crosswise to the rails. The engine was still on the track, but its cabin had been crushed by the coal car, and the boiler was sending squalling jets of steam into the air.

“Folks behind us didn’t get much more than a bump,” Boz said, gesturing with a thumb toward the third-class car. “All behind that’s freight.”

Trace could hear the cattle bawling. Closer up, the third-class passengers were hanging out their windows and exclaiming. And approaching, they heard the rhythmic crunch of boots on gravel, dark figure jogging in the moonlight along the pale line of the track bed. Trace and Boz both reached for their guns.

“Ho there! Anyone hurt?” The running figure was human, and carrying a rifle; as he got closer they recognized the conductor, in his short white collar and spectacles. He jogged to a stop beside them. “You’re not my brakemen. What are you doing off the train?”

“I told them!” the porter protested, climbing down from the mangled balcony. “I told them not to—”

“Shut up, Willie,” the conductor said. “Anyone hurt on your cars?” he said to Trace and Boz, who replied in the negative. “Good, then get back on board and stay out of our way.” He turned, scanning the top of the train for men who weren’t there. He lifted a whistle, on a cord around his neck, and blew several short blasts.

They listened. Nothing answered, except a far-off crack that might have been thunder, and a yelp that might have been a coyote.

“Gunshot,” Trace said.

“Somethin’ like,” Boz agreed.

The conductor gave him a look of dislike. “Get back on your car, boy, I’m not telling you again. Willie, you come with me.”

Willie gave Trace a triumphant look and trotted off after the conductor toward the smoking engine. Trace looked at Boz, then at the colored men who hunkered on the roof and railing of the demolished emigrant car. “You men heeled, any of you?”

A few of them were, with revolvers. One man said there was a shotgun in his baggage.

“Get it,” Trace said. “Stay on watch up there.” He turned and started up the grade after the conductor.

Boz followed. “What is it?”

“Don’t know. But the spirits on this train don’t like it none.”

The wind was cold and the air thin. They weren’t yet in the mountains, but this was definitely higher land. The sky was bright with stars and the moon coming and going behind clouds. Bare-headed and in shirt sleeves, Trace could feel the chill on his skin, but it wasn’t getting through to his blood. His heart was thudding hard and slow, and his senses still had that sharp clarity.

The engine cabin was flat as a flapjack and burning.

“Earl!” the conductor bawled into the dark. “Tommy?”

“They woulda jumped,” Boz said, low. “Can’t be far.”

“What’d we hit?” Trace wanted to know.

They trotted to the front of the tracks, stepping over bits of coal and smoldering wood. A sizeable cairn of rocks had been piled across the tracks—from the depth and extent of the scattered debris, Trace guessed the pile must’ve been half as high as the engine.

“Not a slide, either,” he muttered, looking up and around. There was plenty of stone on the ground, but they weren’t in an area where it was likely to fall. And there was no tell-tale skid of gravel on the bed above, either. None of the stones was bigger than a man’s head. “These were put here by hand.”

“You hear somethin’?” Boz asked, head cocked, and started off into the dark.

They found the fireman not ten yards from the train, trying to crawl back through the shale and juniper brush. He was sobbing in that broken, wheezy way Trace remembered from Antietam; his shirt was wet and sticky when Trace touched his shoulder.

“Easy, fella, we got you,” Trace said, turning the man onto his back in Boz’s arms. The fireman began to scream immediately, and bat at them with his shredded hands. His face was dark and shiny in the moonlight, black with blood that seemed to be coming from his scalp. The rest of him was shaking and cold, the breath rattling in his throat. “Conductor! We got your man down here!”

There was a skidding and scuffling as the conductor and Willie scrambled down the grade; Willie’s lantern threw shards of light over the ground and the chewed-up fellow between them.

“Tommy!” the conductor said, dropping to one knee. “Tommy, what happened? Where’s Earl?”

The fireman gurgled, hands falling slack away from the conductor’s coat. His sleeves had been torn off, and there was a big chunk of meat missing out of his forearm. In the lamplight they could see a flap of torn scalp dangling over his forehead, and one eye was gone. It looked like a bear had bitten into his head.

Trace met Boz’s eyes, read the question there, and stood up, looking back toward the train.

“What was it, Tommy?” the conductor asked. “Wolves? Did they get Earl?”

Trace squinted. The windows of the passenger cars glowed dimly from the lamps; he could just make out people moving inside. Two men paced the roof of the colored car, keeping watch. One of them had a spark of fire in his hand, which he raised to his lips.

Something dark was slinking up the gravel grade to the tracks. Something blacker than the sky, darker than the shadows. It moved low to the ground, crawling like a frog but much faster, the size of a man. Another one, behind it. Two more—two cars down. Converging on the train.

Trace skinned the Colt and shot the nearest one.

He knew he hit it. It wasn’t a far shot and he saw the thing flinch—worse than that, he felt it squeal, a metal-on-metal shriek that seemed to pierce his skull.

But it jumped—all the black shapes did, and scattered like roaches running from daylight. The men on the roof jumped, too, spun around and looked toward them.

“Back to the train,” Trace said. “Now.”

“Son, I’ve got a man down here and at least five missing,” the conductor snapped.

“Your train is under attack, mister, and that man’s bled out.” Trace thumbed another cartridge into the Colt’s chamber as he spoke, backing away up the grade, Boz already running for the tracks. “Unless you want to lose more passengers you’d best—”

There was a scream, up near the tracks. Cracks of gunfire followed, sounding thin and puny in the wind. Trace turned and hightailed it up the slope.

He saw the two men go down off the roof of the colored car—one flipped out flat as if his legs had been pulled from under him, and the other jumped. More gunfire came from the other side of the train, and a high, terrified scream. He saw Boz’s familiar form ahead of him, leaping across the link between the colored car and the one behind it, and Trace angled his steps to follow but then saw one of those black shapes appear on top of the second-class car.

It perched on the upthrust edge of the roof for a moment, hunkered like a mountain cat or a circus monkey. Its shape was more or less human—head, shoulders, arms—but there was something bestial in its movements and the arch of its back, the way it crouched over its legs. It swung its head to one side, and then there was another beside it, and another, and a fourth.

Trace slowed his steps, watching while they pushed and jostled at each other. They seemed to be talking amongst themselves, like a crowd of young toughs egging each other to take a dare. They nudged the first toward the edge of the roof.

Suddenly it went over—and twisted as it fell, swinging clean through the open door of the emigrant car. Trace shouted and ran toward the car, shooting at the three on the roof. They leapt in three different directions, vanishing into the darkness.

From inside the sleeper car came a rolling and screaming and crashing that sounded for all hell like a fox in a henhouse. A man in a nightshirt and boots half-climbed, half-fell out of the door, and was instantly snatched by a black shadow that hauled him down the pale gravel bank to the underbrush. The lady behind him saw it and began to scream, but some panicked soul pushed her from behind and she fell, head-first onto the grade. A black shadow flung itself on her as if it meant to ravish her. She screamed and beat at it, but it caught her up in clawed arms and fastened its jaws on her throat, ending her scream in a choked gurgle.

Trace ran up to the thing and kicked it in the ribs. It dropped its prey and turned on him with a shriek of rage. In the dark and the confusion, all he saw was gaping mouth, filled with teeth and blood, yellow eyes reflecting hate and fire. He shot it between the mouth and the eyes. It rolled over backwards and kept going down the grade—he had no idea whether it was dead or not. The woman seemed to be, her throat was torn out, and the emigrant car was rocking with the force of the battle going on inside.

He clambered up the end of the car, all but throwing people out of his way. He shouted at them to get to the colored car, but he doubted they heard—the ruckus inside was deafening. Trace fell into the car and slid halfway down the aisle before he caught himself; for a moment he couldn’t even see the monster. All the berths were still down and the oil lamps were swinging dangerously, people were falling over each other trying to get out of the way, while the eye of the storm surged back and forth across the aisle, something dark and snarling in the middle of it.

It resembled a man, but was gray and hairless, with the bulging flat eyes of a fish and a gaping wound of a mouth. In one of those long, spidery arms it held a child, limp and bloodied, while it used the other to grab those nearest it and fling them across the car. The men were trying to corner it, wielding chunks of firewood, walking sticks and a fire-iron, but the thing seemed to be laughing. It held up the child by its hair and slung the lifeless body at them. The nearest man went down under the weight of it, and the thing leapt over him, took two more down with it and dashed their heads against the floor. One of the men brought the fire iron down on its back, but it only squalled and whipped an arm around, backhanding him off his feet and into one of the berths.

Trace took the opening and fired. The first shot hit it high in the shoulder, the second just under the ribs. The sound it made was truly awful, a scream Trace had heard only in nightmares, but it crumpled, fell back in the aisle and slid down a few feet.

He dry-fired twice more at it, advancing by slow steps, while frantic people huddled on the berths and cowered in the aisle. It didn’t seem to be moving, and neither did several of the passengers—Trace saw at least six lying in pools of blood, and the little girl with her neck bent at a terrible angle; an old man with his chest torn open, as if the thing had shoved a fist in and pulled out his heart—

It was Martin Kingsley. He had the fire-ax still clenched in his hands, a surprised expression on his face. Miss Eliza huddled on the berth behind him, her arms around his chest, holding his body, looking at Trace with a blank, lost expression.

“It was so strong,” she said faintly. “It tried to get me.”

“Miss Eliza, you just come here,” Trace said.

“Martin’s dead,” she said.

“I see that, darlin’, you just come here to me. That’s a good girl.”

She blinked, slowly, and then her face tightened like a fist. She rolled her brother’s body off her lap and climbed over it to the aisle, taking Trace’s hand. The front of her bed jacket and petticoat were soaked with blood.

“You hurt?” he asked her.

“I—I don’t think so. Are there more of those things out there?”

Trace could still hear screaming and gunfire coming from outside. “There are, but we can’t stay in here. We got to get to one of the other cars, isn’t so damaged.”

“I’m not going out there!” another woman cried.

“Don’t like the idea myself, lady, but this one ain’t safe.” Trace slung the Colt’s chamber open and shucked the spent casings onto the floor. He pulled a fresh cartridge from his belt and thumbed it into place.

“Look out!” Miss Eliza gasped, and he heard the snarl, the scuffle from the end of the aisle, and half-turned just as something heavy and stinking hit him and knocked him to the floor.

His head struck and the weight of the thing drove the air from his lungs; between that and the stench of its breath his vision was blotted out in red, but he felt its hot exhalation on his face and jabbed his hand up blindly, wedged the heel of his hand under its chin so it couldn’t bite.

It was horribly, demonically strong, and its arms seemed to be ten feet long. It punched him low under the ribs, but not with a fist—its claws punctured and penetrated, through shirt and skin and muscle, a feeling of tearing in his side and pain rushing in like an express engine.

Trace hiked up a knee and got his heel wedged in the thing’s hip, sat up and shoved with everything he had. It threw it back a foot or so; Trace brought both feet together and drove them into its midsection as it pounced, threw it over his head and up the aisle.

It landed hard on its head and Trace was up before it could turn around, snatched up the fire-ax from Kingsley’s stiffening fingers and lunged after it. It met him halfway, snarling, and Trace twisted aside at the last second, swung the ax down at an angle.

The blade sank into its side and it squalled, turned on that impossibly flexible spine and swiped at him with its claws. He yanked the ax free and swung again, cutting up under the armpit this time, followed through with a kick to the chest. It somersaulted backward down the aisle, with a hard grunt as if he had winded it. Trace leapt after it with a yell and a wild swipe of the ax, buried the blade deep into the join of the neck and shoulder. The thing convulsed, unable to squeal with its throat mostly severed; one more fall of the ax and the job was done.

Panting, Trace turned and marched back up the aisle. Miss Eliza held his Colt out to him and he took it, handing the ax off to one of the men. He began shoving bullets into the breech again, faster this time. “Now,” he said. “We got to get out of here. Get to the third-class car, ain’t so damaged. Got it?”

Suddenly there was a crash from the front of the car. Trace wheeled to see two of those things knocking the glass out of the broken windows, beating the frames out of the walls, crawling in to the floor.

“Move!” Trace shouted, as everyone began to scream and climb toward the exit. He backed up the aisle, while the two things crouched over the dead one, sniffing it. There was a third figure standing there, too, the faint blue shade of a Chinaman, looking down on the corpse until the monsters brushed through him and obliterated him from sight.

They turned on Trace, grinning and silent now, their eyes almost human in their mad glee. Their skins were smooth and hairless as slugs, with the same wet transparent sheen. Except for the bones so close to the taut skin, they looked like hog casings stuffed with blood. They rose on their legs to climb the aisle, using those long arms to grip the berths, and Trace could see where their bellies had been cut by crawling through the glass. The wounds were white like proud flesh, leaking blood like a punctured waterskin and closing up even as he watched. It was hard to watch. There was something so human and yet so not, especially in their faces, that jarred with his sense of real-or-not and kept pulling him toward the detachment of nightmare. They had genitals, he saw with distant revulsion, like a man’s might look after he’d pulled himself out of an icy creek.

Then one of them rushed him. Trace almost shot it, but it stopped short, grinning, taunting. Trace backpedaled harder, felt cold air on his back, heard screams and running from outside, knew he was almost at the door. Then the last passenger jumped out and down and Trace stood up on the twisted railing, took a big step onto the roof of the colored car.

The wind was acrid, searing the lungs and eyes. The engine cab was still burning and it looked like there was a fire in the third-class car, as well: bright light danced in the windows and smoke poured out. People staggered out of the car and ran, wavering and ghostlike in their white nightclothes. Some of them carried torches. Shapes that were not quite men oozed under and between the cars.

The two things had climbed out after him and onto the high vantage point of the upended emigrant car.

“That’s fine,” Trace said, backing away and trying to watch in all directions at once. “You just stay there.”

One leapt onto the roof behind him.

He felt it more than he heard it—sensed something dark and silent looming in on him, as if death had materialized out of the night.

He twisted and skidded on the slippery roof, wrenched his knee but managed not to go down, whipped the Colt around. The thing just leapt into the air, six feet up, pushing off with its knuckles like the bat in the cage. It sailed right over the slugs he fired at it and hit him feet-first in the chest. They skewed off the roof in a tangle and plummeted to the gravel.

Trace hit first, lungs dashed flat and brains clubbed half to mush. He raised the Colt groggily, but the beast slapped it from his hand. Its mouth was red and grinning, full of little sharp teeth like a pig’s. He could hear the croaking of his own lungs as he closed his hands around its throat, but it bent over him, breath hot and foul like rotting meat, like the offal of pigs, like a sunken road choked with the bloated bodies of comrades—

Trace’s hands fell to his own throat, scrabbling for the fine chain under his shirt. Oh Lord, not like this. Not yet—He closed his fist around his crucifix, the last thing he had of his Ma’s. Bite on this, you bastard—

He shoved the crucifix at its face, aiming for the eye, but it reared back, snarling. Suddenly a stream of fire shot out of the darkness and struck it between the shoulder blades.

Its growl of anger turned to a howl of agony and panic. It hurtled away, rolling, wallowing in the shale and shrubbery, but the flames would not be smothered: they rose and consumed, and in seconds the thing had collapsed into a pile of bone and ash.

“Trace!” Boz was running toward him, carrying a torch and accompanied by two other coloreds, and a strange tall fellow who looked like a scarecrow let off its pole. “Shit, Trace, I leave you alone two minutes and you’re gettin’ yourself dead—”

Trace sat up, holding the back of his skull with one hand—a goose-egg was already rising back there—and staring confusedly at the scarecrow man. “Did you just spit fire at that thing?” he wheezed.

“Yeah, he did,” Boz said, wedging a hand under his armpit. “Get up, we gotta move fore they come back around—”

“This your gun?” one of the colored men was holding it out to him.

“Yeah,” Trace said. He looked down at his gun hand, the crucifix and its broken chain still wrapped around his fingers. He shoved it in a pocket and took the Colt. “They’re eatin’ my Baptists,” he said hoarsely.

They made for the third-class car, only to find the passengers had mostly escaped and made a run for the stock cars further back. Every few yards, one of the monsters had caught a straggler, and three or four people had stopped to fight it, beating it off with cudgels or rocks. Trace descended on the nearest of these small battles, put two shots in the thing’s head and let someone else bash it aside. They picked up the victims that were still breathing and carried them along, collecting survivors as they went.

Trace could feel the black things gathering behind them. Something—his fear or his gift—had awakened a primitive part of his brain and it was tracking them, like drafts in a warm room, as they converged on his retreating party.

“Get down!” he shouted, and shoved the two colored men to the ground. A black shadow hurtled off the top of the third-class car, right over their heads. That one missed, but the tumble delayed them long enough to let the three behind them catch up.

Trace and the two Negroes were hit at once. Trace shot his through the head, but the Negro’s shotgun was spent and the thing plunged its fist into his chest, scything through bone and gristle with a sound like a gourd splitting open.

The scarecrow loomed up beside him, torchlight glinting off the amber bottle in his hand. He took a sharp pull from it and then spit. Fire streamed from his lips, engulfing the monster and the unfortunate colored fellow. Boz helped the other man up and they pelted after the last fleeing passengers, running up short against a blockade of cows—cows?—milling about beside the track, sleepy and bawling and jostling each other.

“Hee-yaw!” Boz screamed, and fired into the air. The startled cattle shifted and lurched, and Trace saw the yawning mouth of the first stock car, side door open, the conductor leaning down from the bed and helping to hoist up the last few refugees. Boz went next, then the colored man, then the scarecrow, and Trace last, while the men leaned on the sliding door from the inside, propelling it closed.

A clawed hand closed around Trace’s knee. He yelled, and Boz yelled, and grabbed him by the gun arm, which saved him falling but the Colt clattered to the floor and somebody kicked it into the dark corners of the car. The claws sank into Trace’s thigh, hot as any branding iron, and another of the things leapt at the door, landed with one foot in the opening and the other on Trace’s chest.

“Shoot it, goddamn it!” Trace hollered, but a slim pale form thrust between the men, Miss Eliza coming with her arm extended, face drawn and serious as she pressed the cross in her hand against the face of the demon in the doorway.

It shrieked, a high-pitched wail of mortal agony straight out of hell. The cross seemed to sink into its flesh. The yellow lamp of one eye winked out, and it pinwheeled out of the car, landed on the one that had Trace.

It let go. Boz heaved. The door slammed shut with an echoing thud, blotting out the night and boxing in the frightened cries of the passengers—emigrants, railroad employees, second class, third class, white, colored, Baptist and ex-Catholic—packed into a stinking filthy stock car like so much meat for slaughter.

* * *

It had fallen quiet, except for the moaning of the injured. The few remaining children had lapsed into sleep, and some of the traumatized parents were sunk into fugues. Brother Clark was preaching to them—or rather at them—something out of Revelation, with assorted Beasts and Plagues. Trace thought uncharitably that he would have rather seen Clark with his chest ripped open, instead of Martin Kingsley, but he doubted Brother Clark had made any effort to put himself between the monster and its intended prey.

“How many did we leave Ogden with?” Trace asked, low.

“Seventy-three souls, plus twelve hands,” the conductor said, rubbing Willie’s dried blood off his face. He’d lost his spectacles during the massacre.

Trace did a quick head count; the combination of hay and cow manure they’d lit in one of the troughs gave a little light, but it made breathing a chore. The stock car was one of the modern ones—it was solid walls up to the top three feet or so, which were slatted. The breeze took some of the smoke out the top but swirled the rest of it around. From time to time Trace heard one of the creatures slither across the roof, and saw a black silhouette peer in through the slats, but it couldn’t reach the people inside.

There were about forty of them in the stock car. More than half lost, then, unless some others were holed up elsewhere. Least they had water in this car: feed and water troughs to keep the beef from shrinking on its way to sale.

“How long before they call us missin’?” Boz asked.

“Few more hours,” the conductor said. “We’re not due in Eagle Rock until five a.m. They’ll send an engine back after us. But it’ll be sunup before they get here.”

“After sunup, it won’t matter,” said the scarecrow fellow, coming to join them. “If we can hold our position till then, we’ll be all right.”

“How d’you know that?” said Charles, the last of the colored men.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said the scarecrow. “They’re vampires. They don’t like the daylight.”

Miss Eliza, who was bandaging the wound in Trace’s side, made a queer little mewing sound and looked at him. He shook his head at her, once.

Everybody else looked at the tall skinny fellow. He was remarkably ugly, even in the half-dark: gangling and concave, with ears that stuck out from his head, a nose like a lumpy potato, and skin rough as a Colorado creek bed. But he had a loose, aw-shucks smile, and a mild look in his eyes. And of course he had that bottle of booze tucked in his coat pocket, and that trick of spitting fire at demons.

“Maybe I should introduce myself,” he said, when everyone just sat and stared at him. “My name is Sylvane Ferris. Ferris the Fire-Master.”

They looked at him blankly. They were so exhausted, Trace thought, that this gibberish seemed to make sense.

Ferris sighed. “I don’t expect you to have heard of me. I haven’t performed in six years. That blasted Human Torch! I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

Trace asked, gently, “What makes you think these things are vampires?” He didn’t need convincing, himself, but he could see the others did—not least of all Boz.

“I didn’t get a good look at them,” Charles said nervously.

“They were men,” the conductor all but snarled. “Chinese, I should say, gone savage from living in the mountains.”

“Never saw a man could jump like that,” Boz murmured. “Not even a Chinese.”

“I know it sounds incredible,” said Ferris. “But in circus life you come to accept the incredible. Three-headed calves, pigs with two tails and no heads, men with women’s parts and the other way round—”

“Anybody works on the range’s seen cows with extra parts,” Charles said.

“But have you ever seen a man with the teeth of a wolf, and the appetite for blood?” Ferris said. “A man, even a heathen Oriental, who recoiled in pain from the simple touch of a Christian cross? A man who burnt to ash as soon as he was touched by cleansing flame?” He looked at Trace. “A man who couldn’t be killed by a bullet? Whose soullessness made him colder and blacker than a Wyoming night?”

Trace stared at him.

Boz broke in. “I don’t care what they are—they’re hard to kill and they’re hungry. They’re still out there, ‘case you can’t hear ‘em.”

They hushed for a moment, casting wary glances at the roof. Trace could have sworn he heard something chuckle. Brother Clark’s sermon rose in volume slightly; he had moved on to the Whore of Babylon.

“How many are there?” Trace asked. “How many did we kill? I hacked the head off one in the emigrant car, and Ferris there burned at least one, that I saw.”

“I reduced no less than three to ash, if I may be so modest,” Ferris said.

“That’s four. Any others we know didn’t get up?”

“The one I smote with the cross,” Miss Eliza said. “Not the one you saw—one of them attacked me as I ran from the passenger car. I struck it in the mouth and it … melted.”

There was a short silence. Trace remembered how her cross had sunk into the face of the beast; how the one that attacked him had shied from his crucifix. He fished it out of his pocket, found the broken ends of the chain and twisted them together, back around his neck. Miss Eliza watched him do it.

“I blew the head off one,” the conductor said.

“We burned up a couple with the torches,” Boz said, nodding at Charles.

“Eight, then?” Trace looked around at them. “How many are left?”

“At least that many more,” Boz guessed, “since they took half our numbers. They ain’t dumb animals, either. They flushed the passengers out—shoved one of their own into the car, caught the ones who run out.”

“I saw that, too,” Trace said. “And they built a blockade on the tracks. They knew how to stop the train.”

“And they laugh,” said Miss Eliza. “That one laughed when it … killed Martin.”

“Then they’re human,” the conductor said.

“That is a fatal mistake to make, my friend,” Ferris said.

“I’m not your friend, friend. I’m the conductor of this god-damned train and I’ll not hear any more of this foolishness. Now we are gonna sit here until daybreak or until—”

The conductor was drowned out by the sudden startled bawling of cattle. It was frantic and loud, close-by, punctuated by a volley of hoof beats on the gravel, and skidding and thrashing in the brush. Everyone inside the stock car went quiet and stiff, listening to the sounds of butchery outside. Even Brother Clark’s sermon faltered.

“Never heard a steer make that noise,” Charles muttered.

It sounded like the cow was screaming. Then strangling. Then there was a long agonized moan, and the sing-song gibbering of the beasts.

Miss Eliza was wide-eyed. “What on earth are they—”

“They’re killin’ the cattle,” Boz said, and then something huge struck the side of the car.

The stock car trembled on its rails. The passengers screamed and clutched at each other.

“What the devil—” the conductor said.

The impact came again, closer to the ceiling this time, and for an instant a large dark shadow blotted the sky between the ventilation slats. The slats cracked under the impact, buckling inward.

Boz leaped to his feet. “They’re throwin that carcass at the—”

The third blow crashed through. The narrow slats, not built to withstand a half-ton of beef, splintered to admit the front half of a steer. The passengers screamed and scattered from the spot, packing into the ends of the car, but the body stuck there and hung, head lolling, one horn broken off. One of its front legs cocked through at a grotesque angle. Blood and froth dripped from its mouth.

Then it began to saw back and forth in the opening. The things outside fluttered around it, climbing over the slats, trying to pull it out. The limp head rolled and bobbed.

“Oh, my Lord,” Miss Eliza said sickly, and put her hand over her mouth.

But the beef was well and truly stuck. One of the things shrieked in rage and drove a fist into the steer’s side, then began to squeal and thrash when its hand became stuck. One of the others came to its assistance. The first one swatted it away, but the jerk freed its arm and they both toppled off. There was a thud and a yelp as they hit the gravel.

Somebody laughed, screamingly. It was an awful sound, choked and hysterical, and others in the car took it up, wailing mad laughter until it dissolved into crying. Brother Clark’s voice rose shrill over the chorus.

“Brethren! Be not afraid! The hour of death may be upon you, but trust in the Lord and you will be redeemed!”

“Hour of death, my ass,” Boz said. “I don’t mean to die in some box car like a dumb beast.”

“Nor do I,” said the conductor, hefting up his rifle.

“Though this darkness may surround us, and the minions of Satan try to tempt us to the path of unrighteousness—”

“I say we go out there and give those bastards a taste of lead,” said Charles, brandishing his shotgun in one hand, a torch in the other.

“Don’t go near that door,” Trace snapped. “You open that and all these people are dead. We’re not fightin’ them off a second time.”

“You wanna wait in here till they break in?” Charles demanded.

“Lead don’t stop them, remember?” Boz said. “I didn’t mean we should go rushin’ out there.”

“Yet we must not falter! For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rules of the darkness of this age—”

“They won’t break in, and if they do we’ll make our stand here,” the conductor said. “Better to take one at a time than open up our flank to their numbers.”

”Are they demons?” Miss Eliza asked, low, looking up at Trace. “They shied from the cross. That book you were reading—there was writing in it. Didn’t it say how to kill them?”

Trace tried to signal for her to be quiet, but Boz turned sharply and gave him an awful, accusing look.

“She told you how to kill them?” he said. “She knew what they were?”

“I didn’t,” Miss Eliza said quickly. “He had a book. A pulp novel, really, but—”

“I didn’t write those notes,” Trace said. “And she didn’t tell me, exactly. Not anything like this.”

“What did she say, exactly?” Boz demanded.

“She didn’t say anything, Boz, she just wrote some notes on a magazine and left it for me to find. I didn’t know it meant anything, you know she never tells me half of—”

“But what did it say?” Boz and Miss Eliza cried together.

Trace blinked. The conductor, Charles, and Ferris were looking at him, too. And in the sudden quiet, Trace heard something else.

“Listen,” he said.

There was a soft, slithery sound under their feet, something sliding under the floor of the car. A series of gentle thumps, and something rattling.

“What’s under us?” Trace asked.

“Feed boxes,” the conductor said.

“Full o’ hay and corn,” Charles added.

“And the wheels and undercarriage, of course, the journal boxes.”

“No doors?” Trace asked. “No access in here?”

“No.”

Trace didn’t feel any easier about it. He caught Boz’s demanding, impatient look and swiped a hand down his chin. “Fire kills them. We know that. Sunlight—I think Ferris the Fire-master is right about that, but it doesn’t do us any good. Pure metals, like silver and gold, maybe—”

“Lead’s as pure as it gets,” the conductor said, “and it only slows them down.”

“Don’t have any silver or gold, anyway,” Charles said.

“Shut up, let him think,” Boz said.

Trace ran a hand over his hatless head, trying to recall; there was something else written in that pamphlet, he could see Miss Fairweather’s fine writing in his mind’s eye, but not sharp enough to read it. His fingers brushed the goose-egg on the back of his skull and he winced. Whatever the word was, it made him think of food, of steak and potatoes—

Yum, said a voice.

Trace glanced warily at the ceiling; he was pretty sure he’d heard that voice with his mind, not his ears—he had the faintest tingle of electricity down his back but there was no tell-tale gleam of moonlight in the car, no standing up of the hair on his arms. The dead steer’s mouth was open, its glazing eyes fixed on him, but it didn’t seem to be talking. Miss Eliza and the others were staring at him, still waiting for an answer.

Yum! The voice said again, more insistently. Yem!

“Yim?” Trace repeated.

“What?” Boz said.

“Did somebody say yum? Or yim?”

They all looked at each other, a wary exchange of glances Trace had seen many times, usually just before somebody asked if he’d had too much sun, or maybe too much whiskey. He stepped away from them and turned, slowly, sweeping his gaze carefully over the people huddled against the walls.

The Chinaman stood in the corner, erect and still, while the emigrants around him cowered and wept. He was wearing some kind of dark shirt or robe that blended into the shadows, and when Trace looked directly at him he seemed to fade even more, until only his face and his pointing hand showed pale in the flickering light.

He was pointing under the feed-trough. Yim! he said.

Understanding rushed in on Trace, like a flash-flood in a canyon. He dove for the space under the trough.

It was down there, a whole block of salt-lick for the steers. Trace hugged it to his chest with one arm and crawled out backwards. “Salt!” he crowed. “Salt! That was it!”

“Of course!” Ferris said. “Salt has powerful preservative properties.”

“Salt?” Charles repeated. “What, are you gonna pickle em?”

“I can’t believe this,” the conductor grumbled.

Trace gestured to Boz. “Gimme that ax.”

Boz passed it over and Trace, rose on his knees in the middle of the floor, lifted the ax-handle up in two hands, to bring the flat top of its head down square on the salt-lick.

But he checked it. His knees felt warm where they touched the floorboards. He bent over and put one palm flat against the floor. Not merely warm—hot enough he had to pull away after two breaths. The quality of the smoke in the air they were breathing had changed, too.

He looked at Miss Eliza, who was barefoot. “Your feet feel warm?”

“No,” she said, and came closer to where he knelt, then quickly backed up. “Oh! It is there.”

Trace beckoned to Charles. “Bring that torch over here.” There was smoke coming up through a knothole in the tightly-laid floorboards. He bent low, and sniffed: it smelled of hot metal, like a branding iron. “What did you say was under here?”

The conductor’s face went slack, with terrible understanding. “The wheel journals,” he said hollowly. “We’ve got us a hot box.”

“I think they made us a hot box,” Trace said.

“Ah yes! Lubricating grease burns quite well,” Ferris said brightly. “They had only to light the animal fodder and let it spread.”

“But they burn up if they touch fire,” Charles protested.

“So do we, my friend,” Ferris said, “but we still handle it every day.”

“Maybe you do,” Boz snapped. “They saw us get drove out of the third-class car by fire, thought they’d try it again. These things are too damn smart to be animals.”

“On the contrary, monkeys are quite clever,” Ferris said. “They’ve been known to—”

“Will you shut up!” the conductor shouted. “There’s a damn fire underneath us and this whole car’s gonna go up in about five minutes!”

That, of course, started another uproar. A couple of people rushed for the door, but Boz and the conductor got in front of them, Boz with both guns out. Miss Eliza tried to calm them, her hands and voice soothing, pressing people back toward the edges of the car. Brother Clark began to pray, calling out for an angel with a fiery sword.

Trace got a leg up on one of the water troughs and stood, balancing against the wall to look out through the slats. Down the slope about five yards from the tracks, the black shapes crouched in a line, watching the car, firelight reflecting in their eyes. Smoke wafted up past the ventilation slats.

Trace hopped to the floor and caught up the ax handle in one hand. “Boz!”

“What?” Boz’s eyes and guns were still on the passengers, but some of them had backed down, and Trace’s words caught their desperate attention.

“Sponge this water out of here,” he said, splashing his hand across the surface of the trough and trying to meet as many eyes as possible. “Soak the floorboards with it, where Mr. Railroad Conductor tells you to. Buy us some time.”

“Sure will, Boss,” Boz said, but it was the passengers who surged toward the trough, taking off shawls and shirts to soak up the water. Charles and Ferris moved to help.

Trace caught Miss Eliza’s elbow, drew her toward the middle of the car where Brother Clark was standing and shouting, waving his arms in the air.

“Remember the prophet Elisha?” Trace said, kicking the block of salt before them. “How he cleansed the poisoned waters?”

She looked blank for a moment, then her eyes widened. “The salt?”

“Yes. It was one of the weapons against vampires mentioned in that penny dreadful—but it’s also one of the guards against evil I studied at seminary—Blessed Salt. Same use as Holy Water, more or less.”

“Holy wa—” She blinked. “You’re a papist? A priest?”

“Papist, yes. Never got as far as a priest. I know the words to say but we’ll need Brother Clark to say them. You think his faith is true?”

“He’s a believer, true enough,” she said, her lips pinched. “But I don’t think he’ll agree to this, Jacob.”

“Make him,” Trace said shortly, and put his hand on Brother Clark’s shoulder. “Pastor, I think I’m ready to hear the error of my ways, now.”

Brother Clark flung him off with a snarl, like a terrier flinging a rat. “Blasphemer! You brought this pestilence upon us!”

“I did not bring it,” Trace said. “I came here to fight it, but I need a holy man.”

“You know nothing of sanctity! You speak with a false tongue, and you bring judgment upon all of us!”

“You’re right,” Trace said. “I know I’m cursed. I’ve been this way for a long time, but I keep tryin’, brother, and I need somebody to show me the right way.” He got down on his knees, slowly, keeping eye contact with the preacher, keeping one hand on the block of salt. “I’m beggin’ you, brother, just help with this one thing. Just ask a blessing on this salt lick and—”

Brother Clark sucked his breath in as if Trace had suggested something obscene. He whipped his right hand across Trace’s cheek. “Blasphemer! Papist! I will not be led astray by your temptations! This is the hour we must stay true, and walk willingly into the fiery furnace! Those of the true faith will be saved!”

Trace’s jaw had already taken some bad blows that night, and the slap was enough to make his eyes water. He clasped a hand to his chin, amazed that anyone could be that arrogant.

Brother Clark gave him a most un-Christ-like look of triumph, and raised his hands. “Brethren! Though we are tested as Job, we must be ready as Job was, to go into that land of darkness, the place from which we shall not return, a land as dark as darkness itself, as the shadow of death without any order, where even the light is like dark—”

Trace swung and clipped him under the jaw. His audience gasped. Brother Clark’s head snapped back and he went down like a sack of potatoes, quiet at last.

“I always hated that passage,” Trace said, flexing his hand.

“I’ve never been fond of it either,” Miss Eliza said.

And that was a damn fool thing to do, Trace thought glumly, looking down at Clark’s slack mouth. He glanced around at the huddled, shuddering congregation. “Anyone else here right with the Lord?”

“Jacob.” Miss Eliza put her hand on his arm. “You do it.”

“Ma’am, I can’t,” he said. “I was never ordained. It has to be a priest.”

“We Baptists don’t believe in the idea of priests as intercessors,” she said. “My father—and my brother, Martin—taught that everyone should read the Bible and attempt to understand it—that anyone could have congress with God, if his heart was open. Elisha may have been a prophet, but he didn’t bless the salt himself, if you recall. He didn’t purify the water. He asked the Lord to do those things, and the Father did them because Elisha believed. There can’t be any wrong in you asking for the same blessing.”

The hiss of steam caught his attention; he looked over to see Boz and Ferris scooping water from the troughs with a feed bucket and flinging it on the floor. The wood was hot enough that the water just sizzled when it hit. The last few children were whimpering and trying to back away from the spot, but they were already crowded into the corner as hard as they could get. The air was beginning to get quite warm.

“Trace!” Boz hollered. “Whatever you’re doing over there, you better do it fast!”

An odd sort of calm settled over him. Not peace; more like the sense of fatalism he’d felt on the battlefield. What the hell, he thought. He had to do something. At worst his blessing would do nothing, and the salt might still act as a repellent, if Miss Fairweather’s notes were to be believed.

He closed his fist around his crucifix and pulled it off over his head, kissed it and crossed himself. He dropped to one knee and put his hand on the block of salt. Miss Eliza sank to her knees, too, and folded her hands.

The words came to mind with frightening ease, bringing with them the smells of incense, and old wood, and musty vestments. He shut his eyes, sucked into a memory so strong and sweet it blotted out the darkness around him—the near-forgotten echoes of the younger boys whispering and fidgeting during catechism, the singing at Vespers, the simple feeling of being good that he had hugged to himself in those days.

“Almighty Lord, I beg you to bless this salt,” he said, “as you blessed the salt scattered over the water by the prophet Elisha. Wherever this salt is sprinkled, drive from us all unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects.” Except the Baptists, we need them, his mind added automatically, and he nearly upset it all by laughing. There was a strong sense of exhilaration building in him, a sense of being heard, of being exactly where he should be, doing exactly was he was meant to do. He made the Cross again. “In the Name and by the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ, drive away the power of evil, and protect us always by the presence of your Holy Spirit. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.”

“Amen,” said a chorus of voices, and he opened his eyes to see that a half-dozen of the passengers had joined him and Miss Eliza on their knees.

He saw something else, too. The block of salt was glowing white, faint but distinct in the smoky gloom. He lifted his hand from it with a quick startled inhalation, and a few grains clung to his fingers, like the luminescence of a moth.

“What is it?” Miss Eliza asked.

“It worked,” he said stupidly.

“It did?”

“Can’t you see that?” he asked, but he could see she didn’t. “Never mind. Step back.”

He raised the ax like a drive-post and smashed it down on the block. A big chunk split off and he hit it again, in short hard blows to break it up as much as possible. The glow never faded, but spread out across the floor where ever the salt touched. Trace bore down on the chunks with the flat of the ax blade until they subsided into powder.

Suddenly there was a fresh yelp and scurry around the edges of the car. Trace looked over his shoulder to see flames licking up through the center of the floor, in a bulls-eye of rapidly spreading black.

“Trace!” Boz hollered again.

“I’m comin!” he said. “Everybody get over here and pick up some salt! Smash it up, grind it down so you can sprinkle it.” Everyone’s hands scrabbled for pieces of salt-lick. Trace scooped a handful of grains into his own pocket and hefted up the ax, moved toward the car door where Boz and the conductor were gathered.

“You really think that salt-lick’s gonna hold them off?” the conductor demanded.

“We don’t have a choice!” Trace shouted. “We can’t stay in here. Try to corral them together, get them off in a unit. I’ll clear the way for you as much as I can.”

“Excellent idea, my godly friend!” Ferris appeared at his elbow, saluted him with his booze-flask. “I’ll be right behind you!”

Trace glanced at Boz, who was showing some serious strain—his expression was set and determined, but his eyes were worried and Trace guessed it was more about the possibly of his being crazy than fear of dying. “Trust me, Boz,” he said. “Stay close to Miss Eliza.”

He gave the door a yank.

It slid half-way and stopped, its track blocked by the dead steer hanging from the ceiling. But that was all right, as Trace had time to realize: the narrow opening meant only two of them could attack at once. And they did.

Ferris spat fire at the one on the left. Trace swung his ax straight up, in two hands, and clove into the other’s ribs. His wild swing threw it up and against the doorframe over his head; it collided and bounced back down, squalling and flailing at his head. Trace shook it off and jumped out after it.

He landed solid and plunged his hand into his vest pocket, swept out his arm in a fanning gesture like sowing wheat. Glowing grains of salt arced out from his throw, and the five beasts who had been converging on him suddenly leapt backwards, one of them falling right down and rolling over. It got up again, shaking its head, shrieking rage at him.

“Come on,” Trace said, brandishing the ax. “Come on, you whore.”

It pushed off on its knuckles and flew at him. He quick-drew the Colt and shot it out of the air, then buried the ax in its head before it could get up again. He wheeled at the sense of something behind him, but it was Ferris, who blew fire at the next one, missing but driving it away. Trace scattered another handful of salt and the creatures hissed and fell back further; he glanced over his shoulder and saw Boz and the conductor leap down from the car. Charles and Miss Eliza followed, and people were handing out the children, but Trace had no more time to look because they were circling him again. He and Ferris stayed back-to-back, while the beasts feinted and grabbed, shying back from the ever-widening lines he drew in salt.

There was a shout and a gunshot blast, and Boz hollering orders, and the crying of children and Miss Eliza’s voice rising somehow calm over all. Trace saw their white nightshirts spreading at the edges of his vision, glimpsed Boz on his left and was glad, as they pushed their perimeter out further from the burning stock car.

It was almost light as day, now, and the heat was getting intense, as the treated lumber of the car began to flame in earnest—he spared a glance to see that everyone was out. Two men were just letting down the limp body of Brother Clark. All the passengers were out on the dicey shale slope, flinging salt around them as Miss Eliza directed, until they were all ringed in a shining white barrier, like a fence made of moonlight.

“It’s workin’,” Boz said breathlessly.

“Yeah,” Trace said, and laughed. The beast nearest him snarled at his mirth and Trace bared his teeth at it. “You like that? Huh? You want some of this?” He whipped out his Colt and shot it in its snarling face. It bowled over backwards and Trace leapt after it.

* * *

“I count fourteen,” Charles said, flinging another head into the smoldering remains of the stock car.

“Me too,” Boz agreed. “Not countin’ the three or four piles of ash, can’t tell what they were.”

“I can account for five piles of ash, personally,” Ferris said.

“That makes twenty even,” Trace said, kicking the canvas-wrapped bundle at his feet. He yawned and popped his back, then cocked his right arm back behind his head to stretch the shoulder. He was going to be damn sore in those muscles for the next few days, although at the moment all he felt was limp and weary in a not-unpleasant way. The sun was just coming over the rise, sending golden fingers of light over the ground and the sleeping pile of emigrants—those that could sleep, anyway. Some of them had just plain lapsed into senselessness, out of shock and exhaustion.

Trace sobered, looking over at them, their clothes smeared with soot and blood. He saw the conductor looking, too. The man’s gaze traveled from the little knot of survivors, over the butchered cattle, across the train standing like a gutted monument to the massacre. The conductor rubbed a hand across his face, paying extra attention to his eyes. He wiped away clean streaks on his cheeks.

Boz put a hand on his shoulder. “You did your duty, mister,” he said. “You did it good. You stayed with the train.”

“Thank you,” the conductor said in a shaky voice. He blinked several times, jabbed at his nose with a middle finger to push up spectacles that weren’t there. He wiped his hand on his pants and offered it to Boz. “Thank you, Mister—?”

“Bosley,” Boz said. “John Bosley.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” the conductor said.

Trace felt a touch on the back of his hand and looked down to see Miss Eliza smiling at him. She looked remarkably pretty and fresh, in her white nightgown, a shawl around her shoulders, with her hair hanging loose and a bit wild.

“Brother Clark is awake,” she said, the corners of her lips twitching. “He doesn’t seem to remember how he came to pass out. He thinks perhaps he breathed too much smoke.”

“Funny, I would have said he was blowin’ it,” Trace said, and they chuckled together, until her eyes suddenly brightened with tears. She put her fingers to her lips and looked away.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said.

She managed a brave smile. “No greater love than this.”

“Yes,” he said gently.

She looked at her hands for a long moment, then lifted her head. “You’re not coming to Oregon with us, are you?”

“No.”

She gestured at the bundle under his boot. “That is the package, then, you are supposed to deliver to your employer?”

“Yeah.”

“This wealthy lady you work for must be a great benefactress.”

“She’s wealthy,” Trace agreed.

“And good,” Miss Eliza said. Her eyes were gray, he saw for the first time, in the growing daylight. “I know that because you work for her. You are a good man, Mr. Tracy. And I see now your calling is higher than ours.”

Trace winced, but made out he was only squinting at the sunlight. “Kind of you to say, ma’am.”

“Listen,” said Ferris, cocking his head. “I think our deliverance is approaching.”

They all turned towards the north, and a moment later they all heard it: the long echoing blasts of an approaching locomotive.

* * *

Trace heaved his burden up the last narrow flight of stairs, through the attic door which the Chinese held open for him. Miss Fairweather stood next to the tin-topped table, gripping its edges, all but quivering with impatience.

He rolled the rucksack off his shoulder into the tin basin, selected a short skinning-type knife from Miss Fairweather’s collection, and cut through the burlap, tore it away until the thing was exposed to daylight.

It was even uglier dead than alive. The eyes had sunk in, and the lips peeled back from the fearsome teeth. It had very little odor, however, and was dry to the touch, as if it had lain in the Great Salt Flats for a few weeks.

“Perhaps I should have specified a fresh specimen,” Miss Fairweather said.

“That’s as fresh as they come, lady,” Trace said. “Been dead less than four days. We took the express back, and you owe me another hundred for payin’ the brakemen to let us on with it.”

“Oh, very well. But why does it appear so desiccated? Did you pack it in quicklime?”

“They just do that. Start fallin’ to ash pretty quick. And the ones that burned up, there wasn’t enough left to fill a tobacco tin.” He felt in one pocket. “Brought you some of that, too, if you’re partial.”

She glanced at the tin he set in the corner of the table, but her primary attention was toward the body. “Head severed from the torso with an ax?”

“Yep. Bout the only thing will do it. Put three bullets in this one, just slowed him down a little.”

“I see.” She looked Trace over, once, assessing. “You sustained no serious injury?”

“Took my share of knocks,” he said, and paused. “Lot of people lost more than me.”

“So I’ve read,” she said, reaching for a pair of slender tongs. “The railroad company is attributing the deaths to attacks by wolves.”

Her dismissive attitude irritated him. “What do you call these, then?”

She made an unpleasant twisting motion and extracted a lead slug. “The popular term is vampire, in the sense that they feed on blood. That word has acquired unfortunate supernatural connotations which I find distracting. In the Canton region of China, where I believe these originated, they are called jiang-shi.”

“Shang shee,” Trace repeated, remembering the Chinamen in the moonlight.

“It translates roughly to ‘hopping corpse,’ which is descriptive, if inaccurate. They are not dead, they are infected with some kind of wasting illness which I suspect is related to lycanthropy and anemia.” She glanced up at him. “You weren’t bitten, you or Mr. Bosley? I can’t be sure it isn’t transmitted through saliva, like hydrophobia.”

“We weren’t bitten.” He watched her drop another lead slug on the table with a flat tonk. “They don’t like sacred things.”

She took up a tiny knife. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, they won’t cross a line of blessed salt.”

“Ah.” She put the knife down again, looking almost pleased. “You read my notes, then.”

“I read them.”

“Salt has been used as a preservative since ancient times, you know. In China it is also believed to keep away evil spirits.”

“Are crosses?” Trace said evenly.

She gave him a witchy smile. “The prevailing theory is that one’s faith is the salient factor, not the symbol itself. Besides, these creatures have some bestial intelligence—I daresay you could wield a cream cake in a threatening manner, and they would shy from it.”

“I know what I saw,” he said. “I know what I felt.”

“I have no doubt of that.” She gave him a considering look. “I shall want a full report from you, either written or dictated to Min Chan. I want to know everything you remember about these creatures—their eating habits, how they moved, how many you saw …” Her voice trailed off as he held out a sheaf of paper, folded and tied with twine.

“Had to kill a few hours, comin’ back on the train,” Trace said. “Figured you’d want the particulars.”

She took the packet, pulled open the slipknot, and unfolded the papers. She turned a page, then another, eyes scanning rapidly. “Mr. Tracy, for someone who exudes such abhorrence for this kind of work, you are remarkably good at it.”

“I never objected to honest work,” he said, thumbs hooked into his gun belt.

Her gaze slid toward him. “And you feel I’ve been dishonest with you?”

“You could have told me what I was ridin’ into out there. You could’ve told the railroad.”

“Oh, certainly. And they would have immediately provided their porters with crosses and a coffer of sacred salt.” She tossed his notes onto the adjacent worktable. “Forewarned is not necessarily forearmed, Mr. Tracy. Neither is foreknowledge the same as machinating a situation, so please don’t assume I put those people in harm’s way merely to force your hand.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Had I not paid for their passage, some other collection of unfortunates would have filled their seats. And under the circumstances, one might suppose a congregation of God’s chosen had better odds of survival—would you not?”

He stared at her, amazed that she could acknowledge the power of faith in one breath, and scorn him for having it in the next.

She made a dismissive gesture, turned back to the corpse. “You were always free to turn down the job.”

“Yeah, until you start danglin’ offers to cure—” He stopped, on the brink of laying himself bare, but it was too late.

“To cure you?” A bark of laughter escaped her lips. “If you believe your gift to be a curse from God, what makes you think I can lift it? I hesitate even to assume it can be removed—it is as much a part of you as your sight. If that were extracted from you, would you be a better man for it?”

He shifted his feet, thinking It ain’t the same.

“And I certainly never implied I could cure your condition. I said I may be able to help you with it.”

“How?”

“By providing you with opportunities to use it.” She took up a magnifying glass and bent over the corpse again, as intent as a vulture. “Ignoring them will not make them stop coming to you. You must learn to control your perceptions—to close your eyes to them, as it were. Practice is the only sure means to control.”

“I thought you couldn’t see them.”

“I don’t,” she said succinctly. “I’ve known others who could.”

Trace opened his mouth, impatient, to ask another question, and then abruptly realized he was doing exactly what she wanted him to do—begging information from her, a piece at a time. Damned patronizing bitch. He ground his teeth, tapped his hat against his thigh.

She ignored him. She picked up a tiny knife and made a long cut down the front of the torso. It parted with the whisper of dried leaves underfoot. At least this one was dead, Trace thought, and then realized he wouldn’t have cared if that hell-demon suffered or not.

“So this is how it’s gonna be?” he said eventually. “You dangle the carrot and I follow?”

“I daresay that is up to you, Mr. Tracy. The donkey wouldn’t follow the carrot if he didn’t expect a reward for his efforts.”

Trace snorted and put his hat back on. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

* * *

Trace chewed a bit of straw while he watched the shop wives and clerks come and go in the restaurant. His stomach was comfortably full, and for the first time in recent memory, so were his pockets. The waitress gave him a saucy glance as she passed by with her hands full of plates.

They ate here often, he and Boz did, when they were in town. The owners knew him and didn’t kick up ugly about serving a colored man. In the back near the kitchen, but that was all right, the food was good and they could sit down together and talk in relative private.

“What’re you chewin’ on, now?” Boz asked after a while.

Trace was tempted to say he was cleaning the steak out of his teeth, but he did have a thought or two on his mind. He’d let Boz do much of the talking through dinner, and it was good news: they were completely out of debt, now, and had a respectable sum in the bank. Boz was looking at a new saddle for his horse, and new boots for himself.

“Remember the other day,” Trace said meditatively, “I was gettin’ on you for sittin’ back in the colored car, and you said I was a hypocrite, cause I was lettin’ you-know-who push me around?”

“Yeah.”

“I know it ain’t fair of me to get on you for that. I don’t have to walk around in your skin, and I ain’t got no call to tell you what’s right. I guess you know what’s best for you.”

“Guess so,” Boz said cautiously. “What’d she say to you, got you stewin’ over there?”

“Ain’t what she said, exactly.” Trace reached out to pick up the last edge of cherry pie crust. “I just been thinkin’—how many of those people you think would’ve survived if you and me hadn’t been there?”

“That Ferris fellow, maybe. Conductor. Handful.”

“Yeah.” Trace popped the last bite in his mouth, chewed.

Boz took a swig of coffee. “So you’re thinkin’ she sent you to help?”

“Doubt it. Feels more to me like she’s testin’ me.”

Boz expression went carefully blank, but not before Trace glimpsed the scorn underneath. “For what?”

“Dunno.” Trace dragged his finger through the pie plate to pick up the sweet juice. “There was this sergeant in my company, used to bully all the young kids. Tell them he knew all kinds of tricks—where to get extra food, where to get whiskey, how to shoot straighter and load faster. Most of it was hooey, but the kids who begged hard enough and ran attendance long enough, he’d teach ‘em things. Give ‘em little treats. Treat ‘em like puppies. Told ‘em he had a reputation for luck—that he’d been through more engagements than anybody in the company and never had a scratch. Told ‘em they’d live longer if they did what he told ‘em.”

“Did they?”

“Saw him blown to bits at Antietam. Most of his unit went down with me in that ditch.” Trace put his thumb in his mouth, cherry syrup to take the place of blood and dirt. “Miss Fairweather’s like that sergeant—she needs somebody to boss around, somebody to make her feel brave. Like if she can convince me she knows what she’s doin’, she’ll believe it, too.”

“You do believe it,” Boz snorted. “You’re lettin’ her yank you around like a pack mule.”

“No.” Trace shook his head. “No, I’m goin’ where she leads me, for now. But the difference between her and that sergeant is, I think she does know some things—like where ghosts are hidden, and monsters are gonna attack.” He paused. “And she knew about me.”

“So you think she’s like you.”

“Not exactly. Some ways she’s like you—doesn’t believe anything isn’t real and solid. Least she won’t admit to it. But there’s no denyin’ she knows things—stuff nobody else does, and I’ve looked. Believe me, I’ve been over most of this country lookin’.”

“And you think she’s gonna tell you what she knows?”

He cocked his head, thoughtfully. “See, that’s the other thing. I’m guessin’ she’s been lookin’ for somebody like me a long time. I figure that Chinese can’t be a—a medium like me, else she’d send him out to do her dirty work. But now she’s got me, and I get the feelin’ she wants to tell, she just wants to be sure.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You dunno.” Boz’s voice hardened. “So you just go where she tells you, maybe get one of us killed, until she decides you’re ready for somethin’ worse.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t do some good out of it. And if it is gonna be somethin’ worse …” He drew a short, hard breath. “I had this feelin’ on the train, like I’d been put there for a reason. And I’ve still got it. Like I’m being set up for somethin’. Like it ain’t just her who’s testin’ me.”

Boz looked away, as if offended, and Trace felt a surge of annoyance. He’d never made any secret of his faith, and he’d never held Boz’s skepticism against him. Boz could at least show him the same tolerance.

But hard on the heels of his irritation was a shadow of unease. Believer or not, it sounded damned cocky to claim you’d been tapped for some divine purpose.

Boz was quiet for a long time, drinking coffee and watching the front door, people coming and going. “So where’s that leave me?” he said eventually. “Trailin’ along behind you, holdin’ your guns, standin’ by while you have tea parties with dead folks?”

“Pullin’ monsters outside of nature off me, before they can bite my head off?” Trace retorted.

Boz met his eyes briefly and looked away again.

Trace felt cool fear touch the nape of his neck. “It’s no different than fightin’ Indians, Boz. Or wolves. Or cattle rustlers.”

“Those things I can see,” Boz said.

Trace had no reply for that. The silence stretched on, colder than before, until the waitress came by to ask if they wanted more pie.

Becoming Stewards of Our World:

The Great Theme of the 21st Century,

Part One

Written by Gregory Benford

Part I: Beyond the Box

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

—Marshall McLuhan

The deep secret about global warming is that the conventional wisdom solution is a lie.

About 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas). They sustain economic growth, bringing political and social stability. Until we can replace fossil fuels (which will take a century, at least) or find practical ways to capture most of their emissions (a very tough job), no political system will allow the deep energy cuts that would truly affect global climate change.

Politicians are now playing the posture game. Companies are the enemy, because … well, they give us what we want: more. So business polishes its’ image, tipping the hat toward minor adjustments. Herd behavior.

Muddling though won’t work, but few will say so in public. “Cap and Trade” or carbon taxes will help, but they cannot solve the problem—demand is too great, and plausible carbon-free power will be a tiny fraction of what we need. (If all drivers in the USA swapped their car for a Prius, oil use would decline only 3%.) No economist I know thinks we can replace even our current energy sources with renewables in less than half a century. And we don’t have that much time.

In 2004, world emissions of carbon dioxide (CO_2, the main greenhouse gas) totaled 26 billion metric tons. CO_2 emissions will grow to about 40 billion tons by 2030, most from developing countries, two-fifths from China alone. Right now China and India alone are building 850 coal-fired plants. Today’s investments are going to be sunk in power plants for the next 50 to 70 years.

We are building so many new conventional coal plants that their CO_2 emissions will overwhelm Kyoto emission reductions (if they even happen) by a factor of five by 2012. Likewise, we’re on the wrong track with “green” nukes (which Greens oppose anyway), so long as they’re burning supply-limited U-238. So, how about wind and solar electricity? Good, but intermittent. Certainly nobody’s building the right electricity distribution and storage network to bring on line at the needed 30 to 50% market penetration. For land use and net energy balance reasons, ethanol is totally inadequate replacement for petroleum fuel, particularly if China and India follow US lifestyles.

These truths will not go away if we ignore or deny them anymore than global warming deniers make that truth go away. I know perception by the public is a matter of emphasis, or “spin,” if you will. But political correctness is one thing. The real world is another.

And demand won’t stop then, either. This problem will not “stay solved” because economies are dynamic.

Poor countries won’t sacrifice economic growth just because they’re lectured by the rich world. Why should they? On a per-person basis, their CO_2 emissions are only about 20% of the rich countries’. In Africa, fewer than half the population even has electricity. Quietly, everywhere, fossil fuel plants are a-building faster and faster, worried about future constraints. CO_2 emissions are accelerating.

The sole smart answer is to go to the tech. Save the world, right away! But existing power-generating technologies, even aggressively pushed, can’t save us. Demand is too large. Research, development and deployment will take many decades.

I first realized this by serving on a Department of Energy long-range study. Our years of work appeared in a prominent paper in Science (ref). Renewable technologies exist in the sense that the science to make a nuclear weapon existed in the late 1930s, or the ability to send a crewed exploration craft to the Moon and return existed in the late ‘50s. But it took the Manhattan and Apollo programs to make them so. The Manhattan-scale project we called for has not materialized.

It’s time to see the climate/energy challenge as a war of survival, with failure not an option. The plausible future emission levels (Fig. 1) make this clear (Fig. 2).

Projected Carbon Dioxide concentrations over time, with best-estimate temperature increases that result. We now have 380 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in our air. The realm between “a” and “b” is what we now have in temperature increase over the mid-20th Century. Source: International Panel on Climate Change

To maintain and improve our civilized lives, we will need to educate ourselves about how the life support systems that sustain us on planet Earth work, and how they could work, to run high tech civilization without savaging the remaining nonrenewable energy resources and precious biodiversity legacy of Earth.

This perspective isn’t really new. Little noticed, we’ve entered a new geological era, the anthropocene. We started ten thousand years ago, swiftly changing the biosphere by converting forests to farms. Large diebacks of species surged as we spread into the new world several millennia ago. Several centuries back, we began altering the atmosphere with CO_2. This now brings on considerable warming within mere decades, and is already turning the oceans more acidic, with big changes within a century from now. These radical, swift swerves will show up in the geological record.

So … what to do?

Answer: get outside the conceptual box.

Climate Restoration

There are at least two (barely examined) ways to stop the greenhouse impacts to come: draw CO_2 from the air, or reflect sunlight. Neither has any traction so far. Governments have devoted only tiny sums to their study.

This first article deals with capturing carbon from the air. The second part will treat reflecting sunlight back into space.

The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide from the air is to grow plants—most popularly trees—since they tie up carbon in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a tree lifetime.

A little-noticed 1992 National Academy of Sciences panel report clarified the muddy science behind global warming and then ventured further. Could we intervene to offset the warming? Accept that greenhouse gases will rise and find ways to compensate for them? Mitigate, not prohibit?

The older term for all such ideas is “Geoengineering.” I find that most people don’t know what that means. I prefer to call these ideas “Climate Restoration,” because that’s the goal. After all, to get a car fixed we don’t go to businesses called “Combustion Engineering,” we go to “Car Repair.”

That 1992 National Academy of Sciences report was the only one that some scientists tried to block from publication. The subject calls up the common Western impulse to solve problems with laws rather than technologies. We endured the War on Alcohol (Prohibition), our War on Drugs is thirty-five years old and has never worked, so a War on Carbon may lie ahead. Such thinking is perfectly in keeping with the universal environmentalist position, which is best understood as a starkly Puritan ethic: “Abstain, sinner!” “The only way to slow climate change is to use less fuel,” asserts Bill McKibben in The End of Nature, a book that roundly condemns such luxuries as privately-owned washing machines and oranges shipped to cold climates.

Here I shall discuss two areas I’ve worked in for over a decade, as chronicled in my 1999 book, Deep Time. Much has happened since, including some name changes.

Invoking engineering implies an existing craft, but neither carbon capture nor reflecting sunlight have been tried on even regional scales. Nobody envisions quick, full-scale climate mitigation. At first we should do laboratory work, carefully testing the basics of any proposed scheme. Then we can follow with small-scale field experiments to answer questions about how our current atmosphere behaves when we change its dynamics slightly. The biosphere is a highly nonlinear system, with climatic lurches before (glaciations, droughts), and unstable modes, too.

Some argue that this simple fact precludes our tinkering with “the only Earth we have.” Of course, we already are—that’s the greenhouse problem. Earth’s climate might be chaotically unstable, so that a state with only slightly different beginning conditions would evolve to end up markedly different. Then the alighting of a single butterfly might change our future. But we also know that the Earth suffers natural injections of dust and aerosols from volcanoes, so probably experiments which affect the planet within this range of natural variability should be allowed.

Still, suppose a big volcano erupts while you are floating artificial dust high in the stratosphere—might this plunge us into a new ice age, pronto? The proper answer is: Not if we keep our artificial dust well below the historical fluctuation rate; and without experiments we cannot make progress.

Global warming is assessed in a rather tightly knit community of scientists, mostly academic. They only study nature, while engineers dream of altering it. Both need experiments to guide them.

Leaving politics aside for the moment, this portends the inevitable emergence of a new techno-visionary community, devoted to solving global ills with global technologies. This is quite different from simply finding the polluters and forcing them to stop. Such good/bad dramas are an old theme in environmental issues; like depletion of the ozone layer and cleansing of the seas, global warming has provoked an automatic politicizing of any proposed solutions at birth.

With ozone and the seas we could comfortably point fingers at big companies or nations. Alas, the culprit in global warming is plain old us.

Capturing Carbon

Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil.

Forests cover about a third of the land, and have shrunk by a third in the last ten thousand years. (They have grown back some over the last half-century in the United States, mostly because marginal farms were abandoned and the trees reclaimed the land.) Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora takes only a few years.

As tropical societies clear the rain forest, the temperate nations have actually been growing more trees, slightly offsetting this effect. In the U.S., we have lost about a quarter of our forest cover since Columbus, with a rebound since 1950. Replanting occurs mostly in the south, where pine trees are a big cash crop for the paper industry. But globally we destroy a forested acre every second. Just staying even with this loss demands a considerable planting program.

Trees soak up carbon fastest when young. Planting fast-growing species will give a big early effect, but what happens when they mature? Eventually they either die and rot on the ground, returning nutrients to the soil, or we burn them. If this burning replaces oil or coal burning, fine and good. Even felling all the trees still leaves some carbon stored longer as roots and lumber.

About half the U.S. CO_2 emissions could be captured if we grew tree crops on economically marginal croplands and pasture. More forests would enhance biodiversity, wildlife and water quality (forests are natural filters), make for better recreation and give us more natural wood products.

Even better, one can do the cheapest part first, with land nobody uses now. This would cost about five billion dollars a year. A feel-good campaign would sell easily, with merchants able to proclaim their eco-virtue (“Buy a car, plant a grove of trees.”)

In the short run, this would probably work well. But trees take water and land is limited, so this is a solution with a clear horizon of about forty years. Soaking up the world’s present CO_2 increase would take up an Australia-sized land area, i.e., a continent. But most such land is in private hands, so the job cannot be done by government fiat in its own territories. Still, a regional effort could make a perceptible dent in overall carbon dioxide levels.

But … leaves absorb more sunlight than grasslands. Some climate modelers argue that adding forests will actually increase warming in the long run, because most of the CO_2 gets drawn down by young trees, which then absorb more sunlight later, warming their areas. So it’s not a certain measure.

Coping With Carbon

Seen in the largest perspective, our current atmospheric buildup of CO_2 stems from our first great invention, the discovery of fire. Given that, our eventual discovery of fossil fuel, and our short political time horizons made a greenhouse problem inevitable.

Can we offset our greenhouse effects by using our second great invention, agriculture? Robert Metzger (engineer and writer) and I explored this with collaborators six years ago and found that we can, with some help from the wheel.

Farming is the largest scale human activity, covering about 10% of the globe’s land area and employing billions. Leveraging this large effort offers a way to help draw CO_2 from the air.

The trick is to use a simple fact: growing a field of corn captures about 400 times as much carbon as humanity adds, per year, to the entire column of air above that field, from ground to space. If we could plant corn over 1/400th of the Earth’s surface, every year we could draw back out what we put into the air by burning. (To see this, check the sidebar.)

Carbon Above a Cornfield The carbon-drawdown of a cornfield calculation begins with assumptions. At harvest time, an average acre of corn has a dry mass of 10 tons in the crop (grain, stalks, leaves and roots). This mass has an average carbon content of 40%, so the crop has 4.0 tons of carbon in it. The carbon got locked up in the plants by photosynthesis-driven chemistry. In the air above the cornfield, humans add CO2 every year, in the amount of 1.6 parts per million of air molecules (ppm) per year. Taken all the way to space, this means there are 10 kg of carbon in the column of air above the cornfield. (Getting this demands using the masses of CO2 and air, and multiplying by the height of the atmosphere.) Then one acre of corn incorporates as much of our annual increase in carbon stored in the air column above 400 acres.

So there is a lot of carbon hovering over our heads. It gets drawn down into vegetation like corn every year, only to be returned to the air when the bulk of the vegetation rots. The annual oscillation in CO_2 in the whole atmosphere reflects this storage in the northern hemisphere, where most of the land is; in winter the CO_2 returns to the air. Harnessing this prodigious storage method could give us great leverage over the global CO_2 imbalance. Just keep the vegetation from rotting back into the air by hiding it.

As he does so often, Freeman Dyson had the basic idea first. In 1977 he proposed storing away trees. (“Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?”, Energy J. 2, 287-291.) Much has been done since.

Lately, two distinct approaches emerged for hiding away (sequestering) CO_2 from the air:

1.Pre-emission carbon sequestering.

Take carbon out before burning fuel or letting vegetation rot. The Department of Energy studies only capturing carbon during the burning process, then packing it away under pressure. One can inject it into deep saline reservoirs, as is done by a Norwegian energy company, STATOIL. They separate CO_2 from natural gas at high cost and inject about a million tons per year into the open spaces where they got the oil a kilometer below the North Sea ocean floor. Other possible sites include active and depleted oil and gas reservoirs, and mined cavities in salt domes. The danger here is that many domes leak, because millions of wildcatter drillings have punctured them.

2. Post-emission carbon sequestering.

This means sucking CO_2 from the air after burning the fuel. This is intrinsically better, because it can reduce present levels, the only way to do so besides growing more trees (which is a good, though limited idea). This makes nature a partner in doing the work.

There’s a little-noticed secret here, too. We put about 7.4 GtC (giga-tons of Carbon, C—where giga- means a billion) into the air. But only around 3.5 GtC gets permanently into our atmosphere. So nearly half goes somewhere else—most likely, the oceans and the land, though we know this only poorly.

Still, this missing half means that nature hides a lot of carbon, too. By capturing carbon after the burning, directly from air, we get the benefit of nature’s work before we do ours. We bat last, in other words, in the cleanup position.

The Metzger-Benford (MB) idea appeared in Climatic Change 49: 11-19, in 2001. It’s simple, low tech:

Collect crop residues after the harvest. Take only the easy bits from above ground and those that are not needed to control soil erosion. Float this downstream on This barges to use as little fuel as possible, out into river deltas or the deep ocean. Drop it overboard. Let gravity take it below the “thermocline,” so that the carbon the residue releases into the oceans does not return to our air for at least a thousand years, and perhaps longer.

This has big advantages. It:

(a) uses biomass that is now mostly left to rot in the fields,

(b) demands no new land,

(c) uses residues that can be gathered and shipped with the same equipment and people used to bring in the crop,

(d) requires no new technologies or transport systems to gather and ship the residues, and it

(e) is a post emission process.

Further, available crop residues increase with population growth since food production rises with population.

Why put it in the sea? Because the deep oceans already sequester the vast bulk of the world’s carbon—over 99%. The oceans are not CO_2 saturated, they can hold much more, and the deep ocean circulates carbon back to the surface in millennia. Carbon left 4 km down will not return to our air for about 8000 years. The deeper we put it, the better.

Even this is a worst case. Residues left exposed on the ocean floor have their decay byproducts easily enter into the waters. Embedding them beneath the ocean floor during sinking, or by subsequent covering from silting or other covering mechanisms, as in river deltas, makes this time much longer. Below ocean depths of about 1 km lies the thermocline, where there is little oxygen and temperatures are only a few degrees above 0 C. This oxygen-starved environment mixes with surface waters very slowly.

Simply dropping baled waste, with weights attached to ensure that trapped air does not make the bales float, should then sequester the waste. (The weights could be made of carbon-rich solid wastes that, left on land, would normally decay into CO_2; this sequesters more carbon.) To make doubly sure, and extend the sequestering time, one might shape the waste into cylinders with conical weight heads. These ‘carbon torpedoes’ would penetrate the bottom sediments to several meters, sealing in decay products. This may prove particularly useful, since then trapped methane or CO_2 can attain the concentration where stable hydrates of methane or CO_2 form, securing the carbon for very long times. Simply offloading farm waste into an actively depositing river delta like the Mississippi’s can bury it within days as later river silt falls upon it. This, too, secures the carbon for a long while.

Indeed, carbon left near subduction zones will get drawn into the Earth’s crust, not due back for 100 million years. This puts the engine of continental drift on our side.

Costs and Criticisms

This method is far cheaper than capturing CO2 in power plants—that usually demands 30% of the plant power output. The reason is that the idea uses nature’s plants, not power plants. Ordinary crops do the work for us as we farm.

How big a prospect is this idea? Suppose we assume a typical erosion-abatement farm technique that leaves 25% of the residue on the field. Adding up only major grains (wheat, milled rice, and corn) yields for the USA a total of 180 mtC (million metric tons of carbon). This is about 13% of total USA carbon emissions in 1990, the base year for the Kyoto Treaty.

How about the whole world? Available big crops could lock up nearly 17% of global 1990 emissions.

These are big numbers. Kyoto would have reduced emissions far less, and no one expects even those who signed it to fully comply. Yet Kyoto will cost at least $100 billion.

We found that depositing the entire disposable U.S. waste tonnage, 450 Mt of plant waste, would cost about $22.5 billion if total collection and transport costs are $50/ton, a reasonable estimate. Still, $22.5 billion seems a small cost to hide 13% of all U.S. emitted carbon. Kyoto alone would have cost us about $90 billion.

Can it work globally? Scaling this result to other nations makes sense only for those already producing substantial crops easily movable to ocean sites. This probably includes some European states, the Ukraine and a few developing nations such as South Africa and Brazil (the Amazon is a great way to move sugar cane stalks).

There can be political advantages, too. The $22 billion per year spent to sequester farm residue will go to the American heartland, into the hands of ordinary laboring people such as farmers and truck drivers. It demands no new infrastructure and is easily stopped if unwanted effects occur. A program of domestic carbon credits exchanged in a market could make disposal efficient. After all, waste need not be cleanly handled, as are edible crops; coal barges will serve nicely.

Such bulk disposal is the simplest, lowest tech way to hide carbon from our atmospheric cycle. As a bonus, it will give ordinary working people a feeling that they, too, can do something active about climate change. And because farm waste plausibly rises with population, as does energy use, this sequestering method will then keep pace with the predicted rise of our numbers to about 9 billions within a half century.

The projected cost of capturing 13% of our CO_2 at power plants is huge—$300 billion or more. Pre-emission carbon sequestering simply cannot compete.

Many people don’t like putting carbon into the oceans. We know that our fossil fuel emissions have already made the seas more acidic, and this will add more. Further, it sounds like pollution, dumping farm waste. This appeals to emotions, though ocean moderating of the air is how nature does it, striking a slow balance between sea and air. The essential point, I’ve found in discussing this with oceanographers, is that deep sequestering has a very long return time—thousands of years. The oceans do not swiftly transport their chemical properties vertically. The acid buildup we have caused has so far penetrated only about a kilometer downward. Putting carbon at the bottom of the oceans, and perhaps even subducting it into the crust, speeds up a natural process (the carbon we’re emitting will eventually end up in the Earth’s deep crust). Also, it protects the zone of air and upper oceans where nearly all life lives.

What has been the reception to this idea? A lab experiment at the University of Washington showed that waste does indeed enter the water under deep ocean conditions as we said. A cost analysis showed that the economics works at present levels of carbon trading prices, so the method can compete with carbon credit markets.

But there has been no action at all from the Department of Energy. They fund only pre-emission capture, and only skimpily. A pilot plant to test that idea will not open until 2012. Nobody is in a rush to explore carbon capture.

Instead of draconian cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions, there may very well be fairly simple ways—even easy ones—to fix our dilemma. But the discussion of global warming never makes this clear; it seems designed to preclude any hint that we might remedy the situation except through great sacrifice, discomfort, and cost. Indeed, it seemingly assumes a direct relationship between the level of sacrifice, discomfort, and cost demanded by any proposed solution and its scientific efficacy. Solutions based on suppressing fuel use will cost us dearly, in terms of both dollars spent and standard of living. Economists differ over the price tag, with a rough analysis yielding an estimate of about $250 billion a year to reduce carbon dioxide emissions alone by 15 percent worldwide. (This number is easily debatable within a factor of two.) To this price we must add the cost of reducing other greenhouse gases, a cost felt not merely in our pocketbooks but also in the goods, services, and innovations whose production would be halted or forgone.

Puritans and Prophets

Why have ideas like these gotten no traction?

Americans have a deep propensity for pursuing morality into the thickets of science. The cloning of a sheep in Scotland provokes stern finger pointing by archbishops and ethics experts alike. This we must expect as scientific topics become ever more complicated, and freighted with profound implications.

So it inevitably shall be for greenhouse gases. Of course it would be far better to abstain from burning so much. The fossil carbon resources are a vast heritage whose utility, convenience and endless applications we—or rather, surely our great-grandchildren—shall not see again.

In the end, the deep Puritan impulse to scold and condemn for rising fossil fuel use will very probably fall upon deaf ears in both the emerging and the advancing nations. It has not fared well among its natural constituency, those who are far more easily moved by campaigns to end smoking, save the whales or stop sullying the city air.

But among the able nations, those who have the foresight to grasp solutions, an odd reluctance pervades the policy classes. The past shouts but the future can only whisper. Ralph Cicerone, a noted atmospheric physicist, noted that “Many who envision environmental problems foresee doom and have little faith in technology, and therefore propose strong limits on industrialization, while most optimists refuse to believe that there is an environmental problem at all.”

Next time: Editing the Sun : A Way Out Way Out

What I’ve Learned Interviewing Futurists

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Two years of asking people for their expectations about the future has radically changed my view of what is to come.

For decades I thought I had a pretty good notion of what the future might hold, certainly better than most people since I’ve been reading science fiction since I was in grade school, and have gone on to write several science fiction novels as an adult. But in hosting The Future And You I’ve listened to descriptions of trends that I had no idea were building all around me. I’ve heard of discoveries and innovations and areas of research I’d never expected. And I’ve listened to evidence in support of ideas that I’d previously thought too crazy to be true. Combing these many bits of data has painted for me a somewhat startling picture of the future.

Here are just a few of the conclusions I’ve come to.

* * *

The changes we observe in our world will occur at an ever increasing rate. Not just change in the form of technological advancement, but all changes: social, economic, political, linguistic, you name it and it will change faster. This is because people will continue to be more and more connected. They will talk and share information and ideas more and more easily. And because of this, the changes which people bring about in every area of life will happen faster and faster.

Changes that would take ten years to occur today will be done in five years, then three years, then two, and eventually only one. The pace of life, and the sweep of changes, and the volatility of stock markets, will be overwhelming to some. These people will withdraw from society and seek refuge in quieter places of lower technology. But most will function at the more frantic pace; some will even thrive in it.

* * *

We, and I mean every individual in every developed or developing country, will never again have as much privacy as we have today. From this point on into the future, at least for the next few decades, our privacy will shrink every year. And every year we will feel as though it has become invaded so much that it can’t get any worse, and then the next year to our amazement it will get worse. And every little bit of privacy we lose, we will never get back.

This has nothing to do with our overprotective or paranoid governments spying on us; and has everything to do with the relentless progress of technology: cameras in cell phones, in public places, in every police car, and soon in ordinary eyeglasses. These will be increasingly popular, and the images they produce, increasingly accessible through networks—some through private networks and some through the internet.

Soon video cameras will be small enough to be glued onto the back of a bee or a housefly. You will find them in the electronics department at all the big stores. Teenaged boys all across America will release a fly camera into their neighbor’s house or the house of their girlfriend or the girl’s shower room at school.

Eventually the camera won’t need the living fly to carry it through the air, and will instead use a robotic fly. Then it will go directly to where it is instructed, perhaps by joystick. And it will continue to shrink, eventually becoming too small to see or feel. Then it can be guided to travel under that woman’s clothing who just happens to be walking by.

I suggest you enjoy the privacy you have today, because you won’t have it for long, and you will never again have this much.

* * *

Virtual worlds (sometimes called virtual reality) will become increasingly popular in direct proportion to how effectively they provide their users (or inhabitants) with a meaningful personal experience. The current limitations on this are: the power of home computers, the quality of the virtual world’s programming, the power of the virtual world’s computers, and the bandwidth available to the user and throughout the internet. Every one of these is improving at an exponential rate.

Eventually virtual worlds will look and feel and sound to their users as authentic as the natural world. For some it will be a world in which they are young and strong and beautiful, though in the real world they are old and frail and haggard. For others it will be a world in which they can walk and run, though in the real world they have no legs.

* * *

Cell phones will merge with the internet. All popular forms of information technology will be accessible through cell phones and become completely portable. All TV shows, all radio stations, all newspapers, all video games, all commercially produced books, even encyclopedias and libraries. Any entertainment or information company that fails to make the transition to the internet, and therefore cell phones, will fade out of existence.

Books printed on paper will become like candles: decorative objects that we all love and give to one another as gifts but never actually rely upon for their original function.

As more visual entertainment becomes accessible through the cell phone, an optional screen worn as eyeglasses will gain popularity and become the dominant means of viewing TV and movies. This visual device will eventually be replaced by wiring the visual input directly into the optical nerves.

* * *

Just as prosthetic devices have been developed to replace amputated limbs, so too, prosthetic devices will be developed to replace amputated portions of the brain. Eventually these will become common. Someday, after they become common, they will be improved so much that they work better than the tissue they replace. And sometime after that a few people—only a few at first—will begin to migrate their minds into them, completely abandoning their original organic brains. If these pioneers prosper in their new abode, others will follow.

* * *

As our technology allows us greater flexibility to manipulate large complicated organic molecules such as proteins, hormones, genes and viruses, those people who today are hacking the internet will redirect their focus upon this new technology and begin hacking biota. The viruses they unleash upon the world will be viruses in the traditional, not metaphorical, sense.

A hackers usual goal is not to destroy—or in this case to kill—but to impress ones fellow hackers by disrupting people’s lives in some dramatically visual way. But while a bio-hacker’s goal may be to make everyone in Chicago’s hair fall out in a single day, or to make the skin of everyone in New York City turn neon pink, errors can be made, and those errors may be fatal to everyone in Chicago or New York City.

The worst news is that bio-hacking is probably not preventable. Computer hacking wasn’t and still isn’t. We may have to invent bio-firewalls and bio-virus-checkers to protect our bodies against such attacks. The only good news might be that such firewalls might protect us from nature’s viruses as well. In which case we would never again catch a cold.

* * *

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that people either love or hate. There seems to be no emotional middle ground. Yet Wikipedia is growing at an exponential rate. As I write these words it is more than ten times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Eventually, it would seem, that all human knowledge will be contained in this, and other wiki’s, and will be made freely available to everyone with internet access.

* * *

The big screen TV will become ubiquitous and will get all its shows and movies as downloads through the internet. Not some, but all. The internet will become the primary means of distribution for TV shows and movies.

This will occur through a merging of the various TV delivery services. Cable TV networks, for example, will expand their offerings of internet services to their customers until eventually they become indistinguishable from the internet. The same will happen to the satellite TV systems.

Movie theaters will remain popular in their current form for at least a decade and possibly several decades, however, because people go there for the experience of “going out” as a couple or as a group not simply for the content.

* * *

eBay will continue to grow through the next few decades, and will remain the dominant online auction house, though it will also grow in its sales of items which are sold at a pre-set price rather than by auction.

The only competitors to eBay that will prosper are those which sell things eBay refuses to allow. There are dozens of such things, such as fireworks, food, human body parts for surgical transplant, and Nazi memorabilia.

* * *

The Earth (which over geologic-time has never remained at any particular temperature) is currently getting warmer.

Human-Caused Global Warming as a concept is extremely popular within the scientific community as well as with virtually all people who are either young or describe themselves as liberal.

The concept of non-human-caused global warming is not popular within the scientific community but is generally considered a possibility. It is moderately popular, however, with those whose life-style choices are blamed for human-caused global warming.

* * *

More and more surgery will be done using remotely controlled manipulators which enter the patient’s body through a small incision. These devices will get progressively smaller, and be mounted on the end of a thinner and thinner cable, until eventually the cable will be as thin as a human hair, and the manipulators will be available in sizes ranging from that of a peanut for big surgeries, to a grain of sand for very delicate work. In this way surgeries will become progressively less invasive.

At some point the remote surgical manipulator will become liberated from the end of the long cable altogether. These wireless manipulators will be tiny remotely controlled robots.

Exploratory surgery will be done by these robots which will shrink in size over a period of several decades. Early versions smaller than a honey bee may be in use by 2015, and by 2035 they may be too small to see with the unaided eye, but will continue to shrink to the size of a single living cell.

* * *

Learn More

You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.

Or learn more about his podcast The Future And You here, or here or even here.

Television Has a Lot to Answer For

Written by Mike Resnick

It was close to seven decades ago that Isaac Asimov looked around at the current state of the art, realized that except for Eando Binder’s crude, pulpish hero Adam Link, almost every robot in science fiction was a malicious monstrosity, applied a little rationality, and came up with the Three Laws of Robotics.

It was a brilliant breakthrough, and forever put an end to the kind of robots that dominated the covers and interiors of the science fiction magazines of the 1930s. In fact, it seemed reasonable to assume that from that day forward every science fictional robot would be governed by the Three Laws or some variation of them.

So what happened?

Clifford D. Simak created Jenkins, the robot servant in the classic City, a robot who felt, empathized, and could even lie in a good cause. John Sladek created Roderick, a robot whose middle name might well have been Satire. Robert Sheckley created a robot with (very humorous) sexual accomplishments. I picked up a Hugo nomination for a story about a robot whose greatest desire was to cry.

During the same time period that Asimov developed his laws, Robert A. Heinlein created the ultimate time paradox tale in his classic novella, “By His Bootstraps.” No need for anyone to ever write another.

But Heinlein himself topped it with “All You Zombies.” So did David Gerrold with The Man Who Folded Himself. So did William Tenn with “Me, Myself and I.” And none of them had anything in common with “By His Bootstraps” except that they concerned time paradoxes.

Phillip Wylie actually created the first superman in his novel, Gladiator. Then came Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, a mental rather than a physical superman. Then came a whole series of supermen created by A. E. van Vogt. And of course there was Asimov’s Mule, and Henry Kuttner’s Baldies, and James H. Schmitz’s delightful Witches of Karres … and need I go on? The only ones who bore more than a passing resemblance to Wylie’s original were the continuing pulp character Doc Savage, and the continuing comic book character Superman.

Olaf Stapledon gave us a thinking dog in Sirius. Which was nothing like the thinking dogs Clifford D. Simak gave us a decade later in City, or Fredric Brown’s thinking dog, or Brown’s thinking mouse, or any number of thinking cats, horses, dragons, you name it. None of which had anything in common with Sirius, except that they were animals and sentient.

Okay, move the clock ahead to the 1990s and 2000s. I can’t tell you how many young people I’ve spoken to at lectures, workshops, and online who only want to write Star Trek books or Star Wars books (and in the 1990s you could add Beauty and the Beast books). The CompuServe network, back in the 1990s, had about 300 embryonic writers who only wanted to write Pern stories, even though the laws of copyright were explained to them and Anne McCaffrey had to land on a couple who ignored those laws.

For the longest time I didn’t understand it. These aren’t detective or Western stories, where you create a Sherlock Holmes or Hopalong Cassidy and tell his adventures for the rest of your career—and even in mysteries or Westerns, you created your own detective or cowboy, you didn’t swipe someone else’s.

We’re not mysteries or Westerns. We’re science fiction, which gives its writers all time and space to play with. Our galaxy has about one hundred billion stars. We’ve got at least a couple of billion Class G stars, just like our sun, and we’re starting to find out that damned near every star we examine has planets. The possibilities, scientific and fictional, are endless. So why do so many people want only to tell second-hand stories about Kirk and Spock and Picard and Skywalker in a handful of third-hand, shopworn, thoroughly-explored and not-very-logical universes?

When they see something that interests them or impresses them, why don’t they do what Simak did when he read about Asimov’s robots, what van Vogt did when he read about Wylie’s and Stapledon’s supermen, what Gerrold did when he encountered Heinlein’s time paradoxes? Why are the book and magazine slushpiles filled almost to overflowing with thinly-disguised Enterprises and Darth Vaders and the like?

And then it occurred to me. There is one major difference between most of the writers I named, and all of the hopeful ones I’ve been encountering for the past decade or so … and that is that most of the writers I named did not grow up watching television. Television didn’t exist during their formative years, so they grew up reading. They did not watch the same unchanging characters in the same trite, interchangeable plots week in and week out. They did not spend hours every night exposed to uncreative, unthreatening mental pablum that convinces each new generation of couch potato that it is Art. And, uninfluenced by the tube, they kept science fiction lively, creative and innovative.

Conclusion: even out here in the boonies where written science fiction lives, television has a lot to answer for.

Paper books are not going to be joining the dodo any time soon.

If ever.

Written by Eric Flint

Beginning with this essay, I’m going to devote several essays in this column to analyzing the impact on publishing as electronic reading continues to expand. So far, for the most part, I’ve concentrated on demonstrating the fallacy of the various arguments in favor of DRM that focus on the impact of electronic so-called piracy on the sales of paper books.

If we plant our feet on the real world, that was quite reasonable. Outside of some specialty areas like encyclopedia publishing, the overwhelming bulk of publishing—whether you measure that in terms of income generated, number of titles produced, or number of readers—has remained traditional paper publishing. Except for those specialty areas, electronic publishing is still a tiny sliver of the market.

But what if—or when—that changes? What if—or when—electronic publishing becomes the dominant form of publishing? Perhaps even the exclusive form of publishing?

It would seem self-evident, the argument goes, that at that point the problem of electronic piracy would become paramount. Whatever income the expanded sales of paper editions might get from free electronic copies would obviously no longer offset the losses. It would vanish altogether—or, at the very least, become picayune.

From that time on, so the argument goes, doom is upon us. The moment pirate editions of electronic books—and there are no other kind of books, any longer—start reaching the top of the list in search engines, authors will starve to death and publishers will go bankrupt.

Everything about this argument is wrong, from the letter A to the letter Z. And it’s wrong on all levels. It will take me several essays to dismantle the argument, because it’s based on a pile of errors, each of which lays the premise for the next.

I will take up the following issues:

1) Is it true, to begin with, that electronic publishing is on the verge—or even within a decade or two—of replacing paper publishing as the dominant form of publishing?

2) Will the relationship between traditional paper publishing and electronic publishing be one of replacement? Or will it, instead, be a supplemental one? And, within that range, what are the most likely outcomes? Should we use as a past historical model the relationship between:

a) typewriters and computers—complete substitution;

b) manual transmissions and automatic transmissions—a division of the market;

c) ground personal transport and air personal transport—supplemental, with both old and new technologies used by almost everyone;

d) kitchen knives and home food processors—the old technology remains dominant, with the new one purely supplemental and used by relatively few people.

3) Assuming the most likely variant—which is somewhere between “b” and “c,” to prefigure my analysis—how significant will be the impact of electronic copyright infringement? To put it another way, what policies would be best to follow concerning DRM and fair use?

4) Assuming the “worst” possible variant—the complete substitution of paper publishing by electronic publication, and the relegation of paper books to historical curiosities—would those policies need to be drastically changed or modified?

In this essay, I’m going to concentrate on the first issue: How close are we to seeing the advent of the “electronic age” in reading books? And how rapidly is the change going to take place?

I’ll start with the simple version of the answer. We are not even close to the point where, outside of some specialty areas, we will be seeing electronic publishing become the dominant form of publishing. In fact, in those areas of publishing which are and always have been the mainstay of book publishing—fiction of all sorts, and popular non-fiction titles—electronic publishing will remain a sideline for many years to come.

Why? For the good and simple reason that while electronic publishing presents some advantages for publishers and readers (and authors, for that matter), compared to traditional publishing, the advantages simply aren’t great enough for most people to offset either the disadvantages or the sheer cultural inertia of paper books. Analogies between electronic publishing and other technologies which have seen a rapid and explosive growth collapse at the very beginning—because the analogy itself is fallacious.

Whenever you see or hear someone arguing that electronic publishing is about to undergo an explosive development, I urge you to look closely at the structure of the argument. What you will discover—each and every time, with no exceptions—is that the argument is based purely on reasoning by analogy. It is never based on any facts deriving from the actual industry under question, which is the book publishing industry.

That’s because all the facts point in the opposite direction. The facts—which are now based on at least fifteen years of experience—indicate that electronic publishing and reading grow quite slowly, outside of some specialty areas.

Argument by analogy is always suspect. Pointing to the explosive growth of computers, or cell phones, or various forms of electronic copying devices for music and video (VHS, DvDs, etc) as if those phenomena provide any sort of predictive powers for the growth of electronic reading simply begs the question. So do learned arguments about so-called “S-curves” in the development and expansion of technological innovations.

The reason it begs the question is that the argument pre-supposes that simply because something is a technological innovation it is predestined to develop a large market.

But that’s silly. Technological innovations come in a vast range. Some are so much better that they rapidly and completely replace the pre-existing technology. To use my range of examples above, a computer word processing program is so superior to a typewriter for any purpose that within a very short time, typewriters became purely historical objects.

But, moving down my list, consider what happened with automatic transmissions. They were first introduced into the commercial market by Oldsmobile in 1940—over two-thirds of a century ago. But, on a global scale, they’ve only just begun to finally supplant manual transmissions as the predominant form of automobile transmissions, although they did so in North America several decades ago. Still, even in North America, about seventeen percent of all cars purchased use a manual transmission. And that doesn’t include the use of manual transmissions in commercial-size trucks.

Moving still further down my list, air personal transport—once widely predicted in science fiction to be on the verge of replacing ground personal transport—did indeed enjoy explosive growth since the first airplane specifically designed for passenger flight was introduced by Boeing in 1929. But the growth came entirely as a supplement to ground transport, not a substitute. In the United States, air travel has by now largely supplanted rail travel for the passenger market—but it hasn’t made a dent in automobile travel. And, in most of the world outside of the U.S., rail travel is continuing to do quite well.

Finally, there’s the home food processor. First introduced into the market in France in the late 60s, it spread to the United States in the early 70s. To put it another way, the new technology has had four decades to supplant kitchen knives. And …

Kitchen knives are doing just fine, thank you. Even those people—a small share of the potential market—who do buy home food processors, never get rid of their kitchen knives. Food processors have simply become a minor supplement to the traditional technology, and have not replaced that “obsolete” technology at all.

Why? Because while food processors have some advantages over kitchen knives for some purposes on some occasions, they simply don’t provide enough advantages—and have some drawbacks of their own—to replace kitchen knives. Even for people who buy and use home food processors, kitchen knives are still the “default tool” used for most purposes.

To be sarcastic about this, the next time someone lectures you on the S-curve and what it “inevitably” implies for electronic publishing, ask them what the S-curve was for the autogyro.

There’s an old maxim: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

And the fact is, the traditional “obsolete and old-fashioned” paper book ain’t broke. Not for most readers, most of the time, for most purposes. And, whatever its limitations, it possesses some enormous advantages over electronic books.

To begin with, like kitchen knives, paper publishing is a technology that has been tested over centuries and has proven itself to be extremely durable and reliable. In contrast, NO software yet developed has demonstrated that it can even last a decade before it gets replaced by something else.

You can buy a paper book and know, for a certainty, that barring a flood or a fire or a bombing raid or an asteroid strike or real carelessness on your part, you will still be able to read the same book half a century from now. If it’s a hardcover, longer than that.

Can anyone say the same about any electronic reading device on the market today—or predicted to be on the market in the foreseeable future?

No. In fact, everyone has dark memories about “inevitable” technologies that bit them on the ass. Can we say … eight-track tapes … Betamax … software programs too numerous to count which became obsolete …

There are some absolutely enormous advantages to paper books. The biggest and simplest stem from the very simplicity of the technology.

Here’s what you need to obtain and use a paper book:

Literacy in one or another language. That is the only software required.

A relatively small amount of money. That is the only financial limitation—and you can get around that one easily, by borrowing a book or using a library.

If you can read and have some money, you can own and use a paper book. That book does not require you to agree to an end-user license. That book does not carry any risk of becoming obsolete so long as the paper, ink and binding holds up—and they’ll hold up for decades, even with a cheap paperback.

There is no restriction as to which publisher you buy from. You can buy from any of them—because they all use exactly the same software. The English language. (Or whichever other language you’re reading.) There are no security codes you need to obtain, learn, memorize. No username, no password.

And … once you buy that book, you OWN it. No ifs, ands or buts. You can do anything you want with it. Keep it, sell it, lend it to a friend, throw it at the neighbor’s yowling cat or use it for a doorstop. There is no chance at all that you will be subjected to a lawsuit because you violated this or that or the other provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or fell foul of the RIIA.

One universal and standard software. One universal and standard purchasing mechanism. Complete and total ownership.

Those factors alone make the potential market for e-books extremely resistant. All the more so because the only major advantage of electronic text for most readers is simply storage. The one respect in which electronic books and e-book readers are clearly, unequivocally and absolutely superior to paper books is that they don’t take up much space. You can fit an entire bookshelf into one e-book reader. (At least, with certain models.)

The problem, however, is that the same clear advantage is also a major disadvantage. The fact is that the great majority of book purchases are done by a small minority of readers. That’s true in every literate country in the world, although the percentages vary from nation to nation. Russians, for instance, have a traditionally book-oriented culture whose adults read a lot of books, whereas Americans do not. Throughout American history—this is not a recent development “caused” by the digital era; it goes back at least three centuries—most adult Americans read few books, and when they do the books will usually be either religious in nature and/or be practical manuals or self-help books of one sort or another.

What that means is that publishers, author and editors have always relied on a relatively small percentage of the population for their income and livelihoods. In the United States, the figure is not more than fifteen percent of the adult population.

The reason this is possible, however, is because—as a rule; there are always exceptions—those people who do read books typically read a lot of them. Go into any household in the Unites States, and with a few exceptions you will always discover the same thing:

There are either no books visible, beyond perhaps the Bible and one or two self-help books (diet books; “How to Get Rich in Ten Easy Steps;” etc, etc) or there is at least one full bookcase.

Those people who assume that the storage advantage of e-books will be enough in itself to cause that technology to soon dominate the market, should really ponder the implications. Because the reality is that paper books are not and never have been simply a tool to read text. A paper book is a cultural artifact whose intellectual, emotional, social—even symbolic—important is deeply rooted in every literate culture in the world.

There’s a reason, y’know, it’s called the Holy Book.

Try to imagine a world whose regular readers will cheerfully give up bookcases full of books.

Go ahead. Try.

Not so easy, is it?

And for what? Ease of storage?

Oh, what a laugh. I do not know one single person who reads regularly who has not, at least once in their lives, gone to well-nigh incredible lengths to figure out a way to store their books. Be it ingenious locations for bookshelves, stashing them in the basement or attic or garage, whatever. With a few exceptions, it’s only with great reluctance that such people finally decide to give away or sell some of their books. (Except the ones they don’t like, of course. But not even the most rabid enthusiast for e-book readers thinks people will buy the gadgets to store books they don’t want to begin with.)

What other real advantages do e-books have over paper books?

For most people … none worth talking about.

I stress “for most people,” because there are obviously exceptions—and a fair number of them. The single most important group, for whom electronic reading is definitely superior to paper reading, are those people who suffer one or another physical handicap that makes reading paper books difficult. The most common example are people who are blind or have a severe visual impairment. For them, the advent of electronic reading has been a genuine blessing.

But—yes, I know this is cold-blooded—those people are and always have been a small share of the market.

Beyond that, there are some people for whom the various bells and whistles really matter. I know one regular reader who swears to me—and I believe him—that he actually prefers to read electronic text. But people like that are few and far between.

And that won’t change much, or quickly, because the advantages they point to are simply marginal for most readers.

I can easily bookmark a page electronically!

Uh, yeah … and I’ve been doing that with a bookmark or a pencil—or, usually, just a scrap of paper I find somewhere—for half a century. So have and do most people. It’s honestly not the labors of Hercules that’s being saved here. For this, I should spring the money to buy an e-book reader and put myself at the mercy of e-book manufacturers and software developers?

With a backlit screen, I can read in the dark!

Uh, yeah … and how many people, except kids staying up past their bedtime and surreptitiously reading under the blankets with a flashlight, really need that particular advantage? Mind you, I hold those youngsters in very high esteem—having been one myself, at times past—but the cold-blooded fact remains that they’re a tiny percentage of the market. The reason they have curfews to violate in the first place is because they are too young to have much in the way of a disposable income.

I can easily search for text!

This is true—and, as I will examine in a later essay, it’s the reason that many people (including me) like to also possess an electronically formatted version of a book. There are times when being able to search for text is indeed handy.

But being able to search for text is a fairly trivial advantage to e-books, all things considered, especially when you factor into the equation a basic reality: By far the two largest sectors of the publishing market are fiction and popular non-fiction. (The latter category includes things like practical manuals—cookbooks, the Idiot’s Guide to everything including idiocy—any and all manner of self-help books, popular biographies and histories, true crime stories, etc.)

Look, let’s be realistic. I dote on Louis L’Amour westerns. I dote on any number of science fiction and fantasy authors. I dote on a smaller but still significant number of mystery authors.

I have read every single Nero Wolfe novel that Rex Stout ever wrote. But the number of times I have even vaguely pondered the advantage of being able to search the text of those novels is …

Exactly zero. Same with Louis L’Amour. Same with Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke or Ursula Le Guin.

Granted, I also read a lot of history books, and being able to search for something specific is indeed very handy for someone like me, who needs to use history books professionally. That’s why most history books have something called “indexes.” No, the indexes are not perfect. Yes, sometimes—not always—being able to search for something electronically would be easier.

But … but …

Only someone whose enthusiasm for electronic publishing borders on sheer solipsism can honestly think that the advantage of being able to do a somewhat quicker search of text for that relatively small percentage of books he or she would want to search in the first place, is enough by itself to cause an ancient and solidly rooted technology like paper publishing to collapse like a deck of cards.

Or that being able to read in the dark would do it, or that being able to bookmark electronically instead of by using a physical device, or that …

I could go on, but I’d just be belaboring the point. It’s a simple fact—and no technology foreseen will change this fact, either—that the only QUALITATIVE advantage of ebook reading over book reading is storage for most people, and the ability to get around (better, at least) one or another physical handicap for people who suffer from them.

Thazzit. The rest, being blunt, is just bells and whistles. And no technology in the history of the world has ever supplanted a pre-existing technology simply because it offered some bells and whistles. Certainly not a technology as deeply-ingrained into a society’s culture as paper books.

I can visualize in my mind a number of people reading this essay who, by now, are hopping up and down—figuratively, anyway—and deeply indignant because I’m gliding right over all of the subtleties and complexities involved in this issue.

No, I’m not—but I’ll deal with the subtleties and complexities in later columns. Right now, it’s time for the ax and the bludgeon. I do not for one moment think that electronic reading won’t become increasingly important. Of course it will. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be the editor of this electronic magazine and the publisher of another. (That being the Grantville Gazette, a specialty magazine devoted to my 1632 series.) But, for the moment, what needs to be established is a level-headed sense of what the future holds.

Growth, yes. Expanding significance, certainly. But a new technology that is on the verge of inundating traditional paper publishing?

Oh, hogwash.

And my opinion has the great benefit of being supported—year after year after year—by the facts.

People have been predicting, year after year after year, that “very soon now” electronic reading will take off like a rocket and become to be the dominant form of reading.

And, year after year after year, they are always proven wrong. They remind me of certain religious enthusiasts who keep predicting the end of the world or the return of the messiah “very soon now.” Who are always wrong, year after year after year—but still retain their blind faith.

And that’s what it is. Blind faith. There is no rational reason to believe that e-books and electronic reading will have an explosive growth in the foreseeable future. (Again, outside of some specialty areas.)

The reason I’ve spent time on this is because it’s not simply an interesting intellectual debate. Underlying this issue of how rapidly and to what extent electronic reading will grow is a different issue, and one that has much darker overtones.

With very few exceptions—there are some, but not many—people who insist that electronic reading is about to undergo an explosive growth are also alarmists concerning what that will mean for publishers and authors. They are also people who advocate or at least look sympathetically upon “tough” anti-piracy measures. They are also people who predict that authors will soon be faced with enormous financial pain and challenges because of the advent of electronic reading.

The logic is not hard to grasp. Stripped to its essentials, it goes as follows:

Because traditional paper publishing is on the verge of joining the dodo and the passenger pigeon, rigorous and extensive measures must be put in place very quickly or disaster will befall us.

Right. This is, at best, a recipe for error. It is—at best—guaranteed to produce a lot of half-baked and poorly-thought-through policies and laws. More often than not, it is also a recipe for undermining basic political and civil liberties.

The reality is quite otherwise. Yes, electronic publishing is growing and will continue to grow—not simply in absolute terms, but relative to the size of the publishing market as a whole. But, except for a few areas, the growth is incremental. And—I put a stress here, because I will devote a whole column to this aspect of the problem—the form is predominantly takes is NOT—not not not—that of electronic publishing replacing paper publishing. The principal form it takes is that electronic publishing is increasingly supplementing paper publishing.

The point being, we’ve got plenty of time. Plenty of time to experiment with different measures, and try out a multitude of ways by which publishers and authors can not only withstand the pressure of electronic publishing but actually benefit from it.

What we don’t need is panic. What we don’t need are policies, laws and practices that undermine the long-established traditions, laws and customs surrounding copyright.

The Literature of Fandom

Written by Mike Resnick

There has always been a close tie between fandom and the world of professional science fiction. Many of our greatest names—Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Robert Silverberg, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Donald A. Wollheim, Harlan Ellison, tons of others—were fans before they became pros. Most—in fact, each of the writers I just named except Isaac—published fanzines. Fandom not only has a long and honored history of turning out topnotch professional writers, but it has a long and honored—and well-codified—history, period.

Indeed, never has a hobby been so thoroughly researched and written up. Even Mike Glyer’s Hugo-winning fanzine, File 770, is named for the most famous fannish party of all, held in Room 770 of the 1951 Worldcon hotel in New Orleans.

But as science fiction has become big business, we are no longer written almost exclusively by former fans or read exclusively by fans (at least, not in the sense of being members of organized—or disorganized—fandom.)

So I thought it might be interesting and informative not merely to mention that science fiction has the best-documented fandom of any field, but to discuss those books—over 50, believe it or not!—that have codified it for future generations. Now, this doesn’t pretend to be a complete list, not by any means. It’s just what I have managed to accumulate during my 45 years as a fan and a pro (which, I hasten to point out, are not mutually exclusive. I am, always have been, and always will be, a fan—the IRS’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding.) You won’t find more than a tiny handful of these at your local Barnes or Borders, or even on Amazon.com—but go to the dealers from a science fiction convention, or check out bookfinder.com, abebooks.com, albris.com and some of the other bookfinding services online, and eventually you’ll be able to find most of them.

HISTORIES

The first book of major import has to be The Immortal Storm, by Sam Moskowitz (published by the Atlanta Science Fiction Organization Press in 1954, and later reprinted by Hyperion). It is nothing less than the history of American science fiction fandom, culminating with the first Worldcon in 1939, all described in incredibly minute detail. Now, for those of you who may not know it, things did not go as smoothly at that first Worldcon as the participants might have wished. Moskowitz himself (a/k/a SaM, just as Forry Ackerman is a/k/a 4e) barred Don Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, Fred Pohl, Robert A. W. “Doc” Lowndes, and John Michel from entering, and the latter part of The Immortal Storm, told in the third person (though with Moskowitz as a major player), is an account of events leading up to, and including, what has come to be known in fannish history as The Exclusion Act. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember that these are not Kissinger and Disraeli SaM is writing about, but just a bunch of acne-faced kids with delusions of grandeur.

L. Sprague de Camp calls it “An extraordinary (if quite unintentional) study in small-group dynamics.” Harry Warner, Jr. adds that “If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anti-climax.” An unnamed fan is quoted in All Our Yesterdays as calling it “Badly translated from the Slobbovian,” a problem SaM would have again and again with his prose over the years. Damon Knight devoted a short chapter of his book of criticism, In Search of Wonder, to The Immortal Storm. The title of the chapter was “Microscopic Moskowitz.” How microscopic?

Try this brief excerpt on for size: “The membership never exceeded the original five, and since these five promptly split into two factions …”

I should add that there’s a companion piece of sorts. It’s Jack Speer’s Up To Now, available in A Sense of FAPA (which will be discussed later), or as a stand-alone chapbook published by Arcturus Press in 1994. It’s Speer’s version of fannish history in the 1930s, and actually pre-dates Moskowitz’s book. Is it any gentler and kinder?

Well, according to Joe Gilbert, it’s “as if someone had gathered up all the hates, prejudices and petty jealousies that have clogged the pipes of the stream of life since the world was first begun.”

So is it possible to write a history of fandom that doesn’t gather up all the hates, prejudices, etc.? It is if your name is Harry Warner, Jr. Harry took up where SaM and Speer left off, and covered the next two decades of fandom in two volumes. The first, dealing with the 1940s, was All Our Yesterdays, far better written than its predecessors, and without any axes to grind, since Harry’s primary interaction with fandom was through fanzines and letter-writing.

It’s a fabulous, informal history, covering all the high points, reporting on (for example) the initial meeting after the war between DAW (Wollheim) and SaM (the man who barred him from the first Worldcon), filled with well over 100 photos, even indexed. It’s a true treasure of fannish history and anecdotes.

Advent published All Our Yesterdays in 1969, and was set to publish A Wealth of Fable a few years later when Harry pulled the manuscript because, as he said in a letter to the Hugo-winning fanzine Mimosa), “(Editor) Ed Wood submitted a list of things which he thought I should insert in my manuscript. Every one of these items had one thing in common: they concerned Ed Wood’s activities in fandom or matters with which he had been closely associated.”

Anyway, it was Joe Siclari and his Fanhistorica Press to the rescue. Joe mimeographed A Wealth of Fable and turned it into three “issues” of a fanzine in 1977, and that was the only form in which it was available until SCIFI Press and editor Rich Lynch finally brought out a fine-looking hardcover at the 1992 Worldcon.

It’s not even a sequel, but rather a continuation, of All Our Yesterdays, heavily illustrated, obviously written by the same hand, chock full of the anecdotes that almost instantly become fannish legend.

A fascinating, though very localized history, was written by F. Towner Laney back in 1948. It was called Ah! Sweet Idiocy!, it was about his few years in LASFS (the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society), and it pre-dated Sen. Joseph McCarthy in accusing almost everyone the author knew of being either a homosexual, a Communist, or both. The villain of the piece seems to be 4e Ackerman—yet it was Ackerman who footed the publishing bill. Ah! Sweet Idiocy! appeared serially in FAPA (the Fantasy Amateur Press Association), and was later included, in its entirety, in Dick Eney’s massive collection, A Sense of FAPA.

Laney soon dropped out of fandom. He was married four times, and theoretically died on June 8, 1958. I say theoretically, because in the early 1980s I saw the name “F. Towner Laney” on the masthead of a computer magazine published in New York, and how many F. Towner Laneys can there be in the world?

Well, I’ve referred to A Sense of FAPA twice now, so I might as well tell you about it. Back in 1962, Dick Eney collected some of the most interesting items that had ever run in FAPA—fandom’s very first apa, which is still going strong in 2007—and published them before they could be lost forever. Its 370+ pages encompassed tons of artwork and articles, including Speer’s history and Laney’s idiocy. In a way, it’s a rival history of fandom, by people who had no idea they were contributing to fannish history until Eney put all their old articles and cartoons together in one fat fannish volume. You’ll also find “Mutation or Death,” John Michel’s propaganda tract that drew the battle lines between the Futurians and New Fandom, and some wonderful excerpts from Redd Boggs’ immortal Skyhook, young Bob Silverberg’s Spaceship, and other now-classic fanzines.

DICTIONARIES AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS

The first fannish encyclopedia—a dictionary of fannish terms and their origins, actually—was Jack Speer’s Fancyclopedia, published in 1944 by Forrest J Ackerman. It ran over 100 mimeographed pages.

It was succeeded in 1959 by Fancyclopedia II, edited by Dick Eney (and with co-editorial credit to Speer). Fancy II (its fannish nickname), one of my two or three favorite fannish books, runs 184 single-spaced pages, with 19 pages of Additions and Corrections and 24 pages of The Rejected Canon. A fabulous book, which is equally adept at discussing the X Document, telling you how to mix an Atomic cocktail, or displaying the floor plans to the Tucker Hotel. Jack Chalker’s Mirage Press printed a facsimile edition in 1979.

Eney also published the Fancyclopedigest, which was to be a bridge to Fancyclopedia III. When he ceased publishing, the project was taken over by some Los Angeles fans, who announced a pending publication in 1984. As I write this, it’s only 23 years overdue, nowhere near as late as The Last Dangerous Visions (also a Los Angeles project, now that I come to think of it), and I still have some slight hope of seeing it during my lifetime.

A more recent and somewhat less ambitious publication is Elliot Weinstein’s The Fillostrated Fan Dictionary, published in two parts by “O” Press in 1975. It comes in two volumes, totaling 171 pages, and may even have more definitions than Fancy II. But the reason I prefer Fancy II is that it gives anecdotes and histories of the terms, while Fillostrated simply gives definitions.

Halfway between a (small) dictionary and an (equally small) encyclopedia is The Neo-Fan’s Guide, written by Wilson “Bob” Tucker back in 1955. It has been reprinted a number of times, to the best of my knowledge without ever being updated. The most recent copy I’ve seen was published by Mike Glyer in 1984, though I’ve been told that Ken Keller published the authorized 7th edition in 1996. I think its popularity is a combination of two things: Tucker’s continuing status as fandom’s most beloved member until his death a year ago at age 91, and the fact that, unlike, say, the Fancyclopedia, is it quite small and hence inexpensive to print.

Finally, there’s Roberta Rogow’s Futurespeak: A Fan’s Guide to the Language of Science Fiction, published by Paragon House in 1991, and much too limited and media-oriented for my taste.

PROCEEDINGS

For a while there, I had high hopes that I could revisit every Worldcon since 1962 just by reading the transcript, but alas, it was not to be. Still, three of them did see print.

The first was The Proceedings: Chicon III, the complete, heavily-illustrated transcript of all the panels and speeches from the 1962 Worldcon, edited by Earl Kemp and published by Advent in 1963. To me, the highlights of this book are Robert Bloch’s lecture on Hollywood, and Theodore Sturgeon’s Guest of Honor speech.

Then came The Proceedings: Discon, the 1963 Worldcon transcript, also with close to one hundred photos, edited by Dick Eney and published by Advent in 1965. The best thing in this one is a panel with Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, Willy Ley, Leigh Brackett and popular sf cover artist Ed Emshwiller, that addressed the question, “What Should a BEM Look Like?” There’s also a fine Guest of Honor speech by Murray Leinster, who seems to have been forgotten a little faster than most of our giants, and if you never experienced Isaac Asimov as a toastmaster, this will show you what you missed.

Finally, Leslie Turek edited the profusely-illustrated coffee-table-sized edition The Noreascon Proceedings, the main-track transcripts of the 1971 Worldcon, which was published by NESFA Press in 1976. Highlights include a panel with Asimov and Clifford D. Simak, and another with Asimov, Marvin Minsky, and Larry Niven.

By then, Worldcons had gotten so large that it was impossible to glean even a hint of their flavor from a single track of the proceedings, and to print the entire proceedings—which has occasionally run to 15 and more tracks of programming, from 8 to 14 hours a day, during a 5-day weekend—was simply not feasible.

PHOTO BOOKS

The continuing growth of Worldcon eventually spelled fini to a series produced by Jay Kay Klein, science fiction’s unofficial photographic historian. Surely no one who has ever been to a Worldcon prior to the last few years has been able to avoid Jay Kay and his flash camera—but not all that many people know that in 1960 he published his Convention Annual #1, Pittcon Edition, a memory book filled with hundreds of photos and captions from the convention, covering panels, speeches, masquerades, the Hugo ceremonies, lobby lizards, and dozens of parties.

This was followed in rapid succession by Convention Annual #2, Chicon III Edition, in 1962; Convention Annual #3, Discon Edition, in 1963; and Convention Annual #4, Tricon Edition, in 1966. Jay Kay was all set to publish a fifth book, from 1974’s Discon II, but the Worldcon had grown so huge by that time that even with help, he could barely identify half the fans in the photos, and so he retired the series.

Looking back on them, I think the Klein photo books gave even more of a sense of what the conventions were really like than the various Proceedings did, since Jay Kay not only photographed every panel, but also thoroughly covered the art shows, the huckster rooms, the masquerades, and just about every party that was thrown on Worldcon weekend. Until we invent a time machine, these photo books are probably the closest you’ll ever come to experiencing—or re-experiencing—those early 1960s Worldcons.

There were two more memory books, published only months apart—and both, while slickly produced, were far less thorough than the Klein books. In 1984, Steve Francis edited Memories of NorthAmericon, a photo book of the 1979 NasFic that was held in Louisville, Kentucky—and just a few weeks later, Massachusetts Convention Fandom brought out the Noreascon Two Memory Book, the photo book of the 1980 Worldcon, edited by Suford Lewis. (They have since published the Noreascon III Memory Book as well.)

It’s been quite a while since the last photo memory book was produced, yet I know fans cherish them; hopefully some future committee(s) will reestablish the practice.

PRO/FAN MEMOIRS

As science fiction has reached larger audiences, and its practitioners have become more famous, it was inevitable that some of the leading professionals would be asked to write memoirs and autobiographies—and since so many pros came up through fandom, especially in the early days, many of their recollections also concern fandom.

The most important, and delightful, of these is Damon Knight’s The Futurians, published by John Day in 1977 (and later brought out in mass market paperback). Damon chronicles the group of teenagers who banded together in New York in the late 1930s, determined to have an effect on the field of science fiction—and considering that their numbers included Don Wollheim, Fred Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Robert Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, Virginia Kidd, Judith Merrill, and James Blish, among others, I think it’s safe to say they did just that. Knight chronicles their interior and exterior feuds (and one can be forgiven for feeling that, for their first couple of years of existence, they lived only to feud), follows them as Wollheim, Pohl and Lowndes nail down editorial jobs and begin buying from each other (and by 1943 they controlled more than half the magazines in the field), and then traces them to the present day, with Isaac becoming an international superstar, Wollheim morphing from Communist to capitalist and starting his own very successful publishing company, Kornbluth dying far too young, John Michel dying in almost total obscurity. It’s a difficult book to put down.

There’s a collection of six novelette-length autobiographies, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss, entitled Hell’s Cartographers (an editorial tip of the hat to Kingsley Amis’s ground-breaking collection of essays about science fiction, New Maps of Hell). It was published by Harper & Row in 1975, and three of the six autobiographies—by Fred Pohl, Damon Knight, and (peripherally) Robert Silverberg—deal with fandom.

Fred Pohl also wrote a full-length autobiography, The Way The Future Was, published by Del Rey in 1978, which covers much of his life in fandom before he turned pro. Isaac Asimov’s In Memory Yet Green, published by Doubleday in 1979, does much the same, though Isaac was never as heavily involved in fandom as many of his contemporaries. Surprisingly, Robert Bloch’s Once Around the Bloch, published by Tor in 1993, contains almost nothing about fandom, though Bloch himself was the best professional friend fandom ever had. (He wrote me that he had included a number of fannish anecdotes, especially about himself and Bob Tucker, but that they were later excised.)

Some passing references are made to fandom in some other memoirs, most notably Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s Over My Shoulder and Jack Williamson’s Hugo-winning Wonder’s Child, but in truth these are so pro-and-publishing-oriented that they don’t really qualify for mention here, despite their outstanding quality.

Finally, David G. Hartwell’s Age of Wonders, published by Walker in 1984 and since reprinted by Tor, has perhaps the best analysis of the symbiosis between prodom and fandom that has ever been written. It took a pro editor, rather than a fan, to write a general book for the science fiction public that explained in simple, straightforward terms the historic connection between fandom and science fiction, the pervasive influence of fans on the literature through fanzines, conventions, awards, and the graduation from their ranks to professional status of dozens of writers. Anyone even mildly acquainted with the field knows this is true, but it wasn’t until Hartwell’s book that it was stated so clearly that people who weren’t acquainted with fandom would know it too.

COLLECTIONS

My other favorite fannish book, along with Fancyclopedia II, is Bob Bloch’s The Eighth Stage of Fandom, a collection of 49 articles and poems, plus some hilarious filler ads. Bloch made his reputation as a writer of psychological horror, but he was also one of the field’s master humorists, and that sense of humor was never on better display than here. The book was published in hardcover and trade paperback by Advent in 1962, and 30 years later Wildside Press reprinted it in hardcover. It was editor Earl Kemp’s idea, and a damned good one; I love this book.

Bloch’s second fannish collection was Out Of My Head, published by NESFA Press in 1986. It contains 22 stories and articles, including the first new “Lefty Feep” story in four decades.

Another fine fannish writer turned pro was the late Terry Carr, creator of the Ace Specials. His most interesting collection was Fandom Harvest, a hardcover containing some 20 articles—including such classics as “The Hieronymus Fan” and “The Infinite Beanie”—and published in Sweden (but with English text) by Laissez Faire Produktion AB in 1986.

Terry also authored another collection of fanzine articles, Between Two Worlds, the flip half of a hardcover double with Bob Shaw’s delightful collection, Messages Found in an Oxygen Bottle. This two-in-one book was published by NESFA Press in 1986, when Terry was the Worldcon’s Fan Guest of Honor and Bob was its Toastmaster. Terry’s half of the book has 5 pieces, including the classic “Night of the Living Oldpharts,” Bob’s has 9 pieces, including the text of perhaps his most famous speech, “The Bermondsey Triangle Mystery.”

Another Terry Carr product was The Cacher of the Rye, a parody by “Carl Brandon.” Brandon was more than just a pseudonym; he was a fictional creation—a black California fan—that Terry foisted on fandom, and at one time most of fandom believed Carl was an actual person. The book begins with a long article by Carr explaining how and why he created Brandon, then presents the story, and ends with a thorough index of every article and story ever credited to Brandon and who actually wrote them (Carr did the bulk of the writing, but he was helped from time to time by Boob [sic] Stewart, Ron Ellik, and a handful of others who were in on the secret.) The story itself is a semi-loving criticism of fandom, which also manages to take a shot or two at Dianetics.

Another half of a convention double book was In and Out of Quandry, by Lee Hoffman. (The flip side is A. Bertram Chandler’s Up to the Sky in Ships.) Quandry was among the best and most important fanzines of the early 1950s, Lee was its editor, and this hardcover contains 9 articles from it, including “The Bluffer’s Guide to Publishing a Fanzine” and “A Surprise for Harlan Ellison.” It was published by NESFA Press in 1982, when Lee was the Fan Guest of Honor at the Chicago Worldcon. (Chandler was the Pro Guest of Honor.)

The 1996 Worldcon Guest of Honor book, The White Papers, published by NESFA Press, not only contained some brilliant stories by James White, but also many of his fanzine articles as well.

Paranoid/Inca Press brought out a couple of Bob Shaw chapbooks back in 1979, each a sheer delight. The first is The Best of the Bushel, a collection of 13 articles, and second is The Eastercon Speeches, containing five of his always-hilarious “Serious Scientific Talks” from 1974 through 1978. A later book, A Load of Old BoSh (published by BECCON in 1995) collected ten of Bob’s Eastercon speeches. (A word about these speeches: Bob Shaw ranks with Bob Bloch and Isaac Asimov as one of the funniest natural talents ever to hit science fiction’s Toastmaster circuit, and his collected speeches are almost a textbook demonstration on how to delight an audience, without letdown, for a full hour.)

Perhaps the most famous single collection of fannish writing ever put together is the massive Warhoon 28, published in hardcover by Richard Bergeron in 1978. This contains more than 600 pages, single-spaced, by Northern Ireland’s legendary Walt Willis, arguably the greatest fan writer of all. This enormous tome contains, among other things, installments 1 through 44 of his classic column, “The Harp That Once Or Twice;” the 36 chapters of “The Harp Stateside,” his memoir of his first American visit; the 20 chapters of “Twice Upon A Time,” the story of his return visit to America; and 21 segments of the mostly-autobiographical “The Subcutaneous Fan.” There are also a number of convention reports, some fan fiction, and various other examples of Willis’ literary art. A very worthwhile volume.

More recently, NESFA Press published a pair of fannish collections, both of which were nominated for Hugos. First came Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Book, in 1994, which included 15 articles from fanzines; and then, in 1996, multiple Hugo winner Dave Langford’s The Silence of the Langford which includes more than 50 articles and reviews and incorporates the earlier Langford collection, Let’s Hear It For the Deaf Man

And, he said immodestly, I have edited a number of anthologies about fandom: Alternate Worldcons (Pulphouse, 1994), Again, Alternate Worldcons (Old Earth Books, 1996), and, with Patrick Neilsen-Hayden, Alternate Skiffy (Wildside Press, 1997). These were all semi-pro publications. I also edited a mass market anthology of recursive science fiction, Inside the Funhouse (Avon, 1992), which includes some stories about fandom. And my collection of fanzine articles, Once a Fan …, is probably still available from Wildside Press.

Finally, there is a totally different type of collection, and a must-have for any serious student of fandom. This is Science Fiction Fandom, edited by Joe Sanders and published by Greenwood Press in 1994. The book contains 26 articles which cover fandom in various countries, its history, collecting, conventions, apa’s, Fanspeak, and just about everything else you need to know about science fiction fandom. It’s not cheap—I believe my copy cost $50.00—but it’s worth every penny of it.

I should add that some books consisting of fanzine articles, such as The Conan Reader, The Conan Swordbook and The Conan Grimoire, all from the two-time Hugo-winning fanzine Amra, have nothing to do with fandom; whereas the numerous Fanthologies, which collect the best fan articles of the year, would be of interest to anyone who enjoys fine fannish writing. (The Fanthologies, by the way, are sponsored by the annual Corflu convention, with a new volume appearing almost every year.

NOVELS

There have actually been seven professional novels about science fiction fandom. Six are set at conventions. Perhaps even more surprisingly, five of them are murder mysteries. Or maybe it isn’t so surprising at all.

The two best—both of them quite brilliant—are by Barry Malzberg, writing early in his career under the pseudonym of K. M. O’Donnell (his tribute to Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, who often wrote under the pen name of Lawrence O’Donnell; hence K{uttner} M{oore} O’Donnell.) The first is Dwellers of the Deep, half of a 1970 Ace Double, in which fandom must save the universe from alien invaders. The second, Gather in the Hall of the Planets, a 1971 Ace Double, takes place at a Worldcon, and for months after it came out fandom’s (and prodom’s) favorite game was trying to figure out who was who, because every pro and fan in this mordantly funny book has a real-life analog. (Both are included in an omnibus volume from NESFA Press, The Passage of the Light, which was edited by Tony Lewis and myself.)

Gene DeWeese and Buck Coulson wrote a pair of murder mysteries set at Worldcons. Now You See It/Him/Them … (Doubleday, 1975) takes place at the 1974 Discon II, and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats (Doubleday, 1977) is set at the 1975 Aussiecon.

Perhaps the most famous novel about fandom—or at least the best-selling one—is Sharon McCrumb’s Bimbos of the Death Sun (Windwalker Books, 1987). The fandom is not one I much care for—the convention it’s set at is mostly media and gaming—but it’s a fine mystery, and in fact won an Edgar Award. She later produced a sequel, Zombies of the Gene Pool.

Finally, there’s William Marshall’s Sci Fi (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1981), in which a murder takes place in Hong Kong at the All-Asia Science Fiction and Horror Movie Festival. Again, fandom—but not necessarily as we know it.

Peripherally, there’s another novel—Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn’s Fallen Angels (Baen, 1991)—in which thinly-disguised fans appear and Mimosa itself is mentioned, but this, unlike those already mentioned, is not a novel about fandom and/or conventions, but merely a science fiction novel in which some of the characters are fans. I suppose if you stretch the definition far enough, you could even include Frederic Brown’s delightful What Mad Universe?, since the entire story takes place in a universe imagined by a goshwowboyoboy teenaged fan (or, more accurately and confusingly, presumed by an editor to be a universe that this particular fan would create—and even that’s not exactly right, but it’s close enough.)

There are two more books that must be mentioned. Neither is a professional novel, but each was co-authored by a pro, and their place in the history of fannish literature is secure. I’m referring, of course, to the classic work of fan fiction, The Enchanted Duplicator, by Walt Willis and Bob Shaw (a Hugo-nominated writer as well as a fan). This completely charming allegory follows the adventures of Jophan as he sets out to find the Enchanted Duplicator and publish the Perfect Fanzine. It was originally published in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1954, and has been reprinted so many times I’ve lost track of all the editions.

Then, 37 years later, Willis teamed up with another fan-turned-Hugo-nominated-pro, James White, to produce Beyond the Enchanted Duplicator … To the Enchanted Convention. It was published by Gerry Sullivan’s PROmote Communications in 1991, and to be honest, it’s not up to the level of its predecessor, though it’s still an enjoyable read.

FANZINES AND PROZINES

Remember a book called Seduction of the Innocent, by Frederic Wertham, M.D.? It’s the study that suggested Batman and Robin did more together than fight crime, that the Phantom Lady was the logical successor to Gypsy Rose Lee, and that William Gaines of E. C. Comics was in league with the devil. In the end, it was the prime reason the Comics Code was created.

Well, that same Frederic Wertham began seeing his name reviled in one fanzine after another—the editors thoughtfully sent copies to him, since he couldn’t purchase them on the newsstands—and lo and behold, a few years later he wrote a flattering, if shallow, study of them, called it The World of Fanzines, and sold it to Southern University Press, which published it in 1973.

The only other book about fanzines would be the Fanzine Index by Bob Pavlat and Bill Evans, which purports to list every fanzine “From the beginning through 1952.” Assuming that it was published in 1952, I’ve never seen an original; but it was reprinted (I assume) and published (I know) in 1965 by Harold Palmer Piser.

A lovely, nostalgic book, one that demonstrates exactly what fannish enthusiasm is all about, is A Requiem for Astounding, by Alva Rogers, an issue-by-issue study of the golden days of John Campbell’s Astounding, in which Rogers’ less-than-scintillating prose is more than compensated for by his boundless enthusiasm. He imparts that sense of almost unbearable anticipation he—and so many other fans—felt while waiting for each new issue, the agony of not knowing the end of a Heinlein or van Vogt serial for weeks on end. It was published in 1964 by Advent, which tried to recapture the magic in 1986 with Galaxy: The Dark and Light Years, by David L. Rosheim, but while Galaxy was a fine magazine, in ways even better than Campbell’s, the book is a failure. Far from being the adulatory fan that Rogers was, Rosheim didn’t even read Galaxy during Horace Gold’s editorship; and since he can’t capture the sense of enthusiasm Rogers imparts, what remains is a simple recounting of the stories—which has been done better by many other writers and critics.

MISCELLANEOUS

A chapbook of absolute brilliance is The Best of Elmer T. Hack, by Jim Barker and Chris Evans, a BFA/Hack Press Publication, printed in England in 1979. Elmer T. Hack is a cartoon character, a science fiction writer who represents the hack of your choice. The comic strips are hilarious, and there are some mock biographical tidbits and an interview of sorts. Delightful.

Fandom is For the Young, or One Convention Too Many, by Karen “K-Nut” Flanery and Nana Grasmick, a vanity hardcover published by Vantage Press in 1981, is not very well-written, and far too media-oriented for my taste. Then there’s a wonderful little chapbook called Love’s Prurient Interest, by Cathy Ball, published by the Norman Oklahoma Science Fiction Association in 1983. I still don’t know if it’s a parody of fandom set in a romance book, or a parody of romance books set at a science fiction convention, but I do know I liked it enough to purchase it for my 1988 anthology, Shaggy B.E.M. Stories, where it appeared alongside parodies by Asimov and Clarke and didn’t have to take a back seat to either.

Closing out the miscellaneous section are a pair of one-shots by Earl Kemp. Both are in symposium form (i.e., numerous answers to the singular question posed by the title). The first, Who Killed Science Fiction?, published in 1960, won the Hugo Award; the second, Why is a Fan?, is as valid today as when it was published back in 1961.

SO WHAT’S NEXT?

That takes care of my library, and should provide a sufficient answer to those who were afraid that doddering old fans all this history to the grave with us.

So what’s next? Well, as fandom both grew and splintered, it became obvious than neither Harry Warner nor any other single author could do justice to an entire decade of fannish history. But we have three decades to catch up with—the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s—and in three more years we’ll have a fourth.

Well, cheer up. Trufandom, never willing to let an opportunity to publish slip by, is currently, under the leadership of Rich Lynch, preparing the definitive history of fandom in the 1960s. And after he collapses and dies of overwork, I’m sure they’ll find someone to take over and organize the authors who will codify the next four decades.

Substantial Fire, or

Why This Column Almost Didn’t Appear

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Three passes at an opening, one reaching a quarter-length of a full column, and I abandoned each in disgust. I am so tired, sometimes, of my own voice, its transmutation on the page, its bleating, whining, occasionally renunciatory tone; I know all my tricks and at this point so probably do most of you: the Personal Anecdote, the Audacious Opening, the Sweeping Generalization Taken Back In The Next Sentence. Little stabs of humor, sighs of memory and disenchantment, an abrazza for the wife and lovely kids, a wave of appreciation to the ladies and distinguished germs of the audience. I know my every move, have few surprises myself. Nonetheless, deadline beckons, beckons again, is sailing away now under Charon’s guidance as I pursue it helplessly. Who was that genre I saw me with last decade?

The three abandoned attempts: 1) Astounding and Analog were always mislabeled as magazines of “hard science”; their science was about as hard as Horace Gold’s Galaxy was soft. Psionics, levitation, dowsing, Dianetics, mystery, incantation, editorials bemusedly and then viciously questioning “organized science”. By the 1950’s the magazine had become a swamp of undigested mysticism. Fredric Brown’s hectoring Martians, Randall Garrett’s magicians and drunken space voyages, Mark Clifton on paranormal powers of the mind, The Dean Drive, and I could go on but I won’t. In fact I didn’t. At my age the act of shooting fish in a barrel (catch and release or otherwise) seemed as contemptible as baiting nursery school kids or Republicans. 2) Science fiction had an open window, an absolute opportunity in the period 1965-1975 to seize the moment, reach beyond its core audience, become the true literature of that tumultuous, tandem time. But it didn’t happen that way; it sold itself—eagerly, eagerly—to Tolkien imitations, elves, dwarves, Star Trek and finally George Lucas. The game was over before Star Wars, but that film closed the door. If you wanted junk, Roddenberry and Lucas could do it far better and less mysterioso than Knight, Silverberg, Ellison and even Campbell no matter how hard some of us tried. The Pynchons, Powers, DeLillos, Lessings took a place in the canon of literature which science fiction, trumped by junk, never could. And so on and so forth. I tossed that baby in the same place as #1 because the though is by no means original, Carter Scholz was writing this 25 years ago, and it is also the kind of rat trap which can only close on the fingers of the fool who placed it. 3) Brian Stableford was writing three decades ago that science fiction was a uniquely 20th Century, early post-technological format, evolved to help technically-minded adolescents to adapt to the overwhelmingly emergent technological culture. It was a means and measure of adaptation. When that adaptation had been accomplished toward the end of the century, when (thanks as much to Lucas and Roddenberry as anyone else) the adolescents had not only learned to live in the future but were creating it, science fiction had outlived its necessity, had become a decadent form. Spinrad’s nameless Parisian friend who was quoted by Norman as having said in the mid-nineties, “Science fiction? Oh, that is a finished thing,” more or less announced and tied off the situation. This third column showed more promise but haven’t I said this before and didn’t Stableford say it more eloquently than that so long ago? I am as shameless on the issue of self-recycling as any science fiction writer of my generation, but surely this is a point now so self-evident that it is, well, self-evident.

So: Attempt The Fourth. Autobiography may serve as objectivity fails; it is the last refuge of the weary novelist. (It is also the first refuge of the not-so-weary novelist, but that is another sermon.)

My first contact with genre science fiction was Heinlein’s Red Planet in 1950 but it was just a novel to me, I didn’t think of it as science fiction but simply (like Penrod, which I read at about the same time) an interesting novel set in a background which was utterly foreign to me. Then, a few months later, my friend David Bachrach who was already a Junior High School seventh grader, a year ahead of me and a truly rabid science fiction fan persuaded me, to buy the 6/51 Astounding from the newsstand and that pretty much did it for me: Asimov’s “Breeds There A Man” and Russell’s “And Then There Were None” were the essential items there, and they gave me a sense of the distinctiveness and difference of the genre. Bachrach lent me the previous issue of Astounding, the one with Miller’s “Izzard And The Membrane” as the cover story and that was the convincer. No one I had ever read seemed capable of even comprehending the wild pocket-universe of Miller’s computer, let alone furnishing it with structure. It stunned an 11-year-old as it undoubtedly stunned some 41-year-olds and it has been a helpless trudge in thrall ever since. Fifty-six years and still packing it on the road.

And I have been in a lover’s argument with science fiction for all of those fifty-six years; I have been formulating and analyzing and disagreeing and renouncing and embracing and questioning and, still thrashing, have reached some tentative but no definitive conclusions. I have put some portion of a lifetime into parsing this invention and no end yet, but I am not done yet. You can understand why I might sometimes be a little weary of my own voice, but although I can promise no end to weariness, I do promise that I will continue to honor patience. I will go on until I can go on no more. And next time (an abrazza to Algis J. Budrys) I’ll review some books.

—New Jersey December 2007

February 2008

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

The Future And You has reached a new turning point.

The show turned two years old in December of 2007. And these two years have seen many wonderful successes: audience growth, widespread recognition, winning an award, interviews with stars of movies and TV, and even an interview with a 2008 presidential candidate (Senator John McCain). But improvement must be a continuous process. Standing still leads to stagnation; and stagnation, to death.

So in the spirit of improvement, your host has changed the show’s format from a gigantic show released once per month, to a smaller—more easily downloaded and listened to—show released every week. This new weekly format began on January 1, 2008—the very first day of this new year.

If measured on a monthly basis, approximately the same amount of show will be produced, since each of these weekly episodes will be roughly 30 minutes long and usually feature a single guest.

Listeners are encouraged to email the host with their thoughts about the change. Send those emails to me@thefutureandyou.com

Jack McDevitt

Jack McDevit, the best selling author of Seeker and Polaris, was the featured guest for the first weekly show (released on January 1, 2008).

He discussed how he has used the internet and email for research; science fiction on TV and in movies; what he learned by being a teacher and a newspaper reporter; and the novels that changed his life which include Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the young adult stories The Voyage of the Space Beagle.

He also talked about writing alternate history involving Sir Arthur Conan Dole’s Sherlock Holmes, and he describes one of his favorite science fiction movies, the low-budget but brilliantly written film: Time Quest.

Timothy Zahn

Timothy Zahn, the best selling author who is possibly best known for his Thrawn Trilogy (a series of Star Wars novels set in the time after the movies) was the featured guest in the January 9, 2008 episode.

He discussed several of his fears, hopes and worries about the future. He also talked about Wikipedia, Earthlike exoplanets, and how his master’s degree in physics contributes both to the hardness of his science fiction and to the strength of his faith in God.

After describing his ideas in science, theology and sociology he lightened the conversation with anecdotes of how he became a Star Wars playing card, as well as a question on the TV game show Jeopardy.

Upcoming Guests

Guests scheduled for the next few weeks include (in no particular order): George Dvorsky the Chairman of BetterHumans.com (a transhumanist website and organization), Eric Flint (the best selling author) and Matt Browne (an information technologist in Frankfurt Germany).

* * *

Recent News Items

Sir Arthur C. Clarke is 90 years old

Recently, on December 16, 2007, Sir Arthur C. Clarke turned 90 years old. The venerable, some would say legendary, best selling author chose to mark the happy occasion by posting a video message to the entire world online. The link is extremely complicated but you can probably find it easily enough using his name and a phrase such as “birthday massage.”

Sir Arthur C. Clarke is one of several people who shaped and altered the course of your host’s life. Many of his early novels had a strong effect on me, but one of them changed everything.

It was by reading chapter 37 of his novel 2001: a space odyssey (when I was still just a teenager in high school, back in 1973) that triggered my realization that I was a transhumanist. Although it was more than twenty years before I found out there was a name for what I was, and that I was not the only one.

Second Life

On the very first day of this brand new year (January 1, 2008) your host joined Second Life.

During the last year or two I’d heard various tidbits about it but didn’t really know much. My curiosity finally got to me; and so I joined.

I wanted to sign-up using my full name but that didn’t seem to be an option. So I joined as “Boc Cryotank.” (Boc is my last name spelled backwards—without redundant letters. And of course a cryotank is a tank use to store people who are cryopreserved.)

On my first day “in-world” (as the residents call it) I flew like superman, rode a Segway, and teleported myself to a private dance party where six people were dancing in synchrony: all making the same moves at the same time.

Someone typed to me “Hi, Boc. Welcome to the party. Want to dance?”

Having danced, and very poorly, only three times in my life (once on a cruse, once at my wedding and once that I can’t remember) I used the easy excuse—”I’m not sure how. This is my first day inside Second Life.”

A popup appeared on my screen saying something like “to join click yes.”

I clicked Yes and instantly I was dancing. Granted, I was facing the wrong way, but I was making all the same moves they were making. I was dancing! And I’m here to tell you, I was darned good.

When I got over my astonishment, which took nearly thirty seconds, I laughed with a level of joyous stupidity generally only seen in those who are drunk. I laughed so loud and so long that I had to get up out of my chair and walk through the house to let it all out. I wish I’d recorded that laugh, because I must have sounded like a mad scientist just after announcing to the thunderclouds above my castle that my newly-formed creature is alive.

I danced for over two hours. It was fun. Not just the dancing, but everything. Second Life is a fresh new world to learn and explore. It is quite literally “a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist.”

I look forward to spending more time inside, learning and exploring.

Maybe someday I’ll meet you in there. Which is, of course, part of the reason I’m telling you this.

Some of you may already be in there. Some of you may have been inside for a long time; may have established yourselves; may even have longstanding relationships. I would like to meet you in there. Visit with you. Who better to help me understand what’s going on in Second Life than those who already know their way around.

And who knows, if a lot of you are in there maybe we can arrange a get together.

If you are a resident of Second Life please email me, and if you do please be sure to let me now your avatar’s name. To quote the Merovingian: “Let us see where this goes.”

More about the Show’s New Format

The biggest news for the show is, of course, our change to the smaller, but much more frequent, weekly format.

I’ve been considering going to a weekly format for six months or more. My longstanding resistance to the idea has been based on several things. One of these was that when I created the show I used the old Tonight Show from back when Johnny Carson was the host as my format model. Johnny always had a variety of guests talking about a variety of topics.

Another limitation was that I wanted a large enough show that I could put into it a 15 minute long segment for the serialization of my novel Bones Burnt Black without the novel dominating the show. That reason evaporated with the serialization’s completion in the November 1, 2007 episode.

But to be honest the most important reason for my reluctance to change to a show containing only one guest has been my worry that non-famous guests will get listened to far less than guests who are famous. And since it has been my experience that non-famous guests bring as much good stuff to the show as those who are famous, and sometimes far more, I was worried that listeners would miss out.

Looking back, I can see the foolishness of this kind of thinking. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because it’s not my place to force or trick or beguile listeners into listening to every guest.

Yes, some listeners will miss interviews that they would have enjoyed; but what all listeners will gain is the flexibility to zero in on those guests and those topics which they most care about. Everything else is just gravy.

My intention is try this new format for at least three months. That should be plenty of time to see if it works poorly or works well. Please feel free to email me with your thoughts about the change. Send those emails to me@thefutureandyou.com

Jim Baen’s Universe in the Show’s New Format

In keeping with the new shorter but more frequent episodes, the readings from Jim Baen’s Universe Magazine have been shortened to about two and a half minutes each. This is exactly the same amount of time per month, but presented in smaller snippets. To make these snippets as entertaining as possible, Walt Boyes (The Bananaslug and JBU’s Marketing Director) has elected to present a single story in serialized form over a period of weeks. The first story is Christmas Eve at Harvey Wallbanger’s written by Mike Resnick and read by Walt Boyes. (Stoney Compton, author of Russian Amerika, is scheduled to do readings in the near future.)

* * *

Listener Feedback

Censoring the Guests

As host, I receive many emails from listeners. Sometimes I read them into the show. I had to blush when I read the opening of this one in the show, but this listener brought up an important point.

> Steve,

>

> You are a phenomenal talent. I find you intelligent and intellectually

> stimulating. Your personal future projections are scintillating. Some of

> your guests however, are exactly the opposite. They write these wildly

> imaginative sci-fi books, and then when you interview some of them, I am

> appalled by some of their lack of confidence in science and technology.

> Some of them have not followed any of the new technological advances in

> even a minimal manner. In my opinion it casts a dark shadow of illegitimacy

> on their works. My suggestion is to vet them before releasing them on your

> podcast audience. If they appeared intellectually stunted on scientific

> affairs, and completely gloomy on every technological projection, then

> leave them just talking about their works, their efforts, and the

> publishing world. I also suggest you further interview from time to time

> individuals of some authority who are optimistic about the future.

Soaring ever onwards,

Paul

-

I wrote back …

Paul,

Thanks for your most excellent praise. Your assessment of some of my guests is, unfortunately, similar to my own. My standard excuse for including as much as possible of their comments is my desire to avoid any possibility that I might subconsciously begin to censor my guests by editing out anything that makes them sound stupid. Such editing might sound like a benevolent act; but what if they sound stupid only because they disagree with me; or just as bad, because they disagree with what I believe my listeners want to hear?

No. Better I should let a few of them stick their feet in their mouths than risk the same form of unconscious censorship that the traditional media has succumb to with such astounding and universal abandon.

I can promise you, however, that I will make every effort to increase the number of people that I interview based on the quality of their intellect as opposed to the quality of their fame.

Thanks again.

Steve

-

Paul then responded with …

Thanks Stephen,

I really appreciate your considering my input. Your point is well taken about censorship. I have had some rather bone-headed ideas in the past, and I have regrettably been guilty of deeming others who disagreed with me as stupid.

Soaring ever onwards,

Paul

-

Thanks again Paul.

* * *

Learn More

You can learn more about The Future And You here, or here or even here.

Or learn more about its host here or here.

THE END

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