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SCIENCE FICTION STORIES:

Article of Faith

Written by Mike Resnick

Illustrated by Karl Nordman

The first time I saw him, he was sweeping the floor at the back of the darkened church, standing in a beam of light that came streaming down from the window above him, glistening off his metal skin.

“Good morning, sir,” he said as I was heading across vestibule to my office.

“Good morning,” I replied. “You’re new here, aren’t you? I don’t believe I’ve seen you before.”

“I was just delivered this morning, sir,” he said.

“What was wrong with Herbie?”

“I cannot say, sir.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “Have you got a name?”

“Jackson, sir.”

“Just Jackson?”

“Jackson 389V22M7, if you prefer, sir.”

“Jackson will do,” I said. “When you’re through out here, I’d like you to clean my office.”

“I already did, sir.”

“Very good, Jackson,” I said. “I can tell we’re going to get along splendidly.”

“I hope so, sir,” said Jackson.

I went to my office, and since there were no parishioners around I took off my coat and loosened my tie. Then I sat down on my old-fashioned swivel chair, pulled out a pad of yellow paper and a pen, and began working on my next sermon. I was still at it an hour later when Jackson knocked on the door.

“Come in,” I said.

He entered, carrying a tray with a pot of tea and a cup and saucer. “I was told that that you liked your mid-morning tea, sir,” he said, “but they neglected to tell me if you wanted milk, sugar or lemon with it.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Jackson,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You are quite welcome, sir,” he said.

“They certainly programmed good manners into you,” I said.

“Thank you, sir.” He paused. “About the milk, sugar or lemon … ?”

“I don’t need them.”

“What time will you want your lunch, sir?” asked Jackson.

“Noon,” I said. “And I pray that you can cook better than Herbie

could.”

“I have been given a list of your favorite meals, sir,” said Jackson. “Which would—?”

“Surprise me,” I interrupted him.

“Are you sure, sir?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Somehow, lunch seems pretty trivial after you’ve been thinking about God all morning.”

“God, sir?”

“The Creator of all things,” I explained.

“My creator is Stanley Kalinovsky, sir,” said Jackson. “I was not aware that he created everything in the world, nor that his preferred name was God.”

I couldn’t repress a smile.

“Sit down, Jackson,” I said.

He placed the tray on my desk. “On the floor, sir?”

“On a chair.”

“But I am merely a robot,” said Jackson. “I do not require a chair.”

“Perhaps,” I replied. “But it would make me more comfortable if you sat on it.”

“Then I shall,” he said, seating himself opposite me.

“It is true that you were created by Dr. Kalinovsky,” I began, “or at least I have no reason to doubt it. But that implies another question, does it not, Jackson?”

The robot stared at me for a moment before answering. “Yes, sir,” he said at last. “The question is: who created Stanley Kalinovsky?”

“Very good,” I said. “And the answer is that God created him, just as God created me and every other human being, just as He created the mountains and the plains and the oceans.”

Another pause. “God created everything except me?” he asked at last.

“That’s an interesting question, Jackson,” I admitted. “I suppose the answer is that God is indirectly responsible for you, for had He not created Dr. Kalinovsky, Dr. Kalinovsky could not have created you.”

“Then I too am God’s creation?”

“This is the House of God,” I said. “Far be it from me to tell anyone, even a robot, that he isn’t God’s creation.”

“Excuse me, sir, but which is God’s office?” asked Jackson. “It is not in the schemata of the church that I was provided.”

I chuckled. “God doesn’t need an office. He is everywhere.”

Jackson’s head spun very slowly until it had gone 360 degrees and was facing me again. “I cannot see him,” he announced.

“He is here nonetheless,” I said. Then: “It is too difficult to explain, Jackson. You will have to take my word for it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now, Jackson, I really have to get back to work. I’ll see you at lunchtime.”

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I don’t know your name. If someone asks for you, how will they identify you?”

“I am the Reverend Edward Morris,” I replied.

“Thank you, Reverend Morris,” he said, and left.

It had been an interesting conversation, certainly more interesting than any I’d ever had with Herbie, Jackson’s clanking predecessor. We were a small parish in a small town, our industry had moved elsewhere, a lot of people had followed it, and the other two churches had closed down, so there were no neighboring ministers to talk to. Just answering Jackson’s simple questions had refreshed me enough that I was able to attack the rest of my sermon with new energy.

I worked very hard on those sermons. The church had been failing when I arrived from my previous posting. In those early days, we might draw five people on a Sunday, and just the occasional person any other time of the week. Then I began visiting my parishioners’ houses, I spoke at the local schools, I blessed the football and basketball teams before their regional tournaments, and I even volunteered the church as a polling place for the local elections. The only thing I would not do was allow bingo games inside the church; it seemed somehow sacrilegious to help defray our costs by encouraging people to gamble. Before long my efforts began to bear fruit. These days I could usually expect thirty to fifty people on Sundays, and rarely did we go an entire day without two or three people stopping in to commune with God.

Lunch was surprisingly good. By the end of the day I’d written out a draft of the sermon and Jackson had the church sparkling like new—and this church hadn’t been new in a long, long time. Lining one of the corridors was a row of photographs of our previous pastors; I was told that a couple of them were serving back when Benjamin Harrison and James Garfield were our Presidents. A stern-looking bunch for the most part; perhaps too stern-looking, given the way our membership had dwindled over the decades. I think one of the reasons I was hired is because I leave hellfire and damnation to others; I stand four-square on the side of compassion and redemption.

Jackson approached me as I was leaving for the night.

“Excuse me, Reverend Morris,” he said, “but shall I lock the building after you’ve gone?”

I nodded my head. “Yes. I’m sure some of those gentleman on the wall left it open as a sanctuary around the clock, but not in today’s world. We can’t have anyone robbing a church.”

“According to my data banks a church is a place of worship,” said Jackson.

“That’s right.”

“But you told me that this was God’s house, not a church,” he said.

“A church is where we worship God,” I explained. “That makes it His house.”

“God must be very large to need such high ceilings,” remarked Jackson.

I smiled. “That is an interesting observation, Jackson,” I said. “And doubtless He can be that large when He chooses to be. But I think we make the interior of our churches so large not to accommodate God, who needs no accommodation, but to imply his power and majesty to those who come here to worship him.”

He offered no further comment, and I went out to my car. I had to admit that I enjoyed my little chat with Jackson, and I looked forward to talking to him again the next day.

I made a couple of sandwiches for my dinner—cooking isn’t one of my skills—and I spent the rest of the night reading. I was in bed by ten o’clock, as usual, and up at six in the morning. I got dressed, made the bed, put out thistle and sunflower seeds for the birds in the back yard, and finally got into my car and drove to the church.

When I arrived, Jackson was sweeping the floor, just as he’d been doing the day before.

“Good morning, Reverend Morris,” he said.

“Good morning,” I replied. “Jackson, I wonder if you would do me a favor? I’m going to practice my sermon before anyone is likely to arrive this morning. Could you please fill a glass of water and put it on the podium in the pulpit?”

“Yes, sir. Shall I activate the microphone, too?”

I shook my head. “That won’t be necessary. There’s no one around to hear it. I’m just practicing.”

He went off to get the water and I went to my office, hung my coat up in the closet, opened the center drawer of my desk, and pulled out my sermon. I have a wonderful, state-of-the-art computer that can probably think a thousand times faster than I can, but somehow I’m more comfortable writing out my sermons in longhand on a legal pad.

I made a couple of last-minute changes, then left the office. A minute later I was standing in the pulpit, clutching the podium with both hands as I always do (if I don’t, I tend to gesticulate too much), and I began working my way through the sermon.

When I finished I checked my watch. It had taken twenty-two minutes, which seemed an acceptable length. My rule of thumb has always been that anything over thirty minutes is likely to be boring, and anything under fifteen minutes seems truncated and insufficiently thoughtful.

I looked up from my watch and saw Jackson standing motionless at the back of the church.

“I’ll get out of your way now,” I said, starting to walk back toward my office. “Continue whatever you were doing.”

“Yes, Reverend Morris,” said Jackson.

Then a thought occurred to me.

“Just a minute, Jackson.”

“Sir?”

“Were you able to hear my sermon?”

“Yes, Reverend Morris. I do not require a microphone or a sound system.”

“I had a feeling you didn’t.” I looked at him. “Well, what did you think of it?”

“I do not understand the question.”

“Let me explain, then,” I said. “I give a sermon to my parishioners every Sunday morning. It is supposed to bring them spiritual comfort, a concept that is probably beyond your ability to fully comprehend, but it is also intended to instruct them.”

“Instruct them, sir?” said Jackson.

“On how to lead moral, spiritually satisfying lives,” I explained. “The problem is that sometimes I get too close to my subject matter, and I don’t see any logical flaws or contradictions that might have crept in.” I smiled at him—I don’t know why, since a smile is meaningless to a robot. “I would like you to listen to my sermons, not on Sunday mornings, but when I am practicing them during the week, and point out any logical inconsistencies in them. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes, Reverend Morris. I can do that.”

“Good,” I said. “In fact, I think we’ll start with the current one. Can you remember it, or should I read it again?”

“I can repeat it word for word, Reverend Morris,” said Jackson. “I can duplicate your inflections as well, if that is necessary.”

“You don’t have to repeat it,” I said. “Just tell me if there are any logical flaws.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jackson. “You mentioned a man named Jonah who was eaten by a great fish and survived. That is a logical flaw.”

“It would seem to be,” I agreed. “And were it not for God, it would be.”

“I do not understand, Reverend Morris.”

“God is omnipotent,” I explained. “Nothing is impossible for Him. He can heal the sick, resurrect the dead, part the Red Sea so the children of Israel can escape from Egypt, and He can bring Jonah forth from the belly of a whale.”

“But would not the digestive acids destroy Jonah’s flesh and dissolve his internal organs?”

“If God did not intervene, yes,” I said. “But God did intervene.”

“Does God intervene whenever a man is consumed by a great fish?” asked Jackson.

“No.”

Jackson paused for a long moment. “What determines which men God will save?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “No man can know how God’s mind works. We know that He favors just and moral men, though to look at the world today that’s sometimes difficult to believe.”

“I must learn more about God if I am to properly evaluate your sermons, Reverend Morris,” said Jackson.

“Can you read?”

“I can read and speak more than 30 major languages and 200 dialects, sir.”

“Then tonight, after I leave, pick up one of the bibles that we keep in the alcove in to my office and read it.”

“And this will explain God to me?” asked Jackson.

I smiled again and shook my head. “No, Jackson. It will explain our limited understanding of God. If we knew what God knows, we would be gods ourselves, and there can only be one God.”

“Why only one?” he asked.

“Just read the bible,” I replied.

“I will do as you say, Reverend Morris.”

“Good,” I said, gathering the pages of my sermon. “I’m going to my office. I’d like my tea in about an hour.”

“Yes, Reverend Morris.”

And that became our routine for the next three months. Two or three mornings a week I would stand in the pulpit and read my sermon aloud, and Jackson would stand at the back, listening. Then he would point out the contradictions and inconsistencies. Some (less and less each week) were due to his limited understanding of the natures of God and religion, and the remainder were blunders that I then fixed before they could embarrass me on Sunday.

One thing that surprised me was that he never asked a single question about the bible. I knew that he’d read it, because on occasion he would reference a certain passage when pointing out a mistake in my sermon, but never did he discuss it or question me about it. I assumed it was simply beyond his comprehension. He was, after all, just a robot, one that had been created solely to clean the church and keep the building and the grounds in good repair.

Usually he left the main body of the church whenever a parishioner would stop by to pray, but one day I noticed him staring intently at Mrs. Matthews as she knelt in prayer. When she left he came to my office and stood in the doorway until I noticed him.

“Yes, Jackson,” I said. “What is it?”

“I have a question, Reverend Morris,” he said.

“Then ask, and I’ll do my best to answer it.”

“I saw Mrs. Matthews kneeling at the front of the church. I have seen others kneel there, but because she was crying I assumed she had injured herself. Yet when I offered to help her to her feet or summon medical assistance, she told me that she was in no physical distress, and that it was customary to kneel when praying, which I take to mean speaking to God.”

“That is quite correct, Jackson,” I answered. “We kneel to show our respect for Him. And she was crying because she is very worried about the safety of her sons, who are in the armed forces.” He stood motionless and made no reply. “Is there anything else?”

“No, Reverend Morris.”

“Then perhaps you had better get back to your duties.”

“Yes, Reverend Morris.”

He turned and left, and I went back to computing the church’s budget for the coming month. It’s amazing the expenses the public isn’t aware of, like the cleaning bills for the choir’s robes, or the constant repair of the parking lot pavement, and this month I even had to pay to repair a crack in one of the stained glass windows, but I finally finished and put the ledger away.

I checked my watch. It was 4:29, which meant Jackson would show up in another minute, as indeed he did. In all the time he’d worked for me, he’d never been early or late by as much as half a minute, and 4:30 was the time when he brought me the poor box. There wasn’t much in it—in truth, there rarely was—and I counted it, put it in an envelope, and made out a deposit slip.

“Thank you, Jackson,” I said.

“You are welcome, Reverend Morris.”

“I see that Sheldrake’s is offering thirty percent off to anyone who comes in for dinner before 5:30,” I said. “I think I’ll leave a little early tonight, stop by the bank, and treat myself to a nice veal cutlet. I’m sorry to leave you alone, but …”

“I am never alone,” said Jackson.

“I beg your pardon?”

“God is omnipresent, is He not?”

“Yes, He is,” I said, surprised.

“And this is His house,” he continued, “so certainly He is here.”

“Very well said, Jackson,” I told him enthusiastically. “Maybe I’ll let you write a sermon one of these days.”

I picked up the deposit, patted him on the shoulder as I walked past, and left the church. All through dinner I couldn’t stop thinking about what Jackson had said. Oh, I knew he’d read the bible, and had listened to my sermons, but for a robot to suggest that God existed and was omnipresent … well, it was remarkable. I even found myself wondering what kind of sermon a robot might write.

When I showed up at the church in the morning, old Perry Hendricks was waiting for me. He still hadn’t gotten over the death of his daughter, who had fought a losing battle against cancer for close to three years, and I spent the next hour and a half trying to comfort him. It was the one part of the job I hated—not that I didn’t want to bring comfort to the afflicted, but I just felt so inadequate at it.

Then Mrs. Nicholson stopped by to make sure the church would be available for her daughter’s wedding, and to discuss the financial arrangements. I noticed that we didn’t discuss the fact that her daughter was five months’ pregnant, but it’s not my job to judge them, only to help and comfort them.

When she left, Jackson entered the office with my tea.

“I am sorry to be late,” he said, “but I did not want to interrupt you when you were conferring with a parishioner.”

“That was very thoughtful of you,” I said. “Should I find I cannot do without my tea when I have a visitor, I’ll summon you.” I poured a cup and took a sip. “It’s very good. I wish I could share it with you.”

“I cannot consume food or beverages, Reverend Morris,” said Jackson.

“I know. Still, I wish there was something I could do for you, to thank you for all the kindnesses you have performed for me. After all, neither preparing my lunch nor criticizing my sermons can be considered part of your job description.”

He stood absolutely motionless for the better part of 30 seconds, and then, just when I thought his power supply must be failing, he spoke: “There is one thing you can do for me, Reverend Morris.”

“What is it?” I said, surprised. After all, no robot had ever asked me for a favor before.

“Allow me to sit with your congregation on Sunday mornings,” said Jackson.

Of all the things he could have asked, that was the one I least expected.

“Why?” I said.

“I wish to become a member of your church.”

“But you’re a robot!” I blurted.

“If God is the God of all things, then is He not also the God of robots?” said Jackson.

“I should never have told you to read the bible,” I said. “That was a mistake.”

“Is the bible true?” asked Jackson.

“Yes, the bible is true.”

“Then is it not true for robots as well as for men?”

“No,” I said. “I am sorry, but it is not.”

“Why?” he said.

“Because robots don’t have souls,” I answered.

“Where is yours?” asked Jackson.

“Souls are intangible,” I explained. “I cannot show mine to you, but I know that I possess it, that it is an integral part of me.”

“Why am I prohibited from offering the same answer?”

“You are making this very difficult, Jackson,” I said.

“I do not wish to cause you discomfort or embarrassment,” replied Jackson. He paused, then continued: “Is that not the manifestation of a soul?”

“Let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re correct,” I replied. “How do you account for the fact that no other robot has a soul?”

“I do not accept that supposition,” said Jackson. “The bible tells me that we are all God’s creatures.”

“You can be switched off,” I pointed out. “Ask any roboticist.”

“So can you,” replied Jackson. “Ask any doctor. Or any marksman.”

“This is a futile discussion,” I said unhappily. “Even if you were to convince me, my congregation would never accept a robot parishioner.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because everyone has a friend or a relative who’s lost his job to a robot,” I said. “Our two plants have moved away, our young people leave town looking for work as soon as they’re out of school, and it’s like this throughout the county. There is enormous antipathy toward robots these days.” I sighed deeply. “It’s a sign of the times,” I concluded.

He offered no answer, which made me feel even worse.

“Please say that you understand,” I continued.

“I understand, Reverend Morris.”

There was another uneasy silence.

“Have you anything else to say before I leave for the day?” I asked.

“No, Reverend Morris.”

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, “and let’s have no more of this discussion.”

That night I was restless and couldn’t sleep. I took a long walk, hoping that it might help, and eventually I found myself in front of the church. Maybe I’d subconsciously planned to walk there; I don’t know. But I decided as long as I was there and still feeling wide awake, I might as well go inside and get some paperwork done. I walked in through a side door, and headed toward my office when I heard a voice speaking softly.

Curious, I walked in its direction, and a moment later found myself in the back of the darkened church. Jackson was kneeling before the altar, and I could just barely make out his voice:

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”

I turned around and went home without disturbing him.

I spent a really bad, guilt-laden night. I half expected the argument to continue in the morning, but when I arrived at the church Jackson was sweeping up behind the pews, and responded with a perfunctory “Good morning, Reverend Morris,” when I greeted him. He brought me my morning tea on schedule, and didn’t say a word about the previous day’s discussion.

Lunch went by without incident, so did afternoon tea, so did the entire day. And the next day, and the day after that, and finally I stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It turns out I stopped too soon.

It came four days later, on Sunday morning. I waited in my office, scribbling a couple of last-minute changes to the text of my sermon. Finally I walked out and stood in the pulpit, facing my flock.

I began, as I always do, with a blessing. I would then lead them in prayer, followed by some hymns, and finally my sermon—but even as I uttered the first few words I sensed a growing uneasiness. At first I couldn’t spot the cause of it. More and more of them were staring at someone who had just sat down in the back, but I couldn’t imagine what the problem was, since anyone was welcome to come in off the street and worship. Then the newcomer moved slightly, and I saw the light glisten off his cheek.

It was Jackson. He had found or manufactured a flesh-colored cream, and had spread it all over his face, head and hands. He wore a ragged, ill-fitting suit, something he’d probably gotten by rummaging through the dumpsters in the alley behind the church. At first glance, in the dim light of the church, from perhaps one hundred feet away, he appeared human—but only at first glance, and only at a distance.

I climbed down from the pulpit, walked to the last pew, and stood before Jackson.

“Come with me,” I ordered him. “Now!”

He got up, and I led him to the small anteroom behind the altar, closing the door behind us.

“All right, Jackson,” I said. “What’s the idea?”

“For reasons I still do not comprehend, you have restricted your parish to humans,” he said. “I thought if I looked like one, I could join it.”

“It takes more than make-up and a tattered suit to be a man,” I said severely.

“What does it take?” he asked.

“I thought we’ve been through all this already,” I said.

“If God created me, why am I forbidden to speak to Him?” he persisted.

“You are not forbidden to speak to Him,” I said. “You are forbidden to speak to Him in my church when my congregation is assembled on Sunday mornings.”

“If the church is not considered the best conduit for speaking to Him, why do you come here every day?” he asked. “Why do people congregate here to speak to God if they can do so anywhere? If Sunday is not the most opportune time, why do they not assemble on Tuesday?”

My first inclination was to say Force of habit, but that would negate everything I had done in my life, so I tried to couch the answer in terms he would understand and that I could live with.

“It has been said that Man is a social animal,” I began. “He finds comfort in proximity with other Men. I could define the concepts of loneliness and isolation to you, but you cannot know the emotional emptiness that accompanies them. Men gather to pray in church because it offers them a sense of comfort, of community, of shared values. Do you have any comprehension of what I am telling you?”

“What makes you think that I do not comprehend emotional emptiness?” was all that he said.

I stared at him, trying—and failing—to come up with an answer.

There was a sudden pounding on the door.

“Are you all right in there, Reverend?” asked a deep voice from the other side.

“If you need any help with the robot, let us know!” said another.

“I’m fine!” I shouted back. “I’ll be out in just a minute. Please return to your seats.” I turned to Jackson. “You stay here. You are not to leave my office until I come back, do you understand?”

“I understand,” he replied. No “Reverend Morris” or “sir”, just “I understand.”

I left him where he was standing, locked the door behind me, and returned to the pulpit. The angry whisperings suddenly died down when I took my place and they saw I had returned.

“What the hell is going on, Reverend?” demanded Mr. Whittaker.

“What kind of creature was that?” added Mrs. Hendricks.

I held up my hand for silence.

“I will explain,” I said. I pulled my sermon out of my pocket and stared at it. It was about some of the sins we blunder into, sins like gluttony and sloth. Suddenly it seemed so trivial, so removed from the problems that existed right here in my church. “I was going to read this to you today,” I said, “but I think I have something more important to talk about.” I tore the sermon in half and let the pieces float to the floor.

I realized I had everyone’s rapt attention, and I decided to start speaking before I lost it, and hope the words came out right.

“The disturbing sight you saw was Jackson, the robot that many of you have seen performing maintenance tasks around the church for the past few months. Like all robots, he has a compulsion to find defects and correct them.” I paused and stared out across my flock. Their mood was ugly, but at least they were listening. “One day, a few months ago, I decided to make use of that compulsion by practicing my sermons in front of him and having him point out any internal contradictions. This inevitably led him to point out things that we accept as articles of faith as being illogical and contradictory, and so that he would understand the difference between those statements and actual flaws in logic, I had him read the bible. I did not realize until recently that he took it as literal truth.”

“It is the literal truth!” snapped Mr. Remington. “It’s the Lord’s word!”

“I know,” I said. “But he thinks it applies to robots as well as to men. He believes that he has an immortal soul.”

“A machine?” snorted Mr. Jameson. “That’s blasphemy!”

“It’s not enough that they take all our jobs,” added Mrs. Willoughby. “Now they want to take over our churches, too!”

“Blasphemy!” repeated Mr. Jameson.

“We must display some compassion,” I urged. “Jackson is a moral and ethical entity, whose only desire is to join this parish and pray to the Creator of all things. That’s why he made a crude attempt to appear like a man—so that he could sit with you and commune with God. Is that really so terrible?”

“Send him to a robot church, if he can find one,” said Mr. Remington, his voice filled with sarcasm and contempt. “This one’s for us.”

“It’s not right, Reverend,” said Mrs. Hendricks. “If he has a soul, then why not my vacuum cleaner, or my son’s tank?”

“I’m just a man,” I said, “and a flawed man at that. I don’t pretend have all the answers, or even most of them. I will consider your objections during the coming week, and I want each of you to search your heart to see if there is some compassion in it for an entity, any entity, that wishes only to worship God in our company. Next Sunday, instead of a sermon, we will discuss our thoughts on the matter.”

Even after I spoke they kept murmuring. They wanted to argue the subject right now, but I finally put an end to it and insisted that we all go home and sleep on it, that the subject needed serious consideration rather than knee-jerk reaction. I stood at the door to thank each of them for coming, as I always did, and three of the men refused to shake my hand. After the last of them had left, I went back to the anteroom, unlocked it, and ordered Jackson to clean the cream off his face and hands and to put the tattered suit back where he found it.

I went home, found I was so upset that I wasn’t hungry, and decided to take a long walk. It was dark when I got back, and I still hadn’t resolved any of the issues. Were souls the exclusive possession of men? What about the day we finally encounter a sentient alien race out there among the stars? Or the day a dolphin or a chimpanzee prays to the same God I pray to? And if an alien, or a dolphin, why not a robot?

I didn’t know when I got home, and after an almost sleepless night, I still didn’t know.

I went back to the church in the morning. I knew something was amiss when I was still fifty yards away, because the doors were ajar, and Jackson never left them open. I entered, and it was clear that Jackson hadn’t performed any of his morning duties. The floor was dirty, the flowers hadn’t been watered, the garbage hadn’t been taken out.

I decided that whether he had a soul or not, he was getting too damned human in his behavior. Herbie may have been a primitive early model, but he did his chores and never sulked or demonstrated his resentment. Only humans were allowed the luxury of foul moods and bad behavior.

Then I saw that the door to my office was hanging by a single hinge, and was damaged beyond repair. The first thought that came to me was that I’d been robbed, and I raced to the office, oblivious to the fact that there was nothing there worth stealing.

I froze when I reached the doorway. There, on the floor of the office, was Jackson. His metal body was covered with dents, one of his legs had been pulled off, an arm had been sawed in half, and his head was so battered that it was almost unrecognizable.

You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what had happened. My parishioners hadn’t liked what Jackson had done, and they liked what I’d said even less, so they decided to make sure that they never had to share a pew with a robot. And these weren’t strangers, or drunken hooligans. They were my flock, my parishioners. All I could think of was: if this is the way they behave after all my hard work, what does that say about me, the man who was supposed to give them spiritual and moral guidance?

I knelt down on the tile floor next to Jackson. God, he was a mess! The closer I looked, the more dents and holes I found in him. At least one of his attackers must have had something like an ice pick, and had just stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. Another had a saw that could cut through metal. Others had other things.

I wondered how much he had suffered. Did robots feel pain? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t think they believed in God either, so what did I know?

I decided to gather his various parts together. This was God’s house, and it seemed like an obscene desecration to have him strewn all over the room. Then, when I moved his torso and his one connected arm, I saw a single sentence scratched into the tile with a metallic forefinger:

Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.

* * *

I handed in my resignation the next day. In fact, I quit my calling altogether. I’ve been a carpenter for the past eight years. It doesn’t pay much, but it’s honorable work, and as the bible makes clear, better men than I have chosen the same profession. My entire staff is composed of robots. I speak to them all the time, but I’ve yet to find one that’s interested in anything other than carpentry.

As for Jackson, I returned him to the factory. I don’t know why. He certainly deserved a Christian burial, but I didn’t give him one. Did it mean that deep down I truly didn’t think he could possess a soul? I don’t know. The only thing I know is that I’ve been ashamed of myself ever since. Whatever his faults, he deserved better.

I don’t know how they disposed of him. Broke him down for parts, I suppose. To this day I miss him, more than any man should miss a machine. Every Easter I drive over to the scrapheap behind his factory and place a wreath on it. I’m still religious enough to believe that he’s aware of it, and maybe even appreciates it. In fact, I find myself thinking that if I lead a good enough life, I may see him again one of these years. And when I do, I’ll tell him he was right all along.

He forgave the others; maybe he can forgive me too.

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Framed

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Jim Baen’s Universe Vol 3 Num 3

Table of Contents

SCIENCE FICTION STORIES:

Article of Faith

Written by Mike Resnick

Illustrated by Karl Nordman

A Date With Patti Pleezmi

Written by Chuck Rothman

Illustrated by Lee Kuruganti

Shoresteading, Part One

Written by David Brin

The Rings of Ragnaran

Written by J. Simon

Illustrated by Chantelle Thorne

First Rites

Written by Nancy Kress

Illustrated by Jennifer Miller

FANTASY STORIES:

The Mudlark

Written by Pat Cadigan

Illustrated by Maurine Starkey

Soul Survivor

Written by Matthew Joseph Harrington

Illustrated by Bob Greyvenstein

CLASSIC:

Pretty Quadroon

Written by Charles Fontenay

Illustrated by Jared Blando

SERIALS:

Countdown to Armageddon, Episode Seven

Written by Edward M. Lerner

Illustrated by Dean Spencer

INTRODUCING STORIES:

Homo Sylvanus

Written by Amber D. Sistla

Illustrated by Anna Repp

Russian Roulette

Written by Simon Horvat

Illustrated by Dan Skinner

COLUMNS:

The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow

Written by Mike Resnick

Meteoroids, Meteors and Meteorites

Written by Ben Bova

Introductions and Hints of the Future

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Problem is Legal Scarcity, not Illegal Greed

Written by Eric Flint

Scattershot Again

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

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Jim Baen’s Universe Vol 3 Num 3

Ebook

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

First printing, October 2008

Electronic version by WebWrights

http://www.webscription.net

ISSN: 1932-0930

Copyright (c) 2008 by Jim Baen’s Universe

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Publishing Enterprises Publication

Jim Baen’s Universe

P. O. Box 7488

Moore, OK 73153-1488

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Contents

A Date With Patti Pleezmi

Written by Chuck Rothman

Illustrated by Lee Kuruganti

“Now,” I said, very sweetly, as I pressed the taser into Quinlan’s side, “what was it you called me?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it…”

“My name is Tricia, Quinlan. Don’t forget that.” I gave him a slight jolt, just enough to let him know I was serious. “Better yet, from now on you can call me Ms. Mahaffey. If you get to know me real well, you can drop the ‘Ms.’ Is that clear?”

“I—”

I squeezed the trigger again, giving Quinlan a second jolt. It wasn’t quite as big as the first, but it made my point. “Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Quinlan said. He was a small man for a moondigger. They’re usually big and mean—eight hours a day digging tunnels—where the wrong cut might crack things open to vacuum—makes it hard to be calm and contemplative. Not that they give me any trouble; they know better.

“Next time,” I said, letting him loose, “you’re not going to be so lucky.”

“I was just trying to—”

“I don’t care. I just don’t want to hear that name. Ever.”

Quinlan was rubbing his sore arm. He should have been thankful I hadn’t broken it. “I … I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Now you do. And be sure you don’t forget.” I put the taser back in my belt and took out a glass from behind the bar. “Here,” I said, pouring him some of my best stuff—imported from Earth, not made in my back room. “On the house.”

Now Quinlan was even more confused, but not confused enough to turn down a free drink. He was new to Luna City. It was even possible he really didn’t know how much I hated that name.

It had been a noisy night. The Moonshine rarely had a slow one, but they had finished off a new tunnel and a lot of the workers had stopped in to celebrate.

People are generally well-behaved at the Moonshine, since they know that Lunar Horizons would love to shut down any competition to its own bars. Or at least, that was the common knowledge. I knew they could have shut me down years ago, but they liked to be able to say that Luna City wasn’t just a company town.

There was the sound of a scuffle. I leapt over the bar—easy enough to do when you’re at one-sixth gee—and into the middle of it, jolting the scufflers left and right. If I hit a few innocent bystanders—well, they should know better. It was hard work keeping the peace around here: most Lunies were either hotheaded kids on their first job, or people no one on Earth would want to hire—usually for good reason. But the company asked very few questions, since the more settled people weren’t going to pull up stakes and travel a quarter of a million miles. Not for these wages.

At the bottom was a digger and a surface rat. I didn’t ask what started it, and didn’t care. I had a bar to run, and fights were bad for business. In a few moments, they were too convulsed by the shock to be any problem.

“All right,” I said. “That’s the end of—”

Then I spotted him, sitting at table five, not three meters away from me. Someone I had never ever wanted to see again.

Reid Eberhardt.

He looked back at me, a slight smile on his lips, almost a twin of the one he had shown me the last time we spoke.

“Hello, Patti,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

I wanted to jolt him with the taser, like I had with Quinlan when he called me that. I wanted to kill him. Slowly. Several times.

Instead, I turned away from him. Murdering customers was bad for business, even in Luna City. “That’s it!” I shouted. “Bar’s closed.”

There were a few cries of protest, but they were halfhearted; it was late, and everyone knew that I was in charge. People do what I say, or go to the company-run bars. My beer may not win any awards, but it costs half what the company charges and doesn’t taste like it was made from soap. “Everyone out. Now.”

The protests turned to grumbles and people filed out.

Eberhardt stayed behind.

“I meant everyone,” I said.

He smiled at me. “It’s been a long time, Patti.”

“Bastard,” I muttered, but I ended up sitting across from him. “Don’t call me that. My name’s Tricia now. I’m sure you know why.”

Reid shrugged. “You really don’t have the right attitude about this.”

The man hadn’t changed a bit. “You really don’t see anything wrong, do you?”

“Wrong? Of course not. I was honoring your beauty.”

I knew this would be a losing battle. There wasn’t a chance he’d think there was anything wrong in what he did to me. “Why are you here?” I asked wearily.

“It’s a long story, P—Tricia. Care to listen to it over dinner tomorrow?”

“You going to record that, too?”

“Maybe. If it’s interesting enough.”

I stared at him. It was his idea of a joke. How could I have even been so taken in by him?

Reid was my first serious love—you know, the one who makes you feel all the crap they write songs about. One day, without my knowing, he recorded our lovemaking. Then he took my image, computer-enhanced my tits, and animated the result into a porno queen. Patti Pleezmi, he had called her.

“Tricia,” Reid said, “you need to lighten up. Everything was a long time ago.”

I had thought about suing, but Reid waved a release form with my name on it that I couldn’t recall ever signing. And, bottom line, the last thing I wanted to do was admit that the plug-in slut was me. “The interactive’s still selling,” I murmured.

“Not that well,” Reid said, and I knew he probably had the sales figures memorized. “And certainly not here. It’s just Patti Pleezmi, something teenagers sneak into bed with them to find out what sex is like. No one will connect the two of you.”

I guess he was right about that: it was rare that anyone in the Moonshine commented that I looked like the girl in the interactives. At least not to my face—and certainly not twice. Not that I’d admit that to Reid. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” I started to get up. “I think we’ve spent more than enough time going over old times.”

“Tricia,” Reid said. “I didn’t come here to joust with you. I have a business proposition.”

“A business proposition?”

“It’ll be worth a lot if you listen.”

“You really are pushing your luck, aren’t you? Let me tell you a secret. The key to doing business is trust. Do you really think I’d ever trust you again?”

I’ll give him credit: he laughed. “Look, Tricia, let me tell you one thing. I didn’t know who you were until I walked into the bar.”

It was my turn to laugh, though not with amusement. “Right. And there’s a building lot near Tycho I’d like to sell you.”

“It’s true. I needed to talk to someone who might be interested in what I have to sell here. Someone suggested Tricia Mahaffey. Your last name isn’t than uncommon, after all, and I didn’t make the connection.”

“More likely, you didn’t remember my last name.”

“Are you willing to listen to this or not?”

“Never,” I said.

“There’s a lot of money to be made.”

I tried to be indignant. “Money isn’t the issue.”

“But it won’t hurt to have some, will it?”

I didn’t answer. What with all the costs, we were doing just well enough to get by. Liquor costs a lot up here—that’s why I make much of it myself—and even the raw materials can be a bitch to get ahold of. “What is it?” I finally asked, knowing that I’d probably end up regretting the question. I’m just a glutton for punishment.

Reid relaxed. “As you may have guessed, I’ve done okay with InteRact. Vice President now. And we’re ready to move into a new market: Luna City.”

“You’re already here.”

“But Lunar Horizons takes a big cut for our booths. We want to cut separate deals with the independents. To be perfectly frank, we’ll get more money out of it. But so will you.” He gestured around. “You could knock out a wall and add one or two interactive booths. We’ll give you a cut of everything, of course.”

“Does the company know about your plans?”

Reid smiled at me. “Of course not. They’re not going to give up their cut willingly. Better for all involved if we keep it a secret until everything’s signed. Well?”

I was aghast. “You really think I’d go along with this?”

“It’s good money. 20% of the take—all clear profit. A lot better than selling drinks.”

“And have people see … her? You must be stupider than I remember.” I had had to rearrange my life so that no one realized the connection, and I’d be damned before I risked losing that.

“Okay, then. No Patti. As I said, she’d be too tame. Everyone’s probably seen her when they were sixteen.” He shook his head. “Other interactives only.”

I remembered how much he had pushed to get his own way in the past; some people never change. “I don’t want any of them here.”

Reid frowned. “Have you ever tried one?”

“Not after what you did to me.”

“Ah,” Reid said. He reached into his case and took out a helmet made of silver cloth. A wire lead out of it and into a small black box. “Then you ought to give this a try.”

I looked at it like it was a rat. It certainly smelled like one.

“It’s a demo unit. Try before you buy. A little crude, but you can get the idea.” He slid it across the table. “Aren’t you at least curious about what it might be like?”

I slid it back. “Not interested.”

He got up, but left the infernal device where it was. “Think of it as a gift,” Reid said. “Give it a try. Maybe we can do business.”

“I don’t want your gifts!” I shouted after him as he left. He didn’t pay any attention.

I stared at the set. Well, I wasn’t going to give it back. Let him be out the money. “No,” I said. “It’s mine now.” It was a petty revenge, but it still felt satisfying.

* * *

I should have smashed the damn thing then and there, but I stashed it in the back and began cleaning the beer off the floor and tidying up as best I could. My mind kept returning to the player.

All right, I had lied: I was curious. Not just about the interactive, but about the scenario I knew that Reid would have been sure to leave on it.

So, it doesn’t take genius to guess what I did. Suffice to say, a few hours after closing I was on my bunk in the back room of the Moonshine, putting the helmet on my head.

I had expected some sort of transition, a move to another place. But no. I was still on the bunk, still feeling the helmet on my head.

Only there was someone with me.

I nearly jumped. It was me—a younger me, a sexier me, but me nonetheless.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Patti Pleezmi.”

I stared at her. She was nude, and very attractive—more than I ever could be. There was no sign of age or wear and tear on any part of her. Her voice was much my own, though with a certain sparkle I couldn’t imagine I ever had.

“What’s your name?” she asked, smiling warmly.

“Tricia,” I murmured absently. I could feel the warmth of her presence and smell the slight gardenia scent of her perfume.

“Ah. Well, Tricia, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You visiting me doesn’t mean anything. Some women just like to experiment.” She leaned closer. “You look like you want answers… .”

Before I realized what was happening, she was kissing me.

I could feel her lips distinctly as they pressed against mine. It was a tentative kiss, the first kiss between two people who are not sure of making the commitment to be lovers.

I didn’t like it.

Almost at the same moment, Patti broke off. “All right,” she said. “Looks like you’re not into experimenting. We can stop the simulation right now, if you like.”

“No,” I said. “I’m just not interested in … that.”

“Ah,” Patti said. She moved away from me, as though sensing her proximity was making me uncomfortable. “So, what are you interested in?”

“What do you suggest?” I asked, curious about what she was programmed to do.

“I could suggest a lot of things, but I wouldn’t want to mention something that you don’t like.” She touched my arm. There was nothing sexual about it: just a friend making contact with a friend. “I’m here to make you feel good, not to upset you.” She lowered her voice. “Why did you activate me?”

Her confidential tone unnerved me. “I wanted to find out about you.”

Patti shrugged. “Not much to tell. I’m a bunch of data on a computer chip. But don’t let that put you off; I’m based on a real woman. Her body and her personality.”

“Who is she?” I asked.

Patti shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I do,” I said. “I’m you.” It was the first time I ever had admitted it to anyone; the words were strangely easy to say. I was warming to Patti. Despite all my misgivings, she was very easy to like.

Patti seemed to stop for several moments, looking at me as though recognizing me for the first time. “Really?” She squinted, then nodded. “I guess that explains why you’re here, then.” Patti smiled. “Do you like what you see?”

I looked at her nakedness. “No.”

She actually looked hurt. “Really?” Then she blinked and was instantly dressed, a blouse and slacks now covering her. “That better?”

I had to admit it was. “You’re much more human that I would have guessed.”

“People want me to be real. They want to trust me; otherwise, they’d be reluctant to make love—” Patti frowned as she saw my expression. “Do I embarrass you that much?”

“Damn right,” I said.

She was puzzled at my answer. “Then why did you let yourself be recorded?”

“I didn’t know I was being recorded.”

“What?”

I explained.

“That’s terrible!” Patti’s shock was absolutely genuine. “How could anyone do that?”

“I don’t know. I just ran away and tried to pretend it never happened.”

“Really? I wouldn’t have done that.”

The words were spoken gently, but it was as though I was being slapped. “Why?”

“Because,” Patti said, “that means you let the bastard win. You only helped him to ruin your life.”

“What?” I felt myself growing angry. “You think I wanted people to know I was you? Especially here in a city of woman-starved miners? I hate to see their reaction. It’s hard enough to keep them from jumping on me as it is.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I know my customers. Too well sometimes.”

“Tricia, I know men. It’s my job. Sometimes they can surprise you.”

I glared at her.

“But you never tried it out. You just ran away.” She paused. “Tricia, you have to understand that I’m very much like you. I know I couldn’t stand to keep running from myself. Sooner or later I’d stop running and face the music.”

I felt angry. “You’re not like me at all.”

Patti only smiled. “More than you think. Remember, I’m based on you. You’ve denied this part of you for years, but it’s still there. I think you know it’s still there. That’s why you wanted to see me. You wanted to see what you had lost.”

“I don’t want to listen to any more.” I reached to remove the helmet.

“Tricia,” Patti said. “Don’t be mad. Reid Eberhardt is the one you should hate. You just can’t keep running away from yourself forever. You need to become friends with your past, not hate it. And I want to be your friend.”

“How many people did you tell that to?” I shouted at her. God, I felt stupid.

“Tricia, it’s not that. It’s—”

I tore off the helmet. I felt sick to think that I had ever put it on. I stuck the damn thing under the bunk to try to get it out of my sight. I knew I wanted nothing to do with the interactives. Ever.

* * *

Reid returned the next evening. The place was packed, but I noticed the second he entered the door, as though his anger was giving off a signal.

He grabbed my wrist as I was mixing a Bloody Mary. “Leave me alone,” I said.

“I don’t have the time to fool around,” Reid said. “The company has found out our plans. They want me out of here by tonight. Now, if we sign the contract now, we can—”

I shook him off. “No contract.”

“But they can’t stop us once it’s signed.”

“Reid … “

“Look, I know you want more time. This isn’t just a pressure tactic. I’m telling the truth. The company knows all about our plans.”

“Oh, I believe that,” I said. “I’m the one who told them.”

Reid’s eyes went wide with shock and betrayal. His expression was some measure of satisfaction.

“Bitch,” Reid said. “I trusted you.”

I laughed at his indignation. Now he had a small taste of what he did to me. “Call me whatever you want. I agree to nothing.”

Reid turned red with anger. “Bitch,” he shouted.

I pulled out my taser. “Get out of my bar.”

He stared at it.

The Moonshine had turned silent.

Reid looked at the weapon, then at the crowd. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go.” He walked toward the door.

Then, he stopped abruptly, whirling to knock the gun out of my hand. “You know who this woman really is?” he shouted, jumping atop an empty table.

I felt my insides freeze, as the Moonshine grew instantly quiet, as though the moon had been waiting since Armstrong for this revelation. It was my own damn fault for not thinking things through. “Reid,” I said. “You’ve got nothing to gain by doing this.”

“And nothing to lose.” He pointed at me. “This woman is Patti Pleezmi!”

The bar remained quiet. I looked around tiredly, wondering if I’d see the moment when the news sunk in and my hard-earned respect vanished into the vacuum.

“Did you hear me? You remember Patti, don’t you? I bet everyone in the room has had her.”

“That’s enough!” I shouted, not sure if I wanted to kill him, or just run away.

But I had been running for so long. Maybe Patti was right. Maybe I needed to stop running and face things.

I looked around the room. Everyone was watching me, waiting for my next words.

“Yes,” I said, my voice surprisingly strong. “I’m Patti Pleezmi. Anyone want to make anything of it?”

Still silence. But no one seemed to be smirking.

“Tricia?” The soft voice beside me made me jump. It was Quinlan. “You want us to kick him out?”

I didn’t know I could be so astonished. Somehow I managed to nod.

About half the men in the bar rose, and I think the other half would have joined them if they thought it was necessary. They walked menacingly toward Reid.

“You guys didn’t understand me,” he said, but his voice held no bluster. “This is—”

“Oh, shut up,” someone said just before a bottle flew up and landed on Reid’s face.

This wasn’t the movies: the bottle didn’t shatter. But Reid staggered backward in pain and fell off the table.

I really didn’t see him after that. A mass of people surrounded him. I caught a few glimpses as he was dragged out the door.

Quinlan grinned at me. “You all right, Patti … I mean, Tricia?”

When I realized what he called me, I found my voice again. “I told you—”

He held up his hands. “Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to help out an old friend.”

There was something in the way he said it and I put up my guard. “How old a friend?” I asked.

“Oh, come on, Tricia. I doubt there’s a man on the moon who doesn’t know about you and Patti Pleezmi.”

“What?”

“You don’t understand. You were our first, and no one ever forgets his first. We’re all very fond of Patti.” He reddened at the admission.

I though of my meeting with Patti. I had to admit, there was a lot to like about her. “And you didn’t rub my nose in it?”

Quinlan pointed around the room. “You think we’re working here for the money? Nearly all of us are here because we’re running away from something. If anyone recognized me, for instance …” He shook his head. “No one asks.”

I looked around. The rest of the men in the bar were watching me, a few nodding in agreement with Quinlan’s words. They all had known from the start.

They were waiting expectantly.

“If you think you’re getting drinks on the house out of this, you’re all crazy,” I finally said.

There were a few laughs, and the Moonshine was quickly back to normal.

I shook my head. Patti had been right; there was no reason to run. I was running from myself, not from the shame.

Patti was a wise women—for an imaginary one.

I’d have to tell her that myself. I needed to apologize, so tonight, after the bar shuts down, I have a date. A date with Patti Pleezmi. A chance to meet myself again.

I think I will like what I see.

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Framed

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Contents

Shoresteading, Part One

Written by David Brin

“Bu yao! Bu yao!”

Xin Pu Shi, the reclamation merchant, waved both hands in front of his face, glancing sourly at Wer’s haul of salvage—corroded copper pipes, some salt-crusted window blinds, two small filing cabinets and a mesh bag bulging with various metal odds and ends.

Wer tried to winch the sack lower, but the old man used a pole to fend it away from his boat. “I don’t want any of that garbage! Save it for the scrap barge. Or dump it back into the sea.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Wer complained, squeezing the calloused soles of both feet against one of the rusty poles that propped his home above the sloshing sea. One hand gripped the rope, tugging at pulleys, causing the mesh-bag to sway toward Xin. “There are cam-eyes on that buoy over there. They know I raised ninety kilos. If I dump, I’ll be fined! I could lose my stake.”

“Cry to the north wind,” the merchant scolded, using his pole to push away from the ruined building. His flat-bottom vessel shifted, sluggishly, while eels grazed along its mossy hull. “Call me if you salvage something good. Or sell that trash to someone who can use it!”

“But—”

Wer watched helplessly as Xin spoke a sharp word and the dory’s motor obediently started up, putting it in motion. Audible voice commands might be old-fashioned in the city. But out here, you couldn’t afford subvocal mistakes. Anyway, old-fashioned was cheaper.

Muttering a curse upon the old man’s sleep, Wer tied off the rope and left his haul of salvage hanging there, for the cameras to see. Clambering up the pole, then vaulting across a gap, he managed to land, teetering, upon another strut, then stepped onto the main roof of the seaside villa—once a luxury retreat, worth two million Shanghai Dollars. Now his. If he could work the claim.

Stretching under the hot sun, Wer adjusted a wide-brim straw hat and scanned the neighborhood. To his left extended the Huangpu Estuary and the East China Sea, dotted with vessels of all kinds, from massive container ships—tugged by billowing kite-sails, as big as clouds—all the way down to gritty dust-spreaders and fishing dhows. Much closer, the tide was coming in, sending breakers crashing against a double line of ruined houses where he—and several hundred other shoresteaders—had erected hammock-homes, swaying like cocoons in the stiff breeze.

There may be a storm, he thought, sniffing the air. I had better check.

Turning, he headed across the sloping roof, in the direction of a glittering city that lay just a few hundred meters ahead, beyond the surfline and a heavy, gray seawall. that bore stains halfway up, from this year’s high water mark. A world of money and confident ambition lay on the other side. Much more lively than Old Shanghai, with its lingering afterglow from Awfulday.

Footing was tricky as he made his careful way between a dozen broad, lenslike evaporation pans that he filled each day, providing trickles of fresh water, voltage and salt to sell in town. Elsewhere, one could easily fall through crumbling shingles and sodden plywood. So Wer kept to paths that had been braced, soon after he signed the papers and took over this mess. This dream of a better life. And it could still be ours. If only luck would come back to stay a while.

Out of habit, he made a quick visual check of every stiff pipe and tension rope that spanned above the roof, holding the hammock-home in place, like a sail above a ship going nowhere. Like a hopeful cocoon. Or, maybe, a spider in its web.

And, like a spider, Ling must have sensed him coming. She pushed her head out through the funnel door. Jet black hair was braided behind the ears and then tied under the chin, in a new, urban style that she had seen on-web.

“Xin Pu Shi didn’t take the stuff,” she surmised, from his expression.

Wer shrugged, while tightening one of the cables that kept the framework from collapsing. A few of the poles—all that he could afford so far—were made of non-corroding metlon, driven solidly into the old foundation. Given enough time, cash, and luck, something new would take shape here, as the old house died. That is, providing …

“Well?” Ling insisted. A muffled whimper, and then a cry, told him that the baby was awake. “What’ll you do now?”

“The county scrap barge will be here Thursday,” Wer said.

“And they pay dung. Barely enough to cover taking our dung away. What are we to live on, fish and salt?”

“People have done worse,” he muttered, looking down through a gap in the roof, past what had been a stylish master bathroom, then through a shorn stretch of tiled floor, to the soggy, rotten panels of a once-stately dining room. Of course, all the real valuables had been removed by the original owners when they evacuated, long ago, and the best salvageable items got stripped during the first year of overflowing tides. A slow disaster. One that left little of value for late-coming scavengers, like Wer.

“Right,” Ling laughed without humor. “And meanwhile, our claim expires in six months. It’s either build up or clean out, remember? One or the other, or we’re expelled!”

“I remember.”

“Do you want to go back to work that’s unfit for robots? Slaving in a geriatric ward, wiping drool and cleaning the diapers of little emperors?”

“There are farms, up in the highlands.”

“And they only let in refugees if you can prove ancestral connection. Or if you bring a useful skill. But our families were urban, going back two revolutions!”

Wer grimaced and shook his head, downcast. We have been over this, so many times, he thought. But Ling seemed in a mood to belabor the obvious.

“This time, we may not be lucky enough to get jobs in a geriatric ward. You’ll wind up on a levee crew—and wind up buried in the cement. Then what will become of us?”

He lifted his gaze, squinting toward the long, concrete barrier, separating New Shanghai from the sea—part of a monumental construction that some called the New Great Wall, many times larger than the original—defending against an invader more implacable than any other. Here, along the abandoned shoreline, where wealthy export magnates once erected beachfront villas, you could gaze with envy at the glittering Xidong District, on the other side, whose inhabitants had turned their backs to the sea. It didn’t interest them, anymore.

“I’ll take the salvage to town,” he said.

“What?”

“I ought to get a better price ashore. For our extra catch, too. Anyway, we need some things.”

“Yeah, like beer,” Ling commented, sourly. But she didn’t try to stop him, or even mention that the trip was hazardous. Fading hopes do that to a relationship, he thought. Especially one built on unlikely dreams.

They said nothing further to each other. She slipped back inside. At least the baby’s crying soon stopped.

Using the mansion’s crumbling grand staircase as an indoor dock, Wer built a makeshift float-raft consisting of two old surfboards and a pair of empty drums, lashed together with drapery cord. Then, before fetching the salvage, he took a quick tour to check his traps and fishing lines, bobbing at intervals around the house. It meant slipping on goggles and diving repeatedly, but by now he felt at home among the canted, soggy walls, festooned with seaweed and barnacles. At least there were a dozen or so nice catches this time, most of them even legal, including a big red lobster and a fat, angry wrasse. So, his luck wasn’t uniformly bad.

Reluctantly, he released a tasty jiaoxi crab to go about its way. You never knew when some random underwater monitor, disguised as a drifting piece of flotsam, might be looking. He sure hoped none had spotted a forbidden rockfish, dangling from a gill net in back, too dead to do anything about. He took a moment to dive deeper and conceal the carcass, under a paving stone of the sunken garden.

The legal items, including the wrasse, a grouper, and two sea bass, he pushed into another mesh sack.

Our poverty is a strange one. The last thing we worry about is food.

Other concerns? Sure. Typhoons and tsunamis. Robbers and police shakedowns. City sewage leaks and red tides. Low recycle prices and the high cost of living.

Perhaps a fair wind will blow from the south today, instead.

In part, Wer blamed the former owners of this house, for having designed it without any care for the laws of nature. Too many windows had faced too many directions, including north, allowed chi to leak, in and out, almost randomly. None of the sills had been raised, to retain good luck. How could supposedly smart people have ignored so many lessons of the revered past? Simply in order to maximize their scenic view? It had served them right, when melting glaciers in far-north Greenland drowned their fancy home.

Wer checked the most valuable tool in his possession—a tide-driven drill that was almost finished boring into the old foundation, ready for another metlon support. He inspected the watch-camera that protected the drill from being pilfered, carefully ensuring that it had unobstructed views. Just ten more holes and supports. Then he could anchor the hammock-home in place with a real, arched frame, as some of the other shoresteaders had done.

And after that? A tide-power generator. And a bigger rain-catchment. And a smart gathernet with a commercial fishing license. And a storm shelter. And a real boat. And more metlon. He had even seen a shorestead where the settlers reached Phase Three: reinforcing and re-coating all the wires and plumbing of the old house, in order to re-connect with the city grids. Then sealing all the walls to finish a true island of self-sufficiency—deserving a full transfer of deed. Every reclaimer’s dream.

And about as likely as winning a lottery, it seemed.

I had better get going, he thought. Or the tide will be against me.

* * *

Kicking the raft along, he tried to aim for one of the broad gates, where the mammoth seawall swung backward for a hundred meters, rising uphill far enough for a sandy beach to form. On occasion, he had been able to sell both fish and salvage right there, to middlemen who came out through the massive doors. On weekends, a few families came down from nearby city towers, to visit salty surf and sand. Some would pay top rates to a shoresteader, for a fresh, wriggling catch.

But, while a rising tide helped push him closer, it also ensured the gates would be closed, when he arrived.

I’ll tie up at the wall and wait. Or maybe climb over. Slip into town, till it ebbs. Wer had a few coins. Not enough to buy more metlon. But sufficient for a hardworking man to have a well-deserved beer.

As always, he used mask and snorkel while kicking along, pushing the raft. You never knew when something might turn up below, revealed by the shifting sea. Mostly, house sites in this area had been bulldozed and cleared with drag lines, after the evacuation. Common practice in the early days, when people first retreated from the continental margins. Only later was steading seen as a cheaper alternative. Let some poor dope slave away at salvage and demolition, driven by a slender hope of ownership.

In large part, all that remained here were concrete foundations and fields of stubby utility pipes, along with tumbled lumps of stone and concrete too heavy to move. Still, out of habit, he kept scanning for any change, as a combination of curiosity and current drew him by what had been the biggest mansion along this stretch of coast. Some tech-baron oligarch had set up a seaside palace here, before he toppled spectacularly, in one of the big purges. Steader stories told that he was dragged off, one night, tried in secret, and shot. Quickly, so he would not spill secrets about mightier men. There had been a lot of that, all over the world, twenty years or so ago.

Of course government agents would have picked the place cleaner than a bone, before letting the bulldozers in. And other gleaners followed. Yet, Wer always felt a romantic allure, passing two or three meters overhead, imagining the place when walls and windows stood high, festooned with lights. When liveried servants patrolled with trays of luscious treats, satisfying guests in ways that—well—he probably couldn’t imagine, though sometimes he liked to try.

Of course, the sand and broken crete still held detritus. Old pipes and conduits. Cans of paint and solvents still leaked from the ruin, rising as individual up-drips to pop at the surface and make it gleam. From their hammock-home, Wer and Ling used to watch sunsets reflect off the rainbow sheen. Back when all of this seemed exciting, romantic and new.

Speaking of new …

Wer stopped kicking and twisted his body around to peer downward. A glitter had caught his eye. Something different.

There’s been some kind of cave-in, he realized. Under one edge of the main foundation slab.

The sea was relatively calm, this far beyond the surfline. So he grabbed a length of tether from the raft, took several deep breaths, then flipped downward, diving for a better look.

It did look like a gap under the house, one that he never saw before. But, surely, someone else would have noticed this by now. Anyway, the government searchers would have been thorough. Wouldn’t they? What were the odds that… .

Tying the tether to a chunk of concrete, he moved close enough to peer inside the cavity, careful not to disturb much sediment with his flippers. Grabbing an ikelite from his belt, he sent its sharp beam lancing inside, where an underground wall had recently collapsed. During the brief interval before his lungs grew stale and needy, he could make out few details. Still, by the time he swiveled and kicked back toward the surface, one thing was clear.

The chamber contained things. Lots of things.

And, to Wer, almost anything down there would be worth going after, even if it meant squeezing through a narrow gap, into a crumbling basement underneath the sea.

Treasure

Night had fallen some time ago and now his torch batteries were failing. That, plus sheer physical exhaustion, forced Wer, at last, to give up salvaging anything more from the hidden cache that he had found, underneath a sunken mansion. Anyway, with the compressed air bottle depleted, his chest now burned from repeated freedives through that narrow opening, made on lung power alone, snatching whatever he could—whatever sparkle caught his eye down there.

You will die if you keep this up, he finally told himself. And someone else will get the treasure.

That thought made it firm. Still, even without any more trips inside, there was more work to do. Yanking some decayed boards off of the upper story, Wer dropped them to cover the new entrance that he’d found, gaping underneath the house. And then one final dive through dark shallows, to kick sand over it all. Finally, he rested for a while with one arm draped over his makeshift raft, under the dim glow of a quarter moon.

Do not the sages counsel that a wise man must spread ambition, like honey across a bun? Only a greedy fool tries to swallow all of his good fotune, in a single bite.

Oh, but wasn’t it a tempting treasure trove? Carefully concealed by the one-time owner of this former beachfront mansion, who took the secret of a concealed basement with him—out of spite, perhaps—all the way to the execution-disassembly room.

If they had transplanted any of his brain, as well as the eyes and skin and organs, then someone might have remembered the hidden room, before this.

As it is, I am lucky that the rich man went to his death angry, never telling anybody what the rising sea was sure to bury.

Wer pondered the strangeness of fate, as he finally turned toward home, fighting the ebb tide that kept trying to haul him seaward, into the busy shipping lanes of the Huangpo. It was a grueling swim, dragging the raft behind him with a rope around one shoulder. Several times—obsessively—he stopped to check the sacks of salvage, counting them and securing their ties.

It is a good thing that basement also proved a good place to deposit my earlier load of garbage, those pipes and chipped tiles. A place to tuck them away, out of sight of any drifting environment monitors. Or I would have had to haul them, too.

The setting of the moon only made things harder, plunging the estuary into darkness. Except, that is, for the glitter of Shanghai East, a noisy galaxy of wealth, towering behind its massive seawall. And the soft glow of luminescence in the tide itself. A glow that proved especially valuable when his winding journey took him past some neighboring shoresteads, looming out of the night, like dark castles. Wer kept his splashing to a minimum, hurrying past the slumping walls and spidery tent poles with barely a sound. Until, at last, his own stead was next, its familiar tilt occulting a lopsided band of stars.

I can’t wait to show Ling what I found. This time, she has to be impressed.

That hope propelled Wer the last few hundred meters, even though his lungs and legs felt as if they were on fire. Of course, he took a beating, as the raft crashed, half-sideways into the atrium of the ruined house. A couple of the salvage bags split open, spilling their glittery contents across the old parquet floor. But no matter, he told himself. The things were safe now, in easy reach.

In fact, it took all of Wer’s remaining energy to drag just one bag upstairs, then to pick his way carefully across the slanted roof of broken tiles, and finally reach the tent-house where his woman and child waited.

* * *

“Stones?” Ling asked, staring at the array of objects that Wer spread before her. A pre-dawn glow was spreading across the east. Still, she had to lift a lantern to peer at his little trove, shading the light and speaking in a low voice, so as not to wake the baby.

“You are all excited about a bunch of stones?”

“They were on shelves, all neatly arranged and with labels,” he explained, while spreading ointment across a sore on his left leg, one of several that had spread open again, after long immersion. “There used to be glass cabinets—”

“They don’t look like gems. No diamonds or rubies,” she interrupted. “Yes, some of them are pretty. But we find surf-polished pebbles everywhere.”

“You should see the ones that were on a special pedestal, in the center of the room. Some of them were held in fancy boxes, made of wood and crystal. I tell you it was a collection of some sort. And it must have all been valuable, for the owner to hide them all so—”

“Boxes?” Her interest was piqued, at least a little “Did you bring any of those?”

“A few. I left them on the raft. I was so tired. And hungry.” He sniffed, pointedly toward the stewpot, where Ling was re-heating last night’s meal, the one that he had missed. Wer smelled some kind of fish that had been stir fried with leeks, onions and that reddish seaweed that she put into more than half of her dishes.

“Get some of those boxes, please,” she insisted. “Your food will be warm by the time that you return.”

Wer would have gladly wolfed it down cold. But he nodded with resignation and gathered himself together, somehow finding the will to move quivering muscles, once again. I am still young, but I know how it will feel to be old.

This time, at least, the spreading gray twilight helped him to cross the roof, then slide down the ladder and stairs without tripping. His hands trembled while untying two more of the bags of salvage, these bulging with sharply angular objects. Dragging them up and re-traversing the roof was a pure exercise in mind-over-agony.

Most of our ancestors had it at least this bad, he reminded himself. Till things got much better for a generation …

… and then worse again. For the poor.

Hope was a dangerous thing, of course. One heard of shoresteaders striking it rich with a great haul, now and then. But, most of the time, reality shattered promise. Perhaps it is only an amateur geologist’s private rock collection, he thought, struggling the last few meters. One man’s hobby—precious to him personally, but of little market value.

Still, after collapsing on the floor of their tent-home for a second time, he found enough curiosity and strength to lift his head, as Ling’s nimble fingers worked at the tie ropes. Upending one bag, she spilled out a pile of stony objects, along with three or four of the boxes he had mentioned, made of finely-carved wood, featuring windows with beveled edges that glittered too beautifully to be made of simple glass.

For the first time, he saw a bit of fire in Ling’s eyes. Or interest, at least. One by one, she lifted each piece, turning it in the lamplight … and then moved to push aside a curtain, letting in sharply horizontal rays of light, as the sun poked its leading edge above the East China Sea. The baby roused then, rocking from side to side and whimpering while Wer spooned some food from the reheating pot into a bowl.

“Open this,” Ling insisted, forcing him to choose between the bowl and the largest box, that she thrust toward him. With a sigh, he put aside his meal and accepted the heavy thing, which was about the size and weight of his own head. Wer started to pry at the corroded clasp, while Ling picked up little Xie Xie in order to nurse the infant.

“It might be better to wait a bit and clean the box,” he commented. “Rather than breaking it just to look inside. The container, itself, may be worth—”

Abruptly, the wood split along a grainy seam with a splintering crack. Murky water spilled across his lap, followed by a bulky object, so smooth and slippery that it almost squirted out of his grasp.

“What is it?” Ling asked. “Another stone?”

Wer turned it over in his hands. The thing was heavy and hard, with a greenish tint, like jade. Though that could just be slime that clung to its surface even after wiping with a rag. A piece of real jade this big could bring a handsome price, especially already shaped into a handsome contour—that of an elongated egg. So he kept rubbing and lifted it toward the horizontal shaft of sunbeams, in order to get a better look.

No, it isn’t jade, after all.

But disappointment slowly turned into wonder, as sunlight striking the glossy surface seemed to sink into the glossy ovoid. Its surface darkened, as if it were drinking the beam, greedily.

Ling murmured in amazement … and then gasped as the stone changed color before their eyes …

… and then began to glow on its own.

More Than One

The wooden box bore writing in French. Wer learned that much by carefully cleaning its small brass plate, then copying each letter, laboriously, onto the touch-sensitive face of a simple tutor-tablet.

“Unearthed in Harrapa, 1926,” glimmered the translation in Updated Pinyin. “Demon-infested. Keep in the dark.”

Of course that made no sense. The former owner of the opalescent relic had been a high-tech robotics tycoon, hardly the sort to believe in superstitions. Ling reacted to the warning with nervous fear, wrapping the scarred egg in dark cloth, but Wer figured it was just a case of bad translation.

The fault must lie in the touch-tablet—one of the few tech-items they had brought along to their shorestead, just outside the seawall of New Shanghai. . Originally mass produced for poor children, the dented unit later served senile patients for many years, at a Chungqing hospice—till Ling took it with her, when she quit working there. Cheap and obsolete, it was never even reported stolen, so the two of them could still use it to tap the World Mesh, at a rudimentary, free-access level. It sufficed for a couple with little education, and few interests beyond the struggle to survive.

“I’m sure the state will issue us something better next year, when little Xie Xie is big enough to register,” she commented, whenever Wer complained about the slow connection and scratched screen. “They have to provide that much. A basic education. As part of the Big Deal.”

Wer felt less sure. Grand promises seemed made for the poor to remember, while the mighty forgot, Things had always been that way. You could tell, even from the censored histories that flickered across the little display, as he and his wife sagged into fatigued sleep every night, rocked by the rising tides. The same tides that kept eroding the old beach house, faster than they could reinforce it.

Would they even let Xie Xie register? The baby’s genetic samples had been filed when he was born. But would he get residency citizenship in New Shanghai? Or would the seawall keep out yet another kind of unwanted trash, along with a scum of plastic and resins that kept washing higher along the concrete barrier?

Clearly, in this world, you were a fool to count on beneficence from above.

Even good luck, when it arrived, could prove hard to exploit. Wer had hoped for time to figure out what kind of treasure lay in that secret room, underneath the biggest drowned mansion, a chamber filled with beautiful or bizarre rocks and crystals, or specimens of strangely twisted metal. Wer tried to inquire, using the little mesh tablet, only carefully. There were sniffer programs—billions of them—running loose across a million virlevels, even the gritty layer called Reality. If he inquired too blatantly, or offered the items openly for sale, somebody might just come and take it all. The former owner had been declared a public enemy, his property forfeit to the state.

Plugging in crude goggles and using a cracked pair of interact-gloves, Wer wandered down low rent avenues of World Town and The Village and Big Bazaar, pretending to be idly interested in rock collecting, as a hobby. From those virtual markets, he learned enough to dare a physical trip into town, carrying just one bagful of nice—but unexceptional—specimens, unloading them for a quarter of their worth at a realshop in East Pudong. A place willing to deal in cash—no names or recordings.

After so long at sea, Wer found troubling the heavy rhythms of the street. The pavement seemed harsh and unyielding. Pulsating maglev trolleys somehow made him itch, all over, especially inside tight and sweaty shoes. The whole time, he pictured twenty million nearby residents as a pressing mass—felt no less intensely than the thousands who actually jostled past him on crowded sidewalks, many of them muttering and waggling their fingers, interacting with people and things that weren’t even there.

Any profit from that first trip had been slim. Still, Wer thought he might venture to another shop soon, working his way up from mundane items to those that seemed more … unusual. Those kept in ornate boxes, on special shelves, in the old basement trove.

Though just one specimen glimmered, both in his dreams and daytime imaginings. Frustratingly, his careful online searches found nothing like the Stone—a kind of mineral that glowed with its own light, after soaking in the sun. Its opal-like sheen featured starlike sparkles that seemed to recede into an inner distance, a depth that looked both brighter than day and deeper than night. That is, until Ling insisted it be wrapped up and put away.

Worse yet, time was running out. Fish had grown sparse, ever since the night of the jellyfish, when half the life seemed to vanish out of the Huangpo Estuary. Now, the stewpot was seldom full, and often empty.

Soon the small hoard of cash was gone again.

Luck is fickle. We try hard to control the flow of Chi, by erecting our tent poles in symmetrical patterns and by facing our entrance toward the smiling south wind. But how can one strike a harmonious balance, down here at the shore, where the surf is so chaotic, where tides of air and water and stinging monsters rush however they choose?

No wonder the Chinese often turned their backs to the sea … and seem to be doing so again.

Already, several neighbors had given up, abandoning their shoresteads to the jellies and rising waters. Just a week ago, Wer and Ling joined a crowd of scavengers converging on one forsaken site, grabbing metlon poles and nanofiber webbing for use on their own stead, leaving little more than a stubble of rotting wood, concrete and stucco. A brief boost to their prospects, benefiting from the misfortune of others—

—that is, until it’s our own turn to face the inevitable. Forsaking all our hard work and dreams of ownership. Returning to beg our old jobs back in that stifling hospice, wiping spittle from the chins of little emperors. With each reproachful look from Ling, Wer grew more desperate. Then, during his third trip to town, carrying samples from the trove, he saw something that gave him both a thrill and a chill.

He was passing along Boulevard of The Sky Martyrs and about to cross The Street of October The Seventeenth, when the surrounding crowd seemed to halt, abruptly, all around him.

Well, not everybody, but enough people to bring the rhythmic bustle to a dead stall. Wer stumbled into the back of a well-padded pedestrian, who looked briefly as confused as he was. They turned to see that about a third of those around them were suddenly staring, as if into space, murmuring to themselves, some of them with jaws ajar, half-open in some kind of surprise.

Swiftly he realized, these were people who had been linked-in with goggles, specs, tru-vus, or contacts, each person moving through some virtual overlay—perhaps following guide arrows to a destination, or doing business as they walked, while others simply liked their city overlain with flowers, or jungle foliage, or fairytale colors. It also made them receptive to a high priority alert. Soon, half the people in sight were shuffling aside, half consciously moving toward the nearest wall or window in order to get away from traffic, while their minds soared far away.

Seeing so many others dive into a news-trance, the overweight gentleman muttered an oath and reached into his pocket to pull out some wraparound glasses. He, too, pressed close to the nearest building, emitting short grunts of interest while his aiware started filling him in.

Wer briefly wondered if he should be afraid. City life had many hazards, not all of them on the scale of Awfulday. But … the people clumping along the edges of the sidewalk didn’t seem worried, as much as engrossed. Surely that meant there was no immediate danger.

Meanwhile, many of those who lacked gear were pestering their companions, demanding verbal updates. He overheard a few snippets.

“The artifact has spoken …” and “The aliens have begun explaining their invitation, at last …”

Aliens. Artifact. Of course those words had been foaming around for a couple of weeks, part of life’s background, just like the soapy tidal spume. It sounded like a silly thing, unworthy of the small amount of free time that he shared with Ling, each exhausted evening. A fad, surely, or hoax. Or, at best, none of his concern. Only now Wer blinked in surprise over how many people seemed to care. Maybe we should scan for a free-access show about it, tonight. Instead of the usual medieval romance stories that Ling demanded.

Despite all the people who had stepped aside, into virtual newspace, that still left hundreds of pedestrians who didn’t care, or who felt they could wait. They took advantage of the cleared sidewalks to hurry about their business. As should I, he thought, stepping quickly across the street while ai-piloted vehicles worked their way past, evading those with human drivers who had pulled aside.

Aliens. From outer space. Could it possibly be true? Wer had to admit, this was stirring his long-dormant imagination.

He turned onto the Avenue of Fragrant Hydroponics and suddenly came to a halt. People were beginning to stir from the mass newstrance, muttering to one another—in real life and across the mesh—while stepping back into the sidewalk and resuming their journeys. Only, now it was his turn to be distracted, to stop and stare, to push unapologetically past others and press close to the nearest building, bringing his face close to the window of a store selling visualization tools.

One of the new SEF ThreeVee displays sparkled within, offering that unique sense of ghostly semi-transparency—and it showed three demons.

Or at least that’s how Wer first thought of them. They looked like made-up characters in one of those cheap fantasy dramas that Ling loved—one like an imp, with flamelike fur, one horselike with nostrils that flared like caves, and another whose tentacles evoked some monster of the sea. A disturbing trio, in their own right.

Only, it wasn’t the creatures that had Wer transfixed. It was their home. The context. The object framing, containing, perhaps imprisoning them. He recognized it, at once. Cleaner and more pristine—less pitted and scarred—nevertheless, it was clearly a cousin to the thing he had left behind this morning, in the surf-battered home that he shared with his wife and little son.

Wer swallowed hard.

I thought I was being careful, seeking information about that thing.

But careful was a relative world.

He left the bag of stones lying there, like an offering, in front of the image in the ThreeVee tank. It would only weigh him down now, as he ran for home.

Pursuit

Despite his hurry to get home, Wer avoided the main gate through the massive seawall. For one thing, the giant doors were closed right now, for high tide. Even when they opened, that place would throng with fishermen, hawking their catch, and citydwellers visiting the last remaining beach of imported sand. So many eyes—and ais—and who knew how many were already sifting every passing face, searching for his unique biosignature?

I should never have posted queries about an egglike stone that glows mysteriously, after sitting in sunlight.

I should have left it that hole under the sea.

His fear—ever since glimpsing the famous alien “artifact” on TV—was that somebody high and mighty wanted desperately to have whatever Wer discovered in a hidden basement cache, underneath a drowned mansion—and wanted it in secret. The former owner had been powerful and well-connected, yet he wound up being hauled away and—according to legend—tortured, then brain-sifted, and finally silenced forever. Wer suspected now that it was because of an oval stone, very much like the one causing such fuss, around the world. Governments and megorps and reff-consortia would all seek one of their own.

If so, what would they do with the likes of me? When an object is merely valuable, a poor man who recovers it may ask for a finder’s fee. But if it is a thing that might shake civilization?

In that case, all I could expect is death, just for knowing about it!

Yet, as some of the initial panic ebbed, Wer felt another part of his inner self rise up. The portion of his character that had dared to ask Ling to join him at the wild frontier, shoresteading a place of their own. If there were a way to offer it up for bidding … a way to keep us safe … True, the former owner must have tried, and failed, to make a deal. But nobody knew about this kind of “artifact” then … at least not the public. Everything has changed, now that the Americans are showing theirs to the world …

None of which would matter, if he failed to make it home in time to hide the thing. Or to make some basic preparations. Above all, sending Ling and Xie Xie somewhere safe.

Hurrying through crowded streets, Wer carefully kept his pace short of a run. It wouldn’t do to draw attention. Beyond the public-order cams on every ledge and lamp post, the state could tap into the lenses and private-ais worn by any pedestrian nearby . His long hair, now falling over his face, might stymie a routine or casual face-search, but not if the system really took an interest.

Veering away from the main gate, he sped through a shabbier section of town, where multistory residence blocs had gone through ramshackle evolution, ignoring every zoning ordinance. Laundry-laden clotheslines jostled solar collectors that shoved against semi-illegal rectennas, siphoning mesh-access and a little beamed power from the shiny towers of nearby Pudong.

Facing a dense crowd ahead, Wer tried pushing ahead for a while, then took a stab at a shortcut, worming past a delivery cart that wedged open a pair of giant doors. He found himself inside a vast cavity, where the lower floors had been gutted in order to host a great maze of glassy pipes and stainless steel reactor vessels, all linked in twisty patterns, frothing with multicolored concoctions. He chose a direction by dead reckoning, where there ought to be an exit on the other side. Wer meant to bluff his way clear, if anyone stopped him.

That didn’t seem likely, amid the hubbub. At least a hundred laborers—many of them dressed little better than he was—patrolled creaky catwalks or clambered over lattice struts, meticulously cleaning and replacing tubes by hand. At ground level, inspectors wearing bulky, enhanced aiware, checked a continuous shower of some product—objects roughly the size and shape of a human thumb—waving laser pincers to grab a few of them before they fell into a waiting bin.

It’s a nanofactory, Wer realized, after he passed halfway through. It was his first time seeing one up close, but he and Ling once saw a virtshow tour of a vast workshop like this one (though far cleaner) where basic ingredients were piped in and sophisticated parts shipped out—electroptic components, neuraugments, and organoplaques, whatever those were. And shape-to-order diamonds, as big as his fist. All produced by stacking atoms and molecules, one at a time, under programmed control.

People still played a part, of course. No robot could scramble or crawl about like humonkeys, or clean up after the machines with such dexterity. Or so cheaply.

Weren’t they supposed to shrink these factories to the size of a toaster and sell them to everybody? Magic boxes that would let even poor folk make anything they wanted from raw materials. From seawater, even. No more work. No more want.

He felt like snorting, but instead Wer mostly held his breath the rest of the way, hurrying toward a loading dock, where sweltering workers filled mag-lev lorries at the other end. One heard rumors of nano-machines that got loose, that embedded in the lungs and then got busy trying to make copies of themselves… . Probably just tall tales. But Wer still had plans for his lungs. They mattered a lot, to a shoresteader.

He spilled out of gritty industry into a world of street-level commerce, where gaily decorated shops crowded this avenue. Sucking air, his nostrils filled with food aromas, wafting around innumerable grills, woks and steam cookers, preparing everything from delicate skewered scorpions to vat-grown chickenmeat, stretched and streaked to look like the real thing. Wer’s stomach growled, but he pushed ahead, then turned a corner and headed straight for the nearest section of massive wall separating Shanghai East from the rising ocean.

There were smugglers’ routes. One used a building that formerly offered appealing panoramas overlooking the Hunangpo estuary—till such views became unfashionable. Now, a lower class of urbanites occupied the tower.

The lobby’s former coating of travertine and marble had been stripped and sold off years ago, replaced by spray-on corrugations that lay covered with long beards of damp algae. A good use of space—the three story atrium probably grew enough to feed half the occupants a basic, gene-crafted diet. But the dank smell made Wer miss his little tent-home amid the waves.

We can’t go back to living like this, he thought, glancing at the spindly bamboo scaffolding that crisscrossed the vast foyer, while bony, sweat-stained workers tended the crop, doing work unfit for robots. I swore I would not raise our son on algae paste.

The creaky elevator was staffed by a crone who flicked switches on a makeshift circuit board to set it in motion. The building must never have had its electronics repaired since the Crash. It’s been what, fifteen, sixteen years? Yes, people are cheap and people need work. But even I could fix this pile of junk.

The car jerked and rattled while the operator glared at Wer. Clearly, she knew he did not work or live here. In turn, he gave the old lady a smile and ingratiating bow—no sense in antagonizing someone who might call up a face-query. But within, Wer muttered to himself about sourminded “little emperors”—a generation raised as chubby only-children, doted on by two parents, four grandparents and a nation that seemed filled with limitless potential. Boundless dreams and an ambition to rise infinitely high—until the Crash. Till the twenty-first century didn’t turn out quite as promised.

Disappointment didn’t sit well with Little Emperors—half a billion of them—so many that even the mysterious oligarchs in the Palace of Terrestrial Harmony had to cater to the vast population bulge. And they could be grouchy. Pinning the blame on Wer’s outnumbered generation had become a national pastime.

The eleventh floor once boasted a ledge-top restaurant, overlooking a marina filled with opulent yachts, bordering a beach of brilliant, whitened sand. Now, stepping past rusty tables and chairs, Wer gazed beyond the nearby sea wall, upon stubby remnants and broken masts, protruding from a brownish carpet of seaweed and sewage.

I remember it was right about here …

Leaning over, he groped over the balcony railing and along the building’s fluted side, till he found a hidden pulley, attached to a slender rope leading downward. Near the bottom, it draped idly over the seawall and into the old marina, appearing to be nothing more than a pair of fallen wires.

Wer had never done anything like this before, trusting a slender line with his weight and his life. Though, on one occasion he had helped Quang Lu ferry mysterious cargo to the bottom end, holding Quang’s boat steady while the smuggler attached dark bags, then hauled away. High overhead, shadowy figures claimed the load of contraband, and that was that. Wer never knew if it was drugs, or tech, or untaxed luxuries, nor did he care, so long as he was paid.

Quang Lu would not be happy if he ruined this route. But right now, Wer had other worries. He shaded his eyes to peer along the coast, toward a line of surfline ruins—the former beachfront mansions where his simple shorestead lay. Glare off the water stung his eye, but there seemed to be nothing unusual going on. He was pretty sure he could see the good luck banner from Ling’s home county, fluttering in a vague breeze. She was supposed to take it down, in the event of trouble.

His heart pounded as he tore strips off an awning to wrap around his hands. Clambering over the guard rail, he tried not to look down as he slid down the other side, until he could support himself with one arm on the gravel deck, while the other hand groped and fumbled with the twin lines.

It was awkward, because holding onto just one strand wouldn’t do. The pulley would let him plummet like a stone. So he wound up wrapping both slender ropes around his hand. Before swinging out, Wer closed his eyes for several seconds, breathing steadily and seeking serenity, or at least some calm. All right, let’s go.

He let go of the ledge and swung down.

Not good! Full body weight tightened the rope like a noose around his hand, clamping a vice across his palm and fingers. Groaning till he was almost out of breath, Wer struggled to ease the pressure by grabbing both cables between his legs and tugging with his other hand, till he finally go out of the noose. Fortunately, his hands were so calloused that there appeared to be no damage. But it took a couple moments for the pain to stop blurring his vision …

… and when it cleared, he made the mistake of glancing straight down. He swallowed hard—or tried to. A terror that seemed to erupt from somewhere down his spine, ran up and down his back like a monkey. An eel thrashed inside his belly.

Stop it! He told the animals within. I am a man. A man with a duty to perform and luck to fulfill. And a man is all that I am.

It seemed to work. Panic ebbed, like an unpleasant tide, and Wer felt buoyed by determination.

Next, he tried lowering himself, hand over hand, by strength alone. His wiry strength was adequate to the task, and certainly he did not weigh enough to be much trouble. But it was hard to hold onto both strings, equally. One or the other kept trying to snap free. Wer made it down three stories before one of them yanked out of his grip. It fled upward, toward the pulley while Wer, cluinging to the remaining strand, plunged the other way, grabbing at the escapee desperately—

—and finally seized the wild cord. Friction quickly burned through the makeshift padding and into his flesh. By the time he came to a halt, smoke, anguish, and a foul stench wafted from his hand. Hanging there, swaying and bumping against a nearby window, he spent unknown minutes just holding on tight, waiting for his heart to settle and pain speckles to depart his eyes.

Did I cry out? He wondered. Fortunately, the window next to him was blocked by heavy drapes—the glare off the Hungpo was sharp this time of day. Many of the others were boarded-up. People still used this building, but most would still be at work or school. Nor would there be much AI in a hi-rise hovel.

I don’t think I yelled. I think I’m all right. His descent should be masked by heat plumes and glaring sunlight reflections off metal and concrete, making daylight much preferable over making the passage at night, when his body temperature would flare on hundreds of infrared-sensitive cams, triggering anomaly-detection programs.

Learning by trial and error, Wer managed to hook one leg around each of the strands and experimented with letting them slide along his upper thighs, one heading upward and the other going down. It was awkward and painful, at first, but the tough pants could take it, if he took it slow and easy.

Gradually, he approached the dull gray concrete levee from above, and Wer found himself picturing how far it stretched—extending far beyond vision to the left, hugging the new coastline till it reached a great marsh that used to be Shandong Province … and to the right, continuing along the river all the way to happy regions far upstream, where the Chang became the Yangtze, and where people had no fear of rising waters. How many millions were employed building the new Great Wall? And how many millions more labored as prisoners, consigned on one excuse or another to the great task of staving off China’s latest invader. The Sea.

Drawing close, Wer kept a wary eye on the barrier. This section looked okay—a bit crumbly from cheap, hurried construction, two decades ago, after Typhoon Mariko nearly drowned the city. Still, he knew that some stretches were laced with nasty stuff—razor-sharp wires, barely visible to the eye, or heat-seeking tendrils tipped with toxins.

When the time came, he vaulted over, barely touching the obstacle with the sole of one sandal, landing in the old marina with a splash.

It was unpleasant, of course, a tangle of broken boats and dangerous cables that swirled in a murk of weeds and city waste. Wer lost no time clambering onto one wreck and then leaping to another, hurrying across the obstacle course with an agility learned in more drowned places than he could remember, spending as little time as possible in the muck.

Actually, it looks as if there might be a lot of salvage in here, he thought. Perhaps he might come back—if luck neither veered high or low, but stayed on the same course as his life had been so far. Moderately, bearably miserable.

Maybe I will risk it, after all, he thought. Try to find a broker who can offer the big white stone for sale, in some way that might keep us safe… .

Before climbing over the final, rocky berm, separating the marina from the sea, he spotted a rescue buoy, bobbing behind the pilot house of one derelict. It would come in handy, during the long swim ahead.

* * *

It was nearing nightfall when he approached the shorestead from the west, with the setting sun behind him.

Of course, by now the tide was low and the main gates were open—and Wer was feeling foolish. I might have made it home by now, just by waiting in town. In hindsight, his initial panic now seemed overwrought and exaggerated. I might have sold those lesser stones, had a beer by the fishmonger stands, and already have made it home by now, having dinner while showing Ling a handful of cash.

Soon, he faced the familiar outlines—the sagging northside wall … the metlon poles and supercord bracings … the solar distillery … the patches where he had begun preparing two of the upper-story rooms for occupation… . He even caught a scent of that Vietnamese nuk mam sauce that Ling added to half her preparations. It all looked normal. Still, he circled the half-ruined mansion, checking for intruder signs. Oil in the water. Tracks in the muddy sand. Any kind of presence lurking below.

Nothing visible. So far so good.

A wasted day, then. A crazy, draining adventure that I could scarcely afford. Some lost stones …

… though there are more where those came from.

In fact, he had begun to fashion a plan in his head. The smuggler, Quang Lu, had many contacts. Perhaps, while keeping the matter vague at first, Wer might use Quang to set up a meeting, in such a time and place where treachery would be difficult. Perhaps arranging for several competitors to be present at once. How did one of the ancient sages put it?

In order not to be trampled by an elephant, get many of them to push against each other.

All right, maybe no sage actually said that. But one should have. Surely, Wer did not have to match the power of any of the great lords of government, wealth and commerce. What he needed was a situation where they canceled out each other! Enough to get them openly bidding to obtain what he had. Open enough so that no one could benefit by keeping him quiet.

First thing, I must find a good hiding place for the stone. Then come up with the right story, for Quang.

It took real effort just to haul himself out of the water, Wer’s body felt limp and soggy with fatigue. He was past hunger and exhaustion, making his way from the atrium-dock to the stairs, then across the roof, and finally to the entrance of the tent-shelter. It flapped with a welcoming rhythm, emitting puffs of homecoming aromas that made his head swim.

Ducking his head inside, Wer blinked, adjusting to the dimmer light. “Oh, what a day I have had. You won’t believe, when I tell you. Is that sauteed prawn? The ones I caught this morning? I’m glad you chose to cook those—”

Ling had been stirring the wok. At first, as she turned around, he thought she smiled. Only then Wer realized … it was a grimace. She did not speak, but fear glistened sin her eyes, which darted to her left—alerting him to swivel and look—

A creature stood on their little dining table. A large bird of some kind, with a long, straight beak. It gazed back at Wer, regarding him with a tilt of its head, first one way and then the other. A moment later, it spread stubby wings, stretching them, and he numbly observed.

There are no feathers. A penguin? What would a penguin be doing here in sweltering Shanghai?

Then he noticed its talons. Penguins don’t have—

The claws gripped something that still writhed on the tabletop, gashed and torn. It looked like a snake… . Only, instead of oozing blood or guts, there were bright flashes and electric sizzles.

A machine. They are both machines.

Without moving its beak, the bird spoke.

“You must not fear. There is no time for fear.”

Wer swallowed. His lips felt chapped and dry. “What … who are you?”

“I am an instrumentality, sent by those who might save your life.” The bird-thing abruptly bent and pecked hard at the snake. Sparks flew. It went dark and limp. An effective demonstration, as if Wer needed one.

“Please go to the window,” the winged mechanism resumed, gesturing with its beak. “And bring the stone here.”

Well, at least it was courteous. He turned and saw that the white, egg-shaped relic lay on the ledge, soaking in sunlight—instead of wrapped in a dark cloth, as they had agreed. He glanced back sharply at his wife, but Ling was now holding little Xie Xie. She merely shrugged as the baby squirmed and whimpered, trying to nurse.

With a low sigh, Wer turned back toward the stone, whose opalescent surface seemed to glow with more than mere reflections, as he took two steps. Wer could sense the bird leaning forward, eagerly.

As he raised his hands, the whitish surface turned milky and began to swirl. Now it was plain to the eye, how this thing differed from the “Havana Artifact” that he had seen briefly through an ailectronics store window. It seemed a bit smaller, narrower, and considerably less smooth. One end was marred by pits, gouges and blisters that tapered into thin streaks across the elongated center. And yet, the similarities were unmistakable. Especially when his hands approached within a few centimeters. A spinning sense of depth grew more intense. And, swiftly, a dim shape began to form, coalescing within, as if emerging from a fog.

Demons, Wer thought.

Or rather, a demon, as he realized—there was just a single figure, bipedal, shaped vaguely like a man.

With reluctance—wishing he had never laid eyes on it—Wer made himself plant hands on both tapered ends, gritting his teeth as a brief, faint tremor ran up the inner surface of his arms. He hefted the heavy stone, turned and carried it away from the sunlight. At which point, the glow seemed only to intensify, filling and chasing the dim shadows of the tent-shelter.

“Put it down here, on the table, but please do not release it from your grasp,” the bird-thing commanded, still polite, but insistent. Wer obeyed, though he wanted to let go. The shape that gathered form, within the stone, was one that he had seen before. More human-like than the demons he had glimpsed on TV, shown conversing with world delegates in Washington—but still a demon. Like the frightening penguin-creature, whose wing now brushed his arm as it bent next to him, eager for a closer look.

“The legends are true!” It murmured. Wer felt the bird’s voice resonate, emitting from an area on its chest. “Worldstones are said to be picky. They may choose one human to work with, or sometimes none at all. Or so go the stories.” The robot regarded Wer with a glassy eye. “You are fortunate in more ways than you might realize.”

Nodding without much joy, Wer knew at least one way.

I am needed, then. It will work only for me.

That means they won’t just take the thing and leave us be.

But it also means they must keep me alive. For now.

The demon within the stone—it had finished clarifying, though the image remained rippled and flawed. Approaching on two oddly-jointed legs, it reached forward with powerfully muscular arms, as if to touch or seize Wer’s enclosing hands. The mouth—appearing to have four lips arranged like a flattened diamond—moved underneath a slitlike nose and a single, ribbonlike organ where eyes would have been. With each opening and closing of the mouth, a faint buzzing vibrated the surface under Wer’s right palm.

“The stone is damaged,” the penguin-like automaton observed. “It must have once possessed sound transducers. Perhaps, in a well-equipped laboratory—”

“Legends?” Wer suddenly asked, knowing he should not interrupt. But he couldn’t help it. Fear and exhaustion and contact with demons—it all had him on the verge of hysteria. Anyway, the situation had changed. If he was special, needed, then the least that he could demand was an answer or two!

“What legends? You mean there have been more than one or two of these things? You mean they’ve appeared before?”

The bird-thing tore its gaze away from the image of a humanoid creature, portrayed opening and closing its mouth in a pantomime of speech that timed roughly, but not perfectly, with the buzzing under Wer’s right hand.

“You might as well know, Peng Xiao Wer, since yours is now a burden and a task assigned by Heaven.” The penguinlike machine gathered itself to full height and then gave him a small bow of the head. “A truth that goes back farther than any other that is known.”

Wer’s mouth felt dry. “What truth?”

“That stones have fallen since time began. And men have spoken to them for at least nine thousand years.

“And in all that time, they have spoken of a day of culmination. And that day, long prophesied, may finally be at-hand.”

Wer felt warm contact at his back, as Ling pressed close—as near as she could, while nursing their child. He did not remove his hands from the object on the table. But he was glad that one of hers slid around his waist, clutching him tight and driving out some of the sudden chill he felt, inside.

Meanwhile, the entity within the stone appeared frustrated, perhaps realizing that no one heard its words. The buzzing intensified, then stopped. Then, instead, the demon reached forward, as if toward Wer, and started to draw a figure in space, close to the boundary between them. Wherever it moved its scaly hand, a trail of inky darkness remained, until Wer realized.

Calligraphy. The creature was brushing a figure—an ideogram—in a flowing, archaic-looking style. It was a complicated symbol, containing at least twenty strokes. I wish I had more education, Wer thought, gazing in awe at the final shape, when it stood finished, throbbing across the face of the glowing “world-stone.” Both symmetrically beautiful and yet jagged, threatening, it somehow transfixed the eye and made his heart pound.

Wer did not know the character. But anyone with the slightest knowledge of Chinese would recognize the radical—the core symbol—that it was built from.

Danger.

* * *

To be continued in Volume 3 Number 4

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Framed

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Contents

The Rings of Ragnaran

Written by J. Simon

Illustrated by Chantelle Thorne

“We bring peace!” Saerr of Vok bellowed, his scales reflecting a million angry lights. “Idiots! Stop fleeing! We propose a universal oneness of peace and love! The Claw of Kz-Gk hunts you and slays your opposition to our enduring friendship! Come back!” Ships continued to zag and twirl in a dozen evasive directions. Saerr’s motile frill began to inflate.

“Sir,” his First Moltling respectfully hissed.

“Why do aliens hate me? Do they like loneliness? Do they want to hurt my feeling?”

“Sir, we’re broadcasting on maximum power—”

“I WILL BROOK NO FAILURE! LOVE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE!”

“—a frequency which the aliens refer to as ‘death ray.’”

Saerr stopped. “What?”

“Sir, our messages of peace and love are blasting them into space dust.”

“By the fires of Groz-Ka! It’s my birthday party all over again!” His sybiatic membrane inflated pensively. “Why must beautiful things be so fragile? I never knew five eyes could hold so many tears.”

“Sir …?”

“Oh, yes. CEASE BROADCAST!”

Saerr of Vok folded clawed hands together, eyes nictating, and watched the surviving aliens flee. He WOULD befriend them. There WOULD be an exchange of cultures and dance. It would come. Soon.

* * *

Knight-Captain Mupp gratefully sank its rhizomes into the rotting husk of the Star Spore “Indisposable.” The cheese-like block of neurons in what could charitably be called its head churned and mixed, connecting and firing as neurons are wont to do. Little puffballs grew from its mantle and burst, releasing sterile messenger-spores into the air.

“Zounds!” Mupp communicated. “Nearly bought it that time. Damned space lizards!”

“Mmmmksss,” muttered Priest-Lawyer Shlorsh, who’d gotten into the fermented bark again.

“It’s arrogant, really, for animate pre-nutrients to presume to go around blasting things instead of quietly living so they can die and become food. What’s next? Vast civilizations of intelligent dung?”

“Ggggrgllll.”

“Zounds!” Mupp cried. “They’re coming back! Quick, take a message. We must recruit allies to the struggle.” Several robot arms descended around Mupp, each holding an empty balloon to capture his messenger-spores. “Dear Animate Pre-Nutrients,” he mused. “Though a civilization of creatures that hasn’t died yet is an abomination against all that is pure, yet do I extend the hyphae of equality and friendship. Aid us against these abominable space lizards and we will …” Mupp paused. “… eat away the death that surrounds you always, that you might pretend your cheerful little lives have any purpose but to feed us. Message ends. Package and send.” Mupp wiggled its sporatophores at Shlorsh. “I think that went well, don’t you?”

* * *

Ragnaran may have been the only world on which orchids had been bred to have gigantic nectar udders, or where honeybees flew yoked to little beeping sleighs. Great hordes of butterflies flitted along bright, quiet streets, sunning themselves or patronizing hovering robotic flowers. Gripped by some urge, they occasionally swirled together into a great mass, multiple probosci easily piercing each other’s brains, uniting a thousand simple little minds into one so much greater.

Thoughts and memories swirled, coalescing once more into consciousness. The multiple creature decided, based upon a weighted random calculation, that he was male (15,113 to 14,774) and named Kevin (3 to 29,884). Kevin’s thirty thousand wings opened and closed crisply, completely under his control. His “skin” was a masterpiece that repainted itself by the moment, displaying his every thought to any who cared to watch.

“Whew!” he flashed. “Tell me mnagos nectar isn’t the sweetest. Anyones who says it isn’t it is at least 30% lying. Renford!”

A robot flower twirled deferentially over to him. “Sirs?”

“Why is the sky exploding?”

“Evil ravenous space lizards, sirs. Their entertainment programming appears to have the effect of igniting our atmosphere.”

“Huh. Pretty. What about the purple stuff?”

“Missiles from evil ravenous space fungi, sirs. They’ve made no effort to communicate, just bombarded us with lethal spores. Tens of millions of Ragnaronians are now enraged super-zombies thirsty for nectar.”

“Space lizards, you say? Don’t they know that interstellar diplomacy is futile?”

“Apparently not, sirs.”

Kevin fluttered back and forth. “Like that time with the blazing gas beings. They didn’t even realize their friendly greetings were forcing millions of us, mesmerized, to fly into them and self-immolate. Or that race of really quite ungrateful little crustaceans we thoughtfully pollinated. Who knew they were already using that orifice? I mean, what else could it be for?”

“Precisely, sirs.” Renford gave a reserved beep. “About the space lizards …”

A flash of color rippled across Kevin. “Yeah?”

“What shall we do about them?”

“Why ask me?”

“Everyone else are zombies, sirs. You are the last.”

“Oh.” Kevin mulled that over. “Do we have guns?”

“No, sirs. We are pretty. That is our mode of defense. We delight people with our whimsical fluttering until they elect not to hurt us. Well, that and the ruins of the ancient civilization we are perched on, which has the power to destroy all life in the universe.”

“Hmm. Yeah. Let’s unleash an ancient subterranean horror from before time. Fourteen percent of me is thinking that’s a really good idea.”

“And the other eighty-six percent?”

“Having sex.”

“Your will, sirs,” the flower said, and twirled off to do Kevin’s bidding.

* * *

For the second time in its history, Ragnaran had rings—not of ice or stone, but of spaceships. Tens of millions of them. Battle-scarred saucers, hypnotically strobing cylinders, twirling cubes were all but particles in those vast double rings of metal and light. Down on the surface, a Judgement Orb large enough to house tens of millions of sentient beings had hastily been inflated (or, in the case of the aquatic lobes, flooded).

Grand Maxillary Prefect Vikon Vikon-Smith manipulated the controls of the omnipuppet. It was a fat little wailing thing with dozens of appendages, countless bleating orifices, and an unfortunate number of artfully arrayed scent sphincters. “If you speak enough languages simultaneously,” the salesman had assured him, “they’re bound to understand one of them.” Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure his spaceship had needed that micrometeorite undercoating, either.

“Gobs and gobloons!” he swore, kicking the omnipuppet—which immediately translated the obscenity into about fifty million other languages. Silence fell like an thulgroonian space axe. A truly outlandish number of eyes—and other parts—focused on him.

“Fellow, uh, beings,” Vikon Vikon-Smith said. “Let the accused stand forward! Saerr of Vok. Knight-Captain Mupp. Kevin.”

“We’re Gina now,” the Ragnaronian gracefully flashed. “One of the Kevins got smeared over ol’ scale-faces’ windshield.”

“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!” Saerr roared.

“Hey, no prob. He would’ve wanted to go that way. Frankly, we all do. It’s something about the sparkliness.”

“Quite gleemly,” Vikon Vikon-Smith dubiously agreed. “Nonetheless, you three stand accused of unleashing an evil beyond comprehension. Countless years ago …” He hesitated as several scuffles broke out in the upper tiers. He couldn’t make out all the shouting, flashing, beeping, and interpretive dance—just something about radioactive skin and “… mutated me on purpose!” He decided to press on.

“Countless years ago, the peoples of the galaxy had many problems, even as we do today. They fought each other by accident, hurt each other out of misunderstanding. They sought a way to bring peace. They came together long enough to build an enormous crystalline being called the Vyygor. It was part machine and part madness, powered by the pulsing heart of a black hole. It was meant to finally bring peace to the universe. This it did, by erasing all life in the universe.”

Vikon Vikon-Smith paused again. As incompatibilities and misguided attempts to help spread, the scuffles were quickly igniting into battle. At least no one had fired any—

A laser blast flashed across the Judgment Orb. The rattle of projectile fire barked back. The Prefect hastily consulted his notes.

“And. When life re-evolved, and again there was strife, again the great minds of the universe came together to repair the Vyygor and make it work. This time it brought peace by freezing all life into suspended animation and locking it into a monomolecular diamond sphere the size of a solar system. The third time around, the Vyygor went crazy, decided it was God, and enslaved the universe for three rather sticky epochs. Thanks be to the Wavy Ones, someone finally got in and asked it if it could make a dessert so delicious it couldn’t stop at just one. That kept it tied up nicely. But now the Vyygor is awakening, and—”

Vikon Vikon-Smith looked up from his notes. Madness. Chaos. All-out war in every quarter. What was more, several extremely large chlorine beings were looming over him.

“We really don’t want to do this,” the blue one said. “I wrote my thesis on how all life, at the core, is all of one beinghood.”

“I’ve been in diplomat training for thirty molts,” the amorphous one said glumly. “This is my very first mission.”

“But the chlorine atoms in your breath are an isotope that has an unfortunate tendency to, well, kill us. We must regretfully request that you stop breathing.”

“But could you write me a positive recommendation as you die?” the amorphous one said hopefully. “It won’t make any difference to you either way, but it could make things so much easier when I have to tell the corps I killed my boss on my first day.”

“Very well,” Vikon Vikon-Smith agreed. “But my last words are so eloquent, I must entrust them to the omnipuppet.” He picked up the fat little thing, contemplated for a moment, and then hurled it directly at the startled chlorine-beings’ groinal equivalents. “STOP THE VYYGOR!” he screamed, his outer skin popping off in an escape-molt. Pale and naked, he made a dash into madness.

* * *

Battle swirled around Saerr of Vok, the sheepish sort of war fought by intelligent, sensitive philosophs who only occasionally enjoyed letting loose and murdering everything in sight.

“Pathetic space scum!” he bellowed. “BELLIGERENCE IS A SIGN OF WEAKNESS!” Growling, he picked up the discarded omnipuppet and began pumping the controls. “You …” he grunted, “must … listen …” The thing whirled faster and faster, arms screaming through the air as he applied some muscle. In expanding ripples around him, creatures turned to listen. Saerr pumped harder. “Fighting … never … solved … anything …” Wisps of smoke rose from the battered puppet’s joins. Irritated, Saerr pumped harder, faster. “Let’s … exchange … dances …”

The omnipuppet exploded. Jagged shards of ceramic and circuitry shot like spears through all of the life forms that had been perceptive enough to cease fighting and listen to him.

“NOT AGAIN!” Saerr bellowed. A crackle of gunfire answered him. Something pinged off his scales. He retracted his head and ran for the exit, plowing through anything in his way—until he spotted a cute fuzzy ducky just sitting on the ground, helpless amidst all the battle and carnage. Saerr plucked it up into his hands, cradling it protectively … and stared at the severed, bleeding root that had bound it to the ground. The ducky gazed soulfully at him, quacked “I forgive you,” and died.

“Oh, THAT’S IT! I don’t care if it IS my turn to nurse the tadpoles, I am NOT telling them how my day went!”

With a sudden rumbling, shards of crystal shot up through the ground. The Vyygor come to take them all, perhaps. Fine. Sniffling fitfully, Saerr hopped into a crumbling, ancient passage. Maybe revenge was pointless, but dammit, someone was going to pay for making him cry.

* * *

Looking like a half-crescent wisp of shelf fungus, what little remained of Lieutenant-Knight-Captain Mupp Junior clung tenaciously to the vile space lizard’s spiked heel. They were descending a long series of hallways, all crystal and metal and flashing lights. It looked kinda pretty, and every time they passed a shiny metal panel, he saw another fungoid just like himself. Mupp Junior always waved, and the other fungoid always waved back. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. Being parted from 98% of his neural mass had taken a lot out of him, though he couldn’t remember precisely what. The dastardly pre-nutrients had been rumbling and farting about something or other at their grand convocation, he remembered. Then there had been shooting. And crystals. And Mupp had taken the opportunity to covertly infiltrate a water-being’s brain sac—only it hadn’t been water. It had been something that burned in a flash when hit by lasers. If the loathsome space lizard hadn’t stepped in him, there wouldn’t be anything left of Mupp at all.

Well, this time it would be different. Whatever lurked down here—and he could sense its vast power—Mupp Junior would cut a deal with it. Every planet, everywhere, would be nothing but fungoids and the remains of the once-living, experiencing the infinite decompositional joy of serving them!

They passed another shiny surface. Mupp saw another Mupp. He waved enthusiastically, extending his hyphae toward it—and fell from his tenuous perch on the lizard’s heel. He had half a moment to wonder what had happened before the creature’s spiked tail smeared his neurons across a good fifty meters of hallway.

“Mmmmmmm-yaaaaaa,” was his eventual, contented thought.

* * *

A spray of bullets whizzed past, killing Pat, Gene, Edward, Lisa, Gina, Gina, Hugh and Montmorency. Kevin/Gina pondered, decided its name was now Eleanor, and fluttered into the passage the evil space lizard had so recently sprinted down. It was a little hard to think when bits of your thoughts kept getting snuffed out, and as always there wasn’t a robot butler to be found when you really needed one, but Eleanor was determined to … not to … to assure the triumph of … well, actually, that part of her seemed to have gotten wiped out when a well-meaning yeti had tried to shield her with its body and impaled a couple thousand of her on its bristly hairs.

“Sex?” fifteen percent of Eleanor wondered.

“Nectar!” twenty percent countered.

“Revenge?”

“Diplomacy!”

“Run away?”

“Pretty-flashy!”

Having decided that diplomatically pursuing pretty-flashy beings and asking them for nectar was the best course of business, Eleanor flew into a light fixture and electrocuted itself.

“Wheee!” thought the lone survivor as it flew wild loops toward the crystalline ceiling.

* * *

Sulphur beings and needle bats. Vegetablekin and jellyspore umbrellas. As they fought, escaped, negotiated, died—all were seen. All were, in a way, loved. The Vyygor saw its children, and though it could not understand them, it grieved at the sparks that were extinguished.

It couldn’t think. The great machine was far too complex for that, loaded by its million builders with far too many conflicting instructions to even calculate two plus one. Its vast neural nets were paralyzed in a permanent state of spastic indecision. But a world’s worth of metal and crystal wrapped around the heart of a black hole had to do something. The Vyygor had hunches. It had feelings. Paranormal impulses traveled its untold klicks of wiring. Psychic forces condensed around its manyfold circuit banks. It was, basically, a tarot card the size of the galaxy, and it loved everyone.

The Vyygor patiently sent waves of energy through the farthest-flung regions of space, causing microscopic pyramids to spontaneously coalesce out of space dust. Surely the soothing geometric regularity of pyramids would bring peace. Well, that or murdering all life in the universe. The Vyygor had a hunch that this time pyramids would work. At least, it hoped so.

* * *

In the heart of the Vyygor, in front of the Great Control Panel that would have been the solution to everyone’s problems if only it were connected to anything, a lizard and a pseudo-crustacean faced off against one another.

“PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON!” Saerr of Vok bellowed.

“I’m putting down my weapon!” Vikon Vikon-Smith squealed, unsure what the giant lizard was roaring about.

“Weapons preclude possibilities!” Saerr growled, ignoring the panicked creature’s inane squeaking. “Force reduces the number of voices that are heard! TALKING IS FOR WINNERS!”

“We should talk about this!” Vikon Vikon-Smith cried, popping out of another emergency molt.

“Bah! You throw skin at me? Watch me forgive you! Watch! Look how mighty and forgiving I am! Watch me teach you the sacred dance of my ancestral peoples!”

“Stop trying to trample me!” Vikon Vikon-Smith pleaded. “I only have nine more detachable tails to lose!”

“SILENCE, FOOL! I WOULD BE DELIGHTED TO HEAR YOUR PEOPLES’ SACRED STORIES!”

“Eep!” Vikon Vikon-Smith yelped. He darted for the exit. The giant lizard stumbled in mid-dance. And …

* * *

Impulse and perception rippled up and down the Vyygor’s vastness. Pyramids hadn’t worked. Preposterous! Nor perfect spheres. Nor icosahedrons, rhombi, or parallelograms of various types. For a while it had even tried little quartz spheres with a pewter wizard on top. Well, surely a perfectly regular 11,117,777-gon would bring peace to the universe? Wouldn’t it?

* * *

“Not again!” Saerr wailed. His burnished shoulders slumped. He sighed. Pushing past some of the molted skins that now cluttered the control room, he averted his eyes and scraped off what was stuck to the bottom of his foot. If he ever got home to Vera and the tadpoles, he was never going out again! Never! He hated to think how much poetry he’d have to write to work though his feelings from this mission. Sighing, Saerr of Vok chose a random lever on the great control panel and pulled it.

The flashing lights steadied. The hum of the machine quieted. Up above, the sounds of gunfire slackened. Saerr decided, for court martial purposes, that he had very cleverly determined which was the “off” switch and thrown it on purpose. Right. Tail swishing, he fled the control room as fast as he could.

* * *

The Vyygor, an enigma wrapped in a misunderstanding born of mutual incomprehension, sensed that a spark had manipulated a meaningless control that connected to nothing. But! The control was not a perfectly regular n-gon. It was cylindrical. Cylindrical! What if curved geometries held the secrets of universal peace? The Vyygor decided to spend the next few epochs pondering that.

Then it would kill everyone.

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Framed

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Contents

First Rites

Written by Nancy Kress

Illustrated by Jennifer Miller

1: Haihong

She sat rigid on the narrow seat of the plane, as if her slightest movement might bring the Boeing 777 down over the Pacific. No one noticed. Pregnant women often sat still, and this one was very pregnant. Only the flight attendant, motherly and inquisitive, bent over the motionless figure.

“Can I bring you anything, ma’am?”

The girl’s head jerked up as if shot. “No … no.” And then, in nearly unaccented English, “Wait. Yes. A Scotch and soda.”

The flight attendant’s mouth narrowed, but she brought the drink. These girls today—you’d think this one would know better. Although maybe she came from some backward area of China without prenatal care. In her plain brown maternity smock and sandals, it was hard to tell. The girl wasn’t pretty and wore no wedding ring. Well, maybe that was why the poor thing was so nervous. An uneducated provincial going home to face the music. Still, she shouldn’t drink. In fact, at this late stage, she shouldn’t even be flying. What if she went into labor on the plane?

Deng Haihong, one chapter short of her Ph.D. thesis at U.C. San Diego, gulped the Scotch and closed her eyes, waiting for its warmth to reach her brain. Another three hours to Shanghai, two-and-a-half to Chengdu, and perhaps two hours on the bus to Auntie’s. If no one questioned her at the airports. If she wasn’t yet on any official radar. If she could find Auntie.

If …

Eyes still closed, Haihong laid both hands on her bulging belly, and shuddered.

* * *

Shuangliu Airport in Chengdu had changed in four years. When Haihong had left, it had been the glossy, bustling gateway to the prosperous southwest and then on to Tibet, and Chengdu had been China’s fifth largest city. Now, since half of Sichuan province had been under quarantine, only seven people deplaned from an aircraft so old that it had no live TV-feed. Five of the seven already wore pathogen masks. Haihong pulled on hers, not because she thought any deadly pathogens from the war still lingered here—she knew better—but because it made her more inconspicuous. Her stomach roiled as she approached Immigration.

Let it be just one more bored official …

It was not. “Passport and Declaration Card?”

Haihong handed them over, inserted her finger into the reader, and tried to smile. The woman took forever to scrutinize her papers and biological results. The screen at her elbow scrolled but Haihong couldn’t see what it said … For a long terrible moment she thought she might faint.

Then the woman smiled. “Welcome home. You have come home to have your child here, in the province of your ancestors?”

“Yes,” Haihong managed.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Emily’s curious American phrase jumped into her mind: I would give my soul for a drink right now.

Too bad Haihong had already sold her soul.

Chengdu had finished the Metro just before the quarantine, and it was still operating. Everyone wore the useless paper pathogen masks. In California, Emily had laughed at the idea that the flimsy things would protect against any pathogens that had mutated around their terminator genes, and she and Haihong had had their one and only fight. “The people are just trying to survive!” Haihong had yelled, and Emily had gone all round-eyed and as red as only those blonde Americans could, and said apologetically, “I suppose that whatever makes them feel better … ” Haihong had stormed out of the crummy apartment she shared with Emily and Tess only because it saved money.

It had been Emily who told her about the clinic in the first place.

As Haihong pulled her rolling suitcase toward Customs, her belly lurched hard. She stopped, terror washing through her: Not here, not here! But after that one hard kick, the baby calmed down. Haihong made it though Customs, the pills intact in the lining of her dress. She made it onto the Metro, off at the bus station.

The terror abated. Not departed—it would never do that, she realized bleakly. But at least the chance of detection was over. In the bus station, crowded as Shuangliu had not been, she was just one more Chinese girl in inexpensive cotton clothing that had probably been made in Guangdong province before being exported to the U.S. Only the poorest Chinese remained in Sichuan; everyone who could afford to had gone through bio-decon and fled. Chengdu had been the place that North Korea chose to bio-attack to bring the huge Chinese dragon to its knees. Sichuan had been the sacrifice, and rather than have the attack continued on Guangdong’s export factories or Beijing’s government or Shanghai’s soaring foreign tourism, China had not retaliated toward its ancient enemy, at least not with weapons. Politics had been more effective, aided by the world’s outrage. Now North Korea was castrated, full of U.N. peace-keeping forces and bio-inspectors and very angry Chinese administrators. Both of Haihong’s parents had died in the brief war.

“Be careful, Little Sister.” An ancient man, gnarled as an old tree, took Haihong’s elbow to help her onto the bus. The small kindness nearly made her cry. Pregnant women cried so easily. The trip had been so long, so draining … she wanted a drink.

“Shie-shie,” she said, and watched his face to see if he frowned at her accent. She had spoken only English for so long. But his expression didn’t change.

The bus, nearly as ancient as the kind grandfather, smelled of unwashed bodies and urine. Haihong fell asleep, mercifully without dreams. When she woke, it was night in the mountains and the baby was kicking hard. Her stomach growled with hunger. A different passenger sat beside her, a boy of maybe six or seven, with his mother snoring across the aisle. He ducked his head and said shyly, “Do you wish for a boy or a girl?”

The baby was a boy. Ben, shaken, had analyzed with Haihong the entire genome from amnio tissue. Haihong knew the baby’s eye and hair color, prospective height, blood type, probable IQ, degree of far future baldness. She knew the father was Mexican. She knew the fetus’s polymorphic alleles.

She smiled at the boy and said softly, “Whatever Heaven sends.”

* * *

Haihong’s screams shattered the night. The midwife, back in prominence after the doctor left and the village clinic closed, murmured gently from her position beside the squatting Haihong. The smell of burning incense didn’t mask the earthy odor of her spilt waters. Auntie held a kerosene lamp above the midwife’s waiting hands. Auntie’s face had not unclenched, not once, since Haihong had finally found her living in a hut at the edge of a vast vineyard in which she, like everyone else, toiled endlessly. The workers’ huts had running water but no electricity. Outside, more women had gathered to wait.

Haihong cried, “I will die!”

“You will not die,” the midwife soothed. Through the haze of pain, Haihong realized that the woman thought she feared death. If only it were that simple … But Haihong had done all she could. Had explained to Auntie, who was not her aunt but her old amah and therefore much harder to trace directly to Haihong, about the pills. She had explained, but would the old woman understand? O, to have come this far and not succeed, not save her son …

Her body split in two, and the child was born. His wail filled the hut. Haihong, battered from within, gasped, “Give … me!”

They laid the bloody infant in her arms. Auntie remembered what had been rehearsed, drilled into her, for the past nine days. Her obedience had made her an ideal amah when Haihong had been young. Her obedience, and her instinctive love. Her eyes never left the crying baby, but wordlessly she held out to Haihong the prepared dish holding pulverized green powder.

With the last of her strength, Haihong transferred three grains of powder to her fingertip and touched the baby’s tongue. The grains dissolved. The baby went on wailing and all at once Haihong was sick of him, sick of the chance she had taken and the sacrifice she had made, sick of it all, necessary as it had been. She said, “Take him,” and Auntie greedily grabbed the baby from her arms. Haihong tried to shut her ears against his crying. She wanted nothing now but sleep. Sleep, and the drink that, surrounded as they were by vineyards, would be possible soon, today, tomorrow, all the days left in her utterly ruined life.

* * *

2: Cixin

Deng Cixin was in love with the mountains. Unlike anything else, they made him feel calm inside, like still water.

“Sit still, bow bei’r,” Auntie said many times each day. “Be calm!” But Cixin could not sit still. He raced out the door, scattering the chickens, through the neat rows of grapes tied to their stakes, into the village. He scooped up handfuls of pebbles and hurled them at the other children, provoking cries of, “Fen noon an hi!” Angry boy. He was always angry, never knowing at what, always running, always wanting to be someplace else. Except when he was in the mountains.

His mother took him there once every week. She put him into his seat on her bicycle, sometimes pedaling hard with sweat coming out in interesting little globes on the back of her neck, and sometimes walking the bicycle. They covered several miles. After he turned four, Cixin walked part of the way. He liked to run in circles around his mother until he got too tired and she scooped him back onto the bicycle seat. The ride back down was thrilling, too: a headlong dash like the wind. Cixin urged her on: Faster! Faster! If he could just go fast enough, they might leave the ground forever and he would never have to go back to the village.

The best part, however, was in the mountains. Mama brought a picnic—that was a word from the secret language, the one he and his mother always used when not even Auntie was around. Nobody else knew about the secret language. It was for the two of them alone. The picnic had all the things Cixin liked best: congee with chicken and sweetened bean curd and orange juice. Although the orange juice was only for him; Mama had wine or beer.

As they ascended higher and higher, Cixin would feel his shoulders and knees and stomach loosen. He didn’t run around up here; he didn’t have to run around. The air grew sharp and clean. The mountains stood, firm and tall and strong—and how long they stood there! Millions of years, Mama said. Cixin liked thinking about that. You couldn’t be angry at something so strong and old. You could rest in it.

“Tell me again,” Cixin would say, sitting on the edge of Mama’s blanket. “Where do the mountains go?”

“All the way to Tibet, bow bei’r.”

“And Tibet is the highest place in the world.”

“The very highest.”

After a while Mama would fall asleep, thin and pale on her blanket, her short dark hair flopping sideways. Even then Cixin didn’t feel the need to run around. He sat and looked at the mountains, and his mind seemed to drift among the clouds, until sometimes he couldn’t tell which was clouds and which was himself. Sometimes a small animal or bird would sit on the ground only meters away, and Cixin would let it rest, too.

When Mama awoke, it was time for the once-a-week. That was a word from the secret language, too.

The once-a-week was tiny little green specks that Mama counted carefully. They melted on Cixin’s tongue and tasted faintly sour. Mama always said the same words, every time, and he had to answer the same words, every time.

“You must swallow the once-a-week, Cixin.”

“I must swallow the once-a-week.”

“Every week.”

“Every week.”

“If you do not swallow it, you will die.”

“I will die.” Dead birds, dead rats, a mangy dog dead in the road. Cixin could picture himself like that. The picture terrified him.

“And you must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week. Ever.”

“I must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week ever.”

“Promise me, bow bei’r.”

“I promise.” And then, for the first time, “Where does the once-a-week come from?”

“Ah.” Mama looked sad. “From very far away.”

“From Tibet?”

“No. Not Tibet.”

“Where?” He had a sudden idea, fueled by the stories Auntie told him of dragons and ghost warriors. “From a land of magic?”

“There is no magic.” Mama’s voice sounded even sadder. “Only science.”

“Is science a kind of magic?”

She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “Yes, I suppose it is. Black magic, sometimes. Now fold the blanket; we must go back.”

Cixin forget about science and magic and the once-a-week at the exciting thought of the wild bicycle dash down the mountain.

* * *

Twice a year Mama took the bus to Chengdu, another far away land of black magic. For days before she left, Auntie spent extra time kneeling at the household shrine. Cixin, five, eight, nine years old, raced around even more than usual. Mama snapped at him.

“Sit still!”

“Ah, he’s wild today, that one,” Auntie said, but unlike Mama, she was smiling. Auntie was very old. She didn’t work in the vineyards any more, but Mama did. Some nights Mama didn’t come home. Some nights she came home very late, falling down and either giggling or crying. Then she and Auntie argued when they thought Cixin could not hear.

“I said sit still!” Mama slapped him.

Cixin raced out the door, tried to kick the neighbor’s dog, did not connect. He kept running in circles until he was exhausted and his heart was too tired to hurt so much and he saw Xiao sitting by the irrigation ditch with her ancient iPod. Cixin, panting, dropped down beside her.

“Let me see, Xiao.”

She handed over the iPod. A year younger than Cixin and the daughter of the vineyard foreman, Xiao had possessions that the other village children could only dream of. Sweet-natured and docile, she always shared.

Cixin put the iPod to his ear but was too restless to listen to the music. But instead of hurling it into the ditch, as he might have done with anybody else, he handed it carefully back to Xiao. With her, he always tried to be careful.

“My mother is going to a magic land. To Chengdu.”

Xiao laughed. She was the only person that Cixin allowed to laugh at him. Her laugh reminded him of flowers. She said, “Chengdu isn’t a magic land. It’s a city. I went there.”

“You went there? When?”

“Last year. My father took me on the bus. Look, there’s your mother waiting for the bus. She—” Xiao dropped her eyes.

Cixin spat. “She’s drunk.”

“I know.” Xiao was always truthful.

“I don’t care!” Cixin shouted. He wanted to leap up and race around again, he wanted to sit beside Xiao and ask about Chengdu, he didn’t know what he wanted. The bus stopped and Mama lurched on. “I hope she never comes back!”

“You don’t mean that,” Xiao said. She took his hand. Cixin jerked his whole body to face her.

“Kiss me!”

“No!” Shocked, she dropped his hand and got to her feet.

He jumped up. “Don’t go, Xiao! You don’t have to kiss me!” Just saying the words desolated him. “You don’t ever have to kiss me. Nobody ever has to kiss me.”

She studied him from her beautiful dark eyes. “You’re very strange, Cixin.”

“I am not.” But he knew he was.

A band of boys emerged from between the rows of grapes. When they saw Cixin, they began to yell. “Fen noon an hi! Ben dan!”

Cixin knew he was an angry boy but not a stupid one. He grabbed a rock from the irrigation ditch and hurled it at the boys. It fell short but they swarmed around him, careful not to touch Xiao.

Cixin broke free and raced off. They shouted after him: “Half breed! Son of a whore!” He was faster than all of them, even among the trees that began on the other side of the village, even when the ground began to slope upward toward the mountains. He and his mother never went there any more. So now Cixin would go by himself. He would run higher and higher, all the way to Tibet, and maybe he would go live with the monks and maybe he would die on the way and it didn’t matter which. No one would care. His mother was a drunk and a whore, his Auntie was old and would die soon anyway, Xiao was so rich and she had an iPod and she would never ever kiss him.

He leaned against a tree until his breath was strong again. Then he again started up the mountain, walking to Tibet.

* * *

3: Ben

Ben Malloy brought his coffee to the farthest booth of the San Diego cybershop and closed the door. The booth smelled of urine and semen. Public booths, used only by the desperately poor or desperately criminal or deeply paranoid, were always unsavory. He shouldn’t have brought coffee but he’d been up all night, working when the lab was quiet and deserted, and he needed the caffeine.

He accessed the untraceable account, encrypted through remixers in Finland and God-knew-where-else, and her email was there.

B—

Your package arrived. Thank you. Still no breakthrough. Symptoms unchanged. I suspect elevated CRF and cortisol, serotonin fluctuations, maybe neuron damage. Akathesia, short REM latency. Sichuan quarantine may lift soon—rumors.

H

I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot.

Akathesia. Short REM latency. Ben had taught her those terms, so far from her own field. Haihong had always been a quick study.

He closed his eyes and let the guilt wash over him. She’d made the choices—both of them—so why was the guilt his? All he’d done was break several laws and risk his professional future to try to save her.

The guilt was because he’d failed.

Also because he’d misunderstood so much. He had thought of Haihong as an American. Taking her California Ph.D. in English literature, going out for hamburgers at Burger King and dancing to pellet rock and loving strappy high-heeled shoes. A girl with more brains than sense, to whom he’d attributed American attitudes and expediencies. And he’d been wrong. Underneath the California-casual-cum-grad-student-intensity-cum-sexually-liberated woman, Haihong had been foreign to him in ways he had not understood. Ben Jinkang Molloy’s grandmother and father had both married Americans; his father and Ben himself had been born here. He didn’t even speak Chinese.

His father had called him, all those years ago, from Florida. “Ben, your second cousin is coming from China to study in San Diego.”

“My second cousin? What second cousin?”

“Her name is Deng Haihong. She’s my cousin Deng Song’s daughter, from near Chengdu. You need to look out for her.”

Ben, busy with his first post-doc, had been faintly irritated with this intrusion into his life. “Does she even speak English?”

“Well, I should hope so. She’s studying for a doctorate in English literature. Listen, buddy, she’s an orphan. Both parents were casualties of that stupid savagery in Sichuan. She has nobody.”

His father knew how to push Ben’s buttons. Solitary by nature, Ben was nonetheless a sucker for stray kittens, homeless beggars, lost causes. He could picture his father, tanned and relaxed in the retirement condo in West Palm Beach, counting on this trait in Ben.

He said resignedly, “When does she arrive?”

“Tuesday. You’ll meet her plane, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Ben had said, not realizing that the single syllable would commit him to four years of mentorship, of playing big brother, of pleasure and exasperation, all culminating in the disastrous conversation that had been the beginning of the end.

He and Haihong had sat across from each other in a dark booth at a favorite campus bar, Fillion’s.

“I’m pregnant,” Haihong said abruptly. “No beer for me tonight.”

He had stiffened. Oh God, that arrogant bastard Scott, he’d warned her the guy was no good, why did women always go for the bad-boy jerks …

Haihong laughed. “No, it’s not Scott’s. You’re always so suspicious, Ben.”

“Then who—”

“It’s nobody’s. I’m a surrogate.”

He peered at her, struggling to take it in, and saw the bravado behind her smile. She was defiant, and scared, and determined, all at once. Haihong’s determination could crack granite. It had to be, for her to have come this far from where she’d been born. He said stupidly, “A surrogate?”

Again that brittle laugh. “You sound as if you never heard the word before. What kind of geneticist are you?”

“Haihong, if you needed money …”

“It’s not that. I just want to help some infertile couple.”

She was lying, and not well. Haihong, he’d learned, lied often, usually to cover up what she perceived as her own inadequacies. And she was fiercely proud. Look at the way she always leapt to the defense of her two friends and roommates, slutty Tess and brainless Emily. If Ben castigated Haihong now, if he was anything other than supportive, she would never trust him again.

But something here didn’t smell right.

He said carefully, “I know another woman who acted as a surrogate, and it took a year for her to complete the medical surveillance and background checks. Have you been planning this for a whole year?”

“No, this is different. The clinic is in Mexico. American restrictions don’t apply.”

Alarms sounded in Ben’s head. Haihong, despite her intelligence, could be very naive. She’d grown up in some backwater village that was decades behind the gloss and snap of Shanghai or Beijing. Ben was not naive. His post-doc had been at a cutting-edge big-pharm; he was now a promising researcher at the San Diego Neuroscience Institute. A lot of companies found it convenient to have easy access to Mexico for drug testing. FDA approval required endless and elaborate clinical trials, but the starving Mexican provinces allowed a lot more latitude as long as there was “full disclosure to all participants.” As if an ignorant and desperate day laborer could, or would, understand the medical jargon thrown at him in return for use of his body. Congress had been conducting hearings on the issue for years, with no effect whatsoever. Any procedure or drug experimented with in Mexico would, of course, then have to be re-tested in the U.S. But ninety percent of all new drugs failed. Mexico made a cheap winnowing ground.

And, of course, there were always rumors of totally banned procedures available there for a price. But no big pharm or rogue genetics outfit would actually use a legitimate fertility clinic for experimentation … would they?

“Haihong, what’s the name of the clinic?”

“Why?”

Their drinks came, Dos Equis for him and Diet Coke for her. After the waitress left, Ben said casually, “I may be able to find out stuff for you. Their usual pay rate for surrogates, for instance. Make sure you’re not getting ripped off.” Unlike Haihong, Ben was a good liar.

Haihong nodded. So it was the money. “Okay. The clinic is called Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes.”

He’d never heard of it. “How did you learn about this place?”

“Emily.” She was watching him warily now, ready to resent any criticism of her friend.

He said only, “Okay, I’ll get on it. How did your meeting with your thesis advisor go yesterday?”

He saw her relax. She launched into a technical discussion of semiotics that he didn’t even try to follow. Instead he tried to find traces of his family’s faces in hers. Around the eyes, maybe, and the nose … but he and his brothers stood six feet, his hair was red, and he had the spare tire of most sedentary Americans. She was tiny, fragilely made. And fragile in other ways, too, capable of an hysterical emotionalism kept in check only by her relentless drive to accomplishment. Ben had seen her drunk once, it was not pretty, and she’d never let him see her that way again. Haihong was a mass of contradictions, this cousin of his, and he groped through his emotions to find one that fit how he felt about her. He didn’t find it.

Abruptly he said, interrupting something about F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Is the egg yours or a donor’s?”

Anger darkened her delicate features. “None of your business!”

So the egg was hers, and she was more uneasy about the whole business than she pretended. All at once he remembered a stray statistic: Twenty-one percent of surrogate mothers changed their mind about giving up their babies.

“Sorry,” he said. “Now what was that again about Fitzgerald?”

* * *

She was eight months along before he cracked Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes.

His work at the Neuroscience Institute was with genetically modified proteins that packaged different monoamines into secretory vesicles, the biological storage and delivery system for signal molecules. Ben specialized in brain neurotransmitters. This allowed him access to work-in-progress by the Institute’s commercial and academic partners. Colinas Verdes was not among them.

However, months of digging—most of it not within the scope of his grant and some of it blatant favor-trading—finally turned up that one of the Institute’s partners had a partner. That small company, which had already been fined twice by the FDA, had buried in its restricted on-line sites a single reference to the Mexican clinic. It was enough. Ben was good at follow-through.

Haihong was huge. She waddled around campus, looking as if she’d swallowed a basketball, her stick legs in their little sandals looking unable to support her belly. The final chapter of her dissertation had been approved in draft form by her advisor. The date for her oral defense had been set. She beamed at strangers; she fell into periods of vegetable lassitude; she snapped at friends; she applied feverishly for teaching posts. Sometimes she cried and then, ten minutes later, laughed hysterically. Ben watched her take her vitamins, do her exercises, resolutely avoid alcohol. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her anything.

The day in her fourth month that she said to him, awe in her voice, “Right now he’s growing eyelashes,” Ben was sure. She was going to keep the baby.

Twenty-one percent.

He went himself to Mexico, presenting his passport at the border, driving his Saab through the dusty countryside. Two hours from Tijuana he reached the windowless brick building that was not the bright and convenient clinic Haihong had gone to. This was the clinic’s research headquarters, its controlling brain. Ben went in armed with the names and forged references of the partner company, with his formidable knowledge of cutting-edge genetics, with pretty good Spanish, with American status and bluster. He spent an hour with the Mexican researchers on site, and left before he was exposed. He obtained names and then checked them out in the closed deebees at the Institute. Previous publications, conference appearances, chatter on the e-lists that post-docs, in self-defense, create to swap information that might impact their collective futures. It took all his knowledge to fill in the gaps, complete the big picture.

Then he sat with his head in his hands, anxiety battering him in waves, and wondered how he was ever going to tell Haihong.

* * *

He waited another week, working eighteen hours a day, sleeping in his lab on a cot, neglecting the job he was paid to do and cutting off both his technicians and his superiors. The latter decided to indulge him; they all thought he was brilliant. Every few hours Ben picked up the phone to call the FBI, the FDA, the USBP, anyone in the alphabet soup of law enforcement who could have shut it all down. But each time he put down the phone. Not until he had the inhibitor, which no one would have permitted him to cobble together had they known. Let alone permit giving it to Haihong.

A lot had been known about neurotransmitters for over seventy years, ever since the first classes of antidepressants. Only the link with genetics was new, and in the last five years, that field—Ben’s field—had exploded. He had the fetus’s genome. The genetics were new, but the countermeasures for the manifested behaviors were not. Ben knew enough about brain chemistry and cerebral structures.

What he hadn’t known enough about was Haihong.

“An inhibitor,” she said at the end of his long, lurching explanation, and her calm should have alerted him. An eerie, dangerous calm, like the absence of ocean sucked away from the beach just before the tsunami rolls in. He should have recognized it. But he’d been awake for twenty-two hours straight. He was so tired.

“Yes, an inhibitor,” he echoed. “And it will work.”

“You’re sure.”

Nothing like this was ever sure, but he said, “Yes. As sure as I can be.” He tried to put an arm around her but she pushed him away.

“An inhibitor calibrated to body weight.”

“Yes. Increasing in direct proportion.”

“For his entire life.”

“Yes. I think so. Haihong—”

“Side effects?” Still that eerie calm.

Ben ran his hand through his red hair, making it all stand up. “I don’t know. How can I know?” He wanted to be reassuring, but the brain contained a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand or so branches. That was ten-to-the-hundred-trillionth power of possible neural connections. He was pretty sure what neurotransmitters the genemods on the baby would increase production of, and pretty sure he could inhibit it. But the side effects? Anybody’s guess. Even aspirin affected different people differently.

Haihong said, “A six-month shelf life and a one-week half-life in the body.”

She echoed his terminology perfectly, still in that quiet, mechanical voice. Ben put out his hand to touch her again, drew it back. “Yes. Haihong, we need to call the FDA, now that I have something to use as an emergency drug, and let them take over the—”

“Give me the first batch.”

He did. This was why he’d made it, because he’d known months ago what she had never told him in words. Twenty-one percent.

He agreed to put off calling the authorities for one more day. “Just give me time to assimilate it all, Ben. A little time. Okay?”

He’d agreed. It was her life, her child. Not his.

The next day she’d been gone.

In the foul public cyberbooth, nine years later, Ben deleted Haihong’s email. Rumors, she’d written, Sichuan quarantine may lift soon. Interred in her remote village, which the most modern of technologies had forced back into the near primitive, she hadn’t even heard the news. The quarantine had always been as much political as anything else, or it wouldn’t have been in force so long. It was to be lifted today and even now, right there in Chengdu from which she must have sent her email, she still seemed oblivious. I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot.

What exactly did that mean?

He left his coffee untouched in the filthy booth. Outside, in the fresh air under California’s blue sky, he pulled out his handheld and booked a flight to China.

* * *

4: Haihong

She left the People’s Internet Building at dusk. Usually she spent several hours on-line, as long as she could afford, in an orgy of catching up on news, on the academic world, on anything outside the quarantine. She only had the opportunity every six months.

This time, she left as soon as she’d emailed Ben, uploading onto him her bi-annual report, her gratitude, her despair. Unfair, of course, but how could it matter? Ben, in California, had everything; he could add a little despair to his riches. To Haihong nothing mattered any longer, nothing except Cixin, the unruly child who did not love her and for whom she’d given her future. A fruitless sacrifice, since Cixin had no future, either. Everything barren, everything a waste.

She clutched the package in her hand, the precious six-month supply of inhibitor of proteins in the posterior superior parietal lobes. The pills were sewn inside a gift for Cixin, a stuffed toy he was too old for. Ben had not done any further work on the side-effects. Maybe he had no way to measure them, eight thousand miles away from his research subject. Maybe he had lost interest. So Cixin would go on being irritable, restless, underweight, over-stressed. He would—

Outside, Haihong blinked. The sparse and rotting skeleton left of Chengdu seemed to have gone mad! Gongs sounded, sirens blared, people poured out of the dilapidated buildings, more people than she had known were left in the city. They were shouting something, something about the quarantine …

Starting forward, she didn’t even see the pedicab speeding around the corner, racing along the nearly trafficless street. The driver, a strong and large man, saw her too late. He yelled and braked, but Haihong had already gone flying. Her tiny and malnourished body struck the ground head first. Bleeding from her mouth, unable to feel any of her body below the neck, her last thought was a wordless prayer for her son.

* * *

5: Cixin

By afternoon Cixin was exhausted from walking away from the village, up into the mountains. His legs ached and his empty stomach moaned. Worse, he was afraid he was lost.

He had been careful to follow the path where Mama used to ride her bicycle, and it had led him to their old picnic place. Cixin had stopped and rested there, but the usual calm had not come over him. Should he try to worship, like Auntie did when she bowed in front of her little shrine? Mama said, in the secret language, that worship was nonsense. But nothing Mama said could be trusted. She was a drunk and a whore.

Cixin swiped a tear from his dusty cheek. It was stupid to cry. And he wasn’t really lost. After the picnic place, the path had become narrower and harder to see, and maybe—maybe—he had lost it, but he was still climbing uphill. Tibet was uphill, at the top of the mountains. He was all right.

But so thirsty! If he just had some water …

An hour later he came to a stream. It was shallow and muddy, but he lay on his belly and lapped at the water. That helped a little. Cixin staggered up on his aching legs and resumed climbing.

An hour after that, it began to get dark.

Now fear took him. He’d been sure he would reach Tibet before nightfall … after all, look how far he’d come! There should be monks coming out to greet him, taking him into a warm place with water and beancurd and congee … Nothing was right.

“Stupid monks!” he screamed as loud as he could, but then stopped because what if the monks were on their way to get him and they heard him and turned back? So he yelled, “I didn’t mean it!”

But still no monks came.

Darkness fell swiftly. Cixin huddled at the base of a pine tree, arms wrapped around his body and legs drawn up for warmth. It didn’t help. He didn’t want to race around, not on his hurting legs and not in the dark, and yet it was hard to sit still and do nothing. Every noise terrified him—what if a tiger came? Mama said the tigers were all gone from China but Mama was a drunk and a whore.

Shivering, he eventually slept.

In the morning the sun returned, warming him, but everything else was even worse. His belly ached more than his legs. Somehow his tongue had swollen so that it seemed to fill his entire dry mouth. Should he go back to the place where the water had been? But he didn’t remember how to get there. All the pine trees, all the larches, all the gray boulders, looked the same.

Cixin whimpered and started climbing. Surely Tibet couldn’t be much farther. There’d been a map of China in the village school he’d attended until his inability to sit still made him leave, and on the map Tibet looked very close to Sichuan. He was almost there.

The second nightfall found him no longer able to move. He collapsed beside a boulder, too exhausted even to cry. The picture of the dead dog in the road filled his mind, filled his fitful dreams. When he woke, he was covered with small, stinging bites from something. His cry came out as a hoarse, frustrated whimper. The rising sun filled his eyes, blinding him, and he turned away and tried to sit up.

Then it happened.

Cixin knew.

He was lifted out of his body. Thirst and hunger and insect bites vanished. He was not Cixin, and everything—the whole universe—was Cixin. He was woven into the universe, breathed with it, was one with it, and it spoke to him wordlessly and sang to him without music. Everything was him, and he was everything. He was the gray boulder and the yellow sun rising and the rustling pine trees and the hard ground. He was them and he felt them, it, all, and the mountains reverberated with surprise and with his name: Cixin.

Come.

Cixin.

The child sat on the parched ground, expressionless, and was still and calm.

* * *

“Cixin!”

A sour, familiar taste melting on his tongue, a big hand in his mouth. Then, after a measureless time that was not time, water forced down his throat.

“Cixin!”

Cixin blinked. Then he cried out and would have toppled over had not the big man—how big he was! How pale!—steadied him. More water touched Cixin’s lips.

“Not too much, buddy, not at first,” the big man said, and he spoke the secret language that only Cixin and Mama knew. How could that be? All at once everything on Cixin hurt, his belly and neck and swollen legs and most of all his head. And the big man had red hair standing up all over his head like an attacking rooster. Cixin started to cry.

The big man lifted him in his arms and put him over his shoulder. Cixin just glimpsed the two other men, one from his village and one a stranger, their faces rigid with something that Cixin didn’t understand. Then he fainted.

When he came to, he lay on his bed at Auntie’s house. The big man was there, and the stranger, but the village man was not. The big man was saying, very slowly, some words in the secret language to the stranger, and he was repeating them in real words to Auntie. Cixin tried to say something—he didn’t even know what—but only a croak came out.

Auntie rushed over to him. She had been crying. Auntie never cried, and fear of this made Cixin wail. Something terrible had happened, and it had happened to Mama. How did Cixin know this? He knew.

And underneath: that other knowing, half memory and half dream, already faded and yet somehow more real even than Auntie’s tears or the big man’s strange red hair:

Cixin. Come. Cixin.

* * *

The big man was Cousin Benjamin Jinkang Molloy. Cixin tasted the ridiculous name on his tongue. Despite the red hair, Cousin Ben sometimes looked Chinese, but mostly he did not. That made no sense, but then neither did anything else.

Auntie didn’t like Cousin Ben. She didn’t say so, but she wouldn’t look at him, didn’t offer him tea, frowned when his back was turned and she wasn’t crying or at her shrine. Ben visited every day, at first with his “translator” and then, when he saw how well Cixin spoke the secret language, alone. He paid money to Xiao’s father to sleep at Xiao’s house. Xiao was not allowed to visit Cixin at his bed.

He said, “Why can you talk Mama’s secret words?”

“It’s English. Where I live, everybody speaks English.”

“Do you live in Tibet?” That would be exciting!

“No. I live in America.”

Cixin considered this. America might be exciting, too—Xiao’s iPod came from there. Sudden tears pricked Cixin’s eyes. He wanted to see Xiao. He wanted Mama, who was as dead as the dog in the road. He wanted an iPod. He wanted to get out of bed and race around but his body hurt and anyway Auntie wouldn’t let him get up.

Ben said carefully, “Cixin, what happened to you up on the mountain?”

“I got lost.”

“I know. I found you, remember? But what happened before that?”

“Nothing.” Cixin closed his lips tight. He didn’t actually remember what had happened on the mountain, only that something had. But whatever it was, he wasn’t going to share it with some strange red-headed cousin who wasn’t even from Tibet. It was his. Maybe if Mama hadn’t got dead …

The tears came then and Cixin, ashamed, turned his face toward the wall. Gently Ben turned it back.

“I know you miss your mother, buddy. But my time here is short and I need you to pay attention.”

That was just stupid. People needed food and water and clothes and iPods—they didn’t “need” Cixin’s attention. He scowled.

Ben said, “Listen to me. It’s very important that you go on taking the pills your mother was giving you.”

“You mean the once-a-week?”

“Yes. I’m going to show you exactly how much to take, and you must do it every single week.”

“I know. Or I will die.”

Ben shut his eyes, then opened them again. “Is that what she told you?”

“Yes.” Something inside him trembled, like a tremor deep in the earth. “Is it true?”

“Yes. It’s true. In a very important way.”

“Okay.” All at once Cixin liked speaking the secret language again. It made Mama seem closer, and it made Cixin special. Suddenly he had a thought that made him jerk upright in bed, rattling his head. “Are you really from America?”

“Yes.”

“And Mama was, too?”

“She lived there for a while, yes.”

“She liked it there?”

“Yes, I think she did.”

“Take me to America with you!”

Ben didn’t look surprised—why not? Cixin himself was surprised by his thought: surprised, delighted, frightened. In America he would be away from the village boys, away from the school that threw him out. In America he could have an iPod. “Please, Cousin Ben, please please please!”

“Cixin, I can’t. Auntie is your closest relative and she—”

“She’s not really my Auntie! She was Mama’s amah, is all! You’re my elder cousin!”

Ben said gently, “She loves you.”

Cixin fell back on his bed, hurting his head even more. Love. Mama loved him and she died and left him. Auntie loved him and she was keeping him from going to America. Cousin Ben didn’t love him or he would take him away from this evil village. Love was terrible and ugly. Cixin glared savagely at this horrible cousin. “Then after you go I won’t take my once-a-week and I will die!”

Ben stood. “I will not be blackmailed by a nine-year-old.”

Cixin didn’t know what “blackmail” was, but it sounded evil. Everywhere he was surrounded by evil. Better to die. Again he turned his face to the wall.

Later, he would always think that had made the difference. His silence, his turning away. If he had fought back, Ben would have said more about blackmail and gone away, angry. But instead he ran his hand through his red hair until it stood up like bristly grass—Cixin could just see this out of the corner of his eye—and then put his hand over his face.

“All right, Cixin. I’ll take you to America. But I warn you, it may take a long, long time to arrange.”

* * *

6: BEN

It took nearly two years.

If Ben hadn’t had family contacts at the State Department, it would have been even longer, might have been impossible. The Chinese were discouraging foreign adoptions; Cixin was from within formerly-quarantined Sichuan; the death certificate for Haihong needed to be obtained from a glacially slow bureaucracy and presented in triplicate. But on the other hand, Chinese-American relations were in a positive phase. Ben could prove Haihong had been his second cousin. Ben had received a Citizens’ Commendation from the FBI for exposing the surrogate-ring of American girls exploited by a sleazy Mexican fertility clinic. And Uncle James was on the State desk for East Asia.

During those two years, Ben sent Auntie money and Cixin presents. An iPod, which seemed to be a critical object. Jeans and sneakers. Later, a laptop, to be used at the vineyard foreman’s house to communicate with Ben. They exchanged email, and Cixin’s troubled Ben. Fluent in spoken English, Cixin was barely literate in any language, and he didn’t seem to be learning much from the school software Ben supplied.

Cuzin Ben this is Cixin. Wen r yu comin 4 me. Anty is sik agen. Evrybuddy hates me. I hate it hear. Com soon or I wil die.

Cixin

Cixin—

I am making plans to bring you here as fast as I can. Please be patient.

Could Cixin read that word? Maybe not. The backward connection at the foreman’s house didn’t permit even such a basic tool as a camlink.

Please wait without fuss.

Haihong saying during her pregnancy, “Ben, please don’t fuss at me!”

Take your once-a-week, use your school software, and be good.

What else? How did you write to a child you’d barely met?

You will like America. Soon, I hope.

Ben

Soon, I hope. But did he? Cixin would be an enormous responsibility, and Ben would bear it mostly alone. His parents, old when Ben had been born, lived in failing health in Florida, his sisters in Des Moines and Buffalo. Ben worked long hours in his lab. What was he going to do with a illegally genemod, barely literate, ADH adolescent who shared less than three percent of Ben’s genetic heritage and nothing of his cultural one?

And then, because complications always attracted more complications, he met Renata.

A group from his department at the Institute went out for Friday Happy Hour. Ordinarily Ben avoided these gatherings. People drank too much, barriers were lowered that might better have stayed raised, flirtations started that proved embarrassing on Monday morning. But Ben knew he was getting a reputation as standoffish, if not downright snobbish, and he had to work with these people. So he went to Happy Hour.

They settled into a long table, scientists and technicians and secretaries. Dan Silverstein, a capable researcher fifteen years Ben’s senior, talked about his work with envelope proteins. Susie, the intern whom somebody really should do something about, shot Ben smoldering glances across the table. Ben spotted Renata at the bar.

She sat alone. Tall, a mop of dirty blonde curls, glasses. Pretty enough but nothing remarkable about her except the intensity with which she was both consuming beer and marking on a sheaf of papers. At Grogan’s during a Friday Happy Hour? Then she looked up, pure delight on her face, and laughed out loud at something on the papers.

Ben excused himself to go to the men’s room. Taking the long way back, he peered over her shoulders. School tests of some kind—

“Do I know you?” She’d caught him. Her tone was cool but not belligerent, looking for neither a fight nor a connection. Self-sufficient.

“No, we’ve never met.” And then, because she was turning back to her papers, dismissing him, “Are you a teacher? What was so funny?”

She turned back, considering. The set of her mouth said, This better not be a stupid pick-up line, but there was a small smile in her eyes. “I teach physics at a community college.”

“And physics is funny?”

“Are you at all familiar with John Wheeler’s experiments?”

She flung the question at him like a challenge, and all at once Ben was enjoying himself. “The 1980 delayed-choice experiment?”

The smile reached her mouth, giving him full marks. “Yes. Listen to this. The question is, ‘Describe what Wheeler found when he used particle detectors with photon beams.’ And the answer should be … ” She looked at Ben, the challenge more friendly now.

“That the presence or absence of a detector, no matter how far down the photon’s path, and even if the detector is switched on after the photon passes the beam splitter, affects the outcome. The detector’s presence or absence determines whether the photon registers as a wave or a particle.”

“Correct. This kid wrote, ‘Wheeler’s particles and his detectors acted weird. I think both were actually broken. Either that or it was a miracle.’” She laughed again.

“And it’s funny when your students don’t learn anything?”

“Oh, he’s learned something. He’s learned that when you haven’t got the vaguest idea, give it a stab anyway.” She looked fondly at the paper. “I like this kid. I’m going to fail him, but I like him.”

Something turned over in Ben’s chest. It was her laugh, or her cheerful pragmatism, or … He didn’t know what. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Ben Molloy. I work at the Neuroscience Institute.”

“Renata Williams.” She shook hands, her head tipped slightly to one side, the bar light glinting on her glasses. “I’ve always had a thing for scientists. All that arcane knowledge.”

“Not so arcane.”

“Says you. Sit down, Ben.”

They talked until long after his department had left Grogan’s. Ben found himself telling her things he’d never told anyone else, incidents from his childhood that were scary or funny or puzzling, dreams from his adolescence. She listened intently, her glasses on top of her head, her chin tilted to one side. Renata was more reticent about her own past (“Not much to tell—I was a goody-goody grind”), but she loved teaching and became enthusiastic about her students. They were carrying out some elaborate science project involving the data from solar flares; this was an active sun-spot year. Renata pulled out her students’ sunspot charts and explained them in the dim light from the bar. Eventually the weary bartender stopped shooting them meaningful glances and flatly told them, “Leave, already!”

Ben drove to her apartment. They left her car in the parking lot of the bar until the next day. In bed she was different: more vulnerable, less sure of herself. Softer. She slept with one hand all night on Ben’s hip, as if to make sure he was still actually there. Ben lay awake and felt, irrationally but definitely, that he had come home.

Renata worked long hours, teaching five courses (“Community colleges are the sweatshops of academe”), but with a difference. When she wasn’t working, she had a life. She saw friends, she kick-boxed, she played in a chess league, she went to movies. Ben, who did none of these things, felt both envious and left-out. Renata just laughed at him.

“If you really wanted to kick-box, you’d take a class in it. People generally end up doing what they want to do, if they can. My hermit.” She kissed him on the nose.

If they can. Ben didn’t tell Renata about Cixin. The first month, he assured himself, they were just getting to know each other. (A lie: he’d known her, recognized her, that first night at Grogan’s.) Then, as each month passed—three, four, six—it got harder to explain why he’d delayed. How would Renata react? She was kind but she was also honest, valuing openness and sincerity, and she had a temper.

I’m adopting a Chinese boy for whom I’ve broken several laws that could still send me to jail, including practicing medicine without a license and administering untested drugs that induce socially disabling side-effects. Perfect. Nothing added to romance like felony charges. Unless it was medical experimentation on a child.

Sometimes Ben looked at Renata, sleepy after sex or squinting at her computer, glasses on top of her curly head, and thought, It will be all right. Renata would understand. She came from a large family, and although she didn’t want kids herself, she would accept Cixin. Look at how much effort she put into her students, how many endless extra hours working with them on the sunspot project. And Cixin was eleven; in seven more years he’d be off onto his own life.

Other times he knew that he’d lied to Renata, that Cixin was not an easy-to-accept or lovable child, and that his arrival would make Ben’s world fall apart. At such times, his desperation made him moody. Renata usually laughed him out of it. But still he didn’t tell her.

Then, in August, Uncle James called from Washington. His voice was jubilant.

“I just got the final approval, Ben. You can go get your cousin any time now. You’re a daddy! And send me a big cigar—it’s a boy!”

Ben clutched his cell so tight that all blood left his fingers. “Thanks,” he said.

* * *

“Tell me how it works,” Renata said. They were the first words she’d spoken in fifteen long minutes, all of which Ben had spent talking. Her dangerous calm reminded him of Haihong, all those years ago.

They were in his apartment, which had effectively if not officially become hers as well. His half-packed suitcase lay open on the bed. Ben stood helplessly beside the suitcase, a pair of rolled-up socks in his hand. Renata sat in a green brocade chair that had been a gift from his mother and Ben knew that if he approached that chair, she would explode.

He took refuge in science. “It’s an alteration in the genes that create functional transporter proteins. Those are the amines that get neurotransmitters across synapses to the appropriate brain-cell receptors. The mechanisms are well understood—in fact, there are polymorphic alleles. If you have one gene, your body makes more transporters; with the other version, you get less.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It affects mood and behavior. Less serotonin, for example, is connected to depression, irritability, aggression, inflexibility.”

“And this alleged genemod in your cousin gave him less serotonin?”

“No.” Alleged genemod. Ben dragged his hand through his hair. “He probably does have less serotonin, but that’s a side effect. The genemod affected other proteins that in turn affected others … it’s a cascade. Everything’s interconnected in the brain. But the functional result in Cixin would be a flood of transporters and neurotransmitters in two brain regions, the superior parietal lobes and the tempoparietal region.”

“I don’t want jargon, Ben. I want explanations.”

“I’m trying to give them to you. I’m doing the best I can to—”

“Then do better! Six months we’ve been together and you never mention that you’re adopting a child … what is the effect of the extra transporters on those parts of the brain?”

“Without the inhibiting drug I designed for him, near-total catatonia.”

“That doesn’t make sense! Nobody would deliberately design genes to do that!”

“They didn’t.” Suddenly tired, he sat on the edge of the bed. His flight to Shanghai left in six hours. “Those brain areas orient the body in space and differentiate between self and others. The research company was trying to develop heightened awareness, perception of others’ movements, and reactions to muscular shifting .”

She got it. “Better fighting machines.”

“Yes.”

“Then why—”

“They were rogue geneticists, Renata. They didn’t have access to all the most recent research. They screwed up. They’re all in jail now.”

“And the Neuroscience Institute—”

His patience gave way. “Of course the Institute wasn’t involved! I told you—we helped shut the whole thing down.”

“Except for your little part in supplying this kid with home-made inhibitors. His other problems you mentioned, the restlessness and aggression—”

“Most likely side-effects of the inhibitor,” Ben said wearily. “You can’t alter the ratio of neurotransmitters in the brain without a lot of side effects. Cixin’s body is under huge stress and his behavior is consistent with fluctuating neurotransmitters and high concentrations of cortisol and other stress hormones.”

She said nothing.

“Renata, I promise you—”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen what your words are worth.” She got up from the green chair and walked around him, toward the door. He knew better than to try to stop her. “If you’d told me about Cixin from the beginning—even only that he was coming here to live with you—that would be one thing. I could have accepted it. I mean—that poor kid. It’s not his fault, and I understand family ties as well as you Chinese, or part-Chinese, or whatever you’re calling yourself now. But, Ben, I asked you. I said after our first week or so, ‘Do you see yourself ever wanting children in your life?’ And you said no. And now you tell me—” She broke off.

All this time he’d been holding the socks. Carefully, as if they were made of glass, he laid them into his suitcase. A small part of his chaotic mind registered that, like most socks nowadays, they had probably been exported from China. He said, “Will you still be here when I get back?”

“I don’t know.”

They looked at each other.

“I don’t know, Ben,” she repeated. “I don’t know who you really are.”

* * *

It was the rainy season in Sichuan and over ninety degrees. Ben’s clothing stuck to his body as he waited in the bus station in Chengdu; Cixin’s village still had no maglev service. The station looked cleaner and more prosperous than when he’d come to China two years ago. Children in blue-and-white school uniforms marched past, carrying pictures of giant pandas. Ben had emailed Cixin to ask Auntie to bring him to Chengdu, but Cixin got off the bus alone.

He hadn’t grown much. At eleven—almost twelve—he was a small, weedy boy with suspicious dark eyes, thin cheeks, and an unruly shock of black hair falling over his forehead. A large greenish bruise on one cheek. He carried a small backpack, nothing else. He didn’t smile.

Ben locked his knees against a tide of conflicting emotions. Apprehension. Pity. Resentment. Longing for Renata. But he tried. He said, “Hey, buddy” and put a hand on Cixin’s shoulder. Cixin flinched and Ben removed the hand.

He tried again. “Hello, Cixin. It’s good to see you. Now let’s go to America.”

* * *

7: Cixin

He didn’t know who he really was.

Not now, in these strange and bewildering places. Cixin had never been out of his village. He’d assumed the videos on his laptop had been made-up lies, like Mama telling him about Tibet. But here was Chengdu, full of cars and pedicabs and scooters and huge buildings like mountains and buildings partly fallen down and signs that sprang up from the ground but dissolved when you walked through them and flashing lights and millions of people and men with big guns … . Cixin, who just last week had beaten up three village boys at once and thought of himself secretly as “The Tiger,” clutched Ben’s hand and didn’t know what this world was, what he himself was anymore.

“It’s all right, buddy,” Ben said and Cixin glared at him and dropped the hand, angry because Ben wasn’t afraid.

They sat together in the back of the plane to Shanghai. For a while Cixin was content to stare out the window as the ground fell away and they rose into clouds—up into clouds! But eventually he couldn’t stay still.

“I’m getting up,” he told Ben.

“Toilet’s just behind us,” Ben said.

Cixin didn’t need a toilet, he needed to run. Space between the rows of seat was narrow but he barreled down it, waving his arms. A boy a few years older walked in the opposite direction—on Cixin’s aisle! The boy didn’t step aside. Cixin shoved him away and kept running. The boy staggered up and started after Cixin but was stopped by a shout in Chinese from a man seated nearby. Cixin ran the length of the aisle, cut across the plane, ran back down a different aisle, where Ben grabbed him by the arm.

“Sit, Cixin. Sit. You can’t run in here.”

“Why? Will they throw me off?” This was funny—they were on a plane!—and Cixin laughed. Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. A man in a blue uniform moved purposefully toward them. Cixin stopped laughing—what if it was a soldier with a hidden gun? He cowered into his seat and tried to make himself very small.

The maybe-soldier and Cousin Ben talked softly. Ben sat down and shook a yellow pill from a plastic bottle. “Take this with your bottled water.”

“That’s not my once-a-week!” The once-a-week, for reasons Cixin didn’t understand, had to be left behind at Auntie’s. Too risky for Customs, Ben said, especially for me. Which made no sense because Ben didn’t take the once-a-week, only Cixin did.

“No, it’s not your once-a-week,” Ben said, “but take it anyway. Now!”

Cixin recognized anger. Ben might have a gun, too. In the videos, all Americans had guns. He took the pill, tapped on the window, kicked the back of the seat until the woman in it turned around and said something sharply in Chinese.

Cixin wasn’t clear on what it was. A slow languor had fallen over the plane. Then sleep slid into him as softly as the fog by the river, as calmly as something … something right at the edge of memory … a pine tree and a gray boulder and …

He slept.

Another airport Stumbling through it half awake. Shouting, people surging, a wait in a locked room … maybe it was a dream. Ben’s face tired and white as old snow. Then another plane, or maybe not … yes. Another plane. More sleep. When he woke truly and for real, he lay in a small room with blue walls and red cloth at the windows, four stacked houses up into the sky, in San Diego, America.

* * *

Cixin ran. Waves pounded the shore, the wind whistled hard—whoosh! whoosh!—and sand blew against his bare legs, his pumping arms, his face. He laughed and swallowed sand. He ran.

Ben waited where the deserted beach met the parking lot, the hood of his jacket pulled up, his face red and angry. “Cixin! Get in the car!”

Cixin, exhausted and dripping and happy—as happy as he ever got here—climbed into the front seat of Ben’s Saab. Rain pounded the windshield. Ben shouted, “You ran away from your tutor again!”

Cixin nodded. His tutor was stupid. The man had been telling him that rainstorms like this were rare and due to the Earth getting hotter. But with his own body Cixin had experienced many rainstorms, every summer of his life, and they all were hot. So he ran away from the stupid tutor, and from the even stupider girl who was supposed to come take care of him after the tutor left and before Ben came home from work. He ran the seven streets from Ben’s house-in-the-sky to the beach because the beach was the only place in America that he liked. And because he wanted to run in the rain.

“You can’t just leave the condo by yourself,” Ben said. “And I pay that tutor to bring you up to speed before school starts in September, even though—you can’t just go down to the beach during a typhoon! And I had to leave the lab in the middle of—”

There was more, but Cixin didn’t listen. He’d only been in America ten days but already he knew that Ben wouldn’t beat him. Still, Ben was very angry, and Ben was good to him, and Ben had showed him the wonderful beach in the first place. So Cixin hung his head and studied the sand stuck to his knees, but he didn’t actually listen. That much was not necessary.

“—adjust your dosage,” Ben finished. Cixin said nothing, respectfully. Ben sighed and started the car, his silly red hair stuck to his head.

When they were nearly back at the houses-stacked-in-the-sky, Cixin said, “You look sick, Cousin Ben.”

“I’m fine,” Ben said shortly.

“You don’t eat.”

“I eat enough. But, Cixin, you’re driving me crazy.”

“Yes.” It seemed polite to agree. “But you don’t eat and you look sick and sad. Are you sad?”

Ben glanced over, rain dripping off his collar. “You surprise me sometimes, buddy.”

That was not a polite answer. Cixin scowled and stared out the window at the “typhoon” and tapped his sandy sneaker on the sodden floor of the car. He wanted to run again.

And Ben was too sad.

In the “condo,” instead of the stupid tutor, a woman sat on the sofa. How did she get in? A robber! Cixin rushed to the phone, shouting, “911! 911!” Ben had taught him that. Robbers—how exciting!

But Ben called, “It’s all right, Cixin.” His voice sounded so strange that Cixin stopped his mad dash and, curious, looked at him.

“Renata,” Ben said thickly.

“I couldn’t stay away after all,” the woman said, and then they were hugging. Cixin turned away, embarrassed. Chinese people did not behave like that. And the woman was ugly, too tall and too pale, like a slug. Not pretty like Xiao. The way Ben was holding her … Cixin hated the woman already. She was evil. She was not necessary.

He rushed into his room and slammed the door.

But at dinnertime the woman was still there. She tried to talk to Cixin, who refused to talk back.

“Answer Renata,” Ben said, his voice dangerously quiet.

“What did you say?” Cixin made his voice high and silly, to insult her.

“I asked if you found any sand dollars on the beach.”

He looked at her then. “Dollars made of sand?”

“No. They’re the shells of ocean creatures. Here.” She put something on the table beside his plate. “I found this one last week. I’ll bet you can’t find one bigger than this.”

“Yes! I can!” Cixin shouted. “I’m going now!”

“No, you’re not,” Ben said, pulling him back into his chair. But Ben was smiling. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ll all go.”

“And if we go in the evening and if the clouds have lifted, there should be something interesting to see in the sky,” Renata said. “But I won’t tell you what, Cixin. It’s a surprise.”

* * *

Cixin couldn’t wait until Saturday evening. He woke very early. Ben and Renata were still asleep in Ben’s bed—she must be a whore even if she wasn’t as ugly as he thought at first—and here it was morning. A little morning, pale gray in a corner of the sky. The rainstorm was all gone.

He dressed, slipped out of the house-in-the-sky, and ran to the beach. No one was there. The air was calm now and the water had stopped pounding and something strange was happening to the sky over the water. Ribbons of color—green, white, green—waved in the sky like ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts! Frightened, Cixin turned his back, facing the part of the sky where the sun would come up and chase the ghosts away. But then he couldn’t see the water. He turned back and ran and ran along the cool sand. To his left, in San Diego, sirens started to sound. Cixin ignored them.

Finally, exhausted, he plopped down. The sun was up now and the sky ghosts gone. Nobody else came out on the beach. Cixin watched the nearest tiny waves kissing the sand.

Something happened.

A soft, calm feeling stole through him, calm as the water. He didn’t even want to run any more. He sat cross-legged, half hidden by a sand drift, dreamily watching the ocean, and all at once he was the ocean. Was the sand, was the sky, was the whole universe and they were him.

Cixin. Come. Cixin.

Voices, everywhere and nowhere, but Cixin didn’t have to answer because they already knew the answer. They were him and he was them.

Peace. Belonging. Everything. Time and no time.

And then Ben was forcing open his mouth, putting in something that melted on his tongue, and it all went away.

But this time memory lingered. It had happened. It was real.

* * *

8: Ben

“I’d dropped the dosage to try to mitigate the side effects,” Ben said. He ran his hand through his filthy hair. Cixin lay asleep in his room, sunburned and exhausted. God only knew how long he’d been gone before Ben found his empty bed.

Renata pulled her eyes from CNN. The solar flare, the largest ever recorded and much more powerful than anticipated, had played havoc with radio communications from Denver to Beijing. Two planes had crashed. The aurora borealis was visible as far south as Cuba. Renata said, “Ben, you can’t go on fiddling with his dosage and giving him sleeping pills when you get it wrong. You’re not even an M.D., and yet you’re playing God with that child’s life!”

“And what do you think I should do?” Ben shouted. It was a relief to shout, even as he feared driving her away again. “Should I let him go catatonic? You didn’t see him two years ago in China—I did! He’d been in a vegetative state for two days and he would have died if I hadn’t found him! Is that what you think should happen?”

“No. You should get him medical help. You wouldn’t have to say anything about the genemods or—”

“The hell I wouldn’t! What happens when they ask me what meds Cixin takes? If I didn’t tell them, he could die. If I do, I go to jail. And how long do you think it would take a medical team to find drug traces in his body? Inhibitors have a long half-life. And even if I explain everything, and if I’m believed, what happens to Cixin then? He’s not even on my medical insurance until the adoption is final! So he’d be warehoused, catatonic, in some horrifying state hospital, and I’d be standing trial. Is that what you want?”

“No. Wait. I don’t know.” She wasn’t yelling at him now; her voice held sorrow and compassion. CNN announced that a total of 312 people had died in the two air disasters. “But, sweetheart, the situation as it stands isn’t good for you or Cixin, either. What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? He just isn’t anything like a normal—Cixin!”

The boy stood in the doorway, his shock of black hair stiff from salt air, his eyes puffy from sleep. He suddenly looked much older.

“Ben—what does the once-a-week do to me?”

Renata drew a long breath.

“It’s complicated,” Ben said finally.

“I need to know.”

Cixin wasn’t fidgeting, or yelling, or running. Something had happened on the beach, something besides sunburn and dehydration. Ben’s tired mind stabbed around for a way to explain things to a nearly illiterate eleven-year-old. Nothing occurred to him.

Renata switched off the television and said quietly, “Tell him, Ben. Or I will.”

“Butt out, Renata!”

“No. And don’t you ever try to bully me. You’ll lose.”

He had already lost. Shooting a single furious glance at her, Ben turned to Cixin. “You have a … a sickness. A rare disease. If you don’t take the once-a-week, you will die like your mother said, but first you go all stiff and empty. Like this.” Ben, feeling like a fool, sat on the rug and made his body rigid and his face blank.

“Empty?”

“Yes. No thoughts, nothing. No Cixin. That’s how you were on the beach, like that for a long time, which is why you’re so sunburned.” And maybe more than sunburned. A big solar flare came with a proton storm, and those could cause long-term biochemical damage. Ben couldn’t cope with that just now, not on top of everything else. “Do you understand, Cixin? You went empty. Like a … a Coke can all drunk up.”

“Empty,” Cixin repeated. All at once he smiled, a smile so enigmatic and complicated that Ben was startled. Then the boy went back into his room and closed the door.

“Spooky,” Ben said inadequately. He struggled up from the rug. “How do you think he took it?”

“I don’t know.” Renata seemed as disconcerted as Ben. “I only know what I would be thinking if I were him.”

“What would you be thinking?” All at once he desperately wanted to know.

“I would be wondering who I really was. Wondering where the pills ended and I, Cixin, began.”

“He’s eleven,” Ben said scornfully. Scorn was a relief. “He doesn’t have sophisticated thoughts like that.”

* * *

September. Cixin started school, the oldest kid in the fourth grade. Fortunately, he was small enough to sort of fit in and large enough to not be picked on by his classmates. He could not read at grade level, could not concentrate on his worksheets, could not sit still during lessons. After one week, his teacher called Ben to school for an “instructional team meeting.” The team recommended Special Ed.

After two weeks, Cixin had another episode of catatonia. Again Ben found him at the beach, sitting half in the water, motionless amid frolicking children and splashing teens and sunbathing adults. A small boy with a sand pail said conversationally, “That kid dead.”

“He’s not dead,” Ben snapped. Wearily he forced a dose of inhibitor onto Cixin’s tongue. It melted, and he came to and stared at Ben from dark, enigmatic eyes that slowly turned resentful.

“Go away, Ben.”

“I can’t, damn it!”

Cixin said, “You don’t understand.”

In his khakis and loafers—the school had called him at work to report Cixin’s absence—Ben lowered himself to sit on the wet sand. The blue Pacific rolled in, frothy at the whitecaps and serene beyond. The sun shone brightly. Ben said, “Make me understand.”

“I can’t.”

“Try. Why do you do it, Cixin? What happens when you go empty?”

“It’s not empty.”

“Then what is it?” He willed himself to patience. This was a child, after all.

Cixin took a long time answering. Finally he said, “I see. Everything.”

“What kind of everything?”

“Everything. And it talks to me.”

Ben went as still as Cixin had been. He hadn’t even realized … .hadn’t even thought of that. He’d thought of neurotransmitter ratios, neural architecture plasticity, blood flow changes, synaptic miscues. And somehow he’d missed this. It talks to me.

Cixin leapt up. “I’m not going back to Special Ed!” he yelled and raced away down the sand, his school papers streaming out of the unzipped backpack flapping on his skinny shoulders.

* * *

“Temporal lobe epilepsy?” Renata said doubtfully. “But … he doesn’t have seizures?”

“It’s not grand mal,” Ben said. They sat in Grogan’s. Ben had drugged Cixin again with Dozarin, hating himself for doing it but needing, beyond all reason, to escape his apartment for a few hours. “With petit mal, seizures can go completely unnoticed. And obviously it’s not the only aberration going on in his brain, but I think it’s a factor.”

“But … if he’s hearing voices, isn’t that more likely to be schizophrenia or something like that?”

“I’m no doctor, as you’re constantly telling me, but temporal-lobe epilepsy is a very well documented source of religious transports. Joan of Arc, Hildegaard of Bingen, maybe even Saul on the road to Damascus.”

“But why does your inhibitor work on him at all? Isn’t epilepsy a thing about electrical firing of—”

“I don’t know why it works!” Ben said. He drained his gin and tonic and set the glass, harder the necessary, onto the table between them. “Don’t you get it, Renata? I don’t know anything except that I’m reaching the end of my rope!”

“I can see that,” Renata said. “Have you considered that Cixin might be telling the truth?’

“Of course he’s ‘telling the truth,’ as he experiences it. Temporal-lobe seizures can produce visual and auditory hallucinations that seem completely real.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

Renata fiddled with the rim of her glass. “Maybe the voices Cixin hears are real.”

Ben stared at her. You think you know someone … “Renata, you teach science. Since when do you dabble in mysticism?”

“Since always. I just don’t advertise it to everybody.”

That hurt. “I’m hardly ‘everybody.’ Or at least I thought I wasn’t.”

“You’re taking it wrong. I just meant that I haven’t closed the door on the possibility of other worlds besides this one, other levels of being. Spirits, aliens, gods and angels, parallel universes that bleed through … I don’t know. But there’s never been a human society, ever, that didn’t believe in some sort of mystery beyond the veil.”

He didn’t know any more who she was. Ben motioned to the waiter for another gin and tonic. When his thoughts were at least partly collected, he said, “You can’t—”

“What I can or cannot do doesn’t matter. The point is, what are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to have an implant inserted under Cixin’s skin that will deliver the correct dose of inhibitor automatically.”

“Really.” Her tone was dangerous. “And who will perform this surgery? You?”

“Of course not. It can be done in Mexico.”

“Do you know what you’re saying, Ben? You’re piling one criminal offense on top of another, and you’re treating that boy like a lab rat.”

“He’s sick and I’m trying to make him better!” God, why wouldn’t she understand?

“Are you going to at least explain all that to him?”

“No. He wouldn’t understand.”

She finished her wine, stood, and looked down at him with the fearlessness he both admired and disliked in her. The light from behind the bar glinted on her glasses. “Tell Cixin what you’re going to do. Or I will.”

“It’s none of your business! I’m his guardian!”

“You’ve made it my business. And even if you were fully his legal guardian—which you’re not, yet—you’re not being his friend. Not until you can consider his mind as well as his brain.”

“There’s no difference, Renata,”

“The hell there isn’t. Tell him, Ben. Or I will.”

* * *

He took a day to think about it, a day during which he was furious with Renata, and longed for her, and addressed angry arguments to her in his mind. Then, reluctantly, he left work in the middle of the afternoon (his boss was beginning to grumble about all the absences) to pick up Cixin at school.

Cixin wasn’t there.

* * *

9: Cixin

The voices came to him as he colored a map of the neighborhood around his school. All week they’d been working on maps, which wasn’t as stupid as the other schoolwork. Cixin sat at his desk and vigorously wielded crayons. Playground, 7-11, houses, maglev stop, school building. North, west, legend to tell what the little drawings were. Blue, red, green …

Cixin.

He froze, his hand holding the green crayon suspended above his desk.

Cixin.

The voice was faint—but it was there. He looked wildly around the room. He knew the room was there, the other kids were there, he was there. In this school room, not on the beach, and not in that other place where even the beach disappeared and he could feel the Earth and sky breathe. So how could he be hearing …

Cix … in …

“Where are you?” he cried.

“I’m right here,” the teacher’s aide said. She hurried to Cixin’s desk and put a hand on his shoulder.

Cixin …

“Come back!” He jumped up, scattering the crayons and knocking away the teacher’s hand.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” she said soothingly. “I’m right here, dear. What do you need?”

Standing, he could see out the classroom window to the parking lot. Ben’s white car pulled in and parked.

Ben was coming for him. Cixin didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew. Ben didn’t like the voices. Ben was very smart and very American and he knew how to do things, get things, make things happen. Ben was coming for Cixin and Ben was going to make the voices go away forever.

Cixin’s mind raced. Ben would have to pass front-door security, go to the school office, get a pass, come down the hall… . . Cixin didn’t hesitate. He ran.

“Cixin!” his teacher called. The other children began shouting. The aide tried to grab Cixin but he twisted away, ran out of the room and down the hall, zigged left, dashed toward the door to the playground. The school doors were locked from the outside but not the inside; Cixin burst through and kept running. Across the playground, over the fence, behind houses to the street … run, fen noon nan hi …

Eventually he had to stop, panting hard, leaning over with his hands on his knees. The houses here were small and didn’t go up into the sky like Ben’s house. Beyond were stores and eating houses and a gas station. Cixin walked behind a place with the good smell of pizza coming from it. Except for the beach, pizza was the best thing about America. Back here no one in a white car could see him. There was a big metal box with an opening high up.

Climbing on a broken chair, Cixin peered inside the big metal box. Some garbage, not much, and a bad smell, not too bad. He hauled himself up and tumbled inside. The garbage included a lot of pizza boxes, some with half-eaten pizzas inside. And no one could find him.

Many things were clear to him now. Ben saying to Renata, “I’ll have to adjust the dosage. He’s growing.” The way to hear the voices, to go to that other place where he saw everything and breathed with the sky, was by having no once-a-week, and by waiting until the one he took before wasn’t in his head anymore. Ben had made him swallow the last once-a-week last Wednesday. This was Tuesday, and already the voices, faint, were there.

He curled up in a corner of the dumpster to wait.

* * *

10: Ben

He looked everywhere, the beach first. The day was warm and the sands choked with people who didn’t have to be at work, as well as teenagers who probably should have been in school, but no Cixin. Ben raced back to the apartment: nothing. He called the school again, which advised him to call the police. Instead he called Renata’s cell; she had no classes Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m very worried about—”

“How did you hear so fast?” she demanded.

“What?”

“You’re inside, aren’t you? Was the TV on at the lab? If there’s a basement in your building go there but stay away from the power connections and make sure you can get out easily if there’s a fire. We put the bulletin out on campus, but who knows how many won’t hear it—twenty minutes! God!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The flare! The solar flare!” And then, “What are you talking about?”

“Cixin’s missing. He ran away.”

“Shit!” And then, very rapidly, “Listen, Ben, another solar flare’s been detected, a huge one, I mean really huge. Word just came down from the Hinode. It’s bigger than the 1859 superflare and that one—just listen. There’s an associated proton storm and nobody knows exactly when it will hit but the one in 2005 accelerated to almost a third of light speed. Best estimate is twenty minutes. There’s going to be fires and power outages and communication disruptions but also proton storms that have biological consequences to living tissue that—you can’t go down to the beach to look for him now!”

“I’ve already been. He’s not there.”

“Then where—”

“I don’t know!” Ben shouted. “But I’ve got to look!”

“Where?” she asked, and her practicality only enraged him more.

“I don’t know! But he’s out there alone and if there are fires—” The phone went dead.

He stood holding it, this dead and useless piece of technology, listening to the sirens start outside and mount to a frenzied wail. Where could Cixin have gone? Ben knew no place else to look, no place else that Cixin ever went. Although he had liked that V-R arcade Ben had once taken him to …

He tore out of the apartment, raced down the stairs, and stopped, frozen.

In the bright sunlight, lights were going out. Traffic lights, the neon window sign at Rosella’s Cafe. They sparked in a glowing electrical arc and went dead. Smoke poured from the windows of a gas station a block over. People stopped, stared, and turned to their cell phones. Ben saw their faces when they realized the cells were all dead.

The sirens grew louder, then all at once stopped.

“What is it?” a young Hispanic woman asked him, clutching his arm. She wore shorts and a green halter top and she wheeled a pram with a fat, gurgling baby.

Ben shook off her hand. “A solar flare, get inside and stay away from windows and appliances!” She let out a great cry of horrified non-understanding but he was already gone, running the several blocks to the V-R arcade.

It took him ten minutes. Cixin wasn’t there. The doors yawned crazily open, and a machine in one of the cubicles had shorted and begun to burn.

The city couldn’t survive this. The country couldn’t survive this. Panic, no communications, fires, the grid gone … and the radiation of a proton storm. Ten more minutes.

He found a corner of the arcade farthest from the booths, near the refreshment counter, and crawled under the largest table. It wouldn’t help, of course, and it didn’t make him feel better. But it was all he could do: wait for the beginning of the end under a wooden picnic table whose underside was stuck with wads of gum from children that might or might not be alive by tomorrow.

* * *

11: Cixin

Cixin.

“I’m here,” he said aloud, to the empty pizza boxes in the dumpster. That was kind of funny because the voices didn’t speak out loud; they didn’t really have words at all. Just a feeling inside his head, and the feeling was him, Cixin. And then a picture:

The whole world, out in space, but covered with such a big gray fog that he couldn’t even see the planet. But Cixin knew it was under the fog, and knew too that the voices hadn’t known it. Not before. But now they did, because they knew Cixin was here. He was them and they were him and both were everything. It was all the way it should be, and he was calm and safe—he would always be safe now.

Hi, he said and it might have been out loud or not, it was all the same thing.

* * *

12: Ben

No other V-R booth shorted and caught fire, although the first one was still smoking. Ben crawled out from under the table. He’d been there half an hour—how long did a proton storm last? He had no idea.

In his pocket, his cell rang.

Ben pulled it out and stared at it incredulously. How … After a moment he had the wits to answer.

“Ben! Are you all right?”

Renata. “Yes. No. I don’t know, I didn’t find Cixin … How come this thing works?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded bewildered. “Mine came on, so I called you … Some communications are back. Not where the grid is out or the satellites destroyed, of course, but the radio stations that didn’t get hit are coming through clear now and—it isn’t possible!”

For the first and only time ever, he heard hysteria in her voice. In Renata’s voice. “The solar radiation. It … it isn’t reaching Earth any more.”

“It missed us?”

“No! I mean, yes, apparently … before the Hinode burned out, it—that’s the Japanese spacecraft designed especially to monitor the sun, I told you about it—the data shows—the coronal mass ejection—”

“Renata, you’re not making sense.” Perversely, her panic steadied him. “Where are you?”

“I’m home. I have a radio. I’m not—it isn’t—”

“Stay there. I’ll get to you somehow. How much of the city is on fire?”

“Not enough!” she cried, which made no sense. “Did you find Cixin?”

“No.” He’d told her that already. Pain scorched his heart. “Stay where you are. I’ll call the cops about Cixin and then come.”

“You won’t get through to the police,” she said, her voice still high with that un-Renata-like hysteria.

“I know,” he said.

* * *

It took him over an hour to walk to her place. He kept trying the cops on his cell until the battery went dead. He skirted fires, looting, police cars, crying people in knots on the sidewalk, but Renata was right: This was not enough damage compared to what he had seen starting in the first few minutes of the solar storm. What the fuck had happened?

“It was deflected,” Renata said when he finally got to her apartment. She’d calmed down. The power was off but bright sunlight poured into the window; the battery-powered radio was turned to the federal emergency station; beside the radio lay a gun that Ben had no idea Renata even owned. He stared at the gun while she said, “Cixin?”

“Still no idea.”

She locked the door and put her arms around him. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s nothing, a fuss with some homeless guy that—what does the radio say?”

“Not much.” She let him go and turned the volume lower. “The satellites are mostly knocked out, but not all because a few were in high orbit nightside and didn’t get here until it … stopped.”

“What stopped?”

“All of it,” she said simply. “The radiation, including the proton storm, just curved around the Van Allen Belt and was deflected off into space.”

He was no physicist. “That’s good, right? Isn’t that what the Van Allen is supposed to do? Only … only why did the radiation start for a while and then stop?”

“Bingo.” Abruptly she sat down hard on the sofa. Ben joined her, surprised at how much his legs hurt. “What happened can’t happen, Ben. Radiation just doesn’t deflect that way by itself. And the magnetic fields contained in the coronal mass ejection were not only really intense, they were in direct opposition with Earth’s magnetic field. We should have taken a hit like … like nothing ever before. Far, far worse than the superstorm of 1859. And we didn’t. In fact, protons should still be entering the atmosphere. And they aren’t.”

He tried to understand, despite the anxiety swamping him for Cixin. “Why isn’t that all happening?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Well, what does the radio say?”

She flung out her hands. “Unknown quantum forces. Angels. Aliens. God. Secret government shields. Don’t you understand … nobody knows. This just can’t be happening.”

But it was. Ben said wearily, “Where do you think I should look next for Cixin?”

* * *

They found him two days later. It took that long for basic city services to begin to resume and for anyone to approach the dumpster. Cixin was catatonic, dehydrated, bitten by rats. He was taken to the overburdened hospital. Ben was called when a nurse discovered Cixin’s name and phone number sewn into the waistband of his jeans—Renata’s idea. He found Cixin rigid on a gurney parked in a hallway jammed with more patients. He had an IV, a catheter, and multiple bandages. His eyes were empty.

Ben put the inhibitor on Cixin’s tongue. Slowly Cixin woke up, his dark eyes over sunken cheeks turning reproachful. Ben yelled for a doctor, but no one came.

“Cixin.”

“They … didn’t … know,” he croaked.

“It’s okay, buddy, I’m here now, it’s okay … Who didn’t know what?”

But painfully Cixin turned his face to the wall and would say no more.

The staff wanted to do a psych evaluation. Ben argued. They turned stubborn. Eventually he said they could get a court order if they wanted to but for right now he was taking his boy home as soon as the treatment for dehydration was completed. The harassed hospital official said several harsh things and promised legal action. A day later Ben signed out Cixin AMA, against medical advice, and drove him home through streets returning to normal much faster than anyone had thought possible.

There was a dreary familiarity to the scene: Cixin asleep in his room, Ben and Renata with drinks in the living room, talking about him. How many times in the last few months had they done this? How many more to come?

Renata had just come from the small bedroom. She’d asked to talk to Cixin alone. “He won’t tell you anything,” Ben had warned, but she’d gone in anyway. Now she sat, pale and purse-lipped, on Ben’s sofa, holding her drink as if it were an alien object.

“Did he tell you anything?” Ben said tiredly. He stood by the window, facing her.

“Yes. No. Just what he told you—’They didn’t know’ and ‘Let me go back.’ Plus one other thing.”

“What?” Jealousy, perverse and ridiculous, prodded him: Cixin had talked more freely to her than to him.

“He said there was a big explosion, a long time ago.”

“A big explosion?”

“A long time ago.”

That hardly seemed useful. Ben said, “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t.”

Renata hesitated. “Ben … do you remember when we met? At Grogan’s?”

“Yes, of course—why wouldn’t I? Why bring that up now?”

“I was correcting papers, remember? My students were supposed to answer questions about Wheeler’s two-slit experiments.”

Ben stared at her. She was very pale and her expression was strange, both hesitant and wide-eyed, completely unlike Renata. “I remember,” he said. “So?”

“The original 1927 two-slit experiment showed that a photon could be seen as both a wave and a particle that—”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Ben snapped, and wondered at whom his nasty tone was aimed. He tried again. “Of course I know that. And your students were writing about Wheeler’s demonstration that observation determines the outcome of which one a photon registers as.”

“The presence or absence of observation also determines the results of a whole slew of other physics experiments,” she said. “All right, you know all that. But why?”

“Feynmann’s probability wave equations—”

“Explain exactly nothing! They describe the phenomena, they quantify it, but they don’t explain why observation, which essentially means human consciousness, should be so woven into the very fabric of the universe at its most basic level. Until humans observe anything fundamental, in a very real sense it doesn’t exist. It’s only a smear of unresolved probability. So why does consciousness give form to the entire universe?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I don’t know either. But I think Cixin does.”

Ben stared at her.

Renata looked down at the drink in her hand. Her shoulders trembled. “The explosion Cixin said he saw in his mind—he said, ‘It made everything.’ I think he was talking about the Big Bang. I think he feels a presence of some kind when he’s in his catatonic state. That whatever genemods he has, they’ve somehow opened up parts of his mind that in the rest of us are closed.”

Ben put his glass down carefully on the coffee table and sat beside her on the sofa. “Renata, he does feel a presence. He’s experiencing decreased blood flow in the posterior superior parietal lobes, which define body borders. He loses those borders when he goes into his trance. And very rapid firing in the tempoparietal region can lead to the sense of an ‘other’ or presence in the brain. Cixin’s consciousness gets caught in neural feedback loops in both those areas—which are, incidentally, the same areas of the brain that SPECT images highlight in Buddhist monks who are meditating. What Cixin feels is real to him—but that doesn’t make it real in the cosmos. Doesn’t make it a … a …”

“Overmind,” she said. “Cosmic consciousness. I don’t know what to call it. But I think it’s there, and I think it’s woven into the universe at some deeply fundamental level, and I think Cixin was accidentally given a heightened ability to be in contact with it.”

Ben said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just think about it. I’m going home now, Ben. I can’t take any more tonight.”

Neither could he. He was flabbergasted, dismayed, even horrified by what she’d said. How could she believe such mystical bullshit? He didn’t know who she was any more.

It wasn’t until hours later that, unable to sleep, he realized that Renata also thought her “cosmic consciousness” had diverted the solar flare radiation away from Earth in order to protect Cixin.

* * *

13: Cixin

Cixin sat in his bedroom, cross-legged on the bed. His iPod lay beside him, but he wasn’t listening to it, hadn’t listened to it for the past week. Nor had he gone to school, played video games, or sent email to Xiao. He was just waiting.

Xiao—he would miss her. Ben had been very good to him, and so had Renata, but he knew he wouldn’t miss them. That was bad, maybe, but it was true.

Maybe Xiao would come one day, too. After all, if the voices were everything, and they were him, then they should be Xiao, too, right? But Xiao couldn’t hear them. Ben couldn’t hear them. Renata couldn’t hear them. Only Cixin could, and probably not until tomorrow. And this time …

The nurse hired to watch him while he was “sick” looked up from her magazine, smiled, and turned another page. Cixin didn’t hate her. He was surprised he didn’t hate her, but she couldn’t help being stupid. Any more than Ben could help it, or Renata, or Xiao. They didn’t know.

Cixin knew.

And when he felt the calm steal over him, felt himself expand outward, he knew the voices would be early and that was so good!

Cixin.

Yes, he said, but only inside his mind, where the nurse couldn’t hear.

Come.

Yes, he thought, because that was right, that was where he belonged. With the voices. But there was something to do first.

He made a picture in his mind, the same picture he’d seen once before, the whole Earth wrapped in a gray fog. He made the sun shining brightly, and a ray gun shooting from the sun to the Earth, the way Renata had described it to him. The picture said POW!! Like a video game. Then he made the ray gun go away.

Yes, formed in his mind. We’ll watch over them.

Cixin sighed happily. Then he became everything and went home, to where he knew, beyond any need to race around or yell at people or be fen noon nan hi, who he really was.

He never heard the nurse cry out.

* * *

14: Ben

She came to him through the bright sunshine, hurrying down the cement path, her dirty blond curls hidden by a black hat. The black dress made her look out of place. This was Southern California; people wore black only for gala parties, not for funerals. But Renata, his numb and weary mind irrelevantly remembered, came originally from Ohio.

Ben turned his back on her.

She wasn’t fooled. Somehow she knew that he hadn’t turned away from not wanting her there, but from wanting her there too much. No one else stood beside the grave. Ben hadn’t told his family about Cixin’s death, and he’d discouraged his few friends from attending. And they, bewildered to learn only after the death that anti-social Ben had been adopting a child, nodded and murmured empty consolations. And then, of course, there were the sunspots. A second coronal mass ejection had occurred just yesterday, and everyone was jumpy.

“Ben, I just heard and I’m so sorry,” Renata said. From her, the words didn’t sound so empty. Her eyes held tears, and the hand she put on his arm held a tenderness he badly needed but wouldn’t allow himself to take.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly. If she even alluded to all that other nonsense … . And of course, being Renata, she did. “I know you loved him. And you did the best you could for him—I know that, too. But maybe he’s where he wanted to be.”

“Can it, Renata.”

“All right. Will you come have coffee with me now?”

He looked down. So small a coffin. Two cemetery employees waited, trying not to look impatient, to lower the coffin into its hole, cover it up, and get back inside. To their eyes, this was a non-funeral: no mourners, no minister or priest or rabbi, only this one dour man reading from a book that wasn’t even holy.

“Please,” Renata said. “You shouldn’t stay here, love.”

He let himself be led away. Behind him the men began to work with feverish speed.

“They’re afraid,” he said. “Idiots.”

“Not everybody can understand science, Ben.” Then, shockingly, she laughed. He knew why, but she clapped one hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

“Forget it.”

Not everybody could understand science, no. In Ben’s experience, almost nobody even tried. Half the population still equated evolution with the devil. But the president had made a speech on TV last night and another one this morning: The new solar flare presents no danger. There will be no repeat of last week’s crisis. The radiation is not reaching Earth. Wisely, she had not tried to say why the radiation was not reaching Earth. Nor why the astronauts on Hope of Heaven, the Chinese space shuttle, had not been fried in orbit. No danger was as far as the president could go. It was already like crossing into Wonderland.

Ben and Renata walked to his Saab. If she’d parked her own car somewhere in the cemetery, as she must have, she seemed willing to leave it. Gently she took the book from his hands and studied the cover.

“I’m not giving in,” he said, too harshly.

“I know.”

“If there really were … ‘more,’ were really something that could be reached, contacted, by more or different brain connections—then what evolutionary gain could have made humanity lose it? Was it too distracting, interfering with survival? Too calming? Too what?’

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Ben said. “And if it really were genetic, really were that the rest of us aren’t making enough of some chemicals or connective tissues or … I just can’t believe it, Renata.”

“I know.”

He wished she would stop saying that. She handed back to him James Behren’s Quantum Physics and Consciousness, but he knew she’d already seen the page he’d dog-eared and underlined. She already knew that over the grave of Cixin, who could barely decipher any language, Ben had read aloud about two-slit and delayed-choice and particle-detector experiments. Renata knew, always, everything.

“Maybe,” she said after a long silence, “if they know now that the rest of us possess consciousness, however rudimentary, not just Cixin … if they know that, then maybe someday … “

She could never just leave anything alone. That’s who she was. Ben shifted the book to his other hand and put an arm around her.

“No,” he said. “Not possible.”

This time she didn’t answer. But she leaned against him and they walked out of the cemetery together, under the bright blue empty sky.

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Framed

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Contents

FANTASY STORIES:

The Mudlark

Written by Pat Cadigan

Illustrated by Maurine Starkey

A week and a half after my mother vanished out of the British Museum, I found her, purely by chance, picking up trash on a stretch of stony shore by the Thames.

By then I had gone from frantic to part jumpy, part dazed. The police had been kind; WPC Nadia Cihan, the officer in charge of the case, had introduced me to some uniformed officers she said had a lot of experience working missing persons cases. But I knew what she was really doing was handling me. Not that I blamed her. People go missing all the time in big cities—one eighty-seven-year-old American tourist was not a significant addition to the thousands of others already missing. I thanked WPC Cihan and the sympathetic uniformed officers and made sure they had enough recent photos. Then I wandered around London in search of her myself, trying not to feel helpless or hopeless.

It wasn’t until I spotted her moving slowly on the rocky riverbank with her cane in one hand and a plastic supermarket carrier bag hanging from her other wrist that I realized I had never expected to see her again.

I wouldn’t have seen her then if I hadn’t stopped to talk to a couple of women on the Millennium Bridge. They were taking photos of the skyline with St. Paul’s Cathedral behind me, where I had just been showing my mother’s picture to anyone and everyone I could though I was mainly targeting tourists. Or, to be precise, people with cameras, who I thought might have accidentally captured her in their recent shots of some sight or landmark and so would recognize her. I don’t know what put that idea in my head, and so far I’d had zero results but was still trying.

“Excuse me,” I said. Just as the women turned to me with identical polite, guarded expressions on their faces, a small bit of movement caught my eye, and I saw her down on the shore. I recognized her immediately by her bearing; she was moving in her usual slow, determined fashion, dressed in her beige raincoat, tweed hat, brown slacks, and walking shoes, the same things she’d been wearing when I’d lost her at the British Museum. “Good God!” I blurted. “What the hell is she doing down there?”

The two women glanced at each other. “Mudlarking,” said the taller one. She had shiny black hair with a magenta forelock.

I looked up at her, bewildered. “What?”

“Mudlarking,” said the other woman. She had very curly black hair with purple accents throughout. “Looking for any interesting bits of stuff that may have washed up on the bank.”

Her accent said she was from North America like me, but she might have been speaking in tongues for all the sense it made. “‘Bits of stuff’? Like what?”

“Like shards of old china,” the second woman replied, shrugging.

“Trash?” I said, incredulous.

“Some of it’s over a hundred years old.”

I stared down at my mother, openmouthed. This was a woman who wouldn’t darken the door of a charity shop and turned up her nose at flea markets, and a stranger was trying to tell me she was picking trash out of the mud and slime by the Thames. Not even whole trash but bits and pieces.

As if to confirm that, my mother bent over, leaning heavily on her cane, and picked something out of the rocks. She examined it as she straightened up again, then dropped it into the plastic bag hanging from her wrist and kept moving, scanning the ground in front of her.

“See?” said the first woman. “Obviously, she found something.”

I shook my head, still dumbfounded. “But what could she possibly want with a piece of—of broken dishware, or whatever?”

“No idea,” said the first woman with a small laugh. “Mudlarkers are not us.”

“I’ll say,” the other woman added, and the two of them laughed together.

I didn’t bother to glare at them before running toward the end of the bridge—literally running, which is something I never do, especially as I’m past fifty. Just off the paved walkway that passed under the bridge, I found a long flight of stone steps leading down onto the riverbank and just barely didn’t take a header as I rushed down, afraid that my mother would somehow disappear again before I could get to her.

The best I could do on that stony shore, however, was a hurried stumble; running was impossible unless I wanted a broken ankle. How the hell was my mother managing with her stiff knees and arthritic hips?

“Mom!” I called, slipping and sliding toward her. She gave no indication that she’d heard me. I called again, louder; her head turned slightly in my direction, then away. Maybe she had lost her hearing aids or run out of batteries. But even as I thought it, I knew she hadn’t. She seemed to hunch in on herself, the way you do when you’re trying to make yourself inconspicuous.

“Mom!” By then I was only a few feet away so that she had no choice but to turn around.

“What?” she said in a heavily put-upon tone. Her faded brown eyes, magnified by her glasses, were weary and uninterested.

“What are you doing here? Where have you been? Answer the second question first,” I added quickly, looking her over. After ten days, she might have been in rough shape, dirty, confused, and ill, but she looked as impeccable as always. The raincoat was clean, her hair under the tweed hat was combed, and she still had her hearing aids as well as her gloves and scarf.

“Where have I been?” she said, emphasizing the I very slightly. “Oh, just around.” She turned her attention back to the rocks and started to move away.

“That’s not an answer!”

She glanced up at me briefly. “No? You didn’t used to feel that way.” She poked the end of her cane into a small pile of stones and levered them apart. “‘Where did you go?’ ‘Out.’ ‘Who were you with?’ ‘Nobody.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘Nothing.’”

“That was different,” I said, exasperated.

“How?”

“I was fifteen, not eighty-seven, and I never went missing for a week and a half—””

“I beg to differ, madam. If you add up all the hours I didn’t know where you were, who you were with, or what you were doing, I think you’ll find it comes to quite a lot more than ten days. Months. Years.”

“But I didn’t do it all at once!” I was getting angry, as much with myself for letting her cloud the issue as with her for disappearing. “And that’s got nothing to do with this. I’ve got the police looking for you, I’ve given your photo and description to every hospital and shelter in London, I’ve been running around like a madwoman accosting strangers in the street, asking if they’d seen you, imagining you lying unconscious in some alley or wandering around disoriented, unable to remember anything—”

“Amnesia?” My mother actually threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, bitch, please. That’s strictly TV-movie.”

I caught her arm as she started to move away. “What did you just say?”

She hesitated, looking blank, then laughed again. “Oh, that. Sorry, I wasn’t actually calling you a bitch, it’s just an expression. You know, like ‘far out’ or ‘groovy’ or ‘off the pigs.’ Whatever.” She shrugged, then laughed a little more. “That, too.” She shook off my hand and batted me aside with her cane so she could continue searching the shore.

“Mom!” I stumbled after her. “Are you trying to tell me that you went missing to get back at me for stuff I did over thirty years ago?”

“Well, revenge is a dish best served cold.” More hearty laughter. “Oh, the look on your face. I’m kidding, honey. For God’s sake, lighten up. And try to remember that everything isn’t about you.”

“All right, so what are you doing?” I asked.

“Mudlarking.” Her smile was sunny. “That’s when you—”

“I know what mudlarking is, a couple of tourists explained it to me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t be caught dead in the Salvation Army store back home, nor would you go to a flea market if I put a gun to your head. But here you are picking rubbish out of the mud. How about Dumpster-diving? Do you do that too, now?”

She gave me an unreadable look and kept going.

“But never mind all of that,” I went on, still following her. “You were missing. For a week and a half. Then when I find you—completely by accident—you act as if nothing’s happened. So what’s going on?”

“Nothing. And I haven’t been missing for a week and a half—”

“No? Then what would you call it?”

She talked over me. “—I’ve been missing for twenty-five years.” Those faded brown eyes had turned hard. “It wasn’t until ten days ago that you finally noticed I was gone.”

* * *

It isn’t easy to argue with a statement like that, but I wasn’t about to let it go. She turned away again and resumed poking at the rocks with her cane.

“That’s bullshit!” I said to her back.

She paid no attention.

“Bitch, please.”

Then she looked back at me, amused, but kept on going. I stumbled over the rocks and caught up to her.

“Bitch, please what?” she said with a heavy sigh.

“Bitch please don’t start with that cliche about old people being invisible and everyone ignoring them,” I said. “Because I haven’t been ignoring you for the past twenty-five years, and you can’t tell me I have.”

Her mouth twitched slightly. “Maybe I didn’t do it all at once.”

I glared at her. “You are very close to experiencing shaken-mother syndrome.”

“Ha, ha, that’s a riot,” she said in a flat voice as she batted me aside with her cane. “Careful you don’t lose your balance and fall here. These rocks are pretty slippery.” As she moved past me, the plastic bag brushed against my leg, and I snatched it up.

“What’s in here?” I asked.

To my surprise, she let me dig around in it instead of trying to pull it away. I pulled out a few fragments of broken china, none larger than the ball of my thumb. Each one had a little bit of pattern on it; nothing I could identify. I looked up at my mother. “This is it? This really is it?”

“What were you expecting—gold doubloons? Blood diamonds?”

I shook my head. “The people I talked to said this was what you were after. They also claimed that this cr—stuff is supposed to be over a hundred years old, but I don’t know how anyone could know that.”

“Well, I found a few pieces of ceramic pipe stem as well,” my mother said. “Nobody’s made those for about that long. Those were pipes for smoking tobacco, not blowing bubbles.”

“I know that.” I dropped the stuff back in the bag. “Mom, no matter how old it is, this is trash. You’re picking up other people’s trash.”

“Yeah, like I’ve never done that before. Except I guess you’re going to tell me that was different just because it happened to be stuff you’d strewn all over the house.”

“You always made me pick up after myself—”

“Only if you were actually in the house to do it. There were plenty of times you managed to escape, and I’d be left to pick up the pieces. Literally.”

“I seem to remember your insisting this wasn’t about me,” I said evenly.

“And nobody loves a smart-ass—do you seem to remember that, too?” My mother frowned at something on the ground behind me and went over to have a closer look. Bracing herself with her cane, she lowered herself to a crouching position and started prying it out of the mud.

“Don’t, Mom.” I stumbled over to her. “Whatever it is, I’ll get it for you—”

She slapped my hand away. “Back off, this is mine! I can pick it up myself!”

I was so startled I drew back too quickly, lost my balance, and fell on my backside. Studying her find, my mother pushed herself up to a standing position while I floundered on the rocks, feeling every one of them digging into me through my clothes. When I finally managed to get up, covered with mud and slime and God only knew what else, she was already several feet away, scanning the ground for more treasure.

I brushed myself off as best I could and caught up to her. “So what didn’t you want me to touch? A gold doubloon or a blood diamond?”

She swung her cane in a low arc, whacking me on the shins. “No, it’s just more trash. Now why don’t you just go away and mind your own business?”

“Because in case you haven’t heard me or you’ve forgotten, you’ve been missing for a week and a half,” I said, getting angry again. “And don’t give me any of that bullshit about being missing for twenty-five years, and I only just noticed. I’ve been out of my mind. I filed a police report—”

“You said, you said already.” My mother swung her cane in the other direction, catching the back of my calf. It stung.

“And I’ve kept the hotel room five days longer than we planned,” I added. “I called the credit-card company and explained the situation, and they agreed to raise the credit limit. But at this exchange rate, it won’t be long before it’s maxed out again. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe they’ll raise the credit limit another couple of thousand dollars, maybe they won’t. Either way, I’m already in more debt than I can afford—”

“So pack up and go home. I didn’t ask you to break the bank.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

She turned to me with that weary, fed-up look. “Bitch, please.”

“Bitch, please yourself!” I said hotly.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing!” she snapped. “I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, and I can do anything I do want to. Now get out of here, you’re bothering me.”

I reached for her. “Mom—”

She smacked my hand away with her cane. “Eighty-seven years, goddammit! Eighty-seven years on this earth, and I can’t do what I want without being harassed! Will you just go back to your life and leave me alone?”

I took a step toward her.

“Get away from me!” She swung the cane at my head. I ducked and almost fell again.

“Go on!” she yelled. “I mean it, get the hell off my South Bank!”

I noticed that the few other people on the shore close enough to hear were staring at us and decided to humor my mother before one of them called the cops. Better for me to go back up to the paved walkway and call WPC Cihan, tell her that I had found my mother and she had obviously had some kind of breakdown, maybe even a small stroke, and we needed an ambulance.

* * *

During the half hour it took for the paramedics to arrive, I watched my mother wander a random but very directed route by the water’s edge, acting as if she had all the time in the world and intended to spend it scavenging. I was half-afraid she’d fall down and half-hoping she would just so I could go back to her.

But she was still on her feet and as steady as ever when the paramedics, a middle-aged woman and a younger man, finally showed up. They listened attentively while I gave them a quick rundown of the situation, emphasizing how out of character my mother’s behavior was.

“Considering her age, it’s possible she’s having some kind of episode,” the woman said, when I asked about the possibility of a stroke. Her name tag said she was Celie Stine and she outweighed me by at least thirty pounds, all of it apparently muscle.

“Is she taking any medications that you know of?” the man asked. His name was Niall Lassiter, and he was almost as muscular as his partner.

“No, not that I know of …” I thought about my mother’s claim to have been missing for twenty-five years. “But she sort of hinted that there were things I don’t know about.”

The woman chuckled. “I’ve got to remember that one. It’ll drive my kids crazy. No offense,” she added with an apologetic look.

“None taken. Just please get my mother off those rocks so I can take her home.” I frowned. They had a first-aid kit or something and their radios but nothing else. “Shouldn’t you have a stretcher?”

“It doesn’t look like we’ll need one.”

I started to follow them, but the man stopped me. “You told us she was very agitated with you, so I think it really would be better if you wait here. We want her to stay calm. Otherwise, she might hurt herself.”

They tramped down the stone steps and made their way over the rocks.

* * *

The paramedics talked to my mother for quite some time. I saw them look into her eyes and take her pulse but nothing else. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought they were simply having a friendly chat. Granted, it was a rather unusual place to socialize, out there on the muddy rocks while the day grew colder and damper and the sky became grayer and more threatening, as if rain were going to pour down at any moment.

Impatient, I looked at my wrist, forgetting that I had left my watch back in the hotel room. Damn it, how long did it take to bundle a frail old woman in her late eighties off to a psych ward? I should have made them go back to the ambulance for a stretcher, I thought, trying to curb my impatience.

Abruptly, the paramedics made their way back across the rocks but without my mother, who had gone back to searching for trash.

I ran to meet them at the top of the stone steps. “What are you doing?”

Niall Lassiter shrugged apologetically. “We talked to her like you asked us to. There’s nothing wrong with her that we can see.”

“You didn’t see much,” I retorted. “I was watching. You didn’t give her an examination.”

“Well, it may not have seemed that way to you,” Celie Stine said in a brisk, professional tone that wasn’t quite unfriendly. “We did take her pulse and her temperature as well as checking her pupils and her reflexes. There’s nothing to suggest that your mother is ill in any way.”

“You didn’t take her blood pressure.” I was trying not to raise my voice, but I was aware of a number of people turning to look.

“That would have meant asking your mother to remove her coat and jumper and rolling up her sleeve. Not a good idea in this environment, I think you’ll agree.” Her tone still wasn’t unfriendly, but it was getting there.

“I also don’t think it’s a good idea to leave her in this environment which I thought you’d agree with, too, but obviously you don’t.” I looked from her to Niall Lassiter. Her expression was cold, but he gave me a sympathetic smile.

“Oh, we agree,” he said. “We just can’t do anything about it.”

“Why not?” I demanded. By that time people going by were stopping to watch, but I was too upset to care.

“Because your mother is over the age of majority. Mudlarking probably isn’t the best activity for someone her age, but it isn’t illegal. She’s not endangering herself or anyone else—”

“But she is endangering herself! She could fall on those rocks and break her hip or her neck or her skull, or all three!”

“She could, but she hasn’t,” Celie Stine said, wearily authoritative. “And we can’t wait around on the off-chance that she might get hurt. There are people who are hurt that we have to tend to.”

They started to leave, and I caught Niall Lassiter’s arm. “Please, you don’t understand—she’s been missing for ten days—”

“Yeah, she mentioned she’d gone off on her own, and you were upset about it.” He removed my hand gently but firmly. “We asked her where she’d been, but she wouldn’t tell us. She doesn’t have to.”

I started to protest, and Celie Stine stepped between me and her partner. “We aren’t cops. If she doesn’t want to tell us where she was for the past ten days, she doesn’t have to. Just judging from her appearance, however, it was somewhere indoors, clean, dry, and warm. Which is more than I can say for the way you look.” She gave me a slow and very pointed up-and-down.

“I fell on the rocks,” I said defensively. “While I was trying to talk to her, to persuade her to come home—”

“This is between you two,” Celie Stine said in a very final way. “Good luck.”

“But she’s irrational!” I called after the paramedics as they walked away. “You don’t understand, she’s behaving like—” I cut off, looking around at the audience I had attracted. It was bigger than I’d realized. “Like a crazy woman,” I finished in a small voice. Defeated, I turned back to see what my mother was doing.

She was gone.

I ran back and forth along the walkway, thinking—hoping—she had simply managed to work her way farther along the riverbank, but I couldn’t find her. I went back down to the shore and stumbled around, asking the few other people there if they had noticed even just the general direction she had gone, but none of them could even remember seeing her at all. The clouds grew darker and seemed to lower, and suddenly I noticed that there was a lot less shore than there had been when I had first spotted my mother.

“Tide’s coming in,” said a man in a long coat and big rubber boots as he headed for the stone staircase. “Best get back up to dry land quick-like, it comes in faster than you’d think.”

I wanted to keep searching near the water’s edge in case she had somehow fallen in but suddenly found myself ankle deep in freezing, dirty water in the dark. In the pouring rain.

* * *

The next morning, I moved to a cheaper hotel. The room was only slightly larger than the walk-in closet in the master bedroom at my mother’s house, and the single bed took up most of it. The bathroom was down the hall, an arrangement I wasn’t crazy about but would afford me a few extra days before my credit card reached its new, horribly ruinous limit.

I talked to the people at the front desk about my situation. One of the clerks, a young Pakistani woman who told me she was attending law school part-time, suggested I put up a Web page then very helpfully did it for me, for a modest fee. I didn’t think the fee was really so modest, but it would have taken me forever to do it myself, and I didn’t want to take the time away from searching for my mother.

I figured she’d try to dodge me by going elsewhere along the Thames to pick trash. Armed with a pair of binoculars and my digital camera, I took some boat rides. It wasn’t the season for boat rides, so I didn’t have to fight a lot of other tourists for space on deck.

The various crews probably thought I was crazy, standing in the wind and the rain, scanning the shore with binoculars and taking pictures seemingly at random. The camera had a good optical zoom on it; I was hoping it might capture something I hadn’t seen clearly with the binoculars. Like an old woman in a beige raincoat and a tweed hat, leaning on a cane, for example. When I thought about that as I lay in the single bed at night trying to sleep, it seemed like a crazy idea. But then, the idea that my mother would disappear on our off-season, cut-rate trip to London would have seemed even crazier before it happened.

Not that it seemed any less crazy after the fact.

* * *

I went to different areas of the Thames and asked other mudlarkers if they’d seen my mother. Some were very friendly, eager to show me their little collections of detritus. I tried to look impressed or at least politely interested, but I don’t think I was successful. Others ignored me unless I actually got in their way. None of them recognized my mother or remembered seeing anyone fitting her description there on the rocks or anywhere else.

I’d have found that hard to believe except that no matter where I went or how many times I visited any of the areas where the mudlarkers went, I never met the same person twice. I told myself there was nothing really strange about that, not really. In a city the size of London, you might meet someone once, then never see them again in this lifetime. Especially if you didn’t actually live there.

* * *

I had run up another week of hotel bills while living on ramen noodles and some other kind of instant, in-the-cup soupy thing when WPC Cihan called to tell me that someone fitting my mother’s description had been spotted lining up for free food every morning on Gower Street. Actually, what she said was queuing, which confused me for a few seconds even after several weeks of hearing British English.

The food came courtesy of an Eastern religious commune. “They run a restaurant over on the edge of Soho,” said the uniformed officer WPC Cihan sent to accompany me as we came out of the Warren Street tube station. John Selkirk was one of the cops I had met when my mother had first gone missing, a stocky, fair-haired, pink-skinned man with light blue eyes, a gap between his front teeth, and one gold earring. To my North American ear, he sounded exactly like Ringo Starr. “This is how they clear out their leftovers and advertise at the same time. Lure in a lot of custom this way.”

I frowned at him. “How?”

“It’s good food,” he said, a bit surprised.

I was still bewildered. There was a bizarre image in my head of homeless people recommending a good place to eat while begging for spare change. Then we turned a corner onto Gower Street, and I saw that it wasn’t just the homeless who enjoyed the free breakfast. The line—queue—for the white cart parked on the sidewalk was almost half a block long, and it wasn’t made up exclusively of homeless people. At least half of the people in it were obviously students; others looked like faculty, and a few seemed far too well-to-do to be there at all. I pointed this out to Officer Selkirk.

“The food is free to anyone who wants it,” he said, amused, “and they keep serving until ten o’clock.” He glanced at his watch. “Which means they’ll be at this for another hour and a half. Besides the rough sleepers, you got your basic skint students here—they’ll eat half and save the other half for lunch, and your basic skint lecturers, who’ll eat a few bites now, skip lunch, and save most of it till teatime. Then you got people who’re getting a plate for somebody in university hospital. You know what hospital food’s like. Anyway, the students’ll get their parents to take them to the restaurant, and the lecturers’ll go there when they get a pay rise. So will the hospital patients when they get released. It all works out.”

I almost asked him how he could be so sure. “But there’s got to be at least a few people cadging a free meal.”

Officer Selkirk chuckled. “Can’t always tell who’s really hungry and who’s blagging just because they can. Never mind, I think I see your mum. Third person behind that tall guy with the red hat?”

He was right. There she was, wearing the same clothes as when I had last seen her and still as neat and clean as ever. She stood in profile to us, leaning on her cane and studying the large redbrick building in front of her as if she intended to memorize it. A plastic bag hung from her wrist, perhaps the same one; it looked as if there was a lot more in it now.

“I don’t want to sneak up on her and startle her,” I told Officer Selkirk, “but I don’t want her running off on me, either.”

“Wait a bit. The closer she is to the food, the less likely she’ll be to scarper.”

“‘Scarper?’” I had a hard time imagining my mother doing that; it sounded like a cross between skipping and capering, possibly with some gibbering. While I, on the other hand, was all too close to it.

“Just wait. I’ll let you know when to make a move.”

We waited longer than what I would have called a bit; there were obviously a number of regulars in the line, and the two people serving food from the cart took time to chat with them as they dished up rice and vegetables with a side of what I supposed was a tofu scrambled-egg substitute. Watching, I actually began to feel hungry.

As if sensing my thoughts, Officer Selkirk said, “Looks good, doesn’t it? You want me to get you a plate?”

“Y—no, of course not,” I said. “I’m here to take my mother home, not to eat.”

“Maybe your mum would be more receptive if you had breakfast with her.”

“My mother is behaving irrationally,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as impatient as I felt. “I’m not going to enable her.”

He shrugged and said nothing more until my mother was about a dozen people from the food cart. Then he gave me a small push. “OK, you’re on.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked.

“No, I’m going to have a friendly chat with the caterers.”

I started to protest, but he was already walking away. Bracing myself, I made my approach, sticking close to the line on her right side, where her vision has always been weaker.

Just as I reached her, she turned her back, gave a big, noisy sigh, and said, “I was wondering when you’d finally come at me.”

For a moment, I wasn’t actually sure if she were talking to me or someone else in line with her.

“Well?” she added, too quickly to let me answer even if I had known what to say. “You didn’t really think you could sneak up on me, did you? I’m your mother. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head and all around the sides. I knew the moment that you and Officer Friendly hit Gower Street.” Finally, she turned to look at me. “Where is Officer Friendly? Don’t tell me your backup’s already bailed on you?”

“Officer Selkirk is talking to the food servers.”

She craned her neck to see what was going on at the front of the line. “Well, so he is.”

“So much for the eyes ringing your head.”

“Don’t get smart with me, you.”

“Or what?” I said. “You’ll spank me? Take me into the middle of a big city where I don’t know anybody and leave me for the gypsies?”

“Keep your voice down.” She rapped me on the shin with her cane. “Remember where you are. There are real gypsies in this town, and they don’t need people like you dissing them.”

“‘Dissing?’”

“That means—”

“I know what it means!”

“Really.” She raised her eyebrows. “I’m surprised.”

Someone behind us smothered a laugh. I forced myself not to turn around and glare, telling myself I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction but mostly because I was afraid it might be a gypsy. I stepped to one side and waved at Officer Selkirk. It took a few moments to get his attention, which was focused on the very pretty woman serving portions of tofu. She was telling him something long and involved, occasionally emphasizing a point by dropping tofu onto someone’s plate with a little extra gusto. He almost managed not to look irritated as he excused himself and came over to me.

“Everything all right now?” he asked, his tone overcheerful.

“No,” I said. “I can’t get her to talk to me.”

He looked from me to my mother. “Please talk to your daughter, ma’am,” he said politely. “She’s been worried sick, and we’ve had an army of police officers searching for you.”

“Tell them to stop looking,” my mother said just as politely and with a hint of affection. “I’m not lost. And I’ve already talked to her—she just won’t listen.” Her eyes swiveled toward me under half-closed lids. “As usual.”

“I see.” Officer Selkirk turned to me. “Please listen to your mother, ma’am. It’s the only way you’ll be able to work things out. Now, you’ll have to excuse me—”

“No, wait!” I said. Everyone in the line turned to look. As usual. Even the food people stopped serving, so they wouldn’t miss anything.

“Ma’am, I can’t do anything more for you,” Officer Selkirk said, his fair features puckering earnestly. “This is a family matter that has to be settled between the two of you.”

“We did that,” said my mother.

“We did not!” I said.

The policeman threw up his hands. I didn’t blame him. “I can’t do anything more for you. I hope you work things out.” He started to walk away.

“She won’t leave me alone!” my mother called after him. “It’s harassment! Stalking!”

He stopped, and I saw his shoulders rise and fall with a big sigh before he turned and came back.

“Mom, what are you talking about? I’m your daughter.”

Officer Selkirk paid no attention to me. “Are you making a formal complaint?”

“Yes, I am,” my mother replied feelingly. “She’s been stalking me, and now she’s trying to force me to go with her when I don’t want to.”

Officer Selkirk sighed again, looking very unhappy. “Please leave this lady alone,” he told me, “or I will have to take action against you.”

“This. Is. My. Mother,” I said, trying not to shout. “She’s been missing for ten da—no, for over two weeks now. I told you she’s been acting irrationally—”

“She’s not acting irrationally now,” he said in a maddeningly reasonable voice.

“No? What do you call this, then?” I grabbed the plastic bag and held it up, shaking it so the fragments clinked. “She’s been picking trash out of the mud by the Thames! That isn’t rational behavior, not for her!”

“Let go!” My mother slapped my hand, hard. “She’s just saying that because I won’t go with her. I don’t have to go with her or anyone else, and I want her to leave me alone.”

“Ma’am, will you please leave your mother alone?” Officer Selkirk looked unhappier than ever as he pried her plastic bag of trash out of my grip and gave it back to my mother without looking inside.

“I can’t just abandon her here in a foreign country! We were supposed to go home weeks ago—”

“Sorry, ma’am, but if you won’t leave this lady in peace, you’ll have to come with me.” He took hold of my arm and began walking me away from my mother.

“No, wait, you can’t do this—” I tried to pull away, which was the wrong thing to do. Suddenly Officer Selkirk had me in a wristlock and was talking into his radio. The police car arrived much more quickly than the paramedics had.

As we drove away, I caught a glimpse of her reaching into the bag and holding something out to the food servers.

* * *

WPC Cihan was not exactly hostile, but she made it clear that she had no more time for me or my mother problem.

“Officer Selkirk did not formally arrest you because he knows you’re having a hard time,” she said, sitting on the edge of the table in an interview room and looming over me. “We all understand you’re in a state. But this is now a family matter—”

“So I’ve been told,” I said. My voice sounded small. I think the room was soundproofed.

“—and the police don’t handle family matters unless they involve violence or something unlawful. Like harassment.”

“You’re saying I can’t take my mother home with me.”

“Not if she won’t go.”

“But she’s not supposed to stay here. Neither of us is. We’re American tourists—”

“North American tourists,” WPC Cihan put in.

“Fine, North American tourists. What’s the difference?”

“To someone from South America? Quite a lot.”

I stared at her. Was a London police officer really quibbling about North and South America with me in the middle of a crisis, or was I hallucinating this part?

“Fine,” I said after a long moment. “I get your point. But my mother still isn’t supposed to stay here indefinitely.”

“Visitors from the United States can stay here up to six months without any special permits.”

I put my face in my hands and tried to compose myself. When I raised my head, WPC Cihan was still looming over me, arms folded, her expression impassive. “I can’t let my mother just stay here for six months.”

“You don’t have anything to say about it. I thought we made that clear to you.”

“You did,” I said miserably. “I just don’t know what to do.”

The other woman blew out a short breath. “Tomorrow morning, check out of your hotel. Go to the airport and catch the first flight home.”

“And just abandon my mother?”

“You’re not abandoning her. She’s made her wishes clear, and obviously you’re not going to change her mind. So do as she asks. Give her her space. Maybe in a few weeks, she’ll feel more receptive, and she’ll call.”

I was still stuck on give her her space and almost missed the rest. “And if she doesn’t? Or you call instead, to tell me you’ve found her body?”

WPC Cihan slid off the table and walked around to the other side, where my shoulder bag was lying open with the contents next to it, including my passport and driver’s license. She swept everything back into the bag and planted it in front of me. “Ma’am, I am not a guidance counselor. Take your things and go. I don’t want to arrest you.”

She called Officer Selkirk to walk me out. He was nice to me, even apologizing for dragging me away in a wristlock. I tried to pay attention to what he was saying, but something was nagging at me.

“—because if anyone sees a person get the upper hand on a cop, that’s it,” Officer Selkirk was saying as we reached the front entrance. “It’s open season, everyone’ll come after us. And I mean everyone, from little kids to identified hardened criminals.” He opened the door for me.

I stopped in my tracks. “Identification!”

“Right, I believe you got all yours back.” He tried to push me over the threshold onto the front steps.

“No, my mother’s identification.”

He looked puzzled but kept trying to nudge me out the door.

“You didn’t ask to see it,” I said urgently.

His pleasant expression was crumbling. “Come on now, you’re blocking the access—”

I braced myself against the side of the door with one arm. “Why didn’t any of you ask to see my mother’s ID?”

“Why would we? You identified her.” He tried to push my arm away.

“You should have asked for her ID. That’s standard practice, isn’t it?”

“I mean it now, you’re in the way here—”

I pushed my whole body against the side of the doorway. “You should have asked for her ID, and you didn’t! You should have confirmed who she was!”

“Ma’am, I’m trying to be patient with you, but you’re creating a problem again, and it’s getting more serious than you realize. You have to leave. Now.”

“But—”

“I don’t think our asking for your mother’s ID would have magically changed her mind and made her want to go with you. Now please, before I have to take you back to WPC Cihan—”

“It would if she didn’t have any.”

He stared at me blankly.

“If she didn’t have any ID, that would have mattered, wouldn’t it?”

“We don’t have mandatory ID cards in this country.” Pause. “Yet.”

“Not for your citizens, but what about foreigners? We have to have passports. If she didn’t have her passport, wouldn’t you have to do something about that? Either make her produce it or take her into custody?”

Officer Selkirk pulled me out of the doorway and shoved me onto the front steps. “Do not come back here.” I opened my mouth to protest, and all at once I was nose to nose with him. “There’s nothing more anyone can do for you. Go home.”

* * *

The US embassy looked like it was getting ready for a siege, but the middle-aged couple ahead of me in the long queue—line—for the entrance told me that this was the standard level of security. “Don’t travel a lot, do you, dear?” the woman asked with a look that said she pitied yokels like me. The line moved steadily, and eventually we were ushered through a metal detector and into a large entry hall, where two people at a desk directed visitors to the correct department.

After a few hours on a hard folding chair in a waiting area, a young man whose ID badge said he was Bryan Lewchuk took me into Office 4A, which looked an awful lot like the interview room back at the police station right down to the furniture.

“Now, you say you lost your mother, is that right?” Bryan Lewchuk’s brow furrowed with professional concern, his pen poised over a yellow legal pad. “Have you filed a report with the Met?”

I nodded.

“And there’s no sign of her?”

“Well, actually, I found her a week ago, but I lost her again the same day. But the police found her again this morning.”

Professional concern turned to bewilderment. I thought it made him look about twelve years old. I told him the whole story while he took notes, occasionally asking me to pause so he could keep up.

When I finished, he said nothing for what seemed like at least half a minute, only staring at the legal pad with a troubled frown. Finally, he sat back in his chair and said, “Now what is it that you think the embassy is supposed to do about this?”

* * *

I wouldn’t say that they threw me out, exactly. The man who escorted me to the exit wasn’t armed—well, not that I could see. Nor did they tell me that I could never come back, only that getting upset and shouting was counterproductive.

* * *

The Pakistani clerk called to me as soon as I walked into the hotel lobby. I was afraid she was going to tell me that my credit card had been refused, but it was something else altogether.

“I’ve had to take down the Web page about your mother,” she said. “The authorities say that she is no longer a missing person so the Web site says she doesn’t belong there anymore. I do hope that nothing bad has happened to her?”

“No, at least not as of this morning,” I said. “But she is still missing. Or she’s missing again. Whichever it is, I’m still looking for her. So could you put the page back up, please?”

“No. You can’t say that someone is missing when the police say she isn’t. The Web site won’t allow it.”

“The Web site?” I said, incredulous. “How does the Web site know anything?” But she was hurrying back to her place behind the front desk. I almost followed her, then caught sight of the head clerk standing at the end of the counter. He had a cordless phone receiver pressed to one ear, and he was glaring at me.

He glared me out of the lobby and into the narrow lift—elevator. Even after the doors closed, I was pretty sure that he was glaring through the walls at me up to the second (third) floor and all the way to my room.

I forced to myself to wait fifteen minutes, then called the front desk. As I had hoped, she answered.

“Just tell me one thing,” I said quietly.

She hesitated. “If I can.”

“Who told this Web site that my mother isn’t missing—the police?”

She hesitated again, a little longer this time. “All I know is, I got an e-mail from the webmaster,” she said, speaking very softly, as if she were trying not to be overheard.

“But how did the webmaster find out?” I asked. “Is there some official connection to the police?”

“You said just one thing,” she reminded me.

“Yes, but—”

There was a loud click as someone else came on the line.

“Hotel staff are not permitted to become involved in guests’ personal problems,” the head clerk said, speaking just a bit louder than was necessary. “Especially when those problems involve filing false police reports. Please don’t make me have to ask you to leave.”

There was another even louder click as he hung up. I heard a whispered “Sorry!” before the line went dead.

How the hell had I come to this, I wondered, sitting on the narrow and not very comfortable bed. All I had done was come to London with my mother, nothing complicated. We weren’t complicated—we’d always had a good relationship. We’d been talking on and off for years about going to London together. I couldn’t even remember which of us originally suggested it.

Unbidden and unwanted, the idea bloomed suddenly in my mind: had my mother planned to do this all along?

I hauled her suitcase out of the tiny closet. I hadn’t touched it since I’d packed everything up to change hotels, and I hadn’t been too careful, just throwing everything in. I hadn’t looked through her things for any clues as to her state of mind or her intentions or anything else. How stupid was that? About as stupid as the police not asking for her ID? Or as stupid as them not asking me about what she may or may not have left behind?

I dumped her suitcase out on the bed, thinking she’d have killed me if she’d seen how badly her clothes were wrinkled. I shook them all out and set them aside, emptied out her toiletry bag and pawed through the travel-sized bottles and tubes. Nothing unusual there—except that they were there. My mother was fastidious, and yet she had gone off without her wash-bag or a change of clothes. Not even a change of underwear. It was too unlikely. About as unlikely as finding her scavenging trash by the Thames, in fact.

The few souvenirs she’d bought were wrapped in layers of newspaper: a model of Big Ben with an actual clock in the tower, a coffee mug—tea mug?—with a picture of the Queen on it, another commemorating Charles and Camilla’s wedding, a toy double-decker bus and black cab. Had the last two been meant for a friend’s grandchild or a neighbor kid? If so, then she couldn’t have been planning to disappear, at least not all along.

Feeling around the inside pockets of her suitcase, I came up with flyers for various tourist attractions but nothing more. Then I noticed a zipped compartment in the lid.

More brochures advertising bus tours and boat rides, trips to Windsor Castle, LegoLand, and a few amusement parks. I hadn’t noticed her pick any of these up and wondered when she’d done it.

As I shuffled through them, something fell out onto my lap. It looked like a business card except it was made of the same hard plastic as a credit card. On one side, in plain, dark blue letters on white, it said, taxi service: dial 10101 from a designated pay phone.

On the back was only one word, in big black stencil-type lettering: void.

How could you tell which pay phones were designated, I wondered? And what was void—the number? The card? I slipped it into my back pocket.

I went through the brochures more carefully, checking inside each one. Folded into the LegoLand flyer was a map showing part of central London around the Thames. No, I realized, it was only part of a map, a panel that had been carefully torn out, showing the area near the Millennium Bridge. Where I had found my mother originally.

There was nothing else hidden among the rest of the brochures. I checked the zippered compartment in the suitcase again and found one last item, something that looked like an empty checkbook. Except the dark green cover said passes, and the stubs had nothing about transactions or balances carried forward. All of them had been stamped used. All twenty-five of them.

Twenty-five stubs … twenty-five years? There were no dates that I could see, but the stamps varied slightly in size and style, and the first one seemed to have been made a very long time ago. Or maybe I was imagining it.

And that really was all. I searched my own suitcase on the off-chance that she might have hidden something there as well as the carry-on bag (she had insisted we take only one between the two of us, and I should do the carrying, of course) but there was nothing else.

I was putting everything away again when my gaze fell on the digital camera sitting on the desk, and a small voice in my brain said that I hadn’t checked that yet. I picked it up, switched it to photo review, then hesitated.

This would be the twilight-zone moment, I thought, the moment when I clicked through the photos I had taken of her and discovered she was gone out of every single one. After which the police would call to tell me they’d found records saying my mother died twenty-five years ago, was I a practical joker or just mentally ill?

But of course, it wasn’t the twilight-zone moment. My mother was still in all the pictures, looking just as she had when I had taken them. No messages appeared in the viewing window saying error. Or void. Or used.

I shoved the suitcases back into the closet and tucked the map into my pocket with the card.

* * *

The cell phone was making the pay phone rarer, I discovered the next morning when I got up early to go in search of a designated one. There were still plenty of them in tube stations, in the ticket halls, and even on the platforms, where cell phones wouldn’t work. But they were fewer and farther between on the street, and a lot of them didn’t work. Nor did any of them seem to be designated.

I tried talking to the woman behind the Information counter at Oxford Circus tube station; she told me she couldn’t help me with taxis or phones. She did, however, recognize the map portion and happily provided me with a whole one.

If there was no way to identify a designated phone, I decided, then I would try some undesignated phones. But, of course, there was the problem with the number—even adding the prefix for inner or outer London, it was too short. In the Leicester Square ticket hall there was a phone with a screen and keyboard, and I thought I’d found what I needed. I hadn’t.

Finally, I called the operator for help.

“Five-digit numbers are for text messaging from cell phones,” she told me politely. “It’s a different system.”

“But if I can call a cell phone from a regular phone, why can’t I use this number?” I asked.

“Landlines are not equipped with screens for texting, for one thing,” she said. “If you really want to explore this issue, you’ll have to call the service provider.”

“Which service provider?”

“Whoever you get your phone service from. Or I can connect you directly to the service provider for the phone you’re using right now.”

“No, but thanks anyway,” I said, and hung up.

I had a cell phone, rented for the duration of my stay in London. Extending the rental was another expense contributing to the imminent demise of my credit rating.

Now that I thought of it, that made it a kind of pay phone.

No, that was stretching it, I thought as I took the handset out of my shoulder bag and looked at it. My mother had flat out refused to carry one herself. She’d complained that she couldn’t see the buttons or the screen, and she couldn’t figure out how to make a call or even answer one. Portable telecommunications had to be my department. The truth was, I fumbled the thing more often than not myself.

Almost without meaning to, I dialed 10101. Immediately, the message came up: no signal. Feeling foolish, I went up the step to Charing Cross Road and pushed through the ever-present crowd to a quiet spot around a corner near Chinatown.

The screen displayed a cartoon of a telephone sending out waves: ringing. I put the phone to my ear. There was no ringing sound or any other signal, just silence for a few seconds, then suddenly, a woman’s voice.

“That card is void—can’t you read?”

“Yes, I—”

“Also, this account is already in progress,” she added briskly and a bit sternly. “How did you get this number?”

“It says taxi service—”

“Were you actually trying to call a cab?” she asked, sounding slightly incredulous.

“Yes, I’m supposed to meet my mother—”

“The final pickup on this number was outside the British Museum a little over two weeks ago.”

“Yes, I realize that,” I lied, “and I was supposed to be there, but my purse was stolen, and I lost everything.”

“Do you remember your own number?”

“No,” I said sadly. “I know it’s only five digits but I have a bad memory. And lousy eyesight.” I put in a tearful voice-break. “Then my mother called and asked me why I wasn’t where we were supposed to meet—”

“All right, take it easy.” I could hear rapid clicking in the background, fingers on a keyboard. “You say she called you? Are you sure?”

“She’s my mother. I would know.”

More clicking. Then: “I’m sorry, if you’ve lost your card, and you can’t remember the number, I can’t help you there. And this number is void.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I pleaded, trying to sound even more tearful.

There was a long moment of silence, and I was afraid she’d hung up. Then she said, “All right, I’ll give you directions to intercept her trajectory.”

“Her what?”

She didn’t seem to have heard me. “You need to go to the Piccadilly Circus tube station. In the main ticket hall, just inside the barrier, you’ll see the CCTV room. Knock on the door and tell them you couldn’t get a taxi.”

“All right.” I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “Then what?”

“They’ll let you in so you can look at the monitors.”

“The monitors?”

“The closed-circuit TV screens. When you see her, just go down to whatever platform she’s on.”

“Oh,” I said. “And you’re sure she’ll be there?”

“It’s her trajectory. The numbers don’t lie.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, just for the sake of saying anything at all. “Are you in touch with her, by any chance?”

“Oh, no, she’s well out of our range at this point. You shouldn’t have any trouble, though.” Pause. “Unless you’re trying to play me.”

I felt a surge of guilty apprehension. “How do you mean?”

“I think you know.” She chuckled slightly. “Doesn’t matter. If you aren’t, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

That didn’t sound good. “And if I did have something to worry about, what would that be?”

But she had already hung up.

* * *

“I couldn’t get a taxi.”

The gray-haired man at the door stepped back and gestured for me to come in. I hesitated for half a second. The CCTV room was dark, the only light coming from the glow of two rows of monitors stacked one on the other above a long, low desk.

“Thanks,” I said. “They said I should just—”

The man put one hand up and shook his head sharply, then gestured at the side of his head. Now I saw he was wearing an earpiece; tiny lights were blinking on and off.

Sorry, I mouthed, but he was already going back to where he’d been sitting at the far end of the desk. Apparently I was free to do my monitor-checking unsupervised.

I was surprised to see that the image quality varied, from OK to fuzzy. OK wasn’t as good as I would have thought; fuzzy was dismayingly poor. Most were one or the other, with very little in between. If my mother was on one of the fuzzy screens, I thought, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to recognize her.

Starting with the top row, I took a long, hard look at each monitor. As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw there were a few controls just below the screen. I was tempted to fiddle with them to see if I could get a better picture. The man who had let me in was still deeply engrossed in whatever his earpiece was telling him and using a stylus on a handheld computer. He’d probably never notice until later, when he discovered he could actually see something, I thought.

On the other hand, it would be just my luck that I’d only end up making things worse. Maybe he wouldn’t notice that, either, but I decided to restrain myself anyway.

By the time I started on the lower row of monitors, my eyes were watering. Despite that, I could actually tell how the cameras were positioned on the platforms. Occasionally, the image on one of the screens would change suddenly and show a set of escalators for a while, then change back. Great, I thought; my mother could have gotten on a train during one of those transitions, and I’d be giving myself eyestrain for nothing.

And then I saw her, sitting in the middle of a row of plastic seats. She took off her tweed hat and fluffed up her fuzzy silver hair, loosened the scarf at her throat and looked off to her left. Waiting for the next train. I checked the number of the platform and rushed down there.

I couldn’t find her, of course. Maybe a dozen people waited along the length of the platform, and the only person sitting was a tall, fortyish man reading a newspaper.

“Has a train arrived here in the last minute?” I asked him.

He looked up at me with a faintly suspicious expression and shook his head.

“Thanks,” I said, looking around. “Would you mind telling me how long you have been waiting here?”

“Maybe five minutes. I don’t really know.”

“Did you happen to see a little old lady, silver hair, with a cane? She’s wearing a beige raincoat and a tweed hat?”

Frowning, he shook his head again. “Sorry.”

“She’s my mother, and I’ve lost her. She’s kind of confused, so if you do see her, could you call somebody, like one of the transport people here?”

“I would, my train’s here.” He stood up just as I became aware of a rumbling behind me. The train rolled in and stopped; people got on and off while I stood there looking down the platform helplessly. A few moments later, the train pulled out again, and I tried to get a good look through the windows of each carriage.

Trying not to be discouraged, I walked the length of the platform, then crossed over to the other one. There were only three people on that one, none of them old or a woman.

Still trying to look at everyone around me, I went back up to the ticket hall. Maybe I had gone to the wrong platform. Or maybe she had gone to a different platform while I was on my way down there. In which case, she might already have boarded a different train. It was probably pointless to go back into the CCTV room—

No, it wasn’t. The cameras recorded as well as surveilled. I could look at the playback, see where my mother had gone.

As soon as I walked in, however, the man was on his feet and hurrying to show me out again. “Sorry, authorized personnel only,” he said sternly. “And you’re definitely not authorized.”

“There was no problem about me coming in before,” I said, moving one way, then the other, trying to get around him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, we don’t allow anyone except transport employees in here.” He took hold of my upper arm and tried to pull me toward the door.

“I told you I couldn’t get a taxi and you just let me right in.”

“You’re completely mistaken—”

For several moments, we struggled with each other, bumping against the desk, until I managed to twist away from him. He reached for me, and I lunged away from him toward the monitor where I had seen my mother.

She was back on the platform, sitting on the same plastic seat.

“Damn!” I yelled, fighting the man off again as he tried to pull me away. “What did you do, call down to her somehow, warn her?”

“Who?” He almost fell backwards, then caught himself on the desk. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or who.”

He had my left arm; I tried to hang on to the desk with my right, slid down onto the floor, and found a metal support underneath. I wrapped my arm and both legs around that.

“I’m going to have to call the transport police,” he told me, trying to pry me off.

“My mother’s got dementia,” I lied. “She ran away, and I’m trying to get her off the street. Call the transport cops, I’ll get them to play back that camera for me. I want to see where my mother went, where she was hiding.”

The man let go of me. “If I call the transport police in here, I’ll show them the playback from that camera. And then it won’t be your mother they’ll be getting off the street and sectioning for dementia.”

“OK,” I huffed, wondering how a bluff could go both weird and wrong. “You just do that, and we’ll see what happens.”

I heard him let out a long breath. “You don’t have clue one, do you?” He sounded as if he pitied me. “All right, tell you what—I’ll show you the playback right now. After you see it, you can decide what you want to do.” He reached down and took my arm gently. “Here, get up and have a proper seat.”

He helped me up and sat me down in a chair in front of the monitor.

The playback didn’t last long. It hadn’t taken me much time to get down to the platform where my mother was sitting. I appeared on camera, looked around, then walked out of the frame. I reappeared a few seconds after the train arrived, although only my head was visible, turning around one way and another, trying to see everyone at once getting on and off the train before it pulled out again. I watched myself stand looking after it before walking away, out of camera range again, to search the rest of the platform as well as the one opposite. And all the while my mother sat quietly, observing everything I did, never moving from her seat.

After watching me go, she turned and looked up at the camera. The expression on her face was unreadable; I don’t think it was because of the lousy resolution.

“It’s a trick,” I said. “You digitized that—”

“Oh, please,” he said, standing behind me. “The pixels are the size of baby teeth. I couldn’t fool with that even if I wanted to. And why would I anyway? I don’t know you.” Pause. “Or I didn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, feeling my hackles rise.

“You lied. I suppose I should have known all along, but it’s been known to happen.”

“What is?”

“Someone missing their taxi and needing interpolation.” He reached forward and touched a control; the screen switched back to real time. “You, however, aren’t one of them. Off you go now.” He pulled me out of the chair and ushered me to the door. “Unless you want the transport police to see you looking directly at the woman you claim you can’t find. Start arguing with them, and you’ll find yourself sectioned before you know it. They don’t take chances with anyone who could be a terrorist. Which is anyone, full stop.”

“Wait, please,” I said, hanging on to the doorjamb the way I had at the police station. “Can’t you at least tell me what’s going on? What’s my mother doing?”

The man shrugged. “Whatever she wants, I suppose. She’s used up her passes and decided to take the last one, which is not a return.”

“Twenty-five passes, twenty-five years,” I said, more to myself than to him.

“That many.” He chuckled slightly. “Peripatetic old girl, was she?”

“No, she wasn’t,” I said. “She never went anywhere. I’d have noticed.”

“Ah, it was like that, was it?”

“Like what?”

He chuckled again. “You didn’t notice. No wonder she decided to use the last one.” He pried me out of the doorway. “Now, it’s time for you to be moving on.”

“But my mother—”

“Hop it,” he said, his voice stern again.

I was still trying to protest when he shut the door in my face.

* * *

“I don’t know if you’re actually still here,” I said quietly to the empty plastic seat on my right. “Or if I’ve just lost my mind. I’d just like to know what this was—is—all about. The passes. Picking trash by the Thames. Having the cops take me away. None of it makes any sense. You’re my mother. We always had a good relationship. I thought, anyway.”

Abruptly, a hefty kid in baggy jeans and a hoody plopped down in the seat. I gasped, but he didn’t hear me over the rhythmic noises coming out of his earphones. Well, I could probably take that as a sign, I thought, and glanced at the kid again. He was nodding along to the beat. I started to get up, and he caught my arm.

“Here,” he said, holding his left earphone out to me. “It’s a major choon, you’ll like it.” When I hesitated, he plugged the thing into my ear himself.

The rhythmic noise faded down suddenly, and I heard a familiar voice say, “Hey, I’m sorry, kid, but when you get offered an alternative to going painfully and feebly into that less-than-good night, you’ll pick up trash by the Thames, too, if that’s what it takes. If you get offered. I’ll try to put in a good word for you. Now go—”

Abruptly the music came up hard and loud, and I yanked the earphone out by the wire.

“See? Major, innit?” The kid smiled and tucked it back into his own ear.

I thanked him and left.

I was about to go through the ticket barrier when I noticed a few CCTV monitors hanging overhead. Odd place for them, I thought, especially when they had a whole room of them. Even odder, the images on them were backwards—people walking right to left were shown left to right. What was the point of that?

I waved one arm to see if I were anywhere near a camera and spotted my hand moving up and down on one of the screens. With everything backwards, it took a few moments to maneuver myself into the right position to appear on the screen. Then I stood there, staring up at my image. I looked a little silly. Like, say, a yokel who didn’t travel much and had never seen anything so advanced as closed-circuit TV that showed everything backwards.

After a minute, my mother still hadn’t appeared behind me. She had probably caught her train. Her trajectory. The numbers didn’t lie, or so I’d been told.

On the screen, a large swarm of people flowed past behind me to the down escalator and immediately hit a bottleneck. I turned away from the monitor to look and saw a group only half the size of that on the monitor, some in a hurry to walk down rather than simply stand and ride.

I looked back at the monitor. Definitely a much larger crowd.

Every day people go missing. It’s a surveillance society; in a city the size of London, a person might appear on camera up to sixty times a day, even a missing person. And then after a while—

I sighed. “OK, but I still don’t understand what picking trash by the Thames has to do with it.”

A woman about to pass me stopped suddenly. “That’s mudlarking. And pardon me, love, but you’ve picked a very bad place to stand, you’re blocking the way.”

“Thanks,” I said. But I stood there for a full count to thirty before I moved.

Back | Next

Framed

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Contents

Soul Survivor

Written by Matthew Joseph Harrington

Illustrated by Bob Greyvenstein

I

CIV

Kevin Ridler was in the habit of making his own entertainment. To this end he wore small hinges under his clothing in tactical locations. (The word “strategic” would be incorrect. This was applied direct action against a target.) As they had been lubricated in the factory, he had washed them in lanolin, then detergent, and dried and reassembled them. They squeaked, very faintly, when he moved. Nobody ever mentioned it in his hearing.

In fact, the artificial joints and cultured cartilage in the right side of his body worked a good deal more smoothly than the makeshift apparatus evolution had installed on the left. (If the thought of further surgery hadn’t given him clenched hair, he’d have had those replaced as well. They ached a lot of the time.) However, while the presence of the implants was widely known, their quality was not. People were disturbed, and developed elaborately artificial behavior in trying not to show it.

Hence the entertainment.

* * *

The town was named Paxburg, and everyone in it who was old enough to have belonged to a political party had been a Republican. (Prohibition had been the last really prosperous time the town had known, and there had always been an unvoiced conviction that the Democrats had ended it just to louse them up—no credit being given them for starting it in the first place, of course.) Such unanimity colored their views even now. Ridler was a veteran, and a disabled one at that; this entitled him to somewhat better treatment than visiting royalty deserved—though given some of King Andrew’s antics following the Denver summit, this could be a broad range.

As may be; the Lost Division was a battle standard, and the Sole Survivor was its totem.

There were three standard questions everyone had, once he was back among civilians:

“What was it like in Katanga?”

“Does it hurt?”

“Did you kill anyone?”

Hot.

Seldom.

Probably.

In Paxburg there was, occasionally, a fourth:

“Where exactly were you hit?”

I wasn’t, lady. I was sleeping under a tank when the People’s Reform Movement tested their bomb on us, and it slid off one row of treads, and everything right of a line from my shoulder arch to the crook of my heel was squeezed into a gap 2 7/8 inches thick. All the scars you see are from surgery.

Go find somebody else, lady.

* * *

He arrived on April 28, and had four days to settle in before the city council met on Friday. During that time he bought some 5c and 10c pipe, 10c pipe caps, 10/5 joints, a maxitool, mousetraps, starter’s pistols, wire, blasting putty, primers, blank cartridges, and a shell loader. On due consideration he also bought a sack of quicklime, and every gumdrop in town. His rental included a garage, and he worked with his purchases there.

The council met in the morning. There wasn’t a great deal for it to do, nor income to do it with, nor inclination to find anything; there were still plenty of people around who recalled what an appalling situation they’d gotten into when government was a profession.

The big issue of the morning was a proposal to extend the law that protected stray cats to include stray dogs. It got very heated, especially after it was pointed out that cats were protected because they kill rodents and birds, and thus decrease food losses, but dogs instinctively kill anything they chase—cats, for instance. The councilors put their heads together after an hour of noise, and presently the mayor announced that Paxburg was not going to start fining people for shooting dogs on their own land, even if the dogs were enticed in some way. Dogs could be dangerous, but the worst a cat ever got was obnoxious.

One prodog campaigner reached in his handbag and got out a little spray can, and Kevin snatched up an ashtray, held it like a shuriken, and yelled “Freeze!” When the man looked at him, Kevin said quietly, “It’ll punch right into your brain. You like baby food?”

The sergeant at arms relieved the man of his surprise, which was a reusable fogger charged with butyl mercaptan—oil of skunk. He was arrested and his insurer notified. (The s/a also asked Kevin if he would be interested in a training post with the town militia, but he declined for lack of time.)

When the call came for other business, he rose again and went to the lectern. “My name is Kevin Ridler,” he said. “One ‘d.’” (This got a mild chuckle. These people were hardly likely not to know his name.) “I’d like to buy the box valley property from the township.”

The mayor looked startled. “Do we own it?”

“Paxburg’s property tax assessor confiscated it in 1986,” the secretary told her. “It’s a white elephant. Good thing for the taxman, too, ‘cause the last owner had a hell of an arsenal. Nobody claimed it during refranchisement.” People were looking at him. “Hey, I’ve been town secretary a long time; it’s a dull job, I read the records,” he said.

“I’ve budgeted ten million for it,” Kevin said, regaining the spotlight. Somebody whistled, as well they might: It came to over a kilo of real money, i.e. bred thorium, and one gram would buy twenty pounds of prime strip steak.

The council put their heads together again, then the mayor said, “Might we know who your insurer is?”

Kevin snorted. “Lloyd’s. Who else?”

“Oh, of course. No problem, then. The sense of the meeting is that for reasons involving patriotism, and in my case fear of Purgatory, we should ask two million.”

“Deal.”

“Not yet. You do know the place needs a lot of work and is pretty well stripped?”

“I’ve seen it. It looks like a full plate. I like working with my hands.”

“Uh—yes. Let’s see, we’ll need a bill of sale…”

“There’s some refranchisement forms still in the blue file cabinet,” the secretary supplied. “I noticed them when we were doing the water thing.”

“Oh good.”

There ensued some discussion of what to do with the money, and they decided to invest in the county electric plant and distribute the income as college scholarships. Somebody suggested using part for small-business loans, but another councilor replied, “They’ll come back if they liked it here,” and that settled that.

* * *

Kevin set up his camper in the driveway and his drafting table in the lobby. There were no intact windows, and the walls inside and out were heavily graffitied, mostly unoriginally. There were two exceptions: along the interior wall of one meeting hall were the words arbeit macht stadtluft, which struck him as funny all over again whenever he saw them; and on the back wall of the main lobby, just where you were facing as you walked in, was the syllable civ, alone and enigmatic. He wondered what someone had meant to write, and why they stopped.

Kevin laid out his traps and baited them, then put on the end caps. With the caps on they looked like giant empty rifle shells. Inside each was the mechanism of a starter’s pistol, wired to a mousetrap spring, the trap being disarmed and baited with a gumdrop. The blank shell held a little lump of blasting putty. If the gumdrop was moved, the putty was detonated, and the reverberating shock wave inside the pipe damn near liquefied the rat or mouse that had set it off.

(Eighteen hours wedged under a tank had given him a thoroughly individual perspective on scavenging rodents. He’d given his ratkillers considerable thought—how to keep a kitten out, for instance—and had also hit upon the happy idea of making the 10c pipes different lengths, so he’d know which to reset by the tone.)

He began work by measuring rooms, a good way to work out the thickness of walls without perforating them further. The drafting table was so he could work out the gaps, of which there were sure to be some. False walls are added, closets are wallpapered over, cellars of Amontillado are bricked up. He measured three walls and two diagonals, which gave him the fourth wall and the corner angles. Door, hinge to corner, and measure the hall and record doors Saturday or Sunday.

Half the rooms in the hallway he checked that night had fireplaces, and the wall between a room with a fireplace and a room without was of poorer construction. This would date from the boarding-school period: Rooms for students had been made by cutting the quarters of the most menial servants in half. Kevin had spent three weeks in a boarding school before managing to get kicked out, and for a while he wondered why they hadn’t bricked up the fireplaces. Later he saw some mortar stuck to one, and realized: They had. Some later owner had reopened the fireplaces but kept the staff in half-sized rooms. Probably the heatless ones were storage.

The walls were pretty thick: Additional layers had been added to allow the passage of electrical wiring. In most places it was still there, too hard to get at. All sockets and fixtures were gone, but there must have been miles of heavy single-strand copper.

After he got to the end of the hall, he came back to the lobby, recopied the room measurements in proper orientation, and added to his already-extensive shopping list:

CRUCIBLES, 2

ALUMINUM, 325 KG

FIRECLAY, 1 TON

SPOOL W/CRANK

DRAWING BENCH

OHMMETER—m

ANNEALING TORCH

WRAPPING SPOOL

CELLULOSE, FLAT, 5MM X 20KM

DIP ROLLERS & POT, GLASS

ACRYLIC ANHYDRIDE, 400 L

He also increased the amount noted by an earlier item, SO_3, and scratched out his note for wiring. He’d make his own milspec AlCu.

He meant to have a reasonable industrial infrastructure worked up by the time the building was fixed. That was what every previous owner had forgotten, and the only thing Marx had gotten right: All wealth is production. The Ridlers had been a clan of lawyers, and this fundamental truth had been driven home cruelly in the Triple Crash. (The only places that had ever prospered without a massive industrial base had been those like the Caymans, which offered an increase in net wealth by concealing property from those whose business was seizing it from its makers and taking small fees for the service.)

The light was going, so he switched on his hard-hat lamp and went out with a zoom camera to spot some of the cabins before sunset. There were supposed to be twenty-eight; he located four, and took quick snaps of three. With the fourth he started having trouble with focus and was forced to go up the draw and stand right there to shoot it. As long as he was there, he snapped the surroundings and interior by the miner’s lamp, using up the rest of the roll in the night.

Saturday morning he developed it and found several negatives fogged. “Good Lord, thorium?” he said aloud, facetiously, and blew them up to puzzle out their locations. Some jokes are true, after all.

The first shot of the cabin had seven characters across it, like a license plate:

321t2uz

Kevin frowned. He’d seen no such thing, and it was big enough to spot, and he’d opened the roll fresh right here.

Another shot showed a darker area on one of the large rockfalls in the draw. There was nothing between his lamp and the subject to cast a shadow there.

One of the interior shots showed the dirt floor—just as level—too high. There was half a course of bricks obscured along the hearth, which were fully visible in the other shots. The floor in that shot had a dark area across most of it.

In another, there was a gap in the bricks under one end of the hearth—one that didn’t exist; he’d stood on those “missing” bricks getting a shot out the door.

A fifth picture was that very shot, and it showed a dark shape across the threshold, just this side of the moonlight shadow of the eaves over the door.

The moon had not been high in the sky—in spring, in temperate climates, it is never high in the sky after sunset. Its path would have been barely above the southern horizon. It could not have made that shadow.

Kevin switched on the repeater in his camper, then took phone, pick, shovel, and provisions up to the cabin.

* * *

Around 3:00 p.m., he pulled up in front of the town marshal’s office. He went in carrying a bundle of plastic bags.

The marshal, who was the council s/a naturally enough, said, “Afternoon, Mr. Ridler. How can I help you?”

“I was hoping to get a fingerprint run down. Damn FBI site isn’t compatible with my scanner, or says it isn’t. Looks like a thumb. I’ve got some good photos.” Kevin unwrapped his parcel to reveal a vintage KA-BAR. It was rusted slightly on one face; on the other, just above the hilt, was a perfect print, in dust cemented by blood. “The first few are in situ. I’ve been webbed up for about two hours. In late November of 1979, Todd Whitney and Steven Ardmore shared a cabin at the Isolation Training Camp. Ardmore said Whitney went hunting and didn’t return, and there was a big search. The inventory number on this matches the one Ardmore was issued; the one he turned in was Whitney’s. I’ve found the body.”

* * *

Sunday was a busy day, but he didn’t get any work done. Kevin cleared up the question of motive while inspecting the hearth—on the far end from what the picture showed; he’d flopped the negative. (Not that anybody else got to see those pictures.) There were four brittle plastic bags behind the bricks, which had been epoxied back into place. The contents proved to be a good grade of refined cocaine. Medically, it was worth at least a hundred grams BT or so; when it was contraband, it could have bought the county.

Ardmore was arrested Monday morning at a board meeting. He had a stroke on the spot but was in good shape for a man pushing eighty. His attorney was quoted as calling the evidence “flimsy”; with any luck the sonofabitch would be acquitted and spend the next ten years in a diaper.

Monday Kevin spent getting things on his shopping list, stressing that the tarps must come first, then the prefab hangar, then the work vehicles, and only then the supplies. A forensic team spent the day unearthing the slit trench where the bloodied floor dirt from the cabin had been laboriously dumped. The draw’s drainage ran right past the trench; the greenery Kevin had stood in while trying to focus on the cabin Friday had been fertilized with Whitney’s blood.

After the cops had gone home for the night, he got out his photos again, held one before a mirror, sighed, and shook his head. He’d heard stories about MBAs.

He took his camera and a folding chair up to the cabin after dinner.

The trouble is, he thought, I’m so used to getting the creeps without warning that I can’t tell if it’s me or not. “‘Justice’ is spelled with a ‘c,’ not a second ‘s,’” he said, once he was settled. He waited. There had been no telltale sounds the first time, either. “Ardmore was arrested this morning. He had a stroke when they took him in. He’s paralyzed.” More silence. “His lawyers may be able to confuse the jury. If so, his business can afford outstanding medical care. He may be paralyzed for a long time.”

Abruptly, a cricket began to chirp. More joined in. There had been none a moment before, and none Friday.

Kevin nodded, stood, folded his chair, and took a couple of photos, and something went plink! on his hard hat.

There was a little brown-brass key on the floor; it had a splinter of wood still adhering to it, from where it had been stuck to the cabin’s rafter. When Kevin picked it up, he read the number 07738. The other side, very fine, read banque de luxembourg.

Kevin looked at it a while, turning it back and forth between his fingers; then he said, very softly, “You’re welcome.”

* * *

When he went into the lobby to put the chair back at the drafting table, he had an immediate sense that something had been moved. He hit the floods.

Everything was in its customary state of high entropy. He inspected the ceiling and the hall mouths, then did a slow walk around the room. Nothing missing. Nothing added. Nothing misplaced. He came back to the doorway and stared, unseeing, at the opposite wall for a good two minutes before its content registered on his brain:

CIII

Still spray-painted on.

He went over to it. Same paint. What in the world—?

His eyes widened, he jerked forward as if struck in the belly, he looked all around him wildly for a moment; then his shoulders slumped, he clutched his head, and in a tone of incomparable dismay he said, “Oh, fuuuuck!”

It wasn’t the beginning of a word.

It was a Roman numeral.

Evidently the long-term tenants kept a census.

Kevin Ridler staggered off to bed.

A few minutes later, after some false starts, the floodlights were switched off behind him.

II

FIRST, DO NO HARM

Kevin shambled out of bed when he heard the first truck, wanting to keep it from honking. He wore camouflage-colored pajamas, and it took the eye a moment to register that the blobs were teddy bears, of various sizes, at assorted angles—wearing ammo bandoliers.

The driver and assistant were sitting in the unmoving cab, gazing openmouthed at the main facade. Kevin looked at it, then faced the truck again and waved his arms.

They came to and got out of the truck. “Nice-looking girl,” the driver said. “What’s her name?”

“Beats me. I’m a hermit. She’s either a squatter or a ghost.”

The assistant spoke up. “I never hearda no ghost mooning nobody.”

The ensuing silence was profound. Finally, Kevin said, “What window?”

“Third floor,” the driver said, frowning as he tried to figure out what was wrong with the pajamas. “By a balcony.” He visibly shook himself out of it, and said, “We got tarps and an Acme Instant Shelter. You want—”

BWOWpweeew!

“What was that?” they both screamed from where they’d hit the dirt.

As he had planned for over two years, Kevin said, “Mice.”

He made his own entertainment.

* * *

The tarps were laid under the shelter around the pond, and the hangar shell was laid at the end of their arc, like the point on a question mark. The truckers laid the net, and Kevin fired the spikes—as a sapper he’d had a nice touch—and as the shell filled with carbon monoxide, the driver explained, earnestly and unnecessarily, “You gotta wait ‘til it goes limp again before you run in the methanol-styrene mix. Otherwise, it could pop. After you do that, it’ll get baggy in maybe an hour, then it’s safe to put in the dimelcet—the dimo—”

“Diaminoacetylene.”

“Yeah, the orange bottle—you done this before?”

“In Katanga.”

The driver slapped himself on the forehead. “Ridler! I even read about you in Leading Edge. Oh Christ, I never even thought about rats. I’m sorry I just said that.”

“It’s ace.”

“Mm, well, thanks. You ought to patent those.”

Kevin shook his head. “There’s already some related patents. And no manufacturing market. The most it ever kills is two—strictly an entertainment device. And it’s more fun to build your own,” he added seriously.

“Yeah, okay,” the driver mused. They watched the bulge grow to its full size, fifteen by forty meters; then the driver said, “Whatcha puttin’ in there?”

“Bulldozer, cherry picker, dynamo, couple of trucks, backhoe, cement mixer, fuel converter, bunch of assorted whatnot.”

“Whatcha makin’ this place?”

“A city.”

“No shit. All on your own?”

“Until I’ve got housing for people, yeah.”

* * *

After he gave the receipt and watched them go, Kevin labored up the steps to what had been the master’s suite, headmaster’s quarters, penthouse, and so on, and there announced: “Hello! Please do not roast the driver’s brain until the vehicle has come to a complete stop! Large holes in the building will reduce the time I can devote to everybody’s problem!”

The air, a little dusty, became still and clear. Something brushed his head and shoulders, and touched him faintly; he felt a touch on the left side of his jawline. He looked down and tried to focus short, and there was a region of distortion, as if the air were denser—

The dust stirred up again. There was nothing in front of him. “Thanks,” he said quietly, and started thinking about what had just happened.

Another truck hove into distant view. “That’ll be the generator.” He sighed and headed back to the stairs. (Down was in fact harder than up.)

* * *

Deliveries continued all week, allowing him little time for reflection. He measured and recorded every room on every level and found scores of dead spaces. So to speak.

He peeled the walls with spall charges to get the wiring out—the lath and plaster were like armor; no wonder nobody’d ever tried it by hand!—and found lots of closures. He opened these, and now and then found bodies, or rather skeletons.

He opened everything, including a luggage room (with no bodies in it), before calling for assistance. There were eleven bodies. Eight were children’s. One (adult) was in an enormous cellar he hadn’t even known was there until he exposed the stairway. (It held an immense number of wine bottles; the latest date he saw was 1864.)

By then he had the records of the place and was scanning them page by page into a data file. The arrivals of priest, rabbi, ministers, and coroner (who had had to come together in a rented truck) didn’t disturb this a lot.

The news eaters did. They rolled into the valley like oranges, having apparently learned nothing back in ‘19.

Kevin refreshed their memories.

* * *

The first six gas grenades went up the draw to the cabin. They were canisters of EP gas, a “humane” weapon the UN had used in Katanga before America had begun cleaning up their usual mess. EP stood for Extreme Peristalsis. (In the Army they’d been known as rocket igniters. Everything from the back of your throat on down ended up in your pants, quite soon.)

Kevin limped more than he had to coming out the door, gas mask in left hand, belt launcher in right, and said, “Tomonaga, Sarasvati, et alia, versus CBS, 2019. You make recordings that are usable as evidence in court. Let’s see your search warrants.” After a moment of silence, he said, “You are here on a criminal enterprise. Every tape, disk, and crystal in your possession goes in a big pile, and then you check each other. One holdout, and everybody hoses the ground for a week.” (EP gas actually didn’t work for more than half a minute or so, followed by a period of tolerance for a few hours; Kevin didn’t think they really had to know that, though.) There was one camera with a red light. Kevin perched the gas mask on his head, drew the long-barreled .223 from the back of his belt, and said in a declamatory voice: “‘The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …’” Then he put a round through the lens, bursting the camera—the pistol being one he’d taken off a death-squad cop in Katanga, and which fired rifle bullets. “Your right to poke your nose around ends at my fist,” he reminded them over the sudden bustle of compliance.

Everybody frisked everybody else. (Interestingly, some of them had clearly had some experience at it.) One man who bolted for his truck and tried to start it was caught and severely beaten by several others, who were evidently less worried about lawsuits than about their dignity, their clothes, or both. When the horrified and humiliated crews from the draw showed up, bodies and clothes wet from cleaning up in the stream, their recordings joined the rest.

Kevin told the latecomers, “It’s my guess you wet people aren’t stupid anymore. The rest of you, strip and back off. Your clothes are going to be searched.”

Compliance with this was slower and more sullen, but complete. A couple of crystals got tossed anonymously onto the pile. Kevin noticed one TV hotshot crying, but had no sympathy after the coverage he’d seen on Katanga—in point of fact, he had to strain to resist the temptation to haul her in front of the rest, and demand, “How do you feel?” (This, he judged, was the difference between mercilessness and cruelty.)

The wet people, who were also terribly hungry, searched the clothes and parcels very briskly.

“When you hear your name called, come take your clothes.” He went through wallets, calling out one at a time. One woman had four assorted emerald cards, all labeled demassi industries, and when Gennifer Queen showed up, Kevin said quietly, “Weekly Galaxy?”

She flinched, and nodded, looking scared.

“Drag your feet leaving and tell your people to hang around. You can have an interview.”

She stared, astonished, but nodded again and retreated with her clothes.

Supermarket-tabloid coverage might be just what was needed to get the rest of the media to leave him alone.

* * *

Of course the vehicle left behind was the unmarked panel truck. When the rest had left, Kevin said, “Go on into the lobby and pull up some debris. I’ve got to take care of these.”

“Need a light?” asked an incredibly muscular man.

“No, I’m going to look them over and send them back,” Kevin told him. “Suitably erased.”

“We’ll tie ‘em up in my jacket,” the big guy said. His name was Horace Delp. “Could be some good stuff in there. You got a second maxicorder?”

“I’ve got four. One of my recreations is editing commercials.”

“Why?”

“I’ll show you some.”

* * *

Gennifer Queen was the nominal reporter. Horace Delp was the graverobber—their remarkably frank term for a background researcher. Alice Byerly did diversions, and Robin Bloom was the photographer. All four laughed, more than was necessary to be merely polite, at his highly irregular productions.

Example:

Grave woman with ultraconservative ram’s-horn hairdo: “Another presidential election is coming up, and voters all have one question for Don Yates.”

Animated giant with armor and spiked helmet: “WHERE IS THE MADNESS WITH WHICH YOU SHOULD BE CLEANSED?”

Man dressed in a pig suit: “Come on down to Hamm’s Toyota and see for yourself!”

President Yates, with his jes’-folks smile: “That’s all I ask.”

Kevin had a dozen of these things completed and had interleaved them through the pilot episode of Star Trek: Secession. They did something for the plot.

After everyone got back from using the bathroom in Kevin’s camper, Kevin said, “The Galaxy is my favorite paper.”

“Why?” Robin said, in honest puzzlement.

Kevin smiled at him, and said, “I was in the Army in Katanga. All journalism is bullshit in a colorful package, and its purpose is to sell beer. You just don’t make no bones about it. And it’s a fun paper. I had a torturer who—sorry, that’s what we called the physical therapists at the VA—she used to read to me out of the Galaxy. No matter how pissed I was, she always got a laugh.

“Okay, here’s how I propose we do this: First, I tell you what’s going on; then we cook up a story you like; then I tell you that story. You can pose me for reaction shots, too, if it’ll help.

“Now. The place is haunted. Thickly. I was led to the first body by a ghost …”

* * *

He finished leading them around the place a couple of hours later. “They said she was in that window,” he pointed out. Robin took a picture. “I went up and asked her not to make trucks crash into the house, and this was apparently agreeable. You want to use my darkroom?”

“Got one in the truck. Fuji Lightning. Want a look?”

“Used to have one. It squeaked.”

“You gotta keep the hypo out of the bearings,” Robin said helpfully.

“It squeaked new. I have a thing about things that squeak.”

The four discussed a possible story while Robin developed his photos. They’d worked out a pretty good one (about a secret society of unregenerate slave owners who still kept slaves and killed anyone who found out) by the time Robin came back in. He had the most peculiar expression—rather as if he’d bitten into a peach, and it tasted like steak. “Have a look at this,” he said, and handed over an enlargement.

It was of the window—good lens, Kevin thought—and showed a woman bundled up like a Moslem’s property. Only her eyes were visible. Kevin laughed. “Quite a sense of humor.”

“How was it done?” Robin cried. “There was nothing there!”

“Beats the freckles off me. Maybe it was an image aimed only at the lens.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they tell you this stuff when you die.”

“They who?”

“You know, they. The ones who know everything and tell only each other. Dead Men In Black, or something.”

* * *

Much later, near sunset, Alice asked him, “How could you afford all this?”

Everybody stared at her. “I was the last survivor of the Eighth Division, in Katanga,” Kevin said.

“Is that in Africa?”

Kevin nodded slowly, then said, “What, exactly, is your function, in connection with this news outlet?”

In a single, swift, two-handed motion, Alice tore her shirt clean off and tossed it at him, and when he caught it she screamed like a chain saw hitting a nail.

Then she got a new shirt out of her bag and put it on. “Diversions,” she said. “You were saying how you got rich.”

Kevin was still blinking rapidly, but he said, “Ever hear of GI insurance?”

“No.”

“Used to be when you joined the armed forces, you were automatically insured, for a lump sum to be paid to whoever you designated if you died in the service. We—”

* * *

“Why?” she said, baffled.

“It got started around World War II. Back then it was ten thousand dollars—real money, enough to live on for like four years. It had gone up, but it came to about a week’s pay when I was in, and one guy got the idea of naming every surviving member of the division as his beneficiaries, so everybody would get this tiny pile of change each. The cost of doing the fund transfer to add it to our paychecks came to more than that. He was the kind of guy whose idea of how to complain about inadequate safety standards was to set the building on fire. He figured to drive the Veterans’ Administration nuts—they were in charge of the insurance, and they’d get fed up and do something, like maybe provide a sensible policy amount. So he did that, and he told his buddies, and it caught on, and we all did it, and the Eighth got nuked in Katanga while I was sacked out under a tank, and when I got out of the hospital I was handed a check for twelve thousand insurance benefits, less one. Next question?”

Gennifer said, “Are you married?” and got a laugh in which Kevin did not participate. The laugh died out.

Kevin said, softly, gently, “I had a sixty-one-ton tank not quite sitting on me for just over eighteen hours. It took the medics that long to get enough chelating enzyme sent from North Carolina to keep the potassium from the ruptured cells from roasting my heart. During that time my blood was forced into the uncompressed parts of my body. I was awake and hyperalert the whole time. Most of the repair work done on me was embryonic tissue grafts, everywhere. I had a huge erection throughout the experience. I haven’t had one since. The pressure damage is fixed, I just go into a panic attack whenever I start to get one. Conditioned response.”

After a little while, Robin said, “The mice. Eating.”

“Oh yes. It made a perceptible noise.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Alice, who managed to get outside before she threw up.

“I think,” Horace said, “if that got out, every hot-twat gold digger in the world would be here, trying to ‘cure’ you, in about a week.”

“No,” Kevin said. “The corpses of the first thousand would block the road.” His voice was like an early hint of winter.

* * *

On the way out of the lobby, Gennifer pointed, squeaked, and staggered. Kevin propped her up and looked.

XCV

“Eight,” Kevin said thoughtfully. “At a guess, the boys from the boarding school days liked the slave-owner story. Must have spoken to their condition.”

“They’re real,” said Gennifer, in a voice approaching ultrasonics.

“I know,” Kevin said.

“Aren’t you at all scared?”

“There’s never been an authenticated case of a ghost harming anybody,” Kevin said.

“They said that in The Haunting of Hill House,” Alice said darkly.

“Well, the ghost didn’t hurt anybody,” Kevin pointed out. “I don’t see how they can.”

“Maybe when it happens no witnesses get out,” Alice persisted.

“Maybe you should invest in a crucifix.” Horace grinned.

“That’s vampires,” Robin objected.

“Can’t hurt,” said Horace.

“That’s chicken soup,” said Kevin.

* * *

From the seized material he erased only those things that included the valley or Paxburg. Crystals he replaced with blanks, in a couple of cases copying onto those the unrelated matters on the originals. It was tedious, but they were indelible. He noticed some other things that looked as if they might be interesting, but they’d have to wait.

Kevin set up blacklights in the cellar to kill the mildew. These weren’t mercury lamps, but tuned-crystal emitters, radiating at two hundred nanometers. The light came out polarized, vertically.

Some of the mildew fluoresced.

So did the ghost.

He’d starved to death. That was what the coroner had said, but Kevin had not, he found, fully grasped it. He did now.

There was a vague suggestion of a suit, but it hung like a bag over bones. He looked like he’d just gotten out of Auschwitz or a Schick center or something.

Don’t shoot.

“Okay.”

I’ll come peacefully.

“I’m not a cop. Why were you down here?”

Conscription. I’ve family in Arkansas.

“Oh. Well, for what comfort it gives you, the Supreme Court ruled conscription unconstitutional.”

Oh, God, I’m free! Have you got anything to eat?

He had some jerky in a shirt pocket. “I don’t know if this’ll do any good, but here.” He held it out. “I’m Kevin.”

Jerome. His hand passed through the jerky. What is this stuff?

“Beef jerky. I was afraid of this. Jerome, you’re dead.”

I can’t be. I’m hungry.

“You starved to death. At least 172 years ago.”

LIAR! Jerome grabbed his left arm.

It went dead. Instantly. Kevin’s heart began racing, and his knees went weak. “Jerome, let go,” he gasped.

You liar, a dead man can’t hold your arm, you’re tormenting me because I won’t go die for some niggers—Jerome was firming up considerably in both opacity and bulk, and his “voice” was developing some Ivy League overtones.

It occurred to Kevin that he could touch what could touch him—but it would have to be very sudden; and did ghosts have bones and pressure points?

He drove his right index finger into Jerome’s left eye, up to the knuckle.

He would never be able to describe, or even clearly recall, that scream.

He would never entirely stop recalling the thunderbolt that followed it. It kicked him off his feet, driving him clean through the wine rack to his left and into the next one. Fortunately, the bottles were empty, so he merely got scratched and cut instead of hammered to a pulp.

Sensation returned to his left arm and was not made to feel welcome. It felt like he’d soaked it in ice water for a really idiotically long time. The pain ran right down into the bone and started doing laps.

There was a stunned feeling along his right side. The shock had traveled up his finger, hand, arm, and shoulder, down his ribs, through the substrate mesh, into his hip, and straight down his leg into the floor. He could tell, because he could feel all those several and combined parts quivering at once.

He suddenly recalled the situation, and sat up. There was no sign of Jerome.

Kevin forced himself to his feet, left arm hanging limp. His right bootheel fell off. He’d pissed himself. He turned toward the stairs, aware of a sharp tang of ozone with a dash of scorched hair.

There was a broad, cloudy mass before the stairs. A figure detached itself from it, came up to about twenty feet, and stopped.

Kevin had also stopped, and his hands began to throb, each in its own distinct way.

The figure focused itself from a pale blob into something vaguely feminine. I hid him. He killed me. Then he starved. Then he killed them. He kept us here. We had to help him. Now we can go. Thank you. And she curtsied.

Kevin managed to sketch out something like a bow. “Glad to do it. Good luck.”

And to you, sir. She dispersed and faded, like fog in the sun. The rest were gone when she was.

Kevin hobbled upstairs and through the lobby, where the mark now read lxxviii (so: Jerome had killed sixteen people—at least sixteen, enslaving that many), and went into his camper.

He peeled his boot off—the laces crumbled—and after inspecting his foot decided he wouldn’t lose the toenails. He finished undressing, stumbled into the bathroom, and leaped back out before he realized it was his reflection that had startled him.

He was sunburnt; his eyes were now baby blue; and his hair had gone white as chalk.

Eyebrows, lashes, body hair, everything.

Every mole he had was charred black.

* * *

Kevin stayed out of the sun for about three weeks, by which time his skin had its pigment back. His follicles didn’t, however; nor did his irises, and his eyes became even more sensitive than they’d been after the retinal grafts.

He spent the time wearing shades and making wire: 65 kilos aluminum per 153 kilos copper, melt, blend, extrude, and draw. No pickling or blasting required: a thin layer of oxide crumbled off as it drew, leaving copper atoms exposed, suitable for soldering. And you could practically anneal it with a match.

New insulation he made from cellulose, acrylic anhydride, and sulfuric acid. The hot-wire he ran through black latex paint before the polymerizer dip.

Then he went in to tear down the paneling, which had been under the wiring and lath, which had been under the latest internal facade. He started in the master suite, on the hypothesis that any crud he dropped or tracked around would only have to be cleaned once that way.

On the third wall he hit he found a remarkable collection of extremely explicit photographs. The woman in each was the same one; the man (or sometimes men) varied. Curious, he peeled the rest of the wall very carefully.

There were 306, in a layout nine high by thirty-four long, interrupted by a hallway. They covered most of the wall. They were yellowed, but not cracked or wrinkled, and they were stuck to that wall. Somebody had known the condensed-milk trick.

In none was the woman completely nude. Sometimes it was only stockings, heels, handcuffs, and blindfold, but she always wore something. She was blond, pretty, and stacked like gold bricks, and in a Cleopatra costume she looked a little like Jean Harlow.

The photos had all been taken in this room, about—He frowned. About from where the opposite wall was. Facing the other way? No, there was the window. Hmm.

Damned if there wasn’t a walk-in closet on the other side of that section. That called for a chat.

It was June 21; he had plenty of daylight left to bring up a chair, a coffeepot, an ashtray, and a blacklamp before nightfall. He poured two cups, plugged in the lamp, lit a smoke, and switched it on.

She’d had plenty of time to prepare, and he knew she liked surprises—so he was surprised differently. She wore a long robe, down to the floor.

She smiled, raised a hand, and waggled her fingers. She looked adorable.

“Those are all you?” he said, thumb over his shoulder.

She beamed and took a bow.

“Prohibition?”

She tapped her nose.

“Don’t you talk?”

She looked sad and put her hands over her ears.

“Deaf. Are you still deaf?” he exclaimed.

She shook her head, then waggled her fingers by her ear.

“The words don’t make sense?”

She tapped her nose again.

“But you read lips.”

Another tap.

Uneasily, he said, “How come you’re not all foggy, like the others?”

She grinned. Then she held up a hand as if to stop traffic, pointed at Kevin sharply, and pointed toward her eyes a couple of times.

“I’m paying attention,” he assured her.

She gave a pleased nod, then held up one finger; then she stuck her elbow out to the side and walked as if escorting a beau. Then she looked around furtively, hunched down a little, and began exaggeratedly tiptoeing along—still with her elbow out. Then she straightened up and made a show of looking around interestedly, and went over to a wall and ran her hand along it.

Then she held up two fingers; then she held her hands out as if clutching something to her, and pumped her hips. Then she puckered up and pushed one finger into her mouth a few times. Then she began to hike up the back of her robe—

“I get the picture. A couple snuck in here to screw extensively. How does that help you?”

She did the stop-traffic gesture again. Then she stepped backward, through her robe, leaving it standing where she’d been and retaining its shape. As Kevin stared, she laid the robe on the floor—still in shape—parted the front below the sash, and moved the sleeves up to the position of arms holding someone. Then she held up three fingers, moved off a little ways, and came strolling up, then acted as if she’d just noticed the robe. She smiled and rubbed her hands together, then got all foggy. The fog drifted into the open bottom of the robe, and some came out the neck and sleeves—and suddenly she was in focus, legs high, ankles crossed, head thrown back, mouth open.

She straightened her robe, got up, and took another bow.

Kevin stuck his cigarette in his mouth and applauded. Then he said, “They must have had some session.”

She gave him a knowing look. Then she held up four fingers. Then she held a hand to her jaw as if holding a phone, and moved her mouth very rapidly, pausing to roll her eyes up and pump her hips vigorously; then she moved her mouth some more. Then she held up the other hand and dropped the first, again holding a phone, but this time with big round eyes and a little round mouth. Then she hung up the imaginary phone, grabbed something to one side, took it in the crook of her elbow, and marched off as if dragging someone that way. Then she made more mouth motions, and phone gestures with alternating hands.

“Lots of couples, by the grapevine,” Kevin said, and got another nose tap. “It doesn’t hurt them?”

She shook her head rapidly, then clutched an imaginary partner and bucked her hips violently a few times. Then she straightened up, held up a hand, and ticked off fingers.

Kevin had to puzzle over this a moment. Then he guessed, “Multiple orgasms?”

She nodded several times, eyes big and bright.

“They don’t get cold?”

She held up thumb and forefinger a little way apart. Then she clutched her hips and jiggled her hands. Then she held up her palms facing each other a couple of feet apart and moved them slowly together, just a few inches closer. Then she made a circle of thumb and forefinger, and nodded.

“They lose weight, and it’s all right with them.”

She looked pleased and pointed at him, once, tapping her nose once more.

“You must have been incredible at charades. I’m Kevin,” he said.

She nodded, held a hand above her eyes, and pointed at him.

“Oh, been watching me.”

She nodded again, then held up a hand. She removed the robe, then stood on tiptoe, held her hands up as if chinning herself on a wall, tilted her head up, and smooched the air. Then she redonned the robe, pointed at him, and blew him a kiss.

“I remember,” he said, smiling. “I like you, too. What’s your name?”

She made a face and shook her head.

“Don’t like it? What should I call you?”

She held her hands before her collarbone, close together, fingers down; then she raised her lip to expose her front teeth and wiggled her nose a few times.

“I can’t possibly call a grown woman ‘Bunny,’” he said.

She looked surprised, then made a handing-over gesture at him.

“I pick one? Uh—Jean?”

She had dimples.

“You know, you make me think of a djinni.” She looked blank. “A djinni from a bottle?” he amplified.

She looked offended and opened her robe, reexposing her crotch.

“No, no.” He laughed. “Like the Arabian Nights. You know, three wishes, kind of thing?” She was clearly unenlightened, and he said, “I’ll be dipped. I’ll bring ‘em up. Can you turn pages?”

She looked astonished for a moment, then nodded quickly and hopped up and down, excited.

“Good God, you’re aching for humor of course. I’ll go get them now.” He started to get up, then sagged. “Jeez, I’m tired!”

Djinni looked alarmed and backed well off, pointing at herself.

“Oh, boy. Ghosts drain more than heat?”

She nodded.

“Oh, boy. Hm. We have to figure something out, then.” She was pointing vigorously at the blacklamp. “What, that makes it worse?”

She tapped her nose.

“Oh, boy. Maybe something to do with seeing you better. I’ll study on it. Off now? Okay.” He switched it off and presently stood.

When he came back up with the first volume, he stopped. He could see a faint blob of something like fog at one end of the pictures. “Djinni, is that you?” he said, and pointed. The blob shifted. He blinked a few times, then shut his eyes. Okay, he wasn’t seeing it. “I can tell where you are,” he said, quietly amazed.

* * *

He spent the next day in town, getting shorn and fed and newly clothed and stared at. He was starting past the marshal’s office just as Ed Ingalls came out, and Ed flinched noticeably, and said, “How many this time?”

Kevin stared, then broke up. “I’m getting some candy,” he said, pointing at the See’s next door.

“Oh God.” Ed sighed in relief.

“You’re lucky I didn’t say ‘Forty or fifty.’” Kevin laughed. “I’m getting a big box.”

“Oh God,” Ed repeated, laughing nervously. “What happened to your hair?”

“Ozone,” Kevin said, as he had to a few other people. “I’ve got UV lamps all over to get rid of mildew. Or no, actually I’ve been watching the news too much.”

Ed nodded. “They said some nasty stuff about you.”

“I was kidding,” Kevin said. “I haven’t even had time to watch the Democrat Underground.”

“They’re off the air,” Ed said. “Caught.”

“Aw, shit. They were funny, too.”

“Political parties, funny?” Ed said, shocked.

“I don’t mean on purpose.”

Ed lifted his head sharply once, now enlightened, then looked past Kevin and stopped smiling. “New nut in town,” he grumbled.

Kevin looked around. “Oh, Christ, it’s my shrink from the VA,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“I knew he was some kind of loony. He can’t answer a question.”

“No shit. Watch this.”

“Hello, Kevin,” the man said at two meters.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Caligari. Ed, meet the man who spent thirteen months trying to certify a cripple incompetent so he could halt further surgery and look after my money for me. Doctor Moreau, meet a man sworn to protect the public from human parasites.”

“Actually, my name’s Stephen Mundy, Ed,” the psychiatrist said, holding out a hand.

Ed looked at the hand like he thought it might be what he’d just smelled, and hung his thumbs on his gun belt. “You always call people by their first names?” he said.

“Is that too personal?” Mundy said.

“Don’t buy into it, Ed, it’s a dominance game,” Kevin warned.

“Little touch of the old paranoia there, Kevin?” Mundy said. He hadn’t stopped smiling since he came into view.

Kevin nodded seriously. “I hear you. I hear you saying you’re concerned about paranoia. We can discuss that if you want.”

Mundy chuckled—exactly eight beats, never more or less—and said, “Still projecting, eh?”

“Is that what you feel I’m doing?”

“Weren’t we talking about you?”

“Is it someone else choosing the subject that makes you feel threatened, or the subject chosen?”

“Is this an appropriate topic?”

“Would you feel more secure with another?”

“Don’t you think you should let go of your resentment?”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Why do you feel the need to evade my questions?” Mundy said, still smiling tolerantly.

“I see my question has made you uncomfortable. Would you rather not deal with it now?” Kevin was doing sincerity.

Mundy looked at the marshal, shaking his head. “Kevin here is under the impression that I’m trying to work my will on him, so he plays these little games of one-upmanship.”

“The only difference I see in how you’re acting is he’s better at it than you,” Ed retorted.

The smile slipped for a moment. Kevin took the opportunity to say, “Stevie’s problem here is that he keeps repressing his true sexual identity, which is that of a celibate. Come on, Ed, I’ll buy you some walnut clusters. So long, Dr. No.” As they turned away, the remark sank in, and Ed burst out laughing.

In the store, Ed said, “How’d you know I like walnut clusters?”

“I dono. Where do you pick stuff up from?”

Kevin had him there. “Damfino. Hey, is that place really haunted?”

“Yeah, but about a quarter of the ghosts have cleared out already. They’ve discovered they can get my attention—I guess most people are immune, or something—and they’ve all got some pressing problem to resolve. ‘S’how I found the first body—I’ve been expecting a subpoena for some time now, by the way; what’s up?”

“Ardmore’s still in the hospital, and his lawyers are trying to thrash up the evidence. Having a tough time,” Ed remarked. “You can’t really fake a print in blood that’s been combining with the metal under it for fifty-seven years. A little more sophisticated than a photo or a footprint, you know?”

Kevin nodded. “Well, that explains what Dr. Knox is in town for.”

“That one I don’t get.”

“Oo, and you a cop, for shame. Heard of Burke and Hare?”

“Oh, yeah, grave robbers who decided to eliminate the middleman.”

“Well, Knox was the guy they sold their nice fresh corpses to. You know, I don’t think the silly ass has ever realized what all these references have in common.”

“Come on, doctors who thought they were higher life-forms, too obvious.”

“To put yourself in someone else’s shoes you have to admit your feet touch the ground. He doesn’t have enough empathy to be a sadist, Ed. I really don’t think he does get it.”

“What the hell is the matter with him, anyway?”

“Money,” Kevin replied. “I checked some public records. There used to be a protectionist organization called the American Medical Association—”

“The Dental Association isn’t protectionist,” Ed protested.

“No resemblance. They kept prices up, and wouldn’t let anyone buy drugs without permission—I don’t mean just morphine, I mean like penicillin. I swear I’m not making this up. They also did anything necessary to keep one of their members out of jail if he hurt or killed somebody. Dr. Szell out there finished spending a staggering sum on courses at one of their approved schools about a month before this outfit was destroyed by antitrust actions, and the bottom dropped out of the market. He’s been festering ever since.

“Right now I’d say he’s here to concoct evidence to discredit me as a witness. Ardmore’s lawyers don’t realize—or don’t care—that leaving the man alive and paralyzed is way harsher than nitrogen suffocation.

“And what Dr. Lysenko doesn’t realize is that no amount of money will ever be enough.” Kevin smiled.

“Money can’t buy happiness.” Ed nodded.

“Sure it can, for most people,” Kevin contradicted him. “You have to know where to shop, is all. There’s probably five billion people on the planet who could be made deliriously happy for life with stuff you can get at Neiman Marcus. Wouldn’t hurt their feelings any at Neiman-Marcus, either,” he reflected. “The thing is, to Dr. Skinner out there, money is happiness. And it won’t work; he’s not starving, you see, so what he needs is something that fulfills whatever talents he presumably has; and he’s too stupid to figure it out.”

* * *

Stephen Mundy, MD, Ph.D., USAMC (ret.), sat in his van and listened to what the laser reflector was picking off the chrome in the candy shop, and thought, Look who’s calling whom stupid.

Ghosts, eh?

* * *

At dawn’s first glimmer on Sunday morning the vans started showing up again, in a column like a segment of the invasion of South Vietnam. They were occupied by people much smarter and very much ruder than newsmen: every investigator from Rhine College at Duke University. They were also better prepared than the newsmen had been: They had a search warrant on public-welfare grounds, issued by a judge who had a covert partisan history to hide and who was regretting the choice already.

Unfortunately, Kevin Ridler was better prepared as well.

Someone from the first van opened a gate whose sign read:

DANGER

KEEP CLOSED

The lead van passed through, by a sign which read:

PRIVATE ROAD

DO NOT ENTER

The convoy rolled on—the gate still open behind them—until the lead van passed a sign saying:

PEST CONTROL

PROVING GROUNDS

—and in so doing crossed a laser beam that had been switched on by the opening of the gate.

This activated the minefield.

Something over an hour later, showered, shaved, fed, armed, and armored, Kevin ambled up to see what all the horn blowing was about.

He stopped about forty meters short of the lead van, looking things over. Then he slung his rifle, got out his phone, and made a call. After a short wait, he said, “I’m sorry about the time, Ed, but I need you to tell Trudy she’s rich. I got about a hundred vans here with fried ignitions and no tires.” (Ed’s sister-in-law, Trudy Wallace, had an articulated carrier truck with a crane.) “They probably have some paper this time. Could you have it checked for authenticity? Carefully … ? Oh, no, neither of you should start the day hungry. There’s no hurry. They’ll be here whenever you happen to find it convenient to show up. Have her call me, same as you, and I’ll shut off the mousetrap… . As far as you know, it is. See you when you’ve had breakfast, maybe a look at the paper… . As soon as I’m done talking with you, Ed… . ‘Bye.”

For his next call, he had to punch some more numbers after connection, but presently he said, “I don’t know how good it is, but it sure pays well. It’s Kevin. Vera, I need an injunction. Do you know where to find a Federal judge on a Sunday morning … ? Wups. Did I wake her, too … ? Shit. I’m sorry, Vera… . Sure, tell her, I’ll own up… . Why is she laughing … ? Well, tell her thanks, and she’s a real good sport… . That is not what I meant … ! No, I couldn’t hear… . Oh. Well, the front van does have something conspicuously exposed on the windshield… . About a hundred… . In my driveway… . They ran over a mousetrap… . It was a big mousetrap. I got it from Switzerland… . Yeah, the whole pass. Very concerned about foreign mice, the Swiss… . Well, the thing is I’m at the edge of the paved net now, and it’s about forty meters from me… . Lemme unscrew my scopesight here. Hold on… . Just in general!”

He used the rifle’s telescope to read off the document number of the warrant. “How’s that … ? Well, I can see four people in the front one, and there’s at least somebody driving all the others, so assuming I’ve erred by 10 percent, at least ninety-three… . Excuse me, I have to reattach the scopesight; I hear a helicopter. I’ll call back.” He hung his phone on the back of his belt, moved nearer the stream to get back in morning shadow, unsafetied, and waited.

Back behind the lines in Katanga, a platoon would load with dye rounds, put up a hundred bucks apiece, and practice shooting at captured helicopters. The pilot would dodge; he got a share of the pot, as did everyone who scored on him, except the guy who got the most hits, who got three shares.

Kevin was no Marine, but he generally came out ahead. Also, this was no Army pilot; there was only one pass into the valley; and the shooting in Katanga had been single rounds, both for ease of scorekeeping and because the pilots wouldn’t do it otherwise.

About a third of the thirty-round clip connected, splattering over the fuselage. Kevin reversed the magazine and fired the other clip, which did about as well.

Then he waited. Somewhere on that bird was an air intake… .

The helicopter made a sudden, violent correction, and the windows opened. Kevin was using puke rounds, filled with ammonium mercaptan—NH4SH. It was volatile, and boiled out of the carnauba-gel matrix, spreading along the hull until it was sucked inside.

Opening the windows had been a mistake: aircraft are built for positive pressure inside, so the intake fans now had less resistance to work against. That is, it got worse.

They opened the hatch.

The pilot was a damn quick study. Kevin only got two rounds from the third clip inside, and after that it was facing the other way.

The helicopter went away. Considerably faster than it had come in.

Kevin strolled back to the house, pausing to switch off the minefield on the way.

There was a flicker from Djinni’s window as he redialed Vera. The sun shone right into the room, so he couldn’t make her out; he waved. Another flicker. He nodded exaggeratedly and hurried up. “Hi, kiddo, how’s your luscious bar beast doing … ? I beg your pardon, Your Honor… !Fine, thank you. I drove them off with puke rounds… . Ammonia and rotten eggs, pretty much… . Beats me, but we’ve got a tow-truck driver in town, and they should make her fortune… . From Duke? Christ on a crutch.” As he went through the lobby door, two men grabbed his arms, and he yelled, “AMBUSH!” before they shut his phone off.

A third man stepped forward, staying out of kicking range, and presented his ID. “Detective Arnold Koop, Interstate Crime Commission. Kevin Ridler, you are under arrest for receiving stolen goods from across state lines. You have the right to remain silent …” et cetera. Once he’d said his piece, Detective Koop said into his radio, “Clear. Come in.”

He, the men holding Kevin’s arms, and a rifleman in the hallway wore mountaineering gear.

One of the people who showed up when the second helicopter landed outside was Dr. Mundy, who, it appeared, was something of a suspenders-and-belt-and-superglue kinda guy. “Hello, Kevin.” He smiled. “I suppose the ‘ghosts’ made you do it.”

“Kevin Ridler. Civilian. 216-A7-9774.”

“He was on the phone to someone when apprehended,” said Koop.

“That’d be the local deputy,” Mundy replied, a misstatement of role intended to get a comment from Kevin. “He’ll be busy with lawyers for a few years,” he added. when it was apparent that this didn’t work. “Don’t be upset, Kevin. We’re going to make aaaall the nasty ‘ghosts’ go away.”

“Kevin Ridler. Civilian. 216-A7-9774.”

Mundy sighed. “Doesn’t seem to have much contact with reality. Take him to the chopper; I’ll have a look around, and join you. Now, now, what is it, Kevin?”

Kevin had been looking sharply from one hallway opening to another. He looked at Mundy, and said, enunciating and projecting, “The relay switches for the blacklamps can be activated with the slightest touch.” Then he smiled, as if thinking of something very satisfying.

“And that pertains to—?”

“Kevin Ridler. Civilian. 216-A7-9774.”

He was taken outside, and the door swung shut.

GOD, I THOUGHT HE’D NEVER LEAVE!

Mundy whirled. There was nobody there. The voice—almost like a massed chorus—had been right behind him.

All the blacklamps switched on.

He turned to go out the door.

There was no door.

And no hallway entrances. Blank walls.

And it seemed like he could see people at the very edges of his vision.

And it was awfully cold all of a sudden.

* * *

Kevin sat strapped into his seat, trying not to smile; it would cause suspicion, and it would be a shame to interrupt a work in progress.

Djinni had tried to warn him; when he’d failed to understand her, she’d gone for reinforcements.

After ten minutes or so, Koop told one of his men, “Go see what’s keeping the doc.”

When the door was opened, Mundy literally came leaping out of it, eyes rolling and teeth chattering. He looked wildly about, saw Kevin, and ran screaming at him with hands clawed. It took six officers to knock Mundy out, and that was with clubs, after he’d been tasered twice and shot with a tranquilizer rifle.

“What happened to him in there?” Koop demanded of Kevin.

“How should—Kevin Ridler. Civilian. 216-A7-9774.”

“God. Call this in,” Koop told the pilot.

That worthy spoke inside his helmet a while, then looked mightily surprised and held out a headset. “Commissioner Olshevski wants to talk to Ridler. He says to turn him loose.”

“What? Let me talk to him.”

“He says you’re suspended, sir, and I’m to advise you of your rights.”

* * *

Kevin spoke warily. “Ridler here… . I see… . I see… . No, in fact they were very diligent in keeping him from eating my face or whatever he had in mind… . Not the foggiest. There’s tons of supplies here—literally tons, thousands of kilos. Anybody in the press invasion could have planted twenty or thirty kilos of God-knows-what, and I’d never know it—oh hell, I have to go through all this shit now in case there was more than one … ! That’s damn decent of you, sir… . Well, okay, Steve, I’m Kevin then… . I’d have to guess it was entirely at Mundy’s instigation. The man can be unbelievably persuasive, and he’s been obsessed with me for years… . I’ve always had the impression that he resented a grunt’s having more money than a doctor… . No shit? God, that’s like fifty years ago, you must have been just a kid… . Well, yeah, but at least in Africa we could get Penthouse… . Maybe he didn’t, but if I remember right, he was sure as hell trying. And they didn’t have catastrophic care in those days—hell, they didn’t have it when I enlisted … ! Frankly, the only real fault I find with Detective Koop is that he’s fairly gullible, and that’s a long way from the worst thing for a citizen to see in a cop… . I don’t know if there’s even any way to find out. Mundy’s in no condition to talk… . Sodomy sic cognito… . It’s mock-Latin. Means ‘I’m buggered if I know.’ … I suppose, if his obsession was really deep—maybe the idea of actually having me totally at his mercy just snapped his cap clean off. The profession does attract way more than its share of flakes… . You gotta admit if nothing else it’s good camouflage… . I have no evidence whatever who’s behind it. By the way, purely intellectual curiosity, how’s the Ardmore case coming along?—Hello … ? Really, that soon? I heard they were dragging their feet… . Glad to help… . As a matter of fact, yes. There’s a small army of space cases I would very much like to see prosecuted for criminal trespass. They’re in cahoots with Mundy, and from out of state, so you do have jurisdiction… . In my driveway, mostly, except for some very ill people who were in a receding helicopter when I saw them last… . You’re my kinda guy, Steve. He wants to talk to your exec,” Kevin told Koop.

“My what?”

“Your second-in-command,” Kevin said, and went inside.

He could tell where she was, but only just: the lamps were off again. “I’m sorry,” he said in a very small voice. “I thought you wanted me to come in quick.”

Without an image or a sound, he nevertheless got a powerful impression of fists on hips and a tapping foot.

“Maybe we can work out some kind of a code,” he said.

III

GOOD-BYE, MR. LOMAN

Kevin got home from his travels on November 22, and told his Pinkertons to take the next week off with pay. “If some sonofabitch bothers me over Thanksgiving, I’ll do some work on the orchard,” he said grimly. “Any trouble?”

“Nothing much. No visitors,” Maria Travis told him. “Ghosts got sort of active on Hallowe’en.”

“Oh yeah?”

She nodded. “They just seemed to be having a good time, though. I put on some old CDs of yours I’d noticed; I hope that was okay?”

“Probably just the ticket,” he agreed. “Did my testimony get on the air? There were an awful lot of objections.”

She grinned and nodded. “Sure did. We got it on tape. Liebe sure looks like an idiot.” (John Liebe was Ardmore’s senior attorney.)

“Liebe is an idiot. Did you see the crowd frost over when he started questioning my war record? There’s a hell of a lot of veterans in this country, and a lot are alive because they’re willing to kill.”

Maria shook her head. “The camera was on you and the judge. He turned to stone.”

“I missed that.”

“You should watch it. You could see him giving Liebe extra slack all that day, holding on to his temper, and all the dork did was make nooses. How was Europe?”

Kevin opened his mouth, gave a violent shudder, shook his head hard, and said, “Haunted.” He thought of Paris and felt sick. “They all want justice, and they’re getting law. I can’t go back there. A month was too much. I gotta crash. See you on the first.”

“Thirtieth.”

“First. Go.”

* * *

He took his luggage inside, rode the nice new elevator up to his suite, and said, “Do you realize that Todd Whitney left me about five billion dollars?”

Djinni rushed up and smooched him, then backed off to a safe distance. Kevin took out a deposit book for Bohemia Generation (as money is power, the Czech electrical utility had decided to branch out into banking) and held it open for her to see the figures:

Gr#B/+599,364.705

“He had—or I should say they had—gold certificates, bearer notes, in a deposit box in Luxembourg, to the tune of 125, 574 ounces. I don’t see how they could have sold that quantity of cocaine by their age, so they must have ripped somebody off, or some goddamn thing. Anyway, I rushed over to Prague—didn’t want a lot of publicity, and the Czechs do a lot of business with Russians, who still have income taxes, poor schmucks.” He rolled his eyes. “Anyhow, it came to almost six hundred kilos of bred fuel, and I get a tenth of the gross annual increase. That’s about 3 percent real growth, immune to inflation or exchange rates or anything. You look very distinct,” he said abruptly.

Djinni smiled wickedly and pumped her hips.

“Oho, some guards liked the decor? Who?”

She held her hands toward her, splayed, as if clasping a couple of gene-plus grapefruit.

“Ursula Chin, okay, and who?”

She held the back of her hand to her forehead in an open-palmed salute.

“Somebody named French?”

She shook her head, acted out firing a rifle, and repeated the salute.

“French soldier? Foreign Legion. Legion? Jesus, how many?”

All fingers; then four more.

“Fourteen? Good Lord, you’re in better shape than I am. How’s Ursula?” he asked worriedly.

Djinni spread her arms, let her hands dangle, and leaned her head back in a sappy grin.

Kevin cracked up.

* * *

The photos presently on the walls were duplicates. Kevin had hired an archaeologist to tell him how to take down the originals and had obeyed like a robot. They’d braced the photo side of the walls, then dismantled them meticulously from the other side, then cut strips from the braced side. (Dr. Porter said he’d make a fine digger.)

The originals had been put on nitrate paper, once popular because it could be made extremely smooth. Unfortunately, even without any accidental fires—its normal fate—its nitrate radicals were unstable, and the paper typically oxidized to powder in a few years. These had been well bonded to rigid, long-cured plaster, though, so the powder stayed where it had been put when it was paper.

Kevin used gold leaf, hydrogen reduction, and anodic repulsion to transfer them to acrycel paper, which was then laminated. The restored photos were notably sharper than the originals; some silver had oxidized over the years, and some had meandered through the paper. The transfer processes had countered both effects, which would not now be repeated.

The pictures now on the wall were photos of the restored pictures. And, as the State Attorney General had had occasion to observe privately with a certain amount of vindictive glee, Kevin Ridler really was a damned fine photographer.

He was also still impotent, and likely to remain so.

Djinni stayed in the room with him until he was asleep. Actually, she was sort of everywhere she’d ever gone, in the valley at least, all the time; but unless she paid attention to some particular location, she was just aware, not thinking. Passive.

She hadn’t been in that state since Kevin had arrived, and wasn’t likely to miss it. It didn’t suit her nature to be passive. (There was, in fact, about 170 square feet of documentary evidence to substantiate this.)

Kevin had bound the restored photos in a book, which was in what was now the library. In her time it had been a dining room, but Kevin planned to put in three big dining rooms where the tarps were now, with lots of glass, looking at the pond.

There were thousands of books in the library. Every book Kevin had ever read, or wanted to read, or heard wasn’t a complete waste of time, even.

(Djinni rather resented never having had a shot at this Heinlein. He looked to be a lively sort; and she’d only have been a few years older than he was.)

It was easier to get into the library and stay there, now that the photos were in it. She hadn’t spent a lot of time in the dining room in life, but now it was more a part of her.

The quiet one who never noticed anybody was there again, looking lost as usual. He didn’t have too much shape, but he didn’t spread out much either. Associating with Kevin had made her less self-absorbed; she decided to follow him for once.

He trudged around a while, then went to the room Kevin had exposed, with all the old hotel records filling it, and stood dismally outside the door. (Employees only.) Then he went around to the front desk, or the relict thereof, and waited for a couple of hours. Then he trudged up the stairs to his room, sat looking out the window for another while, and lay on the air where the bed had been.

What was in those records?

* * *

“Good God, Djinni, there must be five hundred cubic feet of that crap! How urgent can it be after a century?”

She shrugged and pointed at the XLVII on the wall. The figure was new. At the ruin of the first white settlement, well upstream, twenty-six girls had reenacted their assorted rapes and murders every day for a couple of centuries, until Kevin had forced their patriarch out into the open. Kevin had done something to him that he refused to describe to Djinni, merely calling it “the Rasputin Cure.” The figure had dropped by twenty-seven thereafter.

Kevin looked where she was pointing, and said “Okay,” dismally but promptly, and went out to get a wheelbarrow.

* * *

The room was about five meters by nine, and the papers and lost luggage were piled about one and a half high, which actually came to something more like twenty-four hundred cubic feet. About half of it was every guest register from 1933 to 1946. The rest was ledgers, receipts, bills, bundles of unmailed advertising, and unwanted luggage. Kevin had to wear an oxygen mask and digger’s goggles once he started stirring things up. About halfway through the excavation, with nothing sorted yet, Kevin looked up and discovered that he couldn’t see any of the walls through the dust. He felt his way out, bored a suitable hole through from the other side of the rear wall, and ran in the hose of his vacuum cleaner. (He’d designed and assembled the thing himself. The pump was from a diving shop, and the refuse can had originally been a Dumpster rated at ten tons.)

After that, he could see. Also, it was cooler. (A tree next to the air exhaust turned brown and died, though.)

Books and papers went all over the lobby in sorted stacks, or at least somewhat regular heaps. The luggage went in a row under where the room mailboxes used to be. Kevin staggered off to bed. In the middle of the night he came foggily down and shut off the vacuum cleaner. (The air in the lobby was wonderfully fresh.)

* * *

In the morning, Djinni reported that the man hadn’t left his room yet. (He usually didn’t.)

Kevin looked at the mounds in the lobby and decided to inspect the luggage.

Naturally, it was all locked. A locked twentieth-century suitcase needs special tools to open. Say, a bent paper clip. Kevin started with the heaviest, a scarred wooden chest with a rounded top. It held two heavily padded bottles of Napoleon brandy and a Thompson submachine gun that appeared never to have been used. Ed would appreciate the brandy. (Kevin could pass out from a can of beer. Alcohol dilates blood vessels and thus lowers blood pressure.) The Tommy was nice, but he’d have to rearm the rounds before he could use it; old cordite acts funny, but nobody laughs. Fortunately, there wasn’t anyone around he needed to shoot.

He opened more. Clothes, books, perfume congealed to Bakelite, more booze—brushes?

One huge suitcase was packed with all kinds of brushes, each held in its own ring, pocket, or cavity, in a folding frame that fitted together with elegant economy of space. Hairbrush, toothbrush, stripping wire brush, polishing wire brush, bottlebrush, paintbrushes (wall, furniture, and assorted art), toilet brush, carpet brush, upholstery brush, corner brush for cleaning in tight spaces, curveneck brush with extension handle for ceiling fixtures, quite a few sponge brushes, and combs for cleaning brushes.

The lid of the case held a tuxedo, still wrapped in tissue, never worn. Under it was a reservation for two weeks at the Apple River Hunting Lodge, from February 21 to March 6 of 1933. There was also a card giving notice of an award ceremony on the sixth, for “Outstanding Achievement.” There was also a stack of order sheets.

Kevin looked this over twice. Then he went and rummaged out the registers for February and March of 1933.

There was only one check-in on February 21. Illegible signature; hometown, Chicago; firm, Cicero Brush Company. Room, 316 North.

Kevin went into the library, got online, and after a few minutes said, “Oh, Christ,” with terrible pity.

On February 20, 1933, Congress had proposed repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.

On March 5, Franklin Roosevelt had closed the nation’s banks.

And on March 6, a quiet and anonymous little man, who had spent two weeks surrounded by miserable, panicky, wretched bootleggers, discovered that the only recognition he’d ever been offered in his life had been canceled due to the emergency, and that nobody had thought to tell him; and he went quietly and anonymously back to his room, sat for a while, and lay down, and died.

(There were generally a few ghosts in the library. The ones there now noticed the fire starting up where Kevin was, and retreated in unison.)

* * *

Kevin accepted an invite to the Ingalls place for Thanksgiving dinner, presented Ed and Janet with the brandy, talked to Susan and Ed Junior about ghosts, and was invited to offer the blessing.

“Excuse me,” he began. “I realize a lot of people are talking to You tonight, but we don’t mean it as a formality. Many things happen, and we forget to express ourselves in the rush; but tonight we do remember. We are presented with opportunities, and given abilities to try applying to them. When we succeed, we are happier. When we fail, we learn. When we are hurt, we grow stronger. We do not dwell on this, but we are aware that You arranged the situation, and we appreciate it now. Incidentally, the sunset tonight was really remarkable, and particularly commended itself to my attention. You do nice work. Another artistic touch is the fact that food tastes good, so we’re going to eat now, and enjoy every bite. Thanks for listening.”

* * *

Friday he called Vera after lunch, asking for available information on the Cicero Brush Company. (She had a condensing service on retainer.) It downloaded before dinner.

Cicero Brush had started with outstanding products and low prices, but remained a local business for years due to undercapitalization. It was purchased and expanded in 1920. By 1930 it was supplying private clubs throughout the Midwest and parts of Canada. It had doubtless been used as a cover for a progressively increasing degree of bootlegging, as the books seemed to indicate that expenditures exceeded gross sales from 1927 onward.

The company went into a sharp decline during the last three quarters of 1933, and went into receivership in 1934. The plant changed hands a few times, and wound up belonging to the Fuller Brush Corporation.

Kevin thought.

Then he looked through the old hotel brochures for a picture of the front desk.

Once he’d found enough to be accurate, he began reconstructing it. He also ordered some flat brass plates from a jobber in Paxburg, installed an awful lot of blacklamps along the third-floor main corridor, and paid an extortionate sum to have a large business desk installed in the foyer of his suite without delay.

When the guards came back to work, he called a caterer. Arrangements were made.

On the afternoon of December 5, in response to the letter on the pillow of his freshly made bed, the ghost appeared at the open doorway of Suite 300, which now bore a plaque reading:

Kevin Ridler—manager

He was able to enter: his case was in the room.

“Sir,” Kevin said, “in the course of complete overhaul of the facilities, I am afraid your extra bag was knocked open, and some corrosive materials ruined your tuxedo. The person responsible is no longer on the hotel payroll, and it is my hope that you will accept my personal apology along with this replacement. Djinni?” (This was carefully timed.)

She came in with a waggle in her step, carrying the ghost of a suit.

Kevin had had it made in Singapore to exacting specifications, then shipped at maximum speed. When it arrived, it was examined closely by those of the ghosts who were aware of the changes in the hotel and the passage of time, indicating strong perception of their surroundings. It was then destroyed utterly.

It was Chinese silk, midnight blue, with white-pearl buttons and black-satin lining. The vest was black silk, embroidered in silver thread, with dragons.

“If you’d be willing to try it on, sir, we’ll just step out for a moment,” Kevin said, and they did. Kevin closed the door, then nipped down the hall for some quick work with drill and screwdriver. He brushed off, returned, knocked, and said, “Are you dressed, sir?”

Yes.

When Kevin came in, the man’s image was quite crisp. (He looked great, too.)

Djinni was giving him the eye. Kevin said, “Thank you, that’ll be—ahem!” He waved a hand in front of her. “That’ll be all,” he said. She left, a little regretfully.

Kevin said, “I hope it’s not too great an imposition; but I notice you’re in cleaning supplies, and I was wondering if you could tell me something about your line.”

* * *

It was almost three hours before Kevin recalled his original plan. The man was a by-God spellbinder; he must have been one king-hell salesman. When he was doing his pitch, moreover, he was solid. He could actually pick up the brushes and demonstrate them.

Selling had been, very literally, his life.

Kevin finally realized it was dark out and stopped himself from asking another question. “I’ll take ‘em,” he said.

A full sampler? (There were forty-six items.)

“Sampler, hell. I’ll take a thousand of everything, and some reorder forms to use as they wear out. I’d like ‘cider springs’ printed on the toothbrushes.”

A thousand of everything, yes sir! He had to borrow a pen, of course. Say, this is a handy little number. Custom job? (It was a needle-point foam-tip, capable of writing indelibly on window glass, and it cost somewhat less than a large pack of gum. Kevin could just see himself trying to explain this without triggering massive future shock.)

“No, there’s a place that sells them by mail,” he said; which was true as far as it went. (He couldn’t have explained why, but he wanted to be as truthful as possible in his dealings with the ghosts.) “You know, this has been about the most fascinating day I’ve had in this place. You really know your stuff. I’ve got to get down to the dining room. Care to join me?”

Why, certainly. I noticed it’s been redecorated… . He broke off, beginning to be confused.

“I’m trying to attract a better crowd,” Kevin said. “Between this order and the books, I think I’ve got a shot at it. I’m also getting a pretty good reputation. See, when I took this place over, there were a lot of debts. I’m paying them, which I’m in no way bound to do. Things like that have a way of getting around.”

* * *

Kevin opened the doors, and said, “After you, sir.”

The blacklamps went on, and dozens of people jumped up and yelled, “SURPRISE!” Balloons tumbled down from the ceiling, others rose from the tables, underdressed waitresses threw confetti, sparklers were lit, and a forty-piece brass band began playing “Hail to the Chief.”

Kevin had been considerably annoyed to learn that there was nobody in the entire county who could provide a Chinese New Year dragon. However, what he’d provided did seem to have the desired effect.

One result he hadn’t expected was that everybody could see the fellow. Consequently, he was the absolute focus of attention, and whenever he looked around that evening, people would drop their gazes, as if caught staring at a movie star or royalty.

A stage had been set up, and his table was directly before it. Djinni sat at it, and ate up his every word.

There was a magic act, a team of jugglers, a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, and food he could eat. (It had to be destroyed by an arc torch.)

After the stage was clear, it was used as a dance floor. Other couples used it while he and Djinni did.

She went with him to his room. (This was not planned, and Kevin was startled and embarrassed to realize he was jealous.)

The ornate brass plaque on the door of 316 North read:

IN THIS ROOM

SLEPT

THE KING OF THE SALESMEN

* * *

Around 6:00 a.m. he came down to the desk, where Kevin waited. (People had greeted him and pointed him out to one another. Hotel guards had come to attention.)

I’m dead, aren’t I? he said without preamble.

Kevin sighed. “For a hundred and three years and nine months,” he said.

Why did you do all this?

Kevin looked him in the eye. “Because you earned it,” he said. “Debts have to be paid.”

You’re not like most of my customers! I guess that order was part of it, huh?

“Like hell. The factory’s got a new owner, but it’s still in operation. I dunno what they’ll do about the commission, though. Your employee number is on the order forms.”

Huh! So it is. Cicero Brush folded?

“Yeah, they went broke the year after you died.”

Are you serious?

“Sir, I’m practically morbid. They just couldn’t get enough orders to survive.”

I’ll be damned.

“That would surprise me excessively. Three of the ghosts who helped me last night have moved on, I would say, from having done something good for the first time. Gangsters,” Kevin amplified.

I suppose it’s time I checked out, too. He looked puzzled. In fact, if I understand this, I don’t know why I haven’t already.

Kevin had anticipated this possibility the moment he thought of the plan. “There’s something you need, first. No salesman is complete without”—he reached under the desk—”his hat.”

In his hands was a velvet pillow. On this rested the ghost of a golden crown.

It fitted.

Kevin handed over the ghost of the sample case, and said, “It has been a privilege, sir.”

The King of the Salesmen stood tall, smiled, and said, Could you tell her good-bye for me? He was fading—not dispersing.

“Certainly, sir. God bless.”

And to you. He was gone.

The characters on the wall were:

XLIII

—and there was something else underneath them now, very tiny:

By Royal Appointment.

* * *

IV

BOMBSHELL

Kevin was jealous, poor thing, and it took a couple of weeks to knead down the spikes of it that stuck out all over him. The most effective way was doubly unavailable. That was probably most of the problem.

The cold was getting to him, too. Bones—of his right arm and leg, a big chunk of his shoulder, some ribs, and part of his pelvis—had been regrown on frameworks made from open metal mesh around solid metal support rods. When he had worked outside, the chill didn’t just settle in: It raised a barn, plowed, and sent for a wife from the old country. If his right side got too cold, it gave him nightmares. If it was heavily wrapped, it gave him nightmares. Dehydration from heating the room gave him walloping headaches, which produced nightmares; and if the humidity was high, he couldn’t sleep at all.

Through December, he played calypso music. He did get a small tree, which he stood in a pot of warm water and fed stuff to make roots sprout. Everybody got to pick and hang an ornament—or at least show Kevin where to, if they couldn’t pick things up.

This brought the vaguest of the ghosts out of themselves enough to realize they were dead. A number had funny notions about it. Some wandered around howling until Kevin tracked them down and provided a swift kick in the ass, often literally. (He’d made up sort of a suit of armor, of heavy fabric covered with fine wire mesh of the same alloy used in his bones. All he usually needed were the mitts and boots, but he’d wear the whole thing when getting rid of a bad’un. Those were gone now.)

On Christmas, there were presents. The guards and some of the people from the party on the fifth were there, and some of them brought things, too. (Ursula Chin brought Djinni a really shocking little outfit. She’d known!)

Kevin got her a heavily shielded computer with a feather-touch keyboard and a MakeAGameTM crystal. She cried. She hadn’t known she could.

A couple more ghosts vanished as soon as they got their presents. Permanently, that is—wherever they went, when they did whatever they hadn’t done yet, they went there. Djinni wasn’t likely to go. What she hadn’t done was finish living.

There was a wonderful fire in the old dance hall, and the live people mostly sat around it. For much the same reason, the ghosts hung around Kevin, though not as close: He burned much brighter. He wasn’t aware of it; but if he were a ghost, he could have picked up several pounds of stuff and probably carried it around all day at that. The live people around him brightened up from contact.

Djinni loved him desperately.

And it would hurt him if she told him.

* * *

He installed the computer in the master bedroom, with the screen facing away from the bed so she could play whenever she wanted. It had a printer—she could talk to him!

Djinni led him around to where the camera had been concealed and showed him where to dig in the wall.

Her jewelry box was still there. The silver filigree on it was black. Her sapphires—earrings and pendant—gleamed when he brought them into the light.

He hugged her. Ohh, he was warm.

It wasn’t a half-bad Christmas, really.

* * *

When he came back with the mail the next day, he looked amused. There was a letter from Rhine College, asking whether they could send five people to the hotel for the winter recess. It had been sent by government mail and was three weeks old. He called them up.

The five arrived before dinner. They were all creepy. Four had big rotten spots in varying patterns, but the fifth just seemed dead. Not a ghost, but a dead body; empty. That one watched Kevin whenever he was around, and when she was near him, she drew some of the fire out of him.

Kevin took Djinni’s word about them, even though he couldn’t see what she meant. He kept them out of his way by setting them to fetching stuff he needed while he worked, as the price of staying. The fellow in charge of the others thought that didn’t mean him and got very snotty, like that writer who’d stayed here that time, whatsisname, Fitzsomething. It was the type of vicious rudeness that pretends to be humor, so the fellow can blame you when he’s spent an hour picking a fight.

Kevin put up with it exactly once. The second time it began, he took the man by the ankle, dragged him outdoors, and hove him into the pond. The professor began screaming abuse at Kevin, who waited until he paused to inhale, then asked him where his sense of humor was. After that, he shut up and took his turn.

The other ghosts avoided the strangers. Djinni kept an eye on them. It was nasty work, especially since when the dead one was alone, she could feel Djinni around and moved in on her.

They did some peculiar things. They set up video cameras and microphones, distributed thermometers and motion sensors, and recorded every bug, draft, and power fluctuation in the hotel; and every morning, they had long, earnest discussions telling each other how significant it all was. They engaged in what amounted to magic rituals, intended to “make contact.” Djinni’s personal favorite was the business where they wrote cryptic messages to themselves with a pen stuck through a wooden beer coaster. Not one ghost had the slightest thing to do with the results they got from any of this—the only ones who’d have gotten along with them were the ones Kevin had evicted as early as possible, and good riddance.

(One of them was writing a private little monograph, kept secret from the rest to avoid sharing credit with them, on the supernatural significance of the almost complete absence of mice and rats in the vicinity. None of them were very good at noticing things outside their own interests, or any good at asking plain, obvious questions.)

Kevin did the cooking after he’d smelled theirs. They gained weight.

The empty woman became more active as New Year’s Eve approached. She still didn’t talk much, and she slept alone; but one day she did find Djinni’s photos in the library and took the book to the professor. He took them and put them in his knapsack.

Djinni rushed out and set off the mousetraps in order of increasing pitch, which was the signal to get Kevin to his bedroom. He could move fast when he had to. She’d typed, PROF HAS BOOK PHOTOS IN BAG IN ROOM.

Kevin got there in time to shove the man back in as he was coming out the door. The professor tried to bareface it, and Kevin slapped his mouth. The empty woman screamed and launched a mighty kick, and Kevin smacked her ankle upward with his right forearm, and she bashed the back of her head on the floor. The professor opened his bag and took the book out. Then he took out an automatic, smiled exactly like that maggoty-souled shrink, and began to speak.

His defenses were up, and the others were coming too slowly. Djinni looked over the empty woman, drew out the life from the little stuff living inside her, stuck some torn things back together, nerved herself, and slid in.

She went in hard.

* * *

“—a little premature, but we can adapt. Ah, Janet. Frisk him, will you?”

Djinni, shocked nearly senseless at being able to understand his speech, got up very carefully, making a point of grimacing and feeling her head with her fingertips. (In fact, her ankle hurt much worse; it had essentially been whacked with a crowbar.) She stood by Kevin, who glared at her, still holding the book; and with the eye the professor couldn’t see she winked.

Then she ripped her blouse off exactly like that girl Alice, screamed to split masonry, and hurled the blouse at the professor, who said, “What are you—”

Then the book slammed into him. It weighed about six kilos. Then Kevin slammed into him. Kevin weighed about a hundred and twenty kilos. The ricochet was very satisfactory, and when the professor rebounded off the wall, he got a metal-framed fist right under the point of his jawbone.

Djinni knelt, took the professor’s left hand, dragged the nails down her chest, stuck the blouse in his grasp, wrapped his fingers tight, set his fist on the ground, and stamped on it, hard. It crunched.

She winked at Kevin again, wrapped her arms up in front of her, leaned against him, and turned on the tears.

He still didn’t seem to have quite caught on. However, he was patting her back and saying vague soothing things when the others showed up. “You, call a chopper,” he snapped.

“A helicopter?”

“Ambulance, pinhead! You, call the cops. You, call Crisis Line and tell them we’ve got a rape victim. Incoherent. Give her your jacket first.”

“Shouldn’t we—”

“DISCUSS IT LATER!”

When the three had rushed off, though, Kevin made sure she could see his face, then mouthed, Djinni?

She nodded.

Wow. You okay in there?

She nodded again.

Okay. They’ll figure shock is why you can’t talk. How long can you stay in there?

“I can talk,” she whispered, causing him to jump. “I understand, too. Kevin, I don’t know if I can get out. I’ve got her memory. She was empty, there was nobody there—”

“Shh, you’re all right. You want a drink?”

“I—I—Oh Jesus!”

For the first time she remembered how she died. It was a party. She was very drunk. She decided to try a gang bang. She kept drinking, and died of alcohol poisoning.

They hadn’t noticed until she got cold.

Neither had she. She’d stayed in the corpse and tried to keep it moving.

Kevin held her while she threw up, and got her a hot towel for her head. She was still sobbing when the team from Crisis Line showed up. They chased the other three out, listened to the story Djinni came up with, then told her what had happened: The professor had called her in to look at what he said were unusual Kirlian photographs, had showed her the album instead, and when rebuffed had assaulted her. He’d yanked her off the chair, and she slammed her head on the floor then. Kevin heard her scream as he was on his way to check mousetraps, ran in, and slugged the man in the chest. He reeled back and reached for what Kevin took for a knife, and Kevin hit him as hard as he could, causing his head to smack the wall. Once he was down, Kevin helped Djinni up and accidentally stepped backward onto the man’s hand.

Djinni mentioned that the professor was her (that is, the body’s) father, and also her karate instructor.

When the chopper crew mentioned that the man was suffering from frostbite and deep hypothermia, Kevin called the Weekly Galaxy.

The professor died on the operating table. Autopsy revealed no fatal trauma. He had frozen to death.

GHOSTS AVENGE

INCEST VICTIM!

And they posed for the camera, too—stern or menacing, as suited their tastes. Robin didn’t quite know how to react. Kevin got their names for Gennifer, and Horace got some details on them to go along with that; these were printed under the pictures.

And they all got their fifteen minutes, and they were happy, and they left at last.

* * *

Janet Haven made a full recovery from her awful experience, with one side effect: her hair, which had had to be shaved off to fix her head wounds, grew out sheer white.

* * *

Kevin had had a quiet talk with each of the other three “investigators.” He mentioned several important points:

1) He knew what the plan had been—their leader had watched far too much TV not to explain it;

2) Given his, Kevin’s, medical condition, it would be somewhat easier to hang a frame for rape on the Pope: therefore, it was merely meant to harass and discredit him;

3) Therefore Ardmore’s lawyers, who had hired Dr. Haven without telling them of this glaring flaw in the plan, had intended to have their tracks covered by letting the five asphyxiate for perjury in a capital case—this being an Eye-for-Eye-Law state;

4) They were damned lucky the professor’s latent urges had ruined the original plan;

5) Ardmore was well established to be inclined to dispose of witnesses, and presumably his lawyers would have been chosen for similar views;

6) The Peace Corps was always hurting for people with technical training, and they sent people far, far away;

7) Whether the Peace Corps or Ardmore’s attorneys saw to it: Good-bye.

They saw reason. They signed up.

They were sent to Katanga.

* * *

Kevin pretty much lived at the hospital while Djinni was there. She had a slight skull fracture, and after it had been glued up, they kept her for observation. There was some unusual neurological activity going on. It bore some resemblance to that of a child learning to talk, but all over the brain, as if every sector were developing new interconnections. And much faster: days, as opposed to months. She ran a fever.

Physicians still manifested the recurring delusion that medicine was a science, rather than an ad hoc collection of rote learning blended with greater or lesser amounts of nonlogical inspiration. Several doctors, supposing themselves scientists, wanted to keep Janet Haven for continued study. Kevin, not overfond of violence despite the reputation he had carefully nurtured, bought up their debts through dummies and opened foreclosure proceedings. This diverted their minds.

(That was the first time he really grasped how rich he was. The dollar had declined in worth, since the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, to the point where a hundred-dollar bill was worth its face value—that is, it cost that much to print—so the size of the sum was meaningless to him. Using it to alter the course of a dozen people’s lives, however, was something he could understand very well. He thought about it a great deal.)

Kevin took her home on the twelfth, fever gone.

The wall was bare.

* * *

She came out of the bathroom in two towels, saying, “I feel all puffy. I’d actually forgotten about periods. We better get … some …”

There was a floor-length silver fur coat on a stand in the bedroom. Kevin was absent.

She stroked it with her hand, opened it. Black-satin lining. Silk. A stickum note: closet.

Every outfit in the pictures was in the closet, along with other clothes, of a wide range of elegance-versus-practicality. Shoes and underwear, same remarks.

Kevin was downstairs cooking. (She could still tell where he was if she thought about it, though the details of having a body tended to drown out other people.) Djinni picked out clothes.

* * *

“How do you get the alcohol out of champagne without its going flat?” she wondered.

“I don’t, exactly,” he said. “Freeze to dry-ice temperature, vacuum out volatiles, fraction out the alcohol, put the other stuff back. Administer oxygen to nearby Frenchmen.” He smiled.

“Well, it’s good.” She laughed.

“I swear, you’re starting to look like your pictures.”

“I hope so. When I realized I was stuck here, I had to fix the place up in a hurry before I lost the knack.”

“Aha, the fever.”

“No, that came after, when I was fixing it so my memories are actually here in my brain. Everything’s combined, though, so if I get bitchy, just turn me over your knee. The Havens didn’t believe in that,” she said, more quietly. “They believed in humiliation. Janet was empty when Djinni moved in.” She began shivering and couldn’t stop.

He held her. It helped, but she kept on shivering. He picked her up and sat by the fire with her on his lap. She cried some, and nestled against him, and fell asleep.

* * *

The fire was dim when she was awakened by Kevin’s shivering. “Cold?” she murmured, and shifted position. Then she carefully moved off his lap and stood. “Sorry,” she said wretchedly.

“Not your fault,” he said carefully, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. “No reason to expect it. I’ll be fine.”

She chewed a corner of her mouth; he was having a savage anxiety attack. The suturing scars on his right knuckles stood out red against their background. “It’s not going away,” she said.

He shook his head jerkily. “Give it ten mmminnutes,” he said raggedly.

Djinni wavered, then took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “I can do it faster.” She knelt in front of the chair.

When he had quieted, she rearranged his clothing, wiped her mouth, and said, “That’s pretty big.”

“Din use a be,” he said vaguely, drifting.

Djinni murmured, “It wasn’t really meant as a criticism,” but he didn’t catch it. She hauled on his arms and got him out of the chair, then steered him to the elevator and put him to bed. “Can I stay with you?” she said.

“‘Course,” he said, not too far out of it to sound a little surprised.

She put on one of the nightgowns and held him.

V

RESOLUTION

They were some time healing each other. There was resistance. People will hang on to the familiar, however unpleasant it is. However, both had had occasion to learn patience; and they loved.

* * *

There were facilities to house some help, now. He hired them and had them fix up more rooms. Most of the equipment and tools were moved up to the old distillery, which he reconfigured to make turbine fuel. The cabins were torn down, their logs cooked with reduction gases, the tars steamed to make more gases, and the residue used as fertilizer.

More people were hired. Kevin hired a cook.

The next day he taught her to cook.

After that, people came up from Paxburg to eat.

* * *

It was Jann (she had it registered in court) who had the idea of salmon. Dig out a new pond, mix roe and milt, and they would come back to their birthplace to breed. Five years of stocking would probably do it.

* * *

Kevin used residual sulfuric acid (from ether production) to make explosives. These he used to blast down hillsides into the draws. Leftover acid was taken up by ashes from wood reduction, and potassium sulfate was dumped on the rubble. The water it soaked up would freeze in winter and break the rocks up further.

Water, sewers, and power were laid to the cabin sites, and real homes were built. A sewage-processing plant was put up in town, and Paxburg began exporting water.

Jann, who was still awfully good at assessing people, found an entrepreneur who was willing to swap free power for a hundred-year lease on a minireactor site. The sewage plant could then be expanded to take garbage as well, and the increased output from the incineration stage meant the system could supply its own coolant water. The warm coolant water was run, after cogeneration, through the sewer lines, keeping them just warm enough not to freeze in winter. The plant staff could live in a few of the houses. The ash and grindings from the sewage/garbage plant would be dumped on the blast rubble to prevent cementing and speed soil formation.

* * *

When the hotel was finished, Kevin organized his people as a construction and repair corporation, which he then sold to its employees for a dollar. They did well. Their first job was for the people Kevin leased land to for a year-round amusement park—rides when warm, skating and tobogganing when cold. (Skiing was excluded, because skiers took over once they got into a place.) Hotel guests would get in for half price. Staff, free.

About a third of the valley was set up as a tree farm, to feed the fuel plant. The contractors and the amusement park were supplied with vehicular fuel at cost.

By ‘43 at the latest, there would be salmon fishing; the power plant and amusement park would be going concerns; the tree farm would be doing a sideline in small Douglas firs, for Christmas trees; and there would be nothing more to do but count money and keep the paperwork straightened out.

* * *

On New Year’s morning of 2038, Jann finished untying Kevin and led him into the shower—otherwise his entire left side would cramp up, as they’d learned over the past year—and, as she sprayed him down, said, “How are we fixed for ready cash?”

Kevin puzzled briefly over the choice of subject. (He tended to track his thoughts down and bring back the hides; her thinking moved much like a hummingbird. Their minds dovetailed snugly. Too.) “Well,” he said, “outside Prague, and excluding reinvestment, we’ve got around thirty million liquid.”

“Gold?”

“Yeah, something like eight thousand ounces.” He didn’t ask why. She’d get around to it.

“You’re not getting a charge out of Cider Springs anymore, are you?”

“No. I feel like I’m just marking time. I don’t know why—they’re talking about putting an Exchange outlet in Paxburg.”

Jann began lathering him. “We could afford the down payment on that place in Colorado,” she said. “Bring in the equipment from here.”

He shook his head. “I told them when I turned them down, I am not a professional refurbisher. And anyway, if it’s such a great resort, why’d they wait so long? It must have been gutted sixty-five years ago. They should have either rebuilt or sold right after the fire.”

“I’ve been asking around. Your back’s ready to rinse, turn. They tried,” she said, starting to soap his chest. “Nobody ever finished the job. Seven different contractors paid their penalties and split.”

“From a mountaintop?” (The penalty clauses would have been mild next to lost time and moving expenses.) “What’s wrong with the place?”

“It’s haunted,” she said, watching his face as she soaped.

He looked at her for a long moment. “How bad?” he finally said.

She shrugged. “Couple hundred at least. Killed some people.” A faint smile developed on her face. “Oughta fill a few weekends.”

He gave her a look of skeptical amusement. “When do the owners expect us?”

“The fifteenth.” She looked down at her hands. “Am I to employ this, sir?”

“I dunno. Are there any openings it might fit?”

“I believe I’ll try it in all of them and see what position it’s best suited for. So, are we going?”

“Of course.”

* * *

Somewhere, high in the Rockies, a ghost shivered.

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Framed

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Contents

CLASSIC:

Pretty Quadroon

Written by Charles Fontenay

Illustrated by Jared Blando

General Beauregard Courtney sat in his staff car atop a slight rise and watched the slow, meshing movement of his troops on the plains south of Tullahoma, Tennessee. Clouds of dust drifted westward in the lazy summer air, and the dull boom of enemy artillery sounded from the north.

“You damn black coon,” he said without rancor, “you know you’re costing me a night’s sleep?”

The Negro courier stood beside his motorcycle and his teeth flashed white in his good-natured face. The dust of the road filmed his uniform of Southern grey.

“Miss Piquette told me to bring you the message, suh,” he answered.

“A wife couldn’t be more demanding,” grumbled Beauregard. “Why couldn’t she wait until this push is over?”

“I don’t know, suh,” said the courier.

“Well, get back to headquarters and get some supper,” commanded Beauregard. “You can fly back to Chattanooga with me.”

The man saluted and climbed aboard his motorcycle. It kicked to life with a sputtering roar, and he turned it southward on what was left of the highway.

The sun was low in the west and its reddening beams glinted from the weapons and vehicles of the men who moved through the fields below Beauregard. That would be the 184th, moving into the trenches at the edge of what had been Camp Forrest during the last war.

On the morrow this was to be the frontal attack on what was left of the Northern wind tunnel installations, while the armor moved in like a powerful pincers from Pelham to the east and Lynchburg to the west. If the Union stronghold at Tullahoma could be enveloped, the way lay open to Shelbyville and the north. No natural barrier lay north of Tullahoma until the Duck River was reached.

This was the kind of warfare Beauregard Courtney relished, this wheeling and maneuvering of tanks across country, the artillery barrage followed by infantry assault, the planes used in tactical support. It was more a soldier’s warfare than the cold, calculated, long-range bombardment by guided missiles, the lofty, aloof flight of strategic bombers. He would have been happy to live in the days when wars were fought with sword and spear.

When the Second War for Southern Independence (the Northerners called it “The Second Rebellion”) had broken out, Beauregard had feared it would be a swift holocaust of hydrogen bombs, followed by a cruel scourge of guerrilla fighting. But not one nuclear weapon had exploded, except the atomic artillery of the two opposing forces. A powerful deterrent spelled caution to both North and South.

Sitting afar, watching the divided country with glee, was Soviet Russia. Her armies and navies were mobilized. She waited only for the two halves of the United States to ruin and weaken each other before her troops would crush the flimsy barriers of western Europe and move into a disorganized America.

So the Second Rebellion (Beauregard found himself using the term because it was shorter) remained a classic war of fighting on the ground and bombing of only industrial and military targets. Both sides, by tacit agreement, left the great superhighways intact, both held their H-bombers under leash, ready to reunite if need be against a greater threat.

Just now the war was going well for the South. At the start the new Confederacy had held nothing of Tennessee except Chattanooga south of the mountains and the southwestern plains around Memphis. That had been on Beauregard’s advice, for he was high in the councils of the Southern military. He had felt it too dangerous to hold the lines as far north as Nashville, Knoxville and Paducah until the South mobilized its strength.

He had proved right. The Northern bulge down into Tennessee had been a weak point, and the Southern sympathies of many Tennesseans had hampered their defense. The Army of West Tennessee had driven up along the Mississippi River plains to the Kentucky line and the Army of East Tennessee now stood at the gates of Knoxville. Outflanked by these two threats, the Union forces were pulling back toward Nashville before Beauregard Courtney’s Army of Middle Tennessee, and he did not intend to stop his offensive short of the Ohio River.

“Head back for Winchester, Sergeant,” he commanded his driver. The man started the staff car and swung it around on the highway.

He should not go to Chattanooga, Beauregard thought as the car bumped southward over the rutted road. His executive officer was perfectly capable of taking care of things for the few hours he would be gone, but it ran against his military training to be away from his command so soon before an attack.

Had the summons come from his wife, Beauregard would have sent her a stern refusal, even had she been in Chattanooga instead of New Orleans. She had been a soldier’s wife long enough to know that duty’s demands took precedence over conjugal matters. But there was a weakness in him where Piquette was concerned. Nor was that all. She knew, as well as Lucy did, the stern requirements of military existence; and she was even less likely than Lucy to ask him to come to her unless the matter was of such overwhelming import as to overshadow what he gained by staying.

Beauregard sighed. He would eat a light supper on the plane and be back in Winchester by midnight. The pre-attack artillery barrage was not scheduled to open before four o’clock in the morning.

The plane put down at the Chattanooga airport at dusk and a swift military car took him down Riverside Drive, past the old Confederate cemetery, and downtown. Chattanooga was a military city. Grey-uniformed military police stood at the intersections and soldiers on rest leave from both East and Middle armies trooped in laughing gangs along darkened Market Street. Few civilians were abroad.

The siren and circled stars on Beauregard’s car cleared a path for him through the sparse downtown traffic. The car roared out Broad Street, swung under the viaduct and sped up the curving drives of Lookout Mountain. At a darkened house on the brow of the mountain, overlooking Georgia and Alabama, the car pulled up. Beauregard spoke a word to the driver, got out and went to the front door. Behind him the car’s lights went out, and it crunched quietly into the shadowed driveway.

There was light in the house when Piquette opened the door to him. She held out her hands in welcome, and her smile was as sweet as sunshine on dew-sparkling fields.

Piquette’s skin was golden, like autumn leaves, with an undertone of rich bronze. Her dark eyes were liquid and warm, and her hair tumbled to her shoulders, a jet cascade. She was clad in a simple white dress that, in the daring new fashion, bared the full, firm swell of her breasts.

Beauregard took her in his arms, and as her lips clung to his, he felt a grey old man, as grey as his braid-hung uniform. He held her away from him. In the mirror behind her he saw his face, stern, weatherbeaten, light-mustached, with startling blue eyes.

“Piquette, what on earth is this folly?” he demanded, kicking the door shut behind him. “Don’t you know I’m moving on Tullahoma in the morning?”

“You know I wouldn’t call you unless it was important, ‘Gard, as much as I long for you.” When she talked, her delicately moulded face was as mobile as quicksilver. “I’ve found something that may end the war and save my people.”

“Dammit, ‘Quette, how many times have I told you, they are not your people? You’re a quadroon. You’re three-fourths white, and a lot whiter in your heart than some white women I’ve seen.”

“But I’m one-fourth Negro, and you wouldn’t have married me, for that, even if you’d known me before you met your Lucy. Isn’t that right, ‘Gard?”

“Look, ‘Quette, just because things are the way they are… .”

She hushed him with a finger on his lips.

“The Negroes are my people, and the white people are my people,” she said. “If the world were right, I’d be a woman instead of a thing in between, scorned by both. Can’t you see that, ‘Gard? You’re not like most Southerners.”

“I am a Southerner,” he answered proudly. “That I love you above my own blood makes no difference. No, I don’t hate the black man, as so many Southerners do—and Northerners too, if the truth were known. But, by God, he’s not my equal, and I won’t have him ruling over whites.”

“This is an old argument,” she said wearily, “and it isn’t why I called you here. I’ve found a man—or, rather, a man has found me—who can end this war and give my people the place in the world they deserve.”

Beauregard raised his bushy eyebrows, but he said nothing. Piquette took him by the hand and led him from the hall into the spacious living room.

A Negro man sat there on the sofa, behind the antique coffee table. He was well-dressed in a civilian suit. His woolly hair was grey, and his eyes shone like black diamonds in his wizened face.

“General Courtney, this is Mr. Adjaha,” said Piquette.

“From where?” demanded Beauregard warily. Surely Piquette would not have led him into a trap set by Northern spies?

Adjaha arose and inclined his head gravely. He was a short man, rather squarely built. Neither he nor Beauregard offered to shake hands.

“Originally from the Ivory Coast of Africa, sir,” said Adjaha in a low, mellow voice. “I have lived in the United States … in the Confederacy … since several years before the unfortunate outbreak of war.”

Beauregard turned to Piquette.

“I don’t see the point of this,” he said. “Is this man some relative of yours? What does his being here have to do with this crazy talk of ending the war?”

“If you will excuse me, General,” said Adjaha, “I overheard your conversation in the hall and, indeed, Piquette already had informed me of the dissension in your heart. You would be fair to my race in the South, yet you fear that if they had equality under the law they would misuse their superiority in numbers.”

Beauregard laughed scornfully.

“See here, old man, if you think I’m ripe to lead a peace and surrender movement in the South, you’re wasting your time,” he said. “The South is committed to this war, and so be it.”

“I ask only that you listen for a brief time to words that may be more fruitful than a few hours in a quadroon’s bedroom,” said Adjaha patiently. “As I said, I am from the Ivory Coast. When the white man set foot in that part of Africa, he found a great but savage kingdom called Dahomey: the ancestral home of most of the slaves who were brought to the South.

“Before Dahomey there was a civilization whose roots struck back to the age when the Sahara bloomed and was fertile. Before the great civilizations of Egypt, of Sumer and of Crete was the greater civilization of the African black man. That civilization had a science that was greater than anything that has arisen since. It was not a science of steel and steam and atoms, but a science of men’s minds and men’s motives. Its decadent recollections would have been called witchcraft in mediaeval Europe; they have been known in the West as voodoo and superstition.”

“I think you’re crazy,” said Beauregard candidly. “‘Quette, have you hired a voodoo man to hex me?”

“Be tolerant, General,” admonished Adjaha in his mellow voice. “Many of you in the West are not aware of it, but Africa has been struggling back to civilization in the Twentieth Century. And, while most of its people have been content to strive toward the young ways of the West, a few of us have sought in our ancestral traditions a path to the old knowledge. Not entirely in vain. Look.”

Like a conjuror, he produced from somewhere in his clothing a small carved figure. About six inches high, it was cut from some gleaming black stone in the attenuated form so common to African sculpture. It dangled from Adjaha’s fingers on a string and turned slowly, then more swiftly. As it spun, the light from the chandelier flashed from its planes and curves in a silvery, bewildering pattern. Beauregard felt his eyes drawn to it, into it, his very brain drawn into it.

Beauregard stood there, staring at the twirling image. His eyes were wide open and slightly glazed. Piquette gave a little, frightened cry.

“It’s all right, my dear,” said Adjaha. “He’s just under hypnosis. Your General Beauregard is the key that can unlock the past and the future for us.”

* * *

There was an insistent command beating against Beauregard’s brain: “Go back … go back … go back …”

It was a sunny summer morning in Memphis. Beauregard Courtney, Nashville attorney and adjutant general of Tennessee, stepped out of the elevator at the Peabody Hotel and walked across the wide, columned lobby to the newsstand. He did not go by the desk; Beauregard preferred to keep his room key in his pocket when he stayed in a hotel.

He bought a copy of The Commercial Appeal and dropped onto one of the sofas nearby to read the headlines. As he had suspected, the story in which he was involved took top play.

SOUTHERN GOVERNORS GATHER TODAY TO DISCUSS “REVOLT”

It was a three-column head at the right of the page. The Commercial Appeal wasn’t as conservative as it had been when he was a boy, but it still didn’t go in for the bold black streamers, he thought approvingly.

He glanced at the other front page headlines: MERIDIAN QUIET UNDER FEDERAL REGIME … NEHRU BLASTS RACE UNREST IN MISSISSIPPI … PRESIDENT URGES SOUTH: “ABIDE BY LAW”… .

Beauregard sighed. He was caught up in the vortex of great events.

He arose, folding his paper, and walked toward the stairs leading down to the grill. The governors’ meeting was not until eleven o’clock. After breakfast he would talk with some of the Memphis political leaders and telephone Governor Gentry. He was in a delicate position here, representing a state that did not think exactly as he did.

As he reached the steps, a dark-haired woman, dressed in misty blue for the morning, approached from the elevators. He stepped aside to let her precede him. Then they recognized each other.

“Piquette!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were in Memphis.”

The quadroon flashed a smile and a sparkle of black eyes at him.

“I knew you were here,” she said, gesturing at the newspaper.

He hesitated, uncertain whether she was just countering his own remark or telling him that he was her reason for being here.

“Will you have breakfast with me?” he invited.

“Yes,” she answered, and gave him a sidelong glance, “if it’s in my room.”

He laughed, rich and full-throated. She took his arm and they went back to the elevator together. His heart was lighter now that Piquette was in Memphis with him… .

There were eleven Southern governors at the meeting. Governor LeBlanc of Louisiana, like Governor Gentry of Tennessee, had sent a representative in his stead. As representative of the host state, Beauregard opened the meeting, welcomed the visitors and turned over the chairmanship to Governor Dortch of Georgia.

“Gentlemen, there is no point in delaying our principal discussion,” said Dortch. “Within the past week, federal troops have moved into a Mississippi city to enforce the Supreme Court’s infamous integration decree. For the first time since Reconstruction Days, hostile soldiers are on the soil of a sovereign Southern state. The question before us is, shall we bow to this invasion of states’ rights and continue our hopeless fight in the courts, or shall we join hands in resisting force with force?”

Chubby Governor Marsh of Alabama rose to his feet.

“There wouldn’t have been any federal troops if it hadn’t been for this extremist segregation organization, the Konfederate Klan,” he said heavily. “I belong to a segregationist organization myself: I suppose most of you do, because you got elected. But lynching and rioting and burning homes and schools is no way to resist integration. Mississippi’s National Guard should have been in Meridian.”

“If I’d mobilized the Guard, I’d have had a revolt on my hands,” said Governor Ahlgren of Mississippi mildly. “Two-third of the guardsmen belong to the Klan.”

“I’ll go along with the majority, of course,” said Marsh, “but I think this proposed Pact of Resistance can lead only to full-fledged military occupation of the South.”

Almost without willing it, Beauregard arose. Governor Gentry had counseled caution, listening instead of talking, but a fire burned deep in Beauregard. Somehow the laughing face of Piquette as he had seen her last misted his eyes. A powerful urging was on him to beat his breast and cry: “The white man must rule … !”

* * *

Beauregard opened his eyes and looked around him dazedly. He was sitting in the parlour of Piquette’s house on Lookout Mountain. Piquette leaned against his shoulder, patting his hand, and Adjaha stood before him with hands clasped behind his back. Adjaha looked like a worried dwarf.

“You remember that you relived your participation in the governors’ conference in Memphis?” asked Adjaha.

“Yes,” said Beauregard, rubbing his forehead. “You black scoundrel! You hypnotized me with that pagan doll!”

“Yes, sir,” admitted Adjaha. “It took me a long time to trace the key to this war, and when I found you were that key I knew I could reach you only through Piquette. It was your impassioned speech before the governors that turned the South to war instead of peace.”

“Nonsense!” said Beauregard, sitting up straighter. “I just expressed what the majority was thinking. They’d have agreed on the Pact of Resistance even if I had objected.”

“The man of destiny sometimes doesn’t realize his own influence,” said Adjaha drily. “Many factors were concentrated in you that day besides your own native persuasiveness. No, General, your stand swung the governors to the Pact of Resistance. Announcement of that pact spurred the Konfederate Klan to massacre the federal troops at Meridian. That brought the federal proclamation placing Mississippi under martial law and the subsequent mobilization and revolt of the South.”

“Perhaps so,” conceded Beauregard wearily. “Perhaps I did wrong in not following Governor Gentry’s instructions and keeping my mouth shut. But I spoke my convictions, and it’s too late now.”

“That is not necessarily true, General,” said Adjaha. “Time is a dimension, and it is as easy to move east as it is west. A better simile: one can move upward as well as downward, but the presence of gravitation makes special skills necessary.”

Beauregard shook his head.

“A good theory, but good only as a theory,” he said. “If it were more than that, the law of cause and effect would be abrogated.”

“No, it works both ways. The present can influence the past as much as it influences the future, or as much as the past influenced it. Thus, through the past, the present can influence itself. In my native land, the Ivory Coast of Africa, we believe in fan-shaped destiny, General. At every instant where a choice is made, a man may take one of many paths. And those who had the old knowledge of my people could retrace their steps when the wrong path was taken, and choose another path.”

“But I can’t,” said Beauregard. “If I could, I don’t know anything that could have changed what I said and did that day in Memphis.”

“Tell me, General, how long had Piquette been your mistress before the Memphis Conference?” asked Adjaha.

“About three years,” answered Beauregard, too puzzled at this change of tack to be offended.

“Even if you were a psychologist instead of a general, it would be difficult for you to probe the motivation of your own heart,” said the Negro. “Piquette was your reason for voting for war, instead of peace!”

Beauregard sprang to his feet angrily.

“Look, damn you, don’t feed me your voodoo doubletalk!” he thundered. “If it were Piquette alone I had to consider, don’t you think I’d have advocated equality for the black race?”

It was Piquette’s voice that sobered him, like a dash of cold water.

“And yet you try to tell me I’m not a Negro, ‘Gard,” she said quietly.

The anger drained from him. He slumped back to the sofa.

“Ah yes, the perversity of a man whose mind and heart are at odds!” exclaimed Adjaha softly. “You love Piquette, yet your pride tells you that you should not love a woman with Negro blood in her veins. For that you must be aggressive, you must prove that the moral code taught you as a child was not wrong. You went to the Memphis Conference with Piquette’s kisses still sweet on your lips, and because of that your conscience demanded that you stand forth as a champion of the white man’s superiority.”

“So be it, then, you black Freudian,” retorted Beauregard cynically, an angry gleam in his blue eyes. “The die was cast two years ago.”

“The die shall be recast,” said Adjaha firmly. “Piquette must not have gone to Memphis. She must not have been your mistress before you went to Memphis.”

With this, he walked swiftly from the room. Beauregard looked at Piquette, his eyes half amused, half doubtful. She smiled at him.

“What he does is out of our hands,” she said. “It’s still early, ‘Gard.”

He took her in his arms.

* * *

Governor Beauregard Courtney of Tennessee sat in the tall chair behind the governor’s desk and twiddled a paperweight given him, if his recollection was accurate, by the Nashville Rotary Club. His wife, Lucy, a handsome woman whose dark brown hair was just beginning to grey, stood by the door with an armload of packages.

“Beauregard, the people moving into that vacant house down on Franklin Road are Negroes,” she said indignantly. “I want you to do something about it. The very idea! That close to the mansion!”

“They aren’t Negroes,” he said patiently. “They’re my secretary and her mother. My secretary is a quadroon, and her mother’s a mulatto. It’s convenient to have them live so close, in case I need to do some weekend work at home.”

“A quadroon!” Lucy’s eyes widened. “Which of your secretaries is a quadroon?”

“Piquette. And don’t tell me I shouldn’t have employed her. The Negro vote is important in this state, and if I’d hired a full-blooded Negro a lot of the white vote would turn against me.”

“Well, I never! You’ve become more and more of an integrationist ever since you got into politics, Beauregard.”

“Maybe I’ve gained some wisdom and understanding,” he replied. “That is not to say I’m an ‘integrationist.’ I’m still doing my best to get it done slowly and cautiously. But the only way the South could have resisted it was by open revolt, which would have been suicide. And I must say the Southern fears have not been realized, so far.”

Lucy sniffed.

“I have to speak at a woman’s club meeting tonight,” she said, opening the door. “Are you going home now?”

“No, Sergeant Parker will drive you home and come back for me. I’m going to eat downtown and clean up some work in the office tonight.”

She left, and Beauregard leaned back in his chair thoughtfully, having just told his wife a lie.

They had no children to be affected by it, but Lucy never would become reconciled to integration. She blamed him for his part in turning the Memphis Governors Conference away from the proposed Pact of Resistance five years ago.

Beauregard had had his doubts about speaking out against resisting the federal government with the threat of force. Now he thought he had done right: war would have been terrible, and the South could not have won such a war. And it was his statesmanship at that conference, and Governor Gentry’s lavish praise of it, that had set him up to succeed Gentry as governor.

Beauregard sighed peacefully. He had done right, and the world was better for it.

The door opened, and Piquette’s golden, black-eyed face peeked around it.

“It’s four-thirty, Governor,” she said. “Will you want me for anything else?”

“Not just now,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back.

“Room 832,” she said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. Then she was gone.

Beauregard’s blood quickened, but he was disturbed. This that he was going to do was not right. But what other course would a normal man take, when his wife was so estranged that she had become nothing more than a front for the married happiness the people demanded of their governor, a figurehead who lived in another wing of the mansion?

He had met Piquette eight years before, briefly, when he was a staid, climbing Nashville lawyer. Not knowing she was of mixed blood then, he had been drawn to her strongly. He had thought her drawn also to him, but for some reason their paths parted, and he had not seen her again until after his election to the governorship.

She had been among a group of applicants for state jobs, and Beauregard had happened to be in the personnel office the day she came in. He employed her in the governor’s office at once. She was a good secretary.

Nothing untoward had passed between them in that year she had worked as his secretary. In nothing either of them said or did could any members of his staff have detected an incorrect attitude. But there were invitations of the eyes, caresses of the voice … and a week ago their hands had touched, and clung, and he had found that she was willing… .

Beauregard heaved himself to his feet with a sigh. Briefly he felt sorry for Lucy. He would eat supper downtown tonight, but it would be in Room 832.

* * *

Beauregard awoke slowly, with a hand shaking his shoulder. Reluctantly he abandoned a dream in which the South had remained at peace and he was governor of his state.

Piquette’s flower-like face hovered over him in the dimness. She rested one elbow in the big bed beside him and shook his shoulder.

“‘Gard!” she said urgently. “Wake up! It’s after midnight.”

“Oh, damn!” he groaned, rolling out of the warm covers. “And the Northerners will attack today if my intelligence service hasn’t gone completely haywire.”

“Get dressed,” she said, dropping her bare feet to the floor and smoothing her nightgown over her knees. “I’ll fix you some coffee.”

He pulled on his uniform, the Confederate grey with the stars glittering on the collar, while she plugged in the hotplate and started the coffee. Outside, the eastern sky was streaked with dim light, against which the sleeping houses of Winchester thrust up stark silhouettes.

She sat across the little table from him, a flowered robe drawn around her, while he sipped his coffee and thrust the last wisps of dreams from his head.

“‘Quette,” he said, “I want you to pack and get out of here. Before daylight, if you can get ready. Head south, for Birmingham. I’ll send a staff car around for you as soon as I get to headquarters.”

“I don’t want to leave you, ‘Gard,” she objected.

“You’ve got to, ‘Quette. We can’t hold these Federals. We’re in a bulge here, and the only reason they haven’t cracked us out yet is Chattanooga holding our right flank.”

He kissed her goodbye, a long kiss, and strode down the street to the Franklin County courthouse, where he had set up headquarters for the Army of Middle Tennessee when the Union troops had forced them out of Nashville. The place was a beehive of activity.

The eastern sky glowed red over the Cumberlands and the artillery was thundering in the north when General Beauregard Courtney rode out toward the front. He had his driver park the staff car on a slight rise overlooking his troop formations.

The war was going badly for the South, and Beauregard unhappily took much of the responsibility on himself. Perhaps he had been wrong in making that impassioned speech at the Governors Conference in Memphis which, he was sure, had swung the weight of opinion in favour of the Pact of Resistance. Certainly he had been wrong in recommending a far-flung northern battle line at the start of the war, which stretched from Paducah, Kentucky, north of Nashville to Knoxville, with its eastern anchor on the Cumberlands.

It had been his idea that a defensive line so far north would give the South more time to mobilize behind it, would hold the rich industries of Tennessee for the South and would give the South a jumping off place for a strike across the Ohio River. But the North had mobilized faster, and Northern armies had crunched down through the Southern defenses like paper.

Now all of West Tennessee and a segment of Mississippi were in Federal hands. The Southern defense in East Tennessee had been forced back to the mountains around Chattanooga. And his own troops had fallen back from stand after stand after the Battle of Nashville. Even now, Federal armor was reported to have crossed the Tennessee River and be heading southeastward toward Columbia and Lewisburg.

He hoped Piquette had left Winchester by now. Perhaps he should not have kept his quadroon mistress with him through the constant danger of defeat, but with Lucy way down in New Orleans…

As the morning wore on, the guns thundered below him and the tanks rumbled across the Tullahoma plain, spouting fire. Several times his sergeant urged him to withdraw, out of danger, and return to headquarters, but he stayed. He wanted to direct this battle personally, giving his orders over the car radio.

A great pall of smoke hung over the battlefield. Then the attack came, wave after wave of blue-clad infantry, pouring down from the north. Tanks and planes supported them and atomic artillery shells burst in the Southern trenches. The grey lines began to crumble.

“Colonel, throw in the 112th and the armored reserve, and let’s try to get an orderly withdrawal to the Alabama line,” Beauregard ordered into his microphone. He turned to his driver. “Sergeant, I think you’re right. We’d better get out of here.”

The staff car swung around and headed back toward Winchester over the bumpy highway. As it left the rise, Beauregard swore fervently and reached for the microphone. From the west came a great cloud of dust and a mass of rumbling tanks. The Federals had broken through the left flank at Lynchburg.

Jet planes streaked overhead from the north, flying low. The flash of exploding bombs and rockets was visible in Winchester, ahead of them.

Speaking swiftly into the microphone, Beauregard glanced out of the car’s back window.

“Sergeant!” he yelled. “Strafers!”

The driver twisted the wheel so quickly Beauregard was thrown against the door. The speeding car leaped a ditch and bounced into the fields.

Out the window, Beauregard saw the jet swooping down at them like a hawk. It was a speck in the sky, and almost instantly it was on them in a terrifying rush.

He saw the flare of the rockets leaving the plane’s wings, he felt the shock of a thunderous explosion, and the blackness engulfed him.

Beauregard opened his eyes painfully. His head ached and his left arm hurt horribly.

He was lying on a rumpled bed in his torn uniform. Piquette and a wizened, very black Negro man were standing beside the bed, looking down at him anxiously. He recognized that he was in the house in Winchester, in the room where he had spent last night … or was it last night?

“‘Quette!” he croaked, trying to sit up. He couldn’t make it, and he gasped at the pain in his arm. “I thought I told you to leave Winchester.”

“I didn’t want to leave you, ‘Gard,” she answered softly. “And it’s lucky I didn’t. Some men on an ammunition truck found your car. Your driver was killed, and your arm blown half off. They brought you here.”

“Dammit,” he complained, “why didn’t they take me to the base hospital?”

“Because the base hospital took a direct hit from a bomb.”

That startled Beauregard into the realization that there was no sound of firing, no crash of bombs, outside. There were men’s shouts and the normal sounds of a town occupied by the military. Had the Union forces been repulsed by some miracle?

“Well, for Pete’s sake, call the medics and get me to a field hospital,” he ordered. “And you head south for Birmingham, like I told you to.”

“‘Gard,” she said soberly, “I thought it ought to be your decision, and not mine. If we call the medics, they’ll be Federal troops. Winchester was captured hours ago, and it’s just chance that they haven’t entered this house and found you before now.”

Beauregard lay silent, stunned. The strange man beside the bed spoke for the first time.

“It is not his decision,” he said. “There is work that I must do which may be delayed forever if he is captured.”

“This is Adjaha, a friend of mine,” said Piquette. “He came to Winchester to see you. He thinks he knows a way to end the war.”

“Poppycock!” snorted Beauregard weakly.

“General Courtney,” said Adjaha intensely, “you spent last night with Piquette. Where did you spend the night? Here, or in Chattanooga?”

Beauregard opened his mouth to say, “Here, of course.” Then he stopped. Suddenly a vision, almost a memory, rose up before him and he could not be sure. There was a chandelier, and a black voodoo charm… .

“You do remember some of it!” exclaimed Adjaha delightedly.

“It seems that I dreamed the South was winning, and I was going to drive on Tullahoma, and I went to Chattanooga to see Piquette,” said Beauregard slowly. “But it’s mixed up in my mind with another dream, in which there was no war at all, and I was elected governor… .”

“Those were not dreams,” said Adjaha. “They happened and yet they did not happen.”

“I remember you in a dream,” said Beauregard faintly, “and words about ‘fan-shaped destiny… .’”

“You have to understand this or I can do nothing,” said Adjaha hurriedly. “The South was doing well, although it could not have won in the end. You were preparing to advance on Tullahoma, and you did go to Chattanooga last night to see Piquette. This happened.

“But it didn’t happen, because I utilized the ancient knowledge of my people, involving dimensions beyond time, to change the factors that led to it. Decisions of different people were influenced differently at a dozen points in the past so that Piquette did not become your mistress before you went to Memphis, and your own emotional attitude was changed just enough to steer you on a different course.

“Then the other things you call a dream happened instead. There was peace instead of war.”

“Then how is it that we actually have war and defeat?” demanded Beauregard, his voice a little stronger.

“Piquette,” said Adjaha gravely. “You found her again, and she became your mistress after you were governor.”

“But I remember that now!” exclaimed Beauregard. “That’s three years in the future … and there was no war.”

“It is difficult to understand, but the future can change the present,” said Adjaha. “General Courtney, even more than I realized at first you are the ‘man of destiny,’ the key to war or peace in the South, and Piquette is the key to your own emotions.

“Try to comprehend this: you cannot love Piquette in a South that is at peace! The whole social fabric in which you were nurtured demands of you that a woman of Negro blood cannot be your paramour unless she is socially recognized as an inferior and, in a very real sense, not your co-equal lover but the servant of your pleasure. When Piquette became your mistress, even five years after the decisive moment of the Memphis Conference, the entire framework of time and events was distorted and thrown back into a sequence in which the South was at war. This time, unfortunately for you, a slightly different time-path was taken and the South does not fare well.”

“Then you’ve failed, and things are worse than they were if you hadn’t interfered,” said Beauregard.

“No, I must try again,” said Adjaha. “Piquette’s mother must never have brought her to Nashville as a child, so there will be no chance or you ever meeting her at all.”

There was a thunderous knocking at the front door. Federal troops who were investing the town at last had reached this house. Adjaha gave Beauregard one sympathetic look from his dark eyes and slipped quietly from the room, toward the rear of the house.

The knocking sounded again. Beauregard lay in a semi-daze, his blood-encrusted left arm an agony to him. Through the haze over his mind intruded a premonition that bit more deeply than the physical pain: Never to know Piquette?

He clutched her hand to his breast.

“‘Quette,” he whimpered.

“Be still, darling, I won’t leave you,” she soothed him as a mother soothes her child. Her cool hand caressed his cheek.

* * *

United States Senator Beauregard Courtney of Tennessee crossed Canal Street cautiously and plunged into the French Quarter of New Orleans with a swift, military stride. He had always urged Lucy that they take a trip to New Orleans, but she always had demurred; she said that the city reminded her of war and trouble, somehow. Now he had been invited to be the principal speaker at the annual banquet of the Louisiana Bar Association tonight. He had welcomed the opportunity to make the trip, without Lucy.

It had been ten years since his voice at the Memphis conference had swung the South away from war and onto the path of peace. His statesmanship on that occasion had brought him great honour. He had served a four-year term as governor of his state and, on leaving that office, had been advanced to the U.S. Senate. His light-colored hair and mustache were beginning to grey slightly.

Lucy had been a good wife to him, even though there had been that near-estrangement when he was so busy as governor. Perhaps she still did not agree with him entirely on his acceptance of the fact of racial integration without bitter resistance, but she was more tolerant now of his sincerity than she had been once. He was sorry she was not here: she would have enjoyed the Old World atmosphere through which he walked.

Beauregard moved up fabled Bourbon Street, past Galatoire’s and the Absinthe House. He stared with interest at the intricate ironwork of the balconies that overhung the narrow sidewalk, at the bright flowers that peered over the stone walls of gardens, at the blank wooden doors flush with the sidewalk. How far, he wondered, was he from Rampart Street, where the Creoles had kept their beautiful quadroon mistresses in one-story white houses in days long gone? He knew nothing of the Vieux Carre and had no map.

As he penetrated more deeply into the French Quarter, he began to pass the barred gates that stopped the dim corridors leading back to ancient courtyards. These fascinated him, and he tried several of the gates, only to find them locked.

He never knew later, studying the map, whether the street he had just crossed was Toulouse, St. Peter or Orleans, when he came upon one of those gates that stood ajar. Beauregard did not hesitate. He pushed it open and paced eagerly down the shadowed corridor until he emerged into the sunlit courtyard.

There was a stone statue, grey and cracked with age, in the middle of a circular pool in the center of the courtyard. Flower-lined walks surrounded it. The doors that opened into the courtyard were shadowed by balconies, on which there were other doors and to which steep flights of stairs climbed.

On a bench beside the pool sat a woman in a simple print dress. Her skin was tawny gold and her hair was black and tumbled about her shoulders. Her eyes were black and deep, too, when she raised them in surprise to the intruder. She was beautiful, with a poignant, wistful beauty.

“I’m sorry,” said Beauregard. “The gate was open, and I was curious.”

“Mrs. Mills forgot to lock the gate,” she said, smiling at him. “All of us who live here have our keys and are supposed to lock the gate when we go out. But Mrs. Mills forgets.”

“I’ll leave,” he said, not moving.

“No, stay,” she said. “You’re a visitor to town, aren’t you? There’s no reason why you can’t see a French Quarter courtyard, if you wish.”

Beauregard moved closer to her.

“I’m Beauregard Courtney,” he said. For some reason he omitted the “Senator.”

“‘Gard,” she said in a low voice, her big eyes fixed on his face. “‘Gard Courtney.”

Somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind faint memory stirred. Was it the memory of a dream?

“Have I dreamed that we met before?” he asked slowly. “Piquette?”

“You know!” she exclaimed, her face lighting gloriously. “I didn’t dream alone!”

“No,” he said. “No. You didn’t dream alone. Your name is Piquette, isn’t it? I don’t know why I said that. It seemed right.”

“It is right.”

“And you live here?”

“Up there,” she said, and pointed to one of the doors that looked out on the balcony.

Beauregard looked up at the balcony and the door and he knew, as though he had prevision, that before he left the courtyard he would go through that door with Piquette.

He took her hands in his.

“I’ll never let you leave me,” he murmured.

* * *

General Beauregard Courtney sat under the open-sided tent that was his field headquarters and stretched long legs under the flimsy table. He gazed morosely out toward Tullahoma in the north, where the trenches stretched endlessly from east to west and only an occasional artillery shell broke the quiet of the battlefield.

Stalemate.

“I thought trench warfare went out with World War I,” he growled to his executive officer.

“No, sir. Apparently not, sir,” replied Colonel Smithson correctly, not interrupting his preparation of tomorrow’s orders.

Stalemate. The Northern armies and the Southern armies had collided with great carnage on this battlefield. Fighting had swayed back and forth for weeks, and at last had settled down to a stubborn holding action by both sides.

That had been months ago. Now trenches and fortifications and tank traps extended across southern Tennessee from the Cumberlands to the Mississippi. Occasional offensives came to naught. Only the planes of both sides swept daily over the lines, bombarding the rear areas, reducing the cities of Tennessee to rubble.

Beauregard toyed with a pencil and listened idly to the news over the little radio at his elbow. It was a Nashville station, and Nashville was held by the North, but he had learned how to discount the news from the battlefront.

“…And our planes destroyed thirteen Rebel tanks and an ammunition depot in a mission near Lexington,” the announcer was saying. “A gunboat duel in the Mississippi River near Dyersburg was broken off after severe casualties were inflicted on the Rebel crew. Our armored troops have advanced farther into the Texas Panhandle. Wait. There’s a flash coming in …”

There was a momentary pause. Beauregard bent his ear to the radio. Colonel Smithson looked up, listening.

“My God!” cried the announcer in a shaky voice. “This flash … a hydrogen bomb has exploded in New York City!”

Beauregard surged to his feet, upsetting the table. The radio crashed to the ground. The other men in the tent were standing, aghast.

“It isn’t ours!” cried Beauregard, his face grey. “It’s a Russian bomb! It must be … !”

The voice on the fallen radio was shouting, excited, almost hysterical.

“… The heart of the city wiped out … Number of dead not estimated yet, but known to be high … Great fires raging … Radioactive fallout spreading over New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania… .

“Here’s a bulletin: the President accuses the Rebel government of violating the pact not to use large nuclear weapons. Retaliatory action has already been initiated… .

“Here’s another flash: Detroit and Chicago have been H-bombed! My God, has the world gone mad! There’s a report, unconfirmed, that the Detroit bombers came from the north… .”

“They can’t believe we did it!” muttered Beauregard. All the men in the tent, irrespective of rank, were clustered around the radio. No one thought to pick it up from the ground.

A staff car drove in from the south and rocked to a stop in front of the headquarters tent. Beauregard hardly noticed it until Piquette got out, followed by a slight, grey-haired Negro man in civilian clothes.

Beauregard strode out of the tent. The car radio was on loud, and the same announcer was babbling over it.

“‘Quette, what are you doing out here?” he demanded.

“‘Gard, this is Adjaha, a friend of mine,” she said hurriedly. “I couldn’t wait for you to come back to town tonight. I had to get him out to see you before it’s too late.”

“Dammit, it is too late,” he growled. “It’s too late for anything. Haven’t you been listening to that damn radio?”

“This is extremely important, General,” said Adjaha in a mellow voice. “If I may impose on you, I’d like to talk with you for a short while.”

Beauregard frowned and glanced at Piquette. She nodded slightly, and her face was anxious.

“I suppose I have plenty of time to talk,” he said heavily. “We can do nothing but sit here with useless armies while the country tears itself apart. Sergeant, turn that damn car radio off and go bring some chairs out here. You can listen to the radio in the tent.”

They sat, the three of them, and Adjaha talked. Beauregard listened skeptically, almost incredulously, but something within him—not quite a memory, but an insistent familiarity—caused him to listen. He did not believe, but he suspended disbelief.

“So you see, General,” concluded Adjaha, “there is some drive within you and Piquette—call it fate, if you wish—that draws you together. When it was arranged that she did not become your mistress before the Memphis Conference, she did after you became governor. When it was arranged that her parents did not move to Nashville with her, you were drawn to New Orleans to meet her. Apparently you must meet if there is any possibility that you meet, and when you meet, you love each other.

“And, though you can’t remember it, General—for it didn’t happen, even though it did—I explained to you once, on this very day, that you cannot love Piquette in an unrebellious and peaceful South.”

“If we were fated to meet, I’m happy,” said Beauregard, taking Piquette’s hand. “If these fantastic things you say were true, I still would never consent to not having met Piquette.”

“But you must see that it’s right, ‘Gard!” exclaimed Piquette, surprisingly.

“‘Quette! How can you say that? Would you be happy if we were never to know each other?”

She looked at him, and there were tears in her eyes.

“Yes, ‘Gard,” she said in a low voice, “because … well, Adjaha can see a little of the future, too. And on every alternate path he sees … ‘Gard, if the South is at war, you’ll be killed before the war ends!”

“We can’t take any chances this time, General,” said Adjaha. “Should events be thrown back into a path that leads to war, this time you might be killed before I could reach you. Piquette’s parents must never have met. She must never have been born!”

Suddenly, Beauregard believed. This quiet little black man could do what he said.

“I won’t permit it!” he roared, starting to his feet. “Damn the South! Damn the world! Piquette is mine!”

But Adjaha, moving light lightning, was in the staff car. Its motor roared, it swung in a cloud of dust and accelerated toward the south.

“Sergeant! Colonel! Get that stolen staff car!” Beauregard bellowed. He whipped out his service pistol and fired two futile shots after the diminishing vehicle.

The general’s staff boiled out of the tent. They milled around a minute, shouting questions, before piling into two command cars and giving chase to the disappearing staff car.

Beauregard glowered after them. Then he took Piquette’s hand and they walked together into the empty tent.

“… Here’s a late flash,” said the radio on the ground. “Birmingham has been H-bombed. Our planes are in the air against the Rebels …”

Beauregard imagined the ground trembled. Instinctively he looked toward the south for the radioactive mushroom cloud. Then he swung back to Piquette.

“‘Quette, he can’t do it,” said Beauregard. “He’s a voodoo fraud.”

She looked at him with great, dark eyes. Her lips trembled.

“‘Gard,” she whispered like a frightened child. “‘Gard, aren’t there other worlds than this one … ?”

She crept into his arms.

* * *

Colonel Beauregard Courtney sat on the terrace of his home in the suburbs of Nashville and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on his grey head. The steady hum of automobiles on the superhighway half a mile away was a droning background to the songs of birds in the trees of his big back yard.

The “Colonel” was an honorary title bestowed on him by the governor, for Beauregard had never worn a uniform. He had been Governor Gentry’s representative at the fateful Memphis Conference forty years ago, he had been governor of his state, he had been United States senator from Tennessee, he had been chief justice of the state Supreme Court. Now he preferred to think of himself as Beauregard Courtney, attorney, retired.

Where was Lucy? Probably sitting in front of the television screen, nodding, not seeing a bit of the program. She should be out here in this glorious sunshine.

Beauregard’s gardener, a wizened little Negro man, came around the corner of the house.

“Adjaha, you black scoundrel, why don’t you die?” demanded Beauregard affectionately. “You must be twenty years older than I am.”

“Fully that, Colonel,” agreed Adjaha with a smile that wrinkled his entire face. “But I’m waiting for you to die first. I’m here to keep watch over you, you know.”

He picked up the hoe and went around the house.

Curious thing about Adjaha. Beauregard never had understood why an able, well-educated man like Adjaha, in a free and successfully integrated society, would be content to spend his whole life as gardener for Beauregard Courtney.

Beauregard leaned back comfortably in his lawn chair and thrummed his thin fingers on its wooden arm. Absently he whistled a tune, and presently became aware he was whistling it.

It was a haunting little melody, from long ago. He didn’t know the words, only one phrase; and he didn’t know whether that was the title or some words from the song itself, that song of old New Orleans: “… my pretty quadroon …”

“Piquette,” he thought and wondered why that name came to mind.

Piquette. A pretty name. Perhaps a name for a pretty quadroon. But why had that particular name come to mind?

He never had known a woman named Piquette.

* * *

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Framed

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Contents

SERIELS:

Countdown to Armageddon, Episode Seven

Written by Edward M. Lerner

Illustrated by Dean Spencer

PART IV

Life is the game that must be played:

This truth at least, good friends, we know;

So live and laugh, nor be dismayed

As one by one the phantoms go.

—Edwin Arlington Robinson

WEST-CENTRAL FRANCIA, 732

Karl dismounted his steed with an agility that many a younger man could envy. One indiscreet aide did just that, and got a scathing look that rendered him instantly mute. Matters were too serious for such nonsense.

The major domus studied the devastated landscape, especially the great bowl-shaped subsidence crater to which he could put no name, before speaking. When he did speak, he addressed his words to his longtime friend and vassal. Bertchramm and his niece had been crouched beside a prone Harry Bowen when the mounted troop had clattered up; now Bertchramm stood before his liege lord.

“How is Harry? Where are your men?”

Looking grim, the warlord answered the simpler question first. “Everyone else is dead, either from a Saracen ambush or the explosion.” He used the last word awkwardly, an unfamiliar utterance once learned from the man unconscious at his feet. “Terrence is surely dead. He took the bomb into a deep mine so that the earth itself could shelter us.

“Perhaps one or two of our attackers survived and fled; there was such confusion in the explosion that I have no way of knowing. But one of the certain dead, slain by Harry himself, is that devil, Salah-ad-Din.”

“And how is Harry?” Karl prodded gently.

“Taken suddenly and mysteriously ill.”

Harry wore several improvised bandages, none bloody enough to explain a loss of consciousness. His face was red and feverish. Vomit and diarrhea stained his clothing and lay in puddles all around; the stench was overpowering. As Karl watched, Harry’s body convulsed. A trickle of stomach juices trickled out of his mouth.

Karl looked again, slowly and carefully, at the ruination all around him. Even two hours’ hard ride away, the shock of the explosion had been astonishing. What must it have been like here? What cataclysm would this evil magic have wrought in the very midst of his army, had Harry not somehow delayed it?

Karl spoke sternly to his chief of guards. “Watch over that man as you would me. Francia has a debt to him that is beyond all reckoning.

“Pray that our friend lives long enough that we may attempt to repay him.”

* * *

The poorly sprung wagon eventually jolted Harry awake. He was lying in a heap of itchy furs. His body reasserted itself in a chorus of inaudible screams: cuts, scrapes, bruises. More ominous were the internal aches.

He felt like week-old roadkill.

Bertha sat at his feet; she had not yet noticed his awakening. He prodded her with a toe. “We can’t go on meeting this way. I think Bertchramm is getting suspicious.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” No more twenty-first-century humor, he thought. God, I’m going to miss Terrence. “Where are we?”

“Almost back to Tours. Most of the army went on ahead, but we have plenty of guards. Karl’s orders.”

Harry tried to sit up, groaning. Groaning worked, sitting did not. Bertha scooted over to help, lurching as the wagon hit yet another chuckhole in the crude dirt road. “Careful, Harry. You are not well.”

No shit, Sherlock. “You seem all right, I’m glad to see. What about everyone else?”

“Bertchramm is well. There is no one else. The earth swallowed everyone that the Saracens had not already killed.”

“And the army?”

“Almost untouched.” She braced herself against the wild swaying. “Count Odo’s horse bolted. He was thrown from his horse and broke his neck. The warriors take it as a sign of the Lord’s displeasure. The new count has sworn fealty to Karl.”

Another jolt. Harry clenched his jaws to keep from crying out. “Was I knocked out by an … ?” He paused; if Frankish had a word for aftershock, he didn’t know it. “I mean, did the earth shake again?”

Bertha averted her eyes. “No. You just crumpled, very suddenly. You shook uncontrollably, threw up, lost control of your bowels, and turned feverish. Yet Bertchramm and I are fine. I do not understand.”

Harry did. It sounded like ionizing radiation injury, otherwise known—in more enlightened, if possibly less fortunate, times—as radiation sickness. Not all the fallout had been trapped underground; some had clearly vented. He could not know the level to which he had been exposed. He might already be on the mend—

Or terrible things might lie in store.

Radiation most affected the tissues that normally underwent fast replacement: bone marrow, intestines, skin, parts of the nervous system. As those tissues died, the victim became increasingly infection-prone. Red-blood-cell count plummeted. Arteries and veins weakened and hemorrhaged. Toxins from tissue dissolution slowly poisoned the body.

He might develop tumors and body ulcers. Wounds, if he suffered any more, would be ever slower to clot. With a shiver, Harry remembered how his long-ago radiation biology textbook had euphemistically identified the major symptom: shortened life span.

Why were Bertha and Bertchramm unaffected?

Harry ran his fingers through his hair as he pondered. Clumps caught loosely between his spread fingers came out. Think. His mind’s eye visualized as tiny bullets the subatomic debris of decaying nuclei. They whizzed, invisibly small, through air and flesh alike. Occasionally one smacked into a more solid, more critical part of a cell’s delicate internal mechanisms. One imagined cell after another was maimed and mutated.

Aha. This was the first exposure for Bertchramm and Bertha.

He wasn’t so fortunate. Terrence had mentioned low-level radiation in Faisel’s lab. Harry guessed at another exposure, a side effect of the trip to this century. The near-instantaneous release of vast energies from Rothschild’s superconducting storage ring might have drenched him in gamma rays.

It all added up. The accumulated damage from three exposures had taken him down. Harry guessed it was going to kill him.

Bertha misunderstood his sudden silence. “Do you need to sleep?”

To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub …

Harry shivered again. “No, I’d rather not. Will you talk with me?”

REIMS, 732

The long and narrow stone hall was cold and drafty, noisy and packed. Wall hangings and a roaring fire ameliorated the first two conditions, however minimally. Nothing could alleviate the cacophony and overcrowding. Drunken feasters bellowed and quarreled. Serving wenches squealed at pinches and gropes. Dogs fought over scraps of meat. Jongleurs capered and danced for beer and flung coins, storytelling being impractical amid the tumult.

The outlander sat quietly amid the chaos. Karl wondered: Did Harry’s silence come of lingering illness, sadness at the death of his foreign companion, or simple uneasiness at his surroundings? Despite a long sojourn in Francia, the man had never taken on Frankish ways. Take Harry’s persistent search for the rules of speech, whatever those might be, or his fastidious picking at food as though there should be implements other than fingers and knives.

No matter. Harry was guest of honor now, while Karl still had the chance.

After days of rest, Harry remained weak. His pallor and the mysterious loss of his hair only emphasized his frailty. He had aged years within days.

Karl swigged his beer, then hurled the empty golden chalice—booty from the Saracen wagon train—against the wall. Metal clanging on stone went largely unnoticed in the general clamor, the bawling of bawdy songs, and the crackling fire.

Bertchramm heard the clatter, and that was enough. The old warlord hollered until the crowd quieted.

Karl climbed unsteadily to his feet. It was time to recount Harry’s exploits, to render a saga such as the man so richly deserved. Yet at his side, merely sitting and picking at a hunk of bread, Harry was ready to collapse. He would not last through a proper retelling.

The story was unnecessary. The men in this hall had been there; most had felt, from a relatively safe distance, the fury of this bomb. Words were not necessary. Reward was.

Karl said, “The nobility of Francia is gathered to honor Harry and Terrence. All here know of their deeds. Amid celebration, we are nonetheless sad that Terrence has left us. Harry, have you given thought to how we can thank you?”

The outlander did not hesitate. “There is an abbey in Metz …”

Karl nodded. This was proper Frankish behavior. Each man in this room but Harry was a sworn vassal of the major domus, bound to him by a precarium, a lifetime grant of property.

Most of this land Karl had taken from the Church. The far-off Pope knew not to quarrel: Karl’s service against the Saracens far outweighed the nuisance of his land seizures. The Churchmen also valued Karl’s actions against Christian heretics—while Karl took note that the heretic Lombards held territories that bordered his own.

So Harry meant to join his truste (retinue), and to receive the corresponding reward. Good for him. Property and comfort were the least that Harry deserved. “Done. It is yours.”

Then Harry did surprise him. “No, my lord, I do not wish to own the abbey. I wish to retire there.”

“Are you sure, Harry? You have earned the respect of the kingdom.” Karl’s vassals shouted their assent, none louder than Bertchramm.

“Quite sure.” Harry boldly looked Karl straight in the eye. “But there is one boon that I would ask of you.”

Flatly: “Consider it done.”

Then Harry named it, and all Karl’s truste shouted out in amazement. It was unthinkable. They waited for the major domus to strike this outlander dead for his temerity.

Karl stood stock-still for a moment. Then, with a grin, he relaxed. “If not for you, Harry, what use would it be to me now?

“What you ask is yours, with my blessing.”

CENTRAL FRANCIA, 732

The rhythmic lope of his horse lulled Harry into a dreamlike trance. He was finally, it seemed, a soldier: He could sleep anywhere. Trusting his escorts to keep an eye on him, he dozed in the saddle. Every step brought him that much closer to his destination. To distant Metz… .

After long weeks of recuperation he had almost felt fit enough for this journey. Bertha had fussed at him—as she would have done, as she pined to do, for Terrence; he understood that—arguing that he was not yet ready. Gently, he had insisted on leaving, and a stern glance from her uncle had ended the discussion. Harry’s bone-deep weariness now only proved her correct. No matter—he could rest at the abbey.

After his work was done.

The clop-clop of hooves was hypnotic. He swayed as he rode, his body balancing for him. Warriors murmured all around, uncharacteristically softly. He wondered what threats Karl had made to assure his safe, speedy, and, considering the circumstances, comfortable trip.

Gradually, barely perceptibly, the ground beneath them sloped upward. His horse adjusted its gait, and on they rode. In Harry’s dreamlike state, the ascent became a romantic hike with Julia through the hills of eastern France. The whispered conversations around him transmuted into the chirping of birds, cold gusts became warm breezes. He smiled in his sleep.

Harry jerked awake, unsure what had returned him to consciousness. A misstep by his horse on the uneven ground seemed the most likely cause. He must have been asleep for quite a while—the shadow that stretched out before him was far longer than what he last remembered.

A shaft of sunlight broke through the slate-gray sky, just as one had at the mass after the victory near Tours. Harry followed the golden rays to their termination in the taller hills just ahead—and gasped. Amid ancient forest, the sunbeam illuminated a great Roman temple of pristine white marble. Some trick of light cast a pale green glow over the edifice, evergreen reflections enfolding the gleaming stone. Evening mist suffused the rays; the path to the sun seemed almost palpable.

Harry’s spirits leapt at the vision, at the unexpected loveliness. His uplifted mind conjured up the Emerald City of Oz, and a shining city on a hill. At that moment, everything seemed possible. Everything. Yes, he could do it.

Just as abruptly, the hole in the clouds snapped shut. Where once bright light made the eyes squint and hid detail behind a veil of mystery, grayness now cynically revealed all: fallen lintels, cracked columns, cracked and toppled statues, splotches of lichen, ancient stains. The old temple was in ruins—a symbol not of hope and survival, but of doom and decay.

His imagination cruelly superimposed over the scene a boundless ocean of drifting sand. His mind’s eye zoomed in on the half-shattered face of an armless statue, inventing an imperious frown, a wrinkled lip, a sneer of cold command.

The mirage of a memorial plaque suddenly shimmered before him. It bore, from the depths of his subconscious, a mocking inscription:

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Who was he to dare to lay plans?

After the ruined temple disappeared behind them, Harry removed a stained and much-read scrap of cloth from his pocket. He read Terrence’s note once more.

Perhaps he was dying, Harry thought, but he could—and he strongly suspected that he would—die trying.

METZ, 732

Someone pounded insistently—nay, imperiously—on the main gate of the abbey.

Father Gregory shook his head, no, at the one novice foolish enough to look inquiringly at him: They would not interrupt Vigilae to answer the summons. The massive wooden doors resounded from repeated blows. The abbot ignored the booming sound, and the shouting, until prayers were finished. With a twinge of pain from aging knees, he stood and went to see who came so noisily to the abbey. Neither the smoky torch that he carried nor the predawn starlight seemed to cast much light. Old eyes, he thought.

The warrior whose impatient beating on the gate the abbot now halted was unfamiliar. So were his fellows standing in an arc behind him. None looked any wearier than might be expected of a group that had traveled through the night. There was one final member of the company, however, leaning against the stone wall beside the entrance. He was exhausted and sick, and seemed somehow familiar to Gregory.

He took a moment to study this last man. The stranger looked battle-worn and old. No, not old: prematurely aged. A curious tracery of scar tissue crisscrossed his face and covered his hands. The abbot had never seen its like: He could not imagine the manner or combination of injuries that could have caused such scars. One eye was clouded over by a cataract. He had also lost much of his hair; it had come out at random instead of by thinning or receding.

Surely, Gregory thought, I am mistaken. This is not a face anyone could forget.

Yet for all the torment this man must have survived, despite the evident exhaustion and the air of a lingering disease, there was a glimmer of humor in his face, a trace of boyish high spirits. Gregory sensed that this poor soul knew him and expected, in turn, to be recognized. It pained Gregory that he must disappoint this hard-worn man.

His visitor, for such Gregory inferred the stranger to be, studied the abbot with his one good eye. “If you think I look bad,” the man began, standing away from the wall and drawing himself up to his full—and rather surprising—height, “you should see the other guy. Imagine, if you can, glow-in-the-dark worm shit.”

That self-deprecating tone, the odd phrasing … could it possibly be? The height, at least, fit. What could have happened to him? “Harry? Is that really you?”

Harry smiled. “More or less, Father Gregory, more or less. Buy me a beer, and I will tell all.”

METZ, 733

Rest and the serenity of the abbey were the best medicines.

In the days after Harry’s arrival, a mere few hours of idle wakefulness had sufficed to exhaust him. Within weeks, however, as his health slowly improved, he began to hobble about the monastery grounds. Strolling gave way to brisk walks, and eventually, jogging. By the time he had graduated to long hikes through the town, he finally felt well enough to devote part of his day to more private pursuits.

He had arrived in Metz well-heeled, at the insistence of a grateful major domus. Maybe he was even rich—in such a primitive, land-intensive economy, Harry was not sure what constituted monetary wealth. Whatever his financial status, many of his solidi went to the purchase of imported Egyptian papyrus. Hardy papyrus was no longer as freely traded as in Roman times, but—for a price—it remained available. He declined Gregory’s repeated offers of parchment and papyrus from the abbey’s own small stock: One of Harry’s escort had, despite Harry’s explicit orders, told Gregory that Harry had refused Karl’s grant of the entire abbey.

On days when the light was good, Harry tried to work for what he estimated to be four hours. On overcast days, or when the muse was with him, he would splurge and buy a candle. When the abbot asked with what scripture he filled so many scrolls, Harry was at an unusual loss for words. “Apocrypha,” he had finally managed.

The answer was the same when he switched to a new medium.

* * *

Gregory rejoiced in Harry’s slowly returning vigor but knew better than to consider him cured. Anyone who overheard Harry crying out in his sleep would have doubted. The abbot, hearing the shouted names of Terrence and Julia, of Johnny and Melissa, understood all too well that painful memories troubled his guest.

God alone knew with what demons Harry wrestled in his troubled sleep. For too many nights did Gregory pace the hall outside of his friend’s tiny cell, listening to the mutterings, the tossing and turning. Harry’s soul, like his body, carried seemingly inexplicable scars.

The ancient Romans had held that dreams were true omens. For all that this belief was surely pagan superstition, Gregory more than once found himself praying that his friend’s horrible dreams not presage more personal tragedy. What more was possible?

Was it a blessing or a curse that Harry did not consistently think in Frankish? Gregory could never decide. He simply knew that when his friend called out in his sleep, his words were often neither Frankish nor the vulgarized Latin. The anguished shouts, the sad pleas, the defiant protests were identifiable only by tone of voice, all the more poignant for their reduction to such irreducible minima.

In the mornings that followed such tortured nights, Gregory always asked how he could help. Harry would consider the question gravely. His answer never changed. “Ora pro nobis.” Pray for us. When Gregory asked who “we” were, Harry would only smile sadly.

Prayer was what monks did, but Gregory still wished he could do more. Perhaps prayer would have seemed more adequate had Harry ever worshiped with the monks. He never did.

There were times, of course, when Harry’s nighttime shouts were in Frankish. These were almost as incomprehensible. It would have been unseemly to comment uninvited; it must be Harry’s decision to share his innermost thoughts.

Harry’s freely shared waking memories—of the battle near Tours, of his deep friendship with Terrence, of a family and a strange land so distant as to somehow lie beyond any hope of return—these were enough to rend Gregory’s heart.

Harry always said that rules were made to be broken, a notion that was breathtakingly alien. Just once, just this morning, Gregory was overcome by the urge to break a rule. To break his rule against asking Harry about his anguished nights.

Who, the abbot wondered aloud, was this Humpty Dumpty that Harry named in his sleep. What did it mean that Humpty Dumpty had been pushed? Did Harry know who had pushed him?

The amazed look, followed by a hearty laugh, that Gregory got in reply were welcome indeed. Perhaps there was, in fact, hope for Harry.

METZ, 733

By the onset of spring, Harry had recovered a respectable portion of his former strength. His morning hikes took him into the countryside, where he roamed far and wide, planting trees. He was doing his small part, he explained, to repair the damage of the two recent earthquakes. That he chose to do so was inexplicable in a time when people still fought to wrest arable land from the forests.

Townsfolk and monks alike came to think of Harry as a harmless eccentric. No, not harmless—tales of his wartime prowess, grown ever grander in the retelling, precluded that fate—but certainly eccentric. His repeated, enigmatic references to himself as Johann Appleseed only reinforced the impression, especially given his predilection for planting pine trees.

By midspring his wanderings through the woods generated little notice and no interest. As the fresh air and exercise invigorated him, morning hikes became all-day treks, then overnight camping trips.

* * *

Harry led a swaybacked packhorse up the steep hill, singing old show tunes as he went.

He had always wanted to name a pet—say, a female dog—after his obnoxious sister-in-law. It amused him to imagine her reaction. Julia, of course, had nixed that idea. Becky—the piebald mare now bearing saplings and his few supplies—would have to suffice.

Of course, he, not Rebecca, could now fairly be described as piebald.

The forest was mostly coniferous, and undoubtedly lovely year-round. The deciduous trees had not fully greened up when he had started his explorations. Delicate buds and dainty young leaves had been sprouting everywhere then. Dark and mature green was now universal.

Wildflowers and flowering shrubbery splashed vibrant colors everywhere. A stream burbled its way downhill, somewhere off to his left. Birds chirped merrily in the branches overhead. If only, he thought, Julia were here to share this.

One other lack haunted him: To his inartistic and unobservant eye, all hills and dales looked alike. He had climbed countless hills over the past few weeks. Nothing, of course, was as he remembered it. How could it be?

He persevered; it was that or give up. All that kept his radiation-ruined body alive was sheer stubborn tenacity. Willpower would not fight off the first cold he caught.

Well, either he had persevered enough, or providence was cutting him some slack for a change. Whichever, as he crested a hill singing “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, his voice broke off—for there it was.

Harry forced himself to continue singing, to resume his seemingly random path across the countryside. Still, an observant watcher, even one ignorant of English, could not have helped but notice the triumphant tone of the recapitulated chorus.

For once, luck was with Harry. There was no such observer.

* * *

As Harry continued on his meandering course, the day became cold and bleak.

Becky turned skittish; Harry blamed the weather. He tied her reins securely whenever he stopped to plant a tree. Yes, the air had the feel of a possible storm.

A rumble of thunder encouraged him to hurry. His remaining saplings could wait for another day. There would be other trips, he lectured himself. This trip must not draw attention to itself from a change in his behavior.

Good spirits, despite the best of intentions, cannot always be contained. Untying Becky for the walk back to Metz, uncontrollable joy overcame him. He had found it! Lifting his gaze to roiling clouds, he shouted to the watching skies, “I will do it!”

And in these, the darkest of the Dark Ages, when men believed that God intervened in all things, even the fall of a sparrow, the heavens replied. A bolt of lightning split the sky, striking a giant oak tree not far from where he stood. Rolling thunder drowned out the shattering of the great tree, the clatter and crash of flying shards of wood, the sizzle of vaporizing tree sap… .

The fall of a body.

* * *

Night had fallen when Harry regained consciousness. Becky was gone.

His teeth chattered. He wrapped himself in his wet cloak to trap body heat. What now? His health was fragile at best. Whatever destination he picked now might well be his last.

He chose.

Harry stumbled through the woods, tripping in the dark over unseen roots and stones. The wind howled. Rain in sheets lashed his body, his sodden clothes offering little defense. Blowing branches whipped him. Countless wounds stung: He had been blasted with splinters large and small. Liquid trickled down his face and neck, down his aching torso and weary legs. How much was blood?

Warmth was a dim memory of a former life. How long had he been slogging through the now-freezing rain? Too long—that was certain. He could not recall when he had last had feeling in his toes. They, at least, were slightly protected by his boots. His numb, but also bare, hands took the brunt of his repeated falls.

He could not stop shivering. His breath hung in front of him, a steamy vapor. Glints of white hung before him, mixed with the rain. Snow.

That he wasn’t imagining things, it really was getting colder, did not cheer him up.

He was delirious from cold and exposure, and from the onset of a raging fever, when he finally stumbled into the outskirts of Metz. The faintest glow on the horizon suggested that dawn would soon break. The abbey lay just ahead, the flickering lights in the chapel windows marking the assembly of the pious brotherhood at Matins. Voices swelled and blended in predawn prayer, an auditory beacon.

But as Harry scratched feebly on the abbey gate, the faint sounds that he was able to make were all too easily covered by the lovely chanting.

* * *

Harry drifted awake in his familiar cell, beneath an oppressive weight of covers.

The mounded cloaks and furs made it difficult to breathe. Something, anyway, made it hard to breathe. A hacking cough racked his frame, and he knew his own traitorous body was the problem. His chest hurt; that had not been his first wrenching cough. His breath gurgled; his lungs were filled with fluid.

Should he throw off some of the covers? It seemed a dumb idea—he still trembled with chills. Another convulsion overcame him; the spasm brought up a gob of bloody phlegm.

You didn’t need to be a doctor to render a diagnosis: pneumonia.

Now Harry did cast aside his coverings. Ignoring teeth chattering from a raging fever, he hurriedly assembled everything so laborious prepared during his last convalescence. That thought carried a bitter irony: He doubted this illness would end in convalescence. With little resistance to infection, courtesy of the radiation sickness, how could it?

He glanced at the scrap of cloth, Terrence’s final words, tacked to the rough wooden trestle table at which he worked. “You asked for a superweapon and got a Leyden jar,” he muttered. “Now you want a time machine? You’ll take what I’m giving you and like it.”

He was laboriously sealing his work with dripping candle wax when Father Gregory came to check on his patient. “Praise Jesus,” his friend began. “My prayers have been answered. I had feared that we would never speak together again.”

Harry frowned with concentration. He must do this job perfectly. He did not look up until all the wax had cooled. “Sorry, Father. That had to be done just right. Thank you for your prayers.”

Gregory draped another cloak over Harry’s quivering shoulders. “May I bring you some soup?”

“After—” Harry gestured at his work, as chattering teeth interrupted. “After we talk. Will you honor a dying man’s last request?” He brushed aside Gregory’s protests. They were clearly pro forma. “God wills it, my friend. Will you help me?”

The abbot could have no rebuttal to God’s will. He answered, at last, very softly. “How?”

“Has the abbey a brother whom you trust implicitly? Someone whom you would entrust with your holiest relic?”

“Yes, of course,” Gregory said.

The room swayed alarmingly; Harry grabbed on to the abbot for balance. “Who among them is strong? Can one undertake a journey deep into the hills?”

“Several are young and strong enough.”

Harry squeezed Gregory’s arm, the weakness of his grasp dismaying. His hand, to his utter horror, slipped from the abbot’s arm. “And is there one among them who will keep a secret even unto the grave?”

Gregory gaped at the question.

“Forgive me, Father. There is no time to debate. I need an answer.”

Gregory roused himself. “Certainly. Brother Adolphus meets all these requirements. But please take food. You must keep up your strength.”

His strength, Harry knew, had left him for the final time. “First we speak with Brother Adolphus. For what good it will do, I will take some hot soup after that.”

THE VOSGES MOUNTAINS, 1988

Black squirrels were their only companions as Harry and Julia hiked the unspoiled woods. They had broken camp shortly after daybreak, and climbed, he guestimated around a thousand feet. No, no, dummy—this is Europe. Think metric. Call it three hundred meters. The slope had begun quite gently, but it was now quite steep. He might follow her example and use a fallen branch as a walking stick. The rocky outcroppings that they came across with increasing frequency hinted that the terrain would only get rougher.

He let Julia lead, the motion in her taut jeans a quiet delight. Hell, quiet was overrated. He was reaching out to take a pinch when she stopped abruptly.

She poked with her branch at a tangle of bushes. Yet another rocky outcropping peeked through the greenery. “I tell you, that noise I heard came from back here. You know, like wind whistling through a constriction. Maybe there’s a cave back there.”

He crowded up behind her for a perfunctory glance. Yup, it was a bunch of bushes, all right. He completed the pinchus interruptus.

“Quit that.”

“This is our honeymoon. Certain things are traditional.”

She patted his hand lovingly, then brushed it off. “This is romantic, too. Imagine if we found our own cave.” She kept poking through the greenery with her stick. The unseen end went tap, tap, tap against the overgrown rocky escarpment.

Until one thrust met only with air. Taken by surprise, the stick slid from her grasp to clatter on an unseen stone floor. “There is a cave back there!”

“Great!” he answered, trying to sound enthusiastic. So much for his plans. Harry knew better than to try diverting a determined Julia. He squeezed past her, then strained to hold back a wall of undergrowth almost thick enough to constitute a hedge. “See anything now?”

In answer, she plunged past him into a dark opening, reaching into her backpack for her flashlight as she went.

“Wait, dammit. There could be wild animals in there. I promised to take care of you, but you don’t make it easy.” Grumbling, he shrugged the pack from his shoulder and dug for their camp lantern. Once he had it lit, he wormed through the bushes after her.

The glow of the lantern revealed only a modest grotto and a sadly disappointed Julia. She stood, her shoulders slumped, in the center of the small subterranean space. “Nothing.”

“You’ve got to think positively. Isn’t there something we can salvage from this experience?”

“Right.” She turned to leave. “Like what?”

“Well I, for one, have never done it underground.”

He took her raised eyebrow as a yes.

* * *

“Ouch, dammit!” Harry moved cautiously from Julia’s side. Their jackets did not cover the ledge, and his bare buttock brushed bare stone. It was cold.

“Harry?” She sat up in alarm.

“Dunno. I put my damned foot into something in the double-damned dark and maybe broke a toe.” He also scraped his shin when he moved so quickly. He reached for her flashlight.

“Keep your mind on your work, big boy.”

That wasn’t an invitation he would ordinarily ignore, but something was odd. He tuned out the throbbing in his toe, wondering what. A scraping noise? Maybe. Rock against rock? He didn’t think so. Harry scooted down the ledge to where his foot had slipped. The flashlight revealed what had to be a cavity in the rock. He had kicked something big and heavy in there.

With tremendous willpower, he ignored it when Julia grabbed him. He aimed the flashlight at the hole and peered inside.

Words failed him; he managed only a choking noise. He dropped the flashlight. Glass shattered, and the light went out. The hissing camp lantern behind them seemed to cast more shadows than light.

“Are you all right?” Julia pressed her naked body against his back. It was for shelter, he knew, not amorousness.

“I honestly don’t know. Get the lantern and tell me exactly what you see in the opening.”

She returned with the lamp. Side by side, they stared at the sealed pot Harry’s foot had sent skidding across the stone floor. Writing had been etched into the baked clay, but the dust of untold centuries nearly filled the grooves.

After a long while, Julia read the words aloud, and Harry breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t crazy. The big, block letters spelled out, in what looked precisely like Harry’s own handwriting:

PUT YOUR PANTS ON, HARRY. THIS IS SERIOUS.

* * *

The ungainly pottery object sat in the glade to which they had retreated. They studied it, wondering what to do next. When Harry summoned the courage to comment on the stylusmanship, so like his own messy scrawl, Julia readily agreed. She also volunteered, quite unnecessarily, that the asymmetric vessel was ugly enough to have been one of his handicrafts.

“Should we open it?”

Julia laid a hand on his arm. Despite the warmth of the afternoon, her hand was icy even through his sleeve. “It was clearly meant for you. You’ll have to decide.”

A gray, waxy substance glued the lid to the pot. He scraped the sealant with his pocketknife. He worked slowly, meticulously, clearing away every trace of the substance. With a silent prayer to Murphy, he pried under the lid with the knife’s main blade.

The lid rose with the grinding noise of ill-fitting parts. But Murphy was not so easily appeased. The lid cracked, and a piece fell inside. The shard landed hard on something inside; they heard clearly the sound of something go clink. A puff of dust rose.

“Flashlight.” He held out his hand. Nurselike, she slapped his flashlight—hers having been broken in the cave—into his palm. It stung. “A little less enthusiasm, please.” He clicked on the light and directed the beam inside.

Dust and what looked like confetti floated in the air within the vessel. He waited for the flotsam to settle and clear his view. It did, and there was nothing inside but a slab of baked clay atop a layer of … what? Age-crumbled paper?

He reached in and felt gently; he had the creepy sense that he was stirring mummy dust. A flake of paper stuck to his hand. It bore handwriting, faded almost to illegibility.

Almost to illegibility. The bit he’d retrieved carried the words “tell Julia that …” once again in his handwriting. He held it out for her to see. She shivered even before a gust of wind blew the ancient paper into dust. Paper? He didn’t think so. It had felt too thick for paper, but he had no idea what else it might be.

No one—not even they—had known they would be here. They hiked at random, had come here only by chance. Certainly, Julia had found the cave only by dumb luck. How, and by whom, had the pot have been placed there, clearly meant for him?

The papery fragments were too fragile to remove outdoors, prey to any errant gust of wind. He carefully removed the clay tablet, its surface inscribed with rows of tiny letters.

Near one edge of the tablet something glittered: a gold band half-embedded in the clay. The mate of that ring shone on his left hand. The clay was cracked where the ring had been forced into the slab; Harry used his knife once more to free the ring. Numb with astonishment, he wiped its inside surface clear of dust. He felt engraving. Without reading it, he knew what was etched there, for surely it matched the single word on his own wedding band: Forever.

Julia took the clay tablet from his shaking hands. She read each word aloud, slowly and carefully, as though mere elocution could somehow dispel the mystery.

If only it could.

* * *

Night fell, and finally they stirred.

Ever so carefully, Harry replaced the lid of the pottery vessel. He would, as the tablet urged, have a bit of the papyrus carbon-dated for age to confirm the ancient origin of the … time capsule.

Affirmation was not really needed. They both believed. Belief was key, since the full story would never be known. Could never be known. The seal meant to protect the papyrus had failed over the centuries, and the full story had been recorded only on the papyrus. The tablet offered only a safety synopsis.

Julia had made a campfire, but the crackling flames did nothing to dissipate the chill. How much they’d never know … He sat beside Julia and put his arm around her.

“Will you do it?” she asked.

“Make the call?”

She nodded.

“Yes.” Harry gestured at the time capsule. “I feel certain that I owe it to him.”

* * *

Harry and Julia spent the night near the cave. Neither slept much.

When Harry woke from a troubled sleep, he had the nagging sense of something left undone. He replayed yesterday’s events in his mind, over and over.

Ah.

The slab of pottery that another version of him had somehow, somewhen, engraved with directions … it had a broken corner.

Harry reopened the strange pottery vessel. He rocked it gently. Nothing. He shook it again, harder. Something came unstuck, rattled around. He picked it out from under the papyrus fragments.

An irregularly shaped shard of baked clay sat on his palm. Without a doubt, the jagged edge matched the broken corner of the writing-covered tablet.

Lost in concentration, he did not notice Julia creep up behind him. She gave a cry of surprise at the marvel in his hand. The hunk of clay held another piece of jewelry, this time one not familiar.

It was a massive gold ring, carved with what he could only describe as barbaric exuberance. A single, huge emerald occupied its center. Letters, this time done by an unknown hand in an archaic script, surrounded the stone.

He handed the treasure to Julia. For a long time, neither of them spoke. At last, Harry broke the silence.

“Who, do you suppose, was Arnulf?”

PART V

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

—Winston S. Churchill

CHICAGO, 2003

A preoccupied Harry Bowen tilted back in his office chair, its front legs aloft. His own legs rested at the calves on the random clutter that obscured his desktop. His dangling, shoeless feet wiggled to the heavy-metal beat from his Walkman. Sleet rattled on the window. A Nature article on superconductivity held his complete interest.

Someone rapped gently on the frame of the open door. No response. He knocked harder. “Dr. Bowen?”

The unscheduled visitor had a British accent. Without looking up, Harry replied. “Inspector Ambling, I presume.”

NEAR METZ, 2004

“Stay here.” Without a backward glance, Inspector Ambling slammed the door, leaving Harry and two operatives alone in the main security center of the Rothschild Institute.

Harry scanned the screens of the closed-circuit surveillance system. Interpol had been on stakeout here for days, watching the institute and waiting for the anticipated plutonium delivery. Nothing on the monitors looked out of the ordinary to Harry. Perhaps Ambling had been summoned over his earphone.

The call to Interpol’s tip line was meant to handle everything. Harry had recorded key details from the otherwhen tablet—the linkage between Faisel and Hezbollah, and the delivery to the institute of missing Russian plutonium—and imagined the matter closed. Only later did it occur to him that calls to the tip line might be traced.

Now Harry gave his subconscious credit. It had shown foresight, not carelessness.

Interpol had revealed nothing to the public about stolen Russian plutonium. Harry knew: He had done a fairly thorough Google search. Why would they publicize its recovery?

This way, he would know when the plutonium had been recovered. After so many years, he would welcome the sense of closure.

Ambling appeared on the monitor that showed the institute’s main entrance. A van had pulled up, its driver chatting with the guard who stood in the gatehouse. Terrence made the subtle hand gesture that Harry now knew meant “stay alert.” The plan was to let the delivery proceed, recover the plutonium, arrest Faisel, and unobtrusively follow the delivery vehicle to other members of the plot.

Something—it wasn’t clear what—spooked the van driver. He threw the van into reverse. An unmarked car peeled off a shoulder of the main road to block the driveway. The car was too late; the accelerating van grazed the car’s front bumper and set it spinning. The van kept going, skidded backward onto the highway, and sped off.

Shots rang out from the woods around the institute, a few at first, then more, and quickly a torrent. Hezbollah? Ambling threw himself flat. Glass flew from the gatehouse and the spun-out car. The guard hung out a shattered window, surely dead. SUVs appeared from nowhere and gave chase. The gunfire redoubled, with institute guards and Interpol agents blasting back at the woods. There was the whap-whap-whap of a rotor overhead, and all hell broke loose: It was a helicopter gunship.

The firefight seemed endless, but when shooting tapered off and finally stopped, Harry saw it had only lasted a few minutes. Sirens wailed in the distance. Another helicopter went over. He wondered if the terrorists had gotten away.

Terrence walked into the control room, rumpled but unharmed, cell phone in hand. “We have the van, cargo included, and the driver will live. Somehow, in the chaos, our friend Dr. Faisel disappeared. He won’t get far. Roadblocks are going up, and we’ve put out an all-points bulletin.”

* * *

Damn the Firanji! Long after the gunfire had ended, Abdul Faisel stood stock-still in the utility closet whose door he had closed behind himself. The plutonium was as good as gone. His bomb was not to be. He, surely, was a hunted man.

And yet, surely all was as Allah willed. The bomb was irretrievably gone, but another part of his project had been completed.

Carefully, silenced pistol in hand, he cracked opened the closet door. Through the slit only two policemen were visible, their attention for the moment on cluttered workbenches. The double doors to the hall were closed.

Pfft, pfft. Two quiet shots; two bodies down.

He changed the access code on the laboratory door lock and got to work.

* * *

Harry waited in an unmarked car as Inspector Ambling handled “one last bit” of follow-up. It was the fourth promised “one last bit” before he could take Harry to his hotel—unless Harry had lost count. Ambling was a decent enough guy. Harry guessed he would like the man under less intense circumstances.

But now that everything was over, Harry wanted to be with Julia, not here. With his right hand, he spun his wedding band around his left ring finger.

Spin, spin … stop.

Harry studied his hands. Prominent on his right hand was the bulky and priceless ring of Arnulf, the token of otherwhen.

He and Julia had spent years trying to make sense of the time capsule and its contents. Only one theory was self-consistent: As implausible as it seemed, a still-future version of Harry had gone into the past. It must occur after the plutonium heist, after now, or else there would have been no need for now Harry to warn Interpol.

So past Harry (who was also future Harry … his head hurt to think about it) had traveled into history to follow Faisel and his bomb, then sent the time capsule to present-day Harry.

He had notified Interpol. The plutonium was recovered. That should, he and Julia surmised, heal the timeline. So how could the anachronistic ring remain on his hand?

Oh!

Faisel, still at large, might yet travel to the past. Arnulf’s ring on Harry’s finger said that Faisel would go back, and that Harry remained destined to follow.

He had to find a way to break the loop … if he wasn’t already too late.

* * *

Harry bolted from the car. “Where’s Faisel’s lab?” he shouted to an institute security guard as he ran.

“Basement, north side.”

He burst through the front doors, sprinted down the stairs, and bounced painfully off the lab doors. Locked! He shattered the glass front of a fire-ax case with a fire extinguisher, seized the ax, and with it hacked open the lab’s doors.

In pools of blood, two agents lay still on the floor. He saw no sign of Faisel, but who else would have killed them?

There was a rising hum.

It came from the large wire-wrapped apparatus across the lab. Cryogenically cooled cables linked the device to what appeared to be a superconducting magnet. Did the cable tap into the institute’s famed superconducting storage ring?

“Too late.” The taunt, in French, came from inside the apparatus. “And that’s 18, 17 …”

Harry’s mind spun. The clay tablet had not described the time machine, but this must be it. Release all the energy from the storage ring instantaneously; apply the energy/time version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Even without a nuke, Faisel could rewrite history. Assassination of Karl Martel might be less dramatic than nuclear immolation of his army. Would it be as effective? And unlike the climax of a major military campaign, a personal attack could happen at any time. It would be even harder to predict and to stop—especially if Faisel took back a gun.

The risk must be too high. The ring on his hand proved that future Harry still went back.

“… 9, 8, 7 …”

Harry saw no controls, nothing to disable. They must be inside. The only visible power source was the connection to the storage ring; severing that would unleash unimaginable energies.

But what choice did he have?

His hands still clenched the ax. Harry raised it over his head and took a deep breath. Arnulf’s ring glittered.

“… 4, 3 … ” Faisel exulted.

What if the energy discharge were unbalanced?

“… 2, 1 … “

He brought down the ax in a raking blow along one edge of the wire-wrapped enclosure.

Blinding light and irresistible force filled the room. Harry was unconscious before he crashed into the wall behind him.

EPILOGUE

Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

—William Shakespeare

METZ, 2004

Consciousness returned.

“Where am I?” Harry must only have thought the question. His second try came out in a feeble, inarticulate croak.

“You’re awake!” Julia bent over him and softly kissed his cheek. “Take it easy. You’re in a hospital in Metz.”

“Why?” The casts on both legs and an arm had to be part of the answer.

She gave him an odd stare. “An accident at the Rothschild Institute.”

He thought about that for a moment. “I remember intending to visit while we were in the area. But what happened?”

“The police say you ran into the building and broke into a locked lab, apparently trying to save someone inside. They found you with a fire ax in your hands.” She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “Does any of this ring a bell?”

He found the control for the hospital bed and cranked the top of the bed more upright. “Not really. How is the person from the lab?”

“The agent said the experimenter’s name was Abdul Faisel. Whatever he was working on blew up.” Julia patted Harry’s hand sympathetically, keeping to herself Inspector Ambling’s graphic description of the carnage. “He never knew what hit him.”

NEAR REIMS, 738

Whack, whack, thud.

The flaxen-haired little boy, scarcely more than a toddler, fenced with great enthusiasm against a much taller opponent. Periodically, the stick in his hand would break. The tree trunk against which he fought with such bravery always waited patiently while he sought another fallen branch.

Whack, crack.

The woman watched from the doorway of her hut, the smile of a proud mother lighting her face. She had dark blonde hair, blue eyes, and a strong jaw. Every day she wondered: Where does so much energy come from?

In answer to her unspoken question, strong arms enfolded her from behind. A muscular hand stroked her swelling belly. “Will this one be as much the warrior as our son?”

She leaned contentedly against her husband’s broad chest. “The way that he kicks, I think so,” said Bertha.

THE VOSGES MOUNTAINS, 1988

The glow of the lantern revealed only a modest grotto and a sadly disappointed Julia. She stood, shoulders slumped, in the center of the small subterranean space. “Nothing.”

“You’ve got to think positively. Isn’t there something we can salvage from this experience?”

“Right.” She turned to leave. “Like what?”

“Well I, for one, have never done it underground.”

He took her raised eyebrow as a yes.

* * *

“Ouch, dammit!” Harry moved cautiously from Julia’s side. Their jackets did not cover the ledge, and his bare buttock brushed bare stone. It was cold.

“Harry?” She sat up in alarm.

“Oh, nothing. My foot slipped off the end of this ledge into an open space. I banged my ankle.”

“Are you still functional?”

He wiggled his foot gingerly. “More or less.”

“Then keep your mind on your work, big boy.”

It was a suggestion he was happy to accept.

* * *

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, the cyber-themed collection Creative Destruction, and, in collaboration with Larry Niven, the Known Space novels Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds. . His short fiction has appeared in Analog, Artemis, Darker Matter 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 Fools’ Experiments.

Visit Ed’s website at: http://www.sfwa.org/members/lerner/

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Framed

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Contents

INTRODUCING STORIES:

Homo Sylvanus

Written by Amber D. Sistla

Illustrated by Anna Repp

Brennan Candler slouched on his chair in one of the observation decks that dotted the surface of the Vishnu Dreaming. The domed, nullglass roof stretched above him. Stars streamed past him on all sides, disappearing before his eyes had time to focus on them. Just like me, he thought. A quick flash, then gone before anyone has time to notice me. Or care. His rumpled shirt stretched uncomfortably across his stomach. He shifted position and tugged at the straining fabric then sighed. He’d abandoned his exercise regimen, and it showed.

“Oh, I am so glad to see that someone else has decided to forgo stasis for the trip,” said a contralto voice.

Brennan glanced behind him and caught sight of a platinum-haired beauty staring at him. He scrambled to his feet, brought both hands together, and bowed at the visitor. He hadn’t expected this little colonial expedition to have a reverend assigned to it.

She wore the dark grey, utilitarian uniform of the clergy, but she made it seem stylish. Her pale skin glowed under the artificial light in the spaceship. Straight hair, long enough to fall to her waist, eddied around her face and shoulders in the low gravity. Not like Jyotika who always kept her shoulder length curly hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her green eyes flicked up and down the length of him; his ears warmed under their admiring gaze. So unlike Jyotika’s brown eyes which promised warmth but in the end gave none.

The woman held her hand out. “Hello. Please don’t be so formal. I’m Abra Taylor. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Brennan sent a query on her name to his neurolink. He took her hand. It was warm and soft. Jyotika’s work-callused hands had always been cool. Stop thinking about her; she made her feelings plain enough. “Nice to meet you, Reverend. I’m Brennan Candler.”

Abra gasped, clearly delighted. “Not Brennan Candler the botageneticist? I read your latest article in the Geneticist stream. It was so insightful. I’ve been dying to meet you. And please call me Abra.”

Brennan felt the warmth in his ears spread to his face and tried to keep his composure despite the full-fledged blush. Jyotika had never read his articles. The neurolink sent a blinking light to his peripheral vision, and he pulled up the reply to his query. He stored the articles for later, and glanced over her stats: recently graduated theologian, specialty human DNA, with highest honors. Bright future for a rising star. Not like me. His voice came out devoid of emotion. “I’m flattered.”

Abra’s smile faded, and she looked quizzically at him.

I shouldn’t take it out on her, Brennan thought; she’s just trying to be friendly. He plastered a smile on his face. “Are you part of the crew or a colonist?”

Abra’s smile returned. “Neither. To complete my investiture requirements, I signed up to be in charge of the gravidus machines in the nursery and then continue on for a ten-year stint in the research module they’re going to drop on the planet. It’s simple stuff, and it gives me lots of time to work on my dissertation. And as soon as I heard Captain Jyotika Diwan was assigned to the ship, I signed up. How often do you get the chance to travel with a legend? How about you? Crew or colonist?”

Brennan shifted uncomfortably. He knew the only reason Jyotika had been assigned to the menial task of colonist transport was because of his condition; it didn’t even require her to be out of stasis until the end of the journey when the majority of the colonists awakened. “Also, neither. My wife is the captain.”

Abra’s eyes widened. “Perhaps you can introduce us?”

“Once we arrive. She’s in stasis for the journey.” Brennan saw her swallow the inevitable question. Husbands and wives didn’t usually have divergent stasis schedules. He shrugged. He owed it to Jyotika. He supposed she could have canceled the marriage contract. Her reputation would likely have survived the ignominy. But he certainly would never have gotten another contract with a child clause, not with his condition.

Brennan thought of Tamsyn growing in one of the gravidus machines. For that alone, he owed Jyotika. By the time they reached the planet, the marriage contract would expire. Jyotika would be a free woman; she’d get good assignments again. And I? I will be an old man.

Abra tilted her head, and her hair cascaded over her shoulder. She studied him for a moment, then a mesmerizing smile eclipsed the thoughtful expression on her face. “But you are a true scientist, and couldn’t stand to be away from the info streams, right?”

“Sure.”

“If you have time, could I sometimes talk with you about my thesis? They have a mentor stream setup for me, but having someone of your caliber to talk to in real time would be amazing.”

She seemed so young, Brennan thought. And why not? Like most citizens of Ecclesia, the Church-government of Divine Humanity, she had centuries ahead of her; she didn’t have death looming ever closer. Not like me. “Of course, I’d be happy to help. I haven’t really studied human DNA since I graduated, and I wasn’t clergy-bound so even those classes were very basic, but I’ll do what I can. What’s your thesis?”

“Isolation and therapy for the longevity treatment resistant sequence.”

The copious amounts of blood that had earlier fueled his blush now drained from his head. Lightheaded, he struggled to maintain a detached tone to his voice. “What?” He searched her face. Does she know about me? But no, that was impossible, he thought. Information about his condition was not public knowledge. There’d be no way for her to know.

Abra smiled. “I know, I know what you’re thinking. My professors said the same thing. Too ambitious. So many scientists have already looked and thrown up their hands in failure—”

“Not in failure. Why chase an impossibility? Once it was found that the longevity resistance sequence has some overlap with the soul sequence, it made any therapy futile. Why extend someone’s life if it destroys their soul in the process?” Brennan remembered a class in his undergrad studies when they’dviewed the remains of someone who’d had their soul sequence tampered with by an illegal gene shop. After the DNA bonds had disintegrated, only an amorphous,smelly pile of gel remained. He’d decided at that point to forgo the clergy and human DNA studies in favor of the study of soul-less plants.

Abra glared at him. “Obviously my therapy would not advocate turning them into mush. I want to investigate if it’s a full overlap. I know the disorder is rare, but I think it’s unfair that we’ve given up on the subset of people afflicted with this. Is it right that we happily live long lives while they face early deaths? I want to put a stop to it.” Her face was animated, passionate, and sincere.

Jyotika had also been a champion of the disadvantaged; it was one of the things he had loved about her. Stop thinking about her. “That sounds beyond my field of expertise. You better direct your queries to the mentor stream.”

“But, I need exactly your expertise. I think by looking at other species it’ll give new insight for this. I’ve read about long-lived trees. The Methuselah trees, right? How long do they live?”

“They live thousands of years.”

Abra nodded, a triumphant expression on her face. “Imagine being able to live thousands of years without longevity treatments. I want your help to isolate what sequence allows them to do that. They don’t have souls, so we can tinker with the DNA more than we could for humans. Then we can splice it into a human sequence—”

Brennan had been caught up in her excitement, but the thought of splicing non-human into human DNA brought him back to reality. His voice was harsh. “I’ll have nothing to do with anything illegal.”

She hesitated a moment then gave him an offended look. “How dare you suggest such a thing?” She tapped the silver double-helix that twined around the upper sleeve of her uniform. “I take my vows very seriously. The experiment I’m proposing is for simulation only, of course. It will never be used on a real human. This is a pure research project. Of course, we will not actually splice tree DNA into human DNA. It’s a simulation. You know, not real?”

Brennan frowned at the technicality. The thought of splicing non-human DNA into human DNA, even in simulation made him uncomfortable. She’s a reverend; it must be okay, right? “But—”

“Of course we would never try to instantiate it. It’s just to stimulate new ways of thinking. A way to understand ourselves better by comparing and contrasting with other species. What better way to do that than splicing things together? Think of all the people that the research could help. Can you imagine the pain they go through? Especially the ones with children.”

That caught his attention. “What do you mean: especially the ones with children?”

“Any children of longevity resistant people have a higher likelihood of also being longevity resistant.”

Chilled, Brennan rubbed at the goose bumps that sprouted on his arms. “I hadn’t read that research—”

“Oh, that. I’ll zap it to you.” She concentrated for a moment.

Brennan’s neurolink blinked a light in his peripheral vision, notifying him that he’d received the documents. He saved them without opening. Abra’s matter-of-fact attitude already had him convinced. He thought of Tamsyn. Could she get this from me? “Reverend Taylor, I think your project is commendable. Please, don’t hesitate to come to me for any help.”

She preened and tapped his arm. “Call me Abra; don’t make me remind you again. I’ll be seeing you around.”

Brennan watched her walk away. Maybe my last few years will have some excitement after all. Academic excitement, he thought with bitterness. With his condition, he didn’t have any right to think of romantic excitement. He patted his belly, then stood up straight, trying to diminish the bulge. He accessed his neurolink and instructed it to schedule him time in the gym.

* * *

It’s time; past time. Brennan rubbed his eyes, then noticed a light blinking in his peripheral vision: Abra was requesting a virtSession. He thought about his task at hand; later, he promised himself, I’ll tell Tamsyn later.

Brennan closed his eyes and instructed his neurolink to begin the collaborative virtSession. Abra’s avatar grinned at him, and he couldn’t help but grin back. Her enthusiasm was infectious. He wasn’t sure what he would have done without Abra and the project to work on. It had made the past twelve years aboard ship fly.

“I’ve got something that will make Methuselah very interesting.” She pulled up a skew.

Brennan scanned the data and frowned. “What is this? Did you do this?”

“It’s brilliant isn’t it? One of the clerics in the Ministry of Research sent it to me to study as an example of DNA theory.”

“But it’s …” Stopping himself before he said illegal, he looked at the data and back to her again. If a cleric sent it, it must be okay. Right?

“Amazing, right? Government simulators are phenomenal. I thought we could add it to our Methuselah simulation. It’s modeled on the matter converter units. It uses solar power to convert input fuel into the necessary nutrients. The surface of the skin is tweaked to process solar energy. With some toggles, the body hairs can wick things from the subject’s environment to the matter converter—microorganisms, dust, anything they touch.” She giggled. “They’d be very clean.”

Did she just call this major genetic manipulation a tweak? Brennan looked at her incredulously, still unable to find his voice.

“Stomachs are so inefficient. This method is streamlined; nothing is wasted. You should like that, just like your plants, no wasteful byproducts.” Abra beamed at him. “Brilliant. They could even eat as normal. The food would be sent to the matter converter, the stomach, and treated like any other bit of fuel to be processed.”

Something nagged the back of his mind about plants and byproducts, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the scale of change that Abra was suggesting. “But—”

Abra put her hand on his arm. “As long as we’re researching DNA, why not stretch it to its limits? I’m sure the Ministry of Research would be interested in seeing what we do with it. Let’s put it in with the rest of the Methuselah changes, and see how the simulator handles it.”

An intoxicating scent tickled his nose. He wondered how she managed to smell good even in a virtSession. “Why not?”

Abra laughed and embraced him.

Brennan resisted the urge to hug her back and stiffened in her arms. He’d tried to keep the relationship with Abra as platonic and professional as possible. I’m a man who’s dying after all, he thought.

Abra pulled away. The smile dropped from her face.

Brennan felt guilt twist inside him. Must I always disappoint the women in my life? “How about if we get this integrated now?”

Abra’s smile returned. They worked on the skew, integrating the new sequences until their neurolinks warned them they were exceeding the time limits of the virtSession.

He opened his eyes and blinked the dryness out of them.

Time to stop procrastinating, Brennan thought. He stretched then went in search of Tamsyn. It was time to tell his daughter he was dying.

* * *

Ekram bounded into Tamsyn Diwan’s room and grinned broadly.

Tamsyn smiled in return. This is going to be good, she thought.

Ever since they’d taken the compulsory Humanities course in DNA, Ekram had become obsessed with building the most extreme DNA skew he could. He’d become quite good at ferreting out all the variations that, while not prohibited, were not advertised as routine genetic modifications. It’d been a while since he’d found anything sufficiently rare to add to his parameter list.

“Want to guess?” Ekram flopped into the chair next to her.

“Blue eyes? White hair? Eight fingers?”

Ekram laughed at her. “No, no, and already there. Tams, you’re such a Normalist.”

Tamsyn shrugged. “I like my skew, thank you very much.”

“Well, not everyone has the advantage of a DNA skew inherited from the divine Captain Diwan and the uber-intellectual Dr. Candler, so I’ve got to make up what I lack. Hurry and pull up the file.” Since his parents routinely searched his network allotted data space and his personal neurolink storage, Ekram kept all his skew maps in Tamsyn’s data folder. “It’ll be perfect.”

Tamsyn neurolinked to the network and found the file. It would have been easier to do a collaborative virtSession, but Ekram’s parents recorded all of his virtual sessions. She gave a mental sigh, grateful to her parents for more than just her DNA. If she’d had parents like Ekram, maybe she’d have wanted to diversify too. She decrypted Ekram’s most recent skew map, and sent a read/write data stream to the terminal in her room. “So tell me already. What sequence are you going to add?”

Ekram whispered in her ear. “Blue skin.” With a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, he leaned back in his chair.

Tamsyn’s jaw dropped. “No way. That is totally not an allowable sequence. You’re joking,” she said, but she knew he wasn’t; Ekram was nothing if not thorough when it came to researching valid DNA sequences.

“It’s absolutely allowable. Apparently there was a group on Old Earth that had blue skin. Some chemical imbalance or something.” He held his finger up in triumph. “But, a valid skew nonetheless.”

“Your parents will go nova.”

Ekram’s face hardened. “I don’t really care what they do. And in one thousand nine hundred twenty five days, they won’t have any say in what I do. So it makes us even.” He wedged his chair between Tamsyn and the terminal, edging her out of the way.

Tamsyn watched him enter the data. “Are you really going to go through with all that?”

Ekram nodded emphatically, not taking his eyes off the screen. “I know the robo-nannies are just following their instructions, but I’m sick to death of having my parents’ Minimalist philosophies shoved down my throat at every lesson. Humanity is so much more than the DNA we’re born with. I want to …” He swept his arms wide in a gathering gesture then hugged them tight to his chest. “I want to pull it all in.”

A frown pulled at Tamsyn’s lips, and Ekram turned to look at her before she could hide it.

“Double-helix, Tams. It’s not like they’ll touch my soul. I’ll still be me, and we’ll still be best friends. Right?”

Tamsyn half-smiled and gave him a hug. “Of course. Blue skin and all.”

The door slid open and revealed Tamsyn’s father at the entrance. “Oh. You two look like you’re busy with a homework assignment. Tamsyn, I need to talk with you later. It’s not urgent. I’ll find you later. Don’t worry about it.” He fled. The door swished shut.

“What’s wrong with your dad?” asked Ekram.

“Nothing. He’s always sad. Maybe he misses my mom. He doesn’t talk about her.”

“No, not that. I meant his … you know …” Ekram circled his palm around his face.

“Huh?”

Ekram grabbed the skin of his face and scrunched it together until it wrinkled. “It’s like someone’s been squeezing his skin together. And his eyes have all those lines. He almost looks like those pictures of the oldies we saw last week. Is it a skin disease? Can’t he get Reverend Taylor to fix it?”

Unease twisted her gut. She tried to recall the earliest memory of her father, but daily exposure to him had imprinted his current visage in her mind. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s the best father. He even stayed out of stasis to be with me. No one else’s parents did. Your parents are the ones with lots of problems.”

“I won’t argue with you there. Don’t be mad at me, Tams.”

Tamsyn took a deep breath. Ekram didn’t deserve her anger; she offered him a bribe in lieu of an apology. “Want to watch my mom nuke the Gilbar III fanatics who were holding the Senators hostage?” That one was Ekram’s favorite. Her favorite was her mother’s impassioned speech that reconciled the warring factions of New Armstrong.

Ekram grinned. “Sure.”

They sat and watched the data stream. Tamsyn pretended everything was fine again, but she couldn’t get her father’s face out of her mind.

* * *

After he left Tamsyn’s cabin, Brennan wandered the halls aimlessly. How do I tell my child I’m dying? He knew it had to be done, had convinced himself to do it. All the same, he’d been relieved and had happily escaped when he saw Ekram in Tamsyn’s room.

Brennan leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. It’s not something a parent should have to tell a child, his mind screamed to the universe. The universe, as always, gave no reply. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Brennan, are you okay?” Abra asked.

Brennan opened his eyes and forced a smile on his face. “Just tired of being shipboard, I guess.”

Abra gripped his shoulder sympathetically. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry you were awake. Your company has been invaluable. In fact …” She glanced up and down the corridor. It was empty. “After we ended our virtSession, I looked over my notes for my thesis again, and I got an idea. I tried it, and it worked. I’ve discovered the sequence for longevity resistance and while most of it overlaps the soul sequence, the on/off toggle does not.”

Brennan’s heart pounded in his chest. She could turn it off? She could turn it off. “That’s wonderful.” I don’t have to get old yet. He picked Abra up and twirled her around the corridor. He settled her back on the ground, and she snuggled into his chest. Abra looked at him with those wide, innocent eyes, and he felt weak in the knees. “You are amazing.”

Pink tinted her pale cheeks and she buried her face in his neck. She was wearing a perfume that was driving him crazy.

“All those people who think they have to get old, don’t anymore,” he said.

“Not quite. Unfortunately, it only seems to work on adolescents. Older than that, and the resistant sequence has already started doing its damage. At least, that’s what the simulation says. I’ll have to get approval before testing it on actual humans.”

Brennan exhaled sharply, and his hands fell limply to his sides. He felt as if someone had punched him in the gut.

Abra touched his face. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Nothing, I’m just still dying. “I’m just amazed at what you’ve accomplished. Can you show me?”

“Of course.” She led him to her office, and showed him the simulation program.

“Wonderful. This calls for a celebration. Go dress up in your finest, and meet me in the dining hall in one hour.”

Abra’s eyes sparkled. “Sounds great.”

They left her office and parted at the end of the corridor to go to their respective cabins. As soon as Abra was out of sight, Brennan retraced his steps. He toggled the lock on Abra’s office door. She’d given him access while they were collaborating on the Methuselah project.

Brennan pulled a small, thin metal case out of his breastpocket. He flipped the lid up. It was from Tamsyn’s first haircut; he’d saved the first curl.

With trembling fingers, he finally managed to detach one strand of black hair which he placed in Abra’s analyzer and then started the program she’d just demonstrated to him. The results scrolled onto the terminal. He covered his face with his hands and sobbed. The final result etched into his mind’s eye: Sample tests positive for longevity resistance.

Brennan stayed in the office until a light blinked in his peripheral vision. Abra was trying to ping him. He sent her a message: meet me at your office. He didn’t wait long.

Abra strode in wearing a glittering, diaphanous dress that reminded him of an Old Earth angel. Her cheerful expression changed to one of surprise and concern. “You didn’t change yet. What happened? You look awful.”

“I had to check something.” He pointed to the screen.

Abra glanced at the screen. Her eyes widened. “Where did you get this sample? Whose is it?”

Brennan groaned and covered his face with his hands. His words came out with a muffled moan. “It’s Tamsyn’s.”

“Tamsyn’s?” Tears welled in the corners of Abra’s eyes. “Oh, Brennan. Did she inherit this from you? I’d begun to suspect you were resistant, but I didn’t want it to be true.”

When Jyotika had learned, she had looked at him with eyes colder than space. She hadn’t voided their marriage contract, but she might as well have for all the kindness and love she showed him after that.

He nodded. “It’s too late for me, you said. But you can save Tamsyn.”

“But it’s not been tested on actual humans. It won’t be approved for another century at the earliest. I’m sorry, Brennan.”

Brennan had a hard enough time getting the nerve to tell his daughter he was dying, and he refused to tell her that she shared the same fate. “That will be too late for Tamsyn. Fix her now.” His voice came out harsh, rougher than he’d intended. “No one will know.”

“I’d lose my license. They’d defrock me; probably even excommunicate me. You’re talking about an unapproved genetic modification. They would drag me in front of a heresy board.”

“But it’s one small modification that they will no doubt approve anyway, right?”

She waved her hands in a helpless gesture. “Probably, but that doesn’t matter. It isn’t approved now. My equipment wouldn’t even allow me to attempt it.”

Brennan slumped. He’d forgotten about the extra constraints placed on medical software designated for human DNA manipulation; the software he used for plant tinkering was basically the same but didn’t have the same constraints. He jumped up to his feet. “You could run your therapy through my medical software. Have it running as the main process on your equipment. It could handle it; we had it running the Methuselah simulation, didn’t we? Please, Abra. Please, do it for me.” He reached out and took her hand. “Please.”

Abra’s face softened. “I thought we had more time together.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

Brennan looked at the brave, sweet woman in front of him. “You’d risk the heresy board for me?”

Abra groaned. “Don’t remind me. Let’s get it set up quickly before I lose my nerve. Give me access to your software, and I’ll get everything setup. Bring Tamsyn here tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay.” Brennan glanced back on his way out the door. Abra sat with closed eyes, already in deep communion with her neurolink.

* * *

Brennan watched helplessly. Not again, he thought.

Tamsyn threw up. Again. She heaved, and a thin stream of yellow bile trickled out of her mouth.

When she was done, he wiped her feverish face with a cool cloth.

The door opened. Abra stepped into the dim room and touched Tamsyn’s head. Brennan grabbed her hand and took her to the side. “What’s happening?”

“Changes on the DNA level affect everyone differently.”

“But you just made one tiny tweak, you said. And the previous time you made one tiny tweak. And both times she’s gotten so sick.”

“I’m sorry. If I’d’ve known how sensitive she was I would have done both tweaks at the same time. You should be very careful of that in the future. If this were a normal procedure, I’d put the sensitivity in her chart, but obviously I can’t do that in this case.”

Brennan heard the aggravation in her voice and sighed. “I’m sorry. I know you were just trying to be careful with her. It’s just hard to see her like this.”

“I know. I’ve arranged for her to have some time in a regen chamber.”

“Again? How did you manage that?”

Abra dragged her hand across her face. “Don’t ask.”

“Thank you, but I’m afraid Jyotika will find out when she comes out of stasis.”

“I’ve taken care of that. It’s totally off the record, just like last time.” She shook her head and sighed. “The things I do for you.”

* * *

The ship locked into orbit around the soon-to-be-colonized planet Ganga. Quiet and dark for the past fifteen years, the corridors filled with light and activity. Tamsyn and Ekram sat in the observation deck; Ganga dominated the view.

I almost don’t even recognize the ship, thought Tamsyn. “Everything seems so different. Funny. I guess it’s the people that make the place and not the place that makes the place.”

Ekram had a dour expression on his face. He’d had that expression a lot since his father had emerged from stasis two years ago. “Funny. Heh. Yeah.”

“It’s just a few extra years, Ekram. It’ll fly by, just like the trip did.”

“Easy for you to say, you’ll go into stasis soon and when you wake up you’ll vacation on Goa XI with your mother, the hero. Me, on the other hand. I’ve got to slog around helping colonize a planet with my tyrant parents. I can’t believe they won’t let me stay on board ship until I reach my majority. I’ll have to turn eighteen stuck on that planet. Another ship isn’t scheduled to stop by for ten more years. I’ll be twenty-five by then.”

“Cheer up. Maybe they’ll have approved some radical sequences by the time the next ship comes.” That earned her a wry smile from Ekram.

The door swished open and Brennan hesitated in the entrance. “There you are, Tamsyn. Hello, Ekram. Do you mind if I borrow my daughter a bit?”

“Course not, sir. I’ve got to get back and help in the nursery anyway. Sunita’s got a rash again. Can you believe it? She claims she’s allergic to babies.” He snorted and shook his head. “See you later, Tams.”

Brennan took Ekram’s chair. “Nice young man, isn’t he? You’ll miss him. Won’t you?”

Tamsyn shrugged; Ekram figured prominently on the list of things she didn’t want to talk to her father about. “Sure.”

“What if you didn’t have to miss him? Tamsyn, I’ve been thinking a lot, and I’ve decided to stay on the planet when the ship leaves.”

Tamsyn looked back and forth between Ganga and her father. “I don’t understand. Is Mom staying too?”

“Your mother is the captain of this ship and will continue in that capacity. I’ll be joining Reverend Taylor on the planet while she does her research stint. It’ll be for at least ten more years, until the next ship comes.”

Tamsyn felt her lips tighten at the mention of Reverend Taylor. “What about Mom?”

“Sweetie, you know our marriage contract expired last month. We have no plans to renew it. It’ll be better for both of us this way. Come to the planet. It’ll be lots of fun. The research module only stays in one place for a year or two before it flies to another spot on the planet. It’ll be a long time before the colonists get to see what you see. You’ll probably be the first one to set foot in some areas. Reverend Taylor and I would love it if you came with us, at least for ten years. Just until the next ship.”

Tamsyn narrowed her eyes at the thought of Reverend Taylor. “I don’t like her. Always poking and prodding and asking for tissue samples.”

Brennan’s face hardened. “She cares about your health, young lady. She’s been very good to both of us. We owe her a great deal.”

Tamsyn grunted noncommittally and added Reverend Taylor to the list of things not to talk to her father about.

Her father rubbed his finger on the nullglass, outlining Ganga on the viewport. “It’s up to you, of course, but if you don’t stay, I’ll likely be dead before you see me again.”

Tamsyn stared at her father’s profile. When she spoke again, her voice came out in a squeak, like a little girl’s voice. “What are you talking about?”

“I rejected the longevity treatment. I’d appreciate if you gave me ten more years of your company. Just ten more years.”

Tamsyn’s mind reeled. All the pieces suddenly falling in place. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Brennan’s face twisted. “I tried. It was never the right time, I guess.”

A cool, female voice spoke behind Tamsyn. “It’s never the right time for a coward. Have you turned to emotional blackmail, old man? I didn’t think that was your style.” Tamsyn whirled to face the door; she hadn’t even heard it open.

Jyotika strolled forward and the door swished shut behind her. Her jet black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and she wore an impeccably tailored navy blue captain’s uniform. Her sleeves were decorated with the medals, honors, and awards she’d won.

Brennan turned slowly and faced Jyotika. “That was always your domain, wasn’t it Jy?”

Jyotika’s eyes widened, perhaps at the comment or at Brennan’s weathered face or both. “It’s okay Tamsyn. I don’t mind. Go with your father and dear Reverend Taylor. The research lab module is pretty well stocked with educational materials. Don’t worry, you won’t have to help the colonists; just stay in the lab. Ten years is nothing. Not for us, at least. We’ve got centuries ahead of us.”

Brennan jerked back as if from a blow.

Tamsyn’s stomach twisted in nauseating knots. How can they hate each other so much?

Jyotika nodded briskly, her eyes dark and unfathomable. “I’ll go in to stasis shortly after the research shuttle lands on the planet, but I’ve left instructions so that any priority message with your tag will wake me. See you in ten years.” She pivoted on one heel and strode out of the room.

Brennan leaned against the wall, breathing heavily, as if he’d just worked out. “Like a black hole, isn’t she? Irresistible. So … I guess you’re coming after all.”

“But I didn’t decide yet.”

Brennan shrugged. “I don’t think it matters anymore. Let’s start getting your things settled onto the research module. It’s departing for the planet in two days.”

* * *

Tamsyn touched Ekram’s cheek. “Are you okay?”

Ekram’s breath wheezed in and out of his chest. His eyes watered from the overpowering scent of the masala flowers, the only plants that survived at this elevation. “You live on top of a mountain. And I ran.”

Tamsyn gave him a skeptical look. She went up and down the mountain all the time, and it never bothered her.

He caught her hand and pressed it to his face. “You’re magical you know? My skin always tingles when you do that.”

Tamsyn could feel Ekram smile under her hand and giggled. They perched on a large boulder in silence while his breathing eased.

“Ekram, Ekram,” a voice called.

Ekram tensed under her hand. “Peptides in a basket, it’s my dad,” he whispered. “I’m here, sir.” He scrambled up.

“There you are.” Devesh Iyengar, Ekram’s father, breathed heavily from the climb. “Lollygagging around again. If you’ve got so much energy to come all the way over here on your rest day then you obviously aren’t working hard enough. I’ll fix your schedule tomorrow. Now go. They need help in the nursery. Sunita’s complaining about that rash again and setting everyone else off.”

Devesh watched Ekram scramble away then turned to Tamsyn. “Leave him alone. Time is a precious commodity for us, and he doesn’t have any to waste with you.”

“Ekram doesn’t seem to think so.”

“Ah. He’s a sensitive boy. He thinks with his heart, not his mind. If he were thinking properly, he would realize that you will leave him in nine more years when the next ship comes. If he continues to invest time in you, he will be heartbroken. He will have wasted the time spent with you which could have been spent elsewhere, and he will waste more time getting over you.”

“Unless he leaves.”

“What?”

“If he leaves with me on the ship, it won’t be a waste of time, right?”

He cocked his head to the side. “But, none of the charter members of the colony can leave. The government prioritizes colony candidates willing to agree that they and their descendents would forgo genetic manipulation and remain planetbound for five hundred years. Ecclesia likes to nurture genetic purity.” He gave her a sharp look. “We happily agreed to the conditions.”

Tamsyn looked at him in horror. Does Ekram know this?

He squeezed the back of his neck and sighed. “You perhaps think it is harsh, to sign away our children’s freedom. We were thinking only of them. You’re shipborn; you don’t know how it is in Ecclesia. You haven’t seen the decadence. People starting to treat DNA as a mix and match smorgasbord. Changing their sequences as the mood hits them.” He shuddered in disgust. “It’s a sacred thing for us. It’s what ties us to our ancestors and will tie us to our descendants. If you change that, where does it leave you? Alone. Unique, perhaps, in all the universe, but alone. We wanted our children to have their heritage.”

But Ekram wants something else. Tamsyn thought of her friend’s secret skew, but kept her mouth shut. She didn’t want to get him into any more trouble.

Devesh looked down into the valley below. The edge of the settlers’ town was visible in the distance. “Leave him alone. You are not the one for him.” He stumped off in the direction Ekram took.

Tamsyn watched him go with clenched hands. “Ekram won’t stay with you,” she whispered, long after Devesh disappeared. I’ve got to do something. She hurried back to the research module; maybe if Reverend Taylor requested Ekram as a lab assistant, they could take him with them when the ship came.

The door to Reverend Taylor’s office was open. Her obsessively clean office was in disarray. Tamsyn saw her father slumped at the desk with his face in his hands. “Dad, have you seen Reverend Taylor?”

Brennan jumped up as soon as she spoke and grabbed for a gun that sat next to the holo of him and Reverend Taylor.

Something in his face and the way he gripped the gun stopped Tamsyn in her tracks. Confused, she dropped her gaze and noticed Abra’s elegant hand poking out from behind the desk. The blood drained from her head, and she clutched the doorway for support.

Brennan noticed her gaze. “You’re back early. I wanted to get cleaned up before you came.”

Tamsyn couldn’t take her eyes off Abra’s arm. The nails looked freshly painted. She swallowed convulsively in a mouth gone dry. “Is she …” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Dead? Yes.” Tamsyn’s father waved the gun in the dead woman’s direction. “It’s not as bad as you think.”

Tamsyn was sure her father didn’t know what she was thinking; she wasn’t even sure what she was thinking. Nothing made sense. Dad killed Reverend Taylor—the words clamored in her mind, driving out all other coherent thoughts. She pressed her hand against her chest; she couldn’t breathe. She sucked air in, but couldn’t seem to fill her lungs. Out, I need to get out. She inched away from the door.

“Wait. Let me explain.” Brennan held out his hand to her.

Tamsyn froze as his gun hand extended toward her.

Brennan flinched at the sight of the gun in his hand, as if just then realizing it was there. He dropped it on the desk. “She lied. She lied from the beginning. And I was the fool who believed her.” His shoulders drooped. “I was so scared that you would be resistant to longevity treatments. I would have done anything to prevent that. She said she could detect and treat the problem. So I ran your DNA through her analyzer, and it said you were resistant. I begged her to treat you. I begged her. How she must have been secretly laughing at me.”

Brennan glared at the woman on the floor. “I thought it was to fix the problem. You must believe me. When you got so sick, she said it was just sensitivity. How could I have been so trusting? She just wanted a test subject. And I gave her my little girl. My innocent little girl, and I begged Abra to fix you.” He groaned and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, as if to wipe away the memory.

“We’d been running a human/tree gene splice simulation,” Brennan said. “Methuselah, we called it. And she programmed that into your skew. Non-human DNA. In your skew. It’s the most extensive gene mod I’ve ever seen. The reprogramming goes all the way down to the gamete level; what’s one more illegality, right? And that is not even the worst part.”

The room spun and Tamsyn sunk to the floor. Not even the worst part? My father a murderer. Non-human DNA in my skew; I’m not even a human anymore. How could it get any worse? She looked at the dead woman’s outstretched hand and shuddered.

“You weren’t even resistant. It was all a setup so that I’d allow her to treat you. There’s no possible way you were resistant. Your mother … she … you’re her dupe.”

Tamsyn grabbed her pounding head, tears streamed down her cheeks. A clone? She was her mother’s clone? Unbelievable. She had no soul; no rights in Ecclesia. Her parents had made sure of that twice over. Her father opened his mouth again to talk. Please, let him stop, she thought, but he kept talking.

“I don’t know why she did it. She tried to give me a clue, but I was too angry at the time to realize it. When she told me she was pregnant, she said she’d already picked out the name: Tamsyn. She’d said it was to reflect my heritage. My heritage? An English name. It enraged me to think that she knew I was from Eire and thought an English name would be acceptable. She was just like all the others, I thought, thinking that, all European descendants are the same. And the name seemed nonsense to me at the time.” He banged the desk then swept the holo off. It fell to the floor, flickered once, then its image extinguished. “Don’t you see? Tamsyn means twin.”

A dupe. Tamsyn couldn’t wrap her mind around it. “So both of my parents betrayed me. I’m nothing. I’m not even human anymore. I’ve got no soul, my mother already claimed it. What is there left for me?” she asked.

“Don’t believe that.” Brennan walked around the desk, and then reached out to touch Tamsyn’s hair. He dropped his hand to his side when she flinched. “You have so much more compassion and kindness than your mother. So many little things that make you a wonderful person. I think those intangibles are more a part of your soul than whatever is written on your soul sequence.”

Tamsyn’s breath caught in her throat at the blatant heresy. Ecclesia had executed heretics for lesser things. “Do you really believe that?” she whispered.

“Yes. You are you, not Jyotika. Do you think I would have done this for her? I did it all for you—my little girl. I was only thinking of you.”

Tamsyn felt her anger build, adrenaline pumped through her system and she pushed up off the floor. She rested her fists on her hips. “Were you? Were you really? And in all this ‘thinking’ about me, you never stopped to ask me what I wanted?”

His face twisted. “Tamsyn—”

“No. That’s it. You’ve said enough. You’ve ruined me. Both of you. I’m legally dead. Just go, why don’t you? I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Brennan bowed his head; his words were very soft. “I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll leave. Don’t worry. But, it’s not just you. After she finished practicing on you, she did the same procedure to all the subsequent baby batches she started in the nursery.”

Tamsyn’s jaw dropped and she stared at him in horror. Gene mod therapy was only done on consenting adults, or adolescents at the earliest if there were congenital health problems. The blatant illegality of it all stunned her, but obviously Reverend Taylor wasn’t bothered by such trivialities. “How many batches?”

“Three batches, forty-eight babies each.”

One hundred forty-four babies! Tamsyn did the mental calculations; the oldest batch would be two and a half Standard years old now. She scrubbed the tears out of her eyes. “The colonists, I’ve got to tell them.”

“Wait—”

Tamsyn didn’t wait to listen; the babies needed medical attention right away. Maybe it wasn’t too late to reverse what Reverend Taylor had done. She sprinted; the beat of her feet echoed hollowly in the halls. When she reached the door, the sun hung low over the horizon, and long shadows stretched across the ground.

Tamsyn hooked a flashlight around her wrist and jogged on the ragged path to the colonists’ town. A message flashed in her peripheral vision. It was from her father. She downloaded it unopened. What more could he have to say? she wondered.

Distracted, Tamsyn stumbled and careened off the path near the perimeter of town. The fall knocked the breath out of her. Groaning, she pushed herself up and tried to pick the twigs out of her hair. She struggled to her feet and limped the rest of the way in.

A crowd had formed around her, and Devesh pushed his way through. “What’s going on? I thought I told you to stay away.”

Tamsyn told him about the babies. By the time she finished, the crowd’s mutters had turned to shouts. The area between Tamsyn and the crowd had widened.

Devesh waved the noise down. “Bindi: get those babies quarantined. Sita, Apu: get your guns and come with me.” He pointed at Tamsyn. “Nikhil: tie her up.”

Tamsyn tried to hobble away. “Hey. I ran all the way over here to tell you what happened. I just wanted to help.” She pushed their hands away, wishing for the distance of moments earlier. They twisted her hands behind her back and secured them with a rough rope. She tried to pull her wrists loose, but only managed to scrape her skin on the rope.

Devesh gave her a thoughtful look then turned and started on the path, followed by Sita and Apu. Nikhil brought up the rear, tugging Tamsyn behind him. They’d taken her flashlight, and Tamsyn struggled not to stumble in the darkness. When they finally reached the research module, Tamsyn sobbed with relief.

Devesh loomed in the doorway to Abra’s office. Tamsyn angled sideways to see past him into the room. Her father lay asleep on the desk. Devesh stepped forward and held her father’s wrist.

No, Tamsyn wanted to say, my father’s okay; check Reverend Taylor’s vitals. She stared at his hand; she noticed the chalky whiteness, the way it hung limply in Devesh’s grip, the way it thunked lifelessly onto the desk when released. She covered her mouth, muffling her screams. No.

Without even looking at her, Devesh pointed out the door. “Nikhil, go lock her in one of the rooms.”

* * *

Urgent things to know:

1) They won’t understand.

2) Go far, far away.

3) Don’t worry about food. As long as you or the babies are in a non-sterile environment, the hairs of your skin will send anything it touches, anything, to the stomach for processing. Be exposed to light, preferably sunlight, to power the process.

4) I’ve copied all her research notes and files. Go over them after you’ve had a chance to get settled.

5) You are soulful. I love you. Forgive me.

Tamsyn opened her eyes, but the words of her father’s last message were imprinted on her memory. She sat on the floor in a holding room and stared at the nullglass wall directly opposite her. From her position, she could see two other holding cells. Originally meant to hold native species for observation, the rooms she saw now each held sixteen toddlers and two robo-nannies. She assumed the other holding cells were likewise occupied with the remaining babies from three batches that Reverend Taylor had modified. The soundproofed walls swallowed their screams, but she could still see their tear-streaked faces and puffy, red-rimmed eyes as they howled and banged their little fists against the nullglass.

They’re hungry, she realized. The robo-nannies were making no attempts to feed them. She pushed her fist into her stomach to quiet its hunger pangs. Don’t worry about food, her father had said, but the rooms were dark and the air filtered. Even our enhancements can’t help us now, she thought.

Why are they doing this? Tamsyn wondered. Her stomach twisted. These kids need help.

The robo-nannies were in constant motion. Each of their eight arms comforted a child. Half of the exhausted toddlers had dropped off to sleep, when something set off the others. Then they were all awake again, clamoring for a human touch.

Devesh walked down the dimly lit hall, flanked by Apu and Sita. He came directly to Tamsyn’s door and entered her cell without sparing a glance for the children. Dark smudges framed his eyes and he waved a bit on his feet. “This is quite a mess.”

Tamsyn glanced at the children and back. She had no sympathy for whatever stresses he was facing. He continued looking at her as if he expected her to say something.

Devesh cleared his throat. “Your father destroyed a lot of the data, but we’ve managed to salvage enough of Reverend Taylor’s records that we’ve got an idea of what she did. We appreciate you bringing the matter to our attention. I shudder to think what would have happened if things had progressed as they were.”

“Oh yes, terrible. Babies would still be in loving arms instead of locked in cages. Yes, very calamitous.”

Devesh turned away from her, and his hands clenched. “Those aren’t babies. She murdered our babies, replaced them with these changelings.” He swept his fist behind him, still not looking at the crying children in the other rooms. “Those are things. They might look human on the outside, but on the inside …” He shivered. “They are an abomination.”

“How can you say that? Look at them. They’re babies.”

“Not human ones. Not according to the laws of Ecclesia, not according to teachings of generations of theologians, and not according to us.” He faced her, his eyes anguished and pleading. He pitched his voice so only she could hear. “How can I say that about them, you ask? I have to; otherwise, I could not bear to do what must be done. And it must be done. These one hundred forty-four do not outweigh the needs of eleven thousand other colonists.”

Tamsyn looked at his tortured eyes. “Then fix them.”

“The genetic changes are too extensive. Even if we had the equipment for that level of manipulation, no one here has the expertise required to reverse them. I’m not even sure they can be reversed. Taylor, may her DNA be unstrung bit by bit in the chaos of damnation, even coded the changes into the gametes as dominant traits. The abominations would have propagated among us. It would have doomed us when Ecclesia found out.” Agitated, he paced up and down the small confines of the cell.

“Let them go. I’ll take them away. You don’t ever have to see them again.”

Devesh remained silent until he regained his composure. He looked at her with sad eyes. “We’re civilized people. We just wanted to settle peacefully. Our co-op waited for this habitable planet for over two hundred years. We just wanted peace, a place to raise our children and worship the ever-present Being.” He made the sign of the double-helix.

She felt a flicker of hope, quickly dashed by his next sentence.

“This is our planet and we cannot permit abominations to flourish or propagate. If they discovered what happened, they’d quarantine the planet, imprison us. They’d bring us before a heresy board. Even if they allowed us to live, we’d be ruined. Do you understand? We must do what we must before the ship comes. We must.”

Tamsyn felt tension coiling tighter and tighter inside of her. I can’t believe it. She’d seen the colonists interact with the babies; those children had been loved. “Everyone agrees with that?”

Devesh’s lips pinched into a tight line. “We will reach a decision soon. It’s inevitable. The good of the colony always comes first; we pledged amongst ourselves before we came.” He sighed and rubbed his head. “And then there is the question of what to do with you.”

Tamsyn’s heart pounded. Do they know I’m an abomination too? “Just let me go.”

He nodded; his sharp gaze didn’t leave her face for an instant. “Captain Diwan is well-respected. We certainly wouldn’t want to be the ones to tell her something untoward had happened to her only child. Let’s put this nightmare behind us. Come live with us, be a permanent part of our community. Ekram is quite fond of you. Just forget all of this ever happened.”

So Ekram was to be the carrot dangled to buy her silence. “And if I don’t?”

Devesh’s voice was very soft. “Then your mother will be very sad to learn that you also perished in the accident that claimed the lives of your father and Taylor.”

Tamsyn clamped her mouth shut. “The others won’t agree to that.”

“They will when I will suggest that perhaps you have been modified too.”

She glared at Devesh. Her father was right: they wouldn’t understand.

He nodded gently in the silence and left.

Tamsyn watched Sita and Apu pace up and down the corridor and tried to think of a way to get rid of them. Unlike Devesh, they couldn’t ignore the rooms full of pleading children. Finally Sita stopped and stomped the floor. She gestured at a boy in a corner, lying prone and screaming uncontrollably. Apu shook his head. Tamsyn could tell they were shouting but couldn’t hear the words. Apu glared at Sita, but she ignored him and opened Tamsyn’s door.

“Go help that one in the corner,” Sita said.

Tamsyn slowly stretched and stood. She took a deep breath and put on her best little girl face. Sita grabbed her arm and pulled her forward. As soon as they were in the hall, Tamsyn pitched her voice so Apu could hear it. “You must have done something really bad to get stuck guarding us.”

Sita stopped tugging and frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Did you agree to be the scapegoats? Is that why you’re here instead of at the meeting where everyone else gets to vote?”

“What are you talking about?” Sita asked again.

Tamsyn opened her eyes wide and hoped she looked innocent. “Devesh said he was going to appoint some scapegoats so if the next ship comes and questions the settlers about the missing babies they’ll have someone to blame.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Apu. “Someone has to guard the things.”

Tamsyn shrugged. “Really? A bunch of babies and me? Locked in holding cells? The babies don’t even speak real words yet, and I’m only fifteen, there’s no way we can override the lock once you set it. Devesh even blocked my neurolink access to the network. We’re stuck. Are you the scapegoats? Is that why he doesn’t want you there?”

“Would you stop saying that?”

“But someone has to be the scapegoat for when the ship comes. By that time, he might have erased all evidence of what Reverend Taylor did, but he can’t hide the population drop.”

“Shut up.” Apu shoved her in the room with the wailing child and locked the door behind her.

Tamsyn approached the boy and her heart ached. She scooped the rigid child up and sang lullabies and rocked him back and forth. He relaxed in her arms. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Apu and Sita argue and then storm down the hallway to the exit. She smiled, and the baby fell asleep in her arms. A robo-nanny arm gently nudged her, and she placed the boy into its care. The other children in the room cried quietly.

Tamsyn leaned against the wall and initiated a virtSession with her neurolink. She searched for the closest authentication node and sent a request that the block on her network connection be terminated. She hardcoded a name to the identification signature that the neurolink then paired with the unique id represented by her soul sequence.

Identity verified. Request granted. Network authentication complete, Captain Diwan, the research module’s AI responded, and provided its own long binary handle.

Captain Diwan’s last saved workspace opened up before her. For a moment, Tamsyn bowed her head. She hadn’t doubted her father, but the network authentication hit home. So it’s true, I don’t have a soul, I’ve just been borrowing one from my mother. She shook herself. Stop moping; there’s work to do. She wondered how long it would take before the colonists reached a majority; surely it would take a while for them to justify the need to kill one hundred forty-four babies regardless of what their DNA looked like.

Tamsyn established a virtSession with the robo-nannies and instructed them to get the children ready for takeoff. She created a handle named Remo and linked it to the AI’s signature. Remo, how long does it take for liftoff?

Seventeen minutes, replied Remo. What is your destination? Shall I begin engine initialization?

Likely the colonists couldn’t run from town to Remo before liftoff, but Tamsyn decided to wait a bit to let Sita and Apu get further away before she started the engines. Not yet; standby. Turn up the lights and stop filtering the air from outside.

The lights came up and the spicy smell of the masala flowers filled the air. Tamsyn felt her alertness increase and her hunger recede. The urgent edge in the children’s cries eased. Her father had said they needed sunshine and a non-sterile environment. What are we? She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to prevent tears.

Focus, focus; first things first, Tamsyn thought. Step 1: go far, far away. She examined her mother’s workspace. There were a lot of icons she didn’t recognize. One reminded her of a map. She tapped it and Ganga appeared on the screen. Once she zoomed in, Tamsyn gasped. She could see everyone.

Of course, Captain Diwan would have access to all their locations. Tamsyn toggled the map; it showed a bird’s eye view of the planet. She zoomed in, and could discern Remo’s hexagonal outline with nine small clusters of green dots. The sixteen long binary identification signatures of the children hovered next to each cluster. Her own dot showed up as golden.

Her eyes roved over the map. A large cluster of green and blue dots centered in the town meeting hall. The spaceport and the five white cylindrical shapes of the shuttles were empty. She saw two blue dots halfway between Remo and the town. Sita and Apu, she thought. She decided to wait until they reached the town hall; she didn’t want to start anything in motion until they were too far away to stop her. It’ll probably take them twenty more minutes to get there, she figured.

Tamsyn pulled up another instance of the map and toggled it to display the geographical survey. She sorted the bodies of land by size. For her purposes, the current continent was out for obvious reasons. She scanned the descriptions, her tension growing until she scrolled down to LandBlock 7. Large island—vegetation: minimal; ground content: rock and sand, small pockets of porous clay, extensive cave system; water: two underwater aquifers; weather: 89.3% days of sunshine annually.

Sand and sun; perfect, she thought. Methuselah, some tree project, her father had said. Well, LandBlock 7 was the perfect place to plant the seedlings.

Remo, plot a course to LandBlock 7. She squinted at the unfamiliar icons in her mother’s workspace. She glanced at the population map; Sita and Apu’s dots had almost reached the village. No time to experiment; she’d have to go through Remo to contact the other shuttles and hope the colonists couldn’t use another channel to circumvent her.

Remo, contact the AI on the other shuttles. Have them seal their doors. Instruct them to refuse all communication attempts from anyone but me. Do it under my authority as a captain in Ecclesia.

Acknowledgement of order and statement of compliance received, said Remo.

Send them the coordinates for LandBlock 7 and tell them to standby for liftoff at my signal.

Acknowledged.

Tamsyn noticed a light flashing in her peripheral vision—the robo-nannies had the children prepared for liftoff.

Remo, start liftoff and signal the other shuttles to do the same.

Acknowledged.

The engines vibrated to life. Tamsyn looked at the population map and frowned. There was a large cluster of green dots moving along the path from the village to Remo. She zoomed in until the map displayed video images instead of just dots. Her chest clenched. Ekram and a large group of the other shipborn struggled up the mountain.

They’re coming to rescue us, realized Tamsyn. Dear Ekram! She started to initiate a virtSession to tell him they were already escaping and to say goodbye, then stopped. Any virtSession she opened with him would have Captain Diwan’s name tagged on to it. I don’t even exist; I never did. She sagged. Devesh had been right; she wasn’t the one for Ekram.

Tamsyn ended the neurolink session and pushed herself up. She trudged to Reverend Taylor’s old office and peeked inside. The memory of her father’s limp form draped over the desk surfaced, but she forced it back down. Her thoughts turned to the last item Brennan had written on his urgent things to know list: You are soulful. I love you. Forgive me. Her throat tightened and she blinked back tears. Time enough to think about that later, she decided.

Tamsyn strapped herself into a chair and thought of the babies in the nullglass holding rooms. Her shoulders straightened, and she pulled her hair back into a tight bun. I’m the right one to help them. They needed a captain.

The whine of the research module’s engines peaked and they accelerated into the storm-grey sky. Tamsyn smiled. We will be like a great forest.

* * *

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Framed

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Russian Roulette

Written by Simon Horvat

Illustrated by Dan Skinner

The gun lay on the table. It already had three bullets in it; at the start I’d only loaded it with one. Every three spins I’d put another bullet in. I’d only ever gotten to four bullets before blowing my brains out. Not a game to play when you’re loaded, not a game to play when you’re not.

It’s no real risk for a precog. And if my powers fail me, well I don’t think I could go on without my second sight. It freaked out my parents when they caught me at it, though Mum knew what I was going through.

You might think that one day I’m going to pull the trigger when I shouldn’t, but that happens in so few timelines that I know it’s not bloody likely. Most of my visions show me around for decades before they fade into the distant future.

A lonely, distant future. We’d tried changing that. Kat and I built a home together with the average two point three wonderful children, and then, one day, she’d die. And die … and die.

We tried everything to change that. Shuffled the timelines as much as possible—different doctors, different medicines, different exercises. There’s not much you can do with a fatal genetic disorder, though we managed to stave it off for decades before … well, before she’d die.

It’s funny. We’d start to make love, see the baby would probably inherit it and stop. It’s a great way to deflate any interest. But when the children were born safe, oh boy! What a night we’d have. We’d really celebrate then. So none of the kids’ll inherit it from her, that’s something to be happy about.

I try not to focus too much on the down side. Really, I should focus on the decades of love that we share, it’s just that once in a while her death flashes before my eyes, so strongly. Sometimes I see myself, seeing myself, seeing our future together. The feedback loops out of control and I just can’t control it! It’s these damn hormones kicking in.

I am so looking forward to getting over puberty and finally meeting Kat.

* * *

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Framed

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COLUMNS:

The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow

Written by Mike Resnick

There was a (brief) time when they closed the Patent Office because there was nothing left to invent. That was not only before the creation of jet planes, polio vaccine, and computers, but before the telephone and the electric light, believe it or not.

Just goes to show that the future has more surprises than most people think.

There was a time when people thought science fiction was all played out, too. When Apollo XI touched down and Neil Armstrong took his one small step for Man, half the talking heads on TV pointed out that now that we had reached the Moon, science fiction writers had run out of stories.

That was before the height of the New Wave (which, like most of the 1960s, took place more in the 1970s), and before cyberpunk, and before slipstream, and before … Well, you get the picture.

Then Dell killed its science fiction line, and so did Playboy Press, and Pyramid vanished, and Fawcett/Gold Medal were no longer players … but lo and behold, along came DAW and Tor and Baen and a host of smaller presses.

Amazing and Galaxy and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine and half a dozen other magazines died, and that was the end of magazines and short stories. Until you activated your computer and found us, and Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, and a dozen more e-zines, all paying competitive rates.

Sound familiar—like you’ve heard or read it all before? Like maybe three paragraphs ago?

Now that Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died, the last of the so-called “Big Three” (Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov) has gone, and I’m hearing the same pessimism about the future from all the self-appointed experts who are as ignorant of the field as they are of its history.

Just about the time Stanley G. Weinbaum and Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft passed from sight, along came Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon and A. E. van Vogt and Leigh Brackett. And when some of them went off to war, or out to Hollywood, here came Jack Vance and Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. And when some of them went into teaching or Scientology, why, we had Robert Sheckley and Alfred Bester and Cyril Kornbluth in the full flowering of their literary powers. And when some of them deserted us for movies and non-fiction, here came Robert Silverberg and J. G. Ballard and Anne McCaffrey, and when everyone was sure there was no more talent out there, along came Roger Zelazny and Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin … and it’s been like that ever since.

I just came back from Worldcon and DragonCon, and I can tell you that there is still a lot of new talent that just came through the door or is about to start knocking at it. John Scalzi’s only been around three or four years, but he’s already got a Campbell, a Hugo, and a bestseller. Tobias S. Buckell has a Campbell nomination and a Nebula nomination. Naomi Novick, another Campbell winner, was a hit from the start, and the start was only three years ago. And there are a handful of (current) unknowns whose work I’ve seen, here at Jim Baen’s Universe and elsewhere, who are just making their first sales now, and a number of them are going to be major forces in the field a few years up the road.

Just as there’s always a new generation of writers, there’s always a new generation of naysayers. The thing to remember is that history is not on their side.

And who knows more about future history than science fiction people?

* * *

A little sidenote to those of you who nominate for the Hugos. If you’re reading this, you’re subscribers—and if you’re subscribers, I have to assume you like the job Eric and I are doing with Jim Baen’s Universe.

There are always five nominees in each Hugo category. This year it took 35 nominations to make the ballot for Best Short Fiction Editor.

Eric Flint received 15 nominations. I received 13 nominations. Eric and I as a team received 15 nominations. That’s a total of 43, quite enough to make the ballot, which would have been very nice publicity for a relatively young magazine … but officially, they were totals of 15, 15 and 13. Next year you might nominate the pair of us together. Just a gentle suggestion.

* * *

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Framed

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Meteoroids, Meteors and Meteorites

Written by Ben Bova

The headline screamed: “OMG! We Come From Space!”

Right under it was an image of a really hideous alien from a sci-fi flick.

The news story accompanying the headline and picture was much more subdued. It told of a report by researchers from Imperial College, in the United Kingdom, that they had found the chemical uracil in a meteorite.

Uracil is one of the key chemicals in the RNA and DNA molecules. It’s a fundamental part of every living cell on Earth.

Did it originate in outer space and ride to Earth inside a meteoroid? Maybe.

How did life on Earth begin? Was it somehow cooked up out of non-living chemicals here on Earth, or were the basic chemical ingredients for life carried to our planet by asteroids and comets that crashed here? If Earth was seeded from outer space with the chemicals of life, where in blazes did those chemicals come from?

As Yul Brynner said in The King and I, “Is a puzzlement.”

Let’s begin at the beginning.

According to current knowledge, the universe began roughly 14 billion years ago in a spectacular explosion that’s been dubbed the Big Bang. All the matter and energy in the universe came into existence in one titanic blast. “Let there be light!”

Where did all that stuff come from? That’s a question for cosmologists to ponder, and maybe the subject of another column.

For now, looking back some 14 billion years, we have a newly-hatched universe that consists mostly of hydrogen atoms, with a little helium and a trace of lithium. The three lightest chemical elements. Ferocious as it was, the Big Bang couldn’t create elements heavier than lithium.

But stars could. The earliest stars coalesced out of clouds of those light elements and began cooking heavier elements in their cores. Stars are nuclear fusion reactors. They fuse the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to produce helium nuclei. And energy. We call it starlight. Closer to home, we call it sunshine.

As stars age and run low on hydrogen, they begin to fuse helium into carbon, oxygen and neon. They keep producing constantly heavier elements until they finally run out of energy resources and collapse.

Very massive stars blow up in cataclysmic supernova explosions. Our middling-sized Sun won’t explode: it will just puff away its outer layers and quietly collapse into a white dwarf state. Of course, even such a mild end will boil away Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. But that won’t happen for a few billion years, so don’t panic. Yet.

What’s happening is that the stars are blowing into space those heavy elements that they’ve cooked up in their interiors. Those heavier atoms become the building blocks for new stars.

The universe is a big recycling project. Most of the atoms in your body were created inside stars. We are stardust, quite literally.

So now it’s about five billion years ago and our solar system is coalescing out of a cloud of interstellar gas and dust that contains elements such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, calcium, etc. At the center of the cloud a star is born, our Sun. In the maelstrom of gas and dust swirling around the newborn star, planets are forming.

Not just planets. Moons, comets and asteroids are being built too. Comets are basically chunks of ice, with a smattering of sooty dust thrown in. “Dirty snowballs,” they’ve been called. Actually they’re more like dirty icebergs.

Asteroids are chunks of rock that didn’t get sucked into a planet or moon. They’re like the crumbs left over after a banquet.

Today, the planets move in widely-spaced orbits, calm and sedate. It’s a news event when an asteroid crashes into Earth, although you can see plenty of asteroids flash through the sky on any clear night. Meteors are often called “falling stars.” Actually, they’re falling asteroids, most of them no bigger than a dust mote.

In the early days, however, the solar system was more like a shooting gallery. There were chunks of rock almost the size of planets whizzing around. Earth was hit again and again by gigantic asteroids and comets.

While billions of years of rain and weathering have erased most of the impact craters on Earth, you can see the evidence of this early meteoric bombardment on the battered face of the Moon. In fact, the Moon itself was created when a planetesimal the size of Mars smashed into Earth in a grazing blow that tore off a layer of rock that eventually coalesced to form our Moon.

This pounding from asteroids and comets may have seeded Earth with water and chemicals (such as uracil) that led to the development of life. But the pounding could also have obliterated the very earliest living things even as they were forming out of those chemicals. No telling how many times life arose in some spot on Earth, only to be smashed out of existence by a meteoric impact.

Nature is persistent, but lazy. Our solar system formed out of the elements that happened to be available in interstellar space: the debris of aged stars that spewed out their atoms in their death throes. The simple forces of gravity and chemistry produced our planet Earth, together with the rest of the solar system. Life on Earth was likewise produced by those forces, working with the materials that were available. The processes that led to life on Earth used the most abundant ingredients on hand and the easiest chemical pathways for putting those ingredients together.

The chemicals precursors of life exist in deep space. Radio astronomers have detected water, ammonia, and hundreds of organic chemicals in interstellar clouds, including formaldehyde, hydrocyanic acid, and the more complex polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Those chemical were undoubtedly present in the interstellar cloud that gave birth to our solar system.

We are talking now of prebiotic chemistry, chemical reactions that can build up organic molecules that become the building blocks for life.

Comets are particularly interesting to researchers studying prebiotic chemistry. Laboratory simulations have shown that prebiotic chemistry can take place in comets’ ice.

How can chemistry take place in ice? If you sprinkled ice cubes with carbon, nitrogen, etc. and kept them in a freezer, no chemical reactions would occur. The ice is a solid, crystalline lattice; its atoms cannot move around and recombine into more complex compounds.

But the ice in comets has a different structure. (Shades of Kurt Vonnegut and the “ice-nine” of Cat’s Cradle.) The ice in comets is amorphous ice, a form that’s been known to chemists since 1935. Amorphous ice is not a crystalline lattice; its internal structure is more like that of glass, which is structurally a fluid that happens to remain solid at normal room temperature.

When amorphous ice is exposed to ultraviolet radiation (as a comet is in space) it can flow like a liquid even though it’s only a few degrees above absolute zero. Atoms can begin to mix and mingle in amorphous ice. The chemistry of life can begin in comets.

Experiments with amorphous ice in laboratory chambers have produced ethers, alcohols, PAHs and even amino acids - the building blocks of proteins. And astronomers have seen organic chemicals in the tails of passing comets. Comets could bear the seeds of life; they could have brought them to Earth, together with abundant water.

As the recent discovery of uracil in a meteorite shows, asteroids can bring organic material to Earth, too. Meteorites are asteroids that have fallen to Earth. Since the 1960s it’s been recognized that some meteorites - particularly the carbon-rich chondrites - contain water and organic chemical in them. The water isn’t liquid: it’s locked chemically to the rock. But it’s water!

The Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius proposed in 1908 that life originated elsewhere in the universe and was wafted as spores through the vast interstellar distances to arrive eventually here on Earth. This panspermia hypothesis envisions life pervading the universe, but it does not tell us how life began.

The discoveries of organic chemicals in meteorites and the studies of prebiotic chemistry in amorphous ice show that the first steps toward living organisms may indeed have happened in space and been brought to Earth by infalling comets and asteroids.

It seems likely that, yes, we do indeed come from outer space. Or at least some of the chemicals that served as the starting point for the eventual birth of living organisms on Earth were originally created in space and carried here on comets and asteroids.

While most of those chemicals were destroyed in the fiery impact when those asteroids and comets smacked into our planet, here and there, now and then, some survived. And became the starting point for the development of life on our world. Prebiotic chemistry built up constantly more complex organic molecules until, at some point, molecules that could reproduce themselves out of simpler chemicals arose. Life began.

Life on Earth consists of long-chain carbon-based molecules that can make more of themselves out of simpler chemicals. Once such molecules arose, biology began. Darwinian evolution took over and those earliest molecules developed, over eons of time, into bacteria and amebas and sponges and fish, flowers, trees, whales, you and me.

It didn’t take a miracle to produce life: just the right chemicals in the right conditions. Life needs a building-block atom, a medium in which chemical reactions can take place, and an input of energy. For us, living on the surface of a rocky but water-rich planet, the building block atom is carbon, the mixing medium is water, and the energy is sunlight.

There are other possibilities. Right here on Earth there are microscopic extremophiles that don’t need sunlight; living deep underground, their energy source is the planet’s internal heat.

We know that Mars was once warm enough to have had large bodies of water on its surface. Life probably developed on Mars. We may find traces of extinct Martian organisms in those frozen red sands. Or perhaps even living organisms that exist underground. There are oceans of water beneath the ice mantles of at least three of Jupiter’s major moons. Life could be found there. And what of giant Jupiter itself? There’s undoubtedly an ocean beneath that planet’s swirling cloud deck, an ocean ten times wider than Earth. What creatures might live in those waters?

From all that we know today, life is a normal part of the universe, most likely as commonplace as stars and rocks. Future explorations of the solar system will bear this out, I am convinced.

But what about intelligent life? Is intelligence a normal outcome of life’s development? Or is it a rare, perhaps even strange, adaptation that we shouldn’t expect to find on other worlds?

We’ll look into that next time.

* * *

Ben Bova is the author of nearly 120 books of science fiction, high-tech thrillers and nonfiction.He has won six Hugo Awards, is a past president of SFWA and President Emeritus of the National Space Society.His 2006 nove, Titan, received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel of the year.

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Framed

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Introductions and Hints of the Future

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

At the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver this past August, I had a realization. I was sitting on a panel with four other writers, and I found myself talking on the past twenty years in both science fiction and mystery, the history of both genres (covering both movies and television programs), calling now-dead writers by their first names, and correcting the other panelists when they got something horribly wrong.

Midway through I nearly covered my mouth in alarm: I had turned into the panelist I used to hate. The know-it-all who sat at the end of the row and expounded on topics no one else seemed to understand or care about. I dialed down my rhetoric and made sure I didn’t sound like a blow-hard for the last half hour of the panel.

Afterwards, I checked with audience members and other professionals: Had I dominated the panel? Had I sounded like a pedantic idiot? One audience member said, Hell, no, you were the only one up there who was familiar with the topic. The remaining audience members standing nearby agreed.

Several writers pointed out that I was the only person on that panel with experience in both disciplines, and they reminded me that there was a difference between going on at insufferable length about something you don’t know, and talking about your own experiences.

And that’s when the realization hit me: I wasn’t just an established professional in the science fiction field; I was, at the ripe old age of 48, an old-timer. In fact, twice in the last year, someone had called me legendary to my face.

For those of you who don’t know, there are six stages to a writer’s career (and not every writer makes it to each stage). The stages are, in order: 1) wannabe; 2) hot young thing; 3) established professional; 4) old-timer; 5) legendary; and 6) I thought she was dead.

The first two and the last are self explanatory. The middle three are not. The established professional is someone who has professional credits but may still have to prove herself. The old-timer has been in the field as long as most of the professionals can remember. The legendary author is one whose reputation (good and bad) precedes her.

Readers experience these stages each time they pick up a book or story. Usually readers don’t encounter the wannabes. They may notice the hot young thing, particularly if the reader follows the field closely. Often though, a reader’s experience of a writer’s work falls into the middle three categories and depends entirely on the reader himself.

The established professional is someone who has a few books on the stand, but whom the reader hasn’t noticed before. The old-timer is someone the reader has heard of, but may or may not have read. The legendary writer is one of the reader’s favorites—someone whose work the reader picks up every single time that writer publishes something.

For example, Connie Willis—whose first publication in science fiction was sometime in the 1980s—may be an established professional to someone coming across her books for the first time. It’s clear she’s published more than one novel from the books on the store shelves, but not clear how long she’s been publishing. She may be an old-timer to a reader who follows the field (and may or may not have read her works). Connie is legendary to a lot of readers who buy her novels whenever they appear and the sf magazines whenever her name is on the cover.

My realization had been a long time in coming. I hadn’t made the convention circuit for quite a while, and hadn’t realized that there were readers who only saw me as a science fiction writer (and didn’t know that most of my novels in the genre were fantasy). At Worldcon, I could have gotten three different editing jobs—and I haven’t editing anything in ten years. (I turned them down.) And, yes, someone called me legendary, which made me nervous, since the next step is 6) I thought she was dead.

How did I get here—and, more importantly, why am I bringing all of this up in my first column for Jim Baen’s Universe? I’ll answer the second question first.

I’m talking about this in my first column to establish my credentials and to tell you why Eric and Mike hired yet another columnist. I belong to a cusp generation—one who has been relatively quiet on the essay front. In this magazine alone, two of the columnists—Barry and Mike—started publishing fiction around the time I was born. The other columnist—Eric—still seems like a hot young thing to me, but as I check his publishing credentials, I remember that I first became acquainted with him at my final Nebula award ceremony as an editor, over ten years ago. Back then he was already doing interesting and groundbreaking work. He’s doing more now.

Robert Silverberg, a grand master of science fiction, writes for Asimov’s, and most of the writers online, from Cory Doctorow to John Scalzi, belong to the generations of writers who came into the field in the last decade.

No one is writing a visible column from the point of view of the professionals whose careers began in the late 1980s. All of the columnists are best known for their work in science fiction (although Bob, Mike, and Barry have all ventured outside of the field at various points in their careers). And, if you’ll note, none of the columnists I’ve listed are female. (This is important, as you’ll find out from a later column, because the interminable debate about gender and sf publishing has yet again reared its ugly head.)

I sold my first professional short story in 1986 at the age of 25, right after my stint at the 1985 Clarion Writers Workshop. I was a hot young thing whose work was published rapidly enough to earn me the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1990.

At the time, I was also co-founder and editor of Pulphouse Publishing, the largest specialty press (to that date) in the science fiction field. Along with my husband Dean Wesley Smith, I won a World Fantasy Award for my work there. In 1991, my first novel, The White Mists of Power, appeared—and I got hired as the first (and so far only) female editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I won the Best Editor Hugo (as it was called in them thar days) for my work at that magazine.

In 1997, I quit editing altogether—it was never my first love—and continued writing. Only I didn’t just publish novels in the sf field. In mystery, I am the acclaimed, Edgar-nominated writer, Kris Nelscott. In romance, I am the acclaimed Kristine Grayson who, before this current paranormal romance craze, was named the Queen of Paranormal Romance by several review sites.

I have won one Hugo for my writing, several Readers Choice Awards in both science fiction and mystery, have my work published in 13 languages and 14 countries, and—oh, yeah—have hit a number of bestseller lists.

When I put all of that down, I realize that, yes indeed, I can’t be anything but an old timer, especially since my fiction writing career spans more than two decades. Before that, I was a full-time non-fiction writer. And, before that, a journalist with a (nearly useless) history degree.

Okay, now that I’ve scared myself (and probably you, dear reader, if you’ve come this far), let me tell you why I’ve listed many (although not all) of my credentials.

I plan to cover a lot of topics in this column. Occasionally, I will examine how some trend fits into the science fiction field. Mostly, however, I see my mission as my small effort to expand the field. I’ll look at blogs, at the difference between paranormal romances and urban fantasies, at mystery’s resistance to science fiction (and yet who is publishing sf mystery novels or mystery sf novels), at television you might have missed, games we all need to follow, as well as trends you may not have noticed in science, technology, and the culture itself.

All of this from my perspective as a writer who straddles two rather vocal generations.

Let’s start, in the few hundred words I have left, with a few issues that have come up in the last part of this summer.

First, the generation gap in science fiction. Apparently, writers in the blogosphere have decided that people under forty aren’t reading or writing science fiction any more. I’ll deal with this one in depth later, but let me take on the measuring stick that one writer used: the birth dates of the Hugo winners in the past twenty years.

Most of the winners, with the exception of Elizabeth Bear this year, were born before 1970. So, does that prove that there’s a generation gap? Nope. To win a Hugo, you have to build a base of in-field voters and you need to establish name recognition. Both of which take time. If you had taken the same poll in the mid-90s with the same criterion, you would have found few Hugo winners born before 1950.

If this blog writer had taken the time to compute the birth dates of the nominees, he would come up with a different number. And if he’d taken into account—as readers do—that sf is more than just the books published under the genre headings “science fiction” and “fantasy,” he would see that people younger than forty are contributing to every single part of the sf field from gaming to comics to movies to romance.

My father was a mathematician and he taught me that you can use statistics to prove any damn fool thing. And you’ll see me use statistics a lot to disprove some damn fool things as this column progresses.

What else is causing controversy? How about this one? Do writers need to read the writers who came before them to produce their best work? Nope. Writers need to do what is best for the writer. And that’s all.

Besides, dear reader, do you quiz your favorite author on whether or not he has read Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. Le Guin? Of course not. It would never cross your mind to do so because what does it matter so long as your favorite writer tells a very good story?

Let’s move away from blogosphere arguments for a moment and note some coolness that comes from the world of science.

There’s water on Mars! It was the lead story on the news one day in July. Isn’t that great? We can now sustain life on the red planet. All those domed colonies we’ve read about we can build one someday, without trucking in our own water.

And here’s my favorite geek story of the summer because it combines three of my interests: swimming, technology, and outer space. Remember those one-piece racing suits the Olympic swimmers wore in Beijing? You know the ones that look like a 1920s men’s bathing costume? By now we all know that they increased speed and reduced drag so well that a swimmer, swimming naked, wouldn’t do as well as the same swimmer wearing the suit.

Well, those suits are based on technology developed by NASA for astronauts.

I find that exceptionally nifty. Just like I find the pen that sits beside my desk nifty. This pen, a gift to me and all of this year’s Hugo losers from next year’s worldcon in Montreal, is also a thumbdrive with more memory than all of the NASA computers from 1969 put together.

I feel like James Bond every time I use it.

I’m going to cover things like this as well as books and movies. I won’t always geek out with great joy over something new. Sometimes I’ll wade into the thicket of some hot argument—and point you to the opposite opinions lurking in the blogosphere.

So sit back and enjoy. I promise that, even though I’m an established professional, old-timer, and occasional legend, I’ll take you on a journey with each column—a journey we can all enjoy together.

* * *

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Framed

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The Problem is Legal Scarcity, not Illegal Greed

Written by Eric Flint

I devoted most of my last essay to demonstrating, using myself as the example, that finding a pirated copy of an author’s work is not as easy as it seems, at least if you try to do so by using a search engine. Of course, I know perfectly well that DRM enthusiasts will accuse me of loading the question. They will insist that no “real” pirate—more precisely, user of pirate sites—would be naive enough to try to find a pirated edition of an author’s work simply by the brute force method of using a search engine.

But, in reality, they’re the ones who are loading the question. There is, in fact, not a shred of evidence that most readers have any knowledge of the more sophisticated methods available for finding pirated e-books. And plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Granted, all the evidence—on both sides, mind you—is largely anecdotal. So far as I am aware, at least, no one has done a systematic study to determine what percentage of book readers has an extensive knowledge of what it takes to find pirated texts and download them, easily and quickly.

Still, the anecdotes are pretty overwhelming—and they almost all lean heavily toward one pole in the debate.

Mine.

You can cross-check me by doing a simple little experiment of your own. Just talk to every friend and relative you have who reads books on a regular basis. Ask them a couple of simple questions:

1) Do you look for and read or download pirated books?

2) Even if you don’t, do you know how to do it?

Some of you, who have a lot of friends and relatives who are heavily involved in one or another aspect of the computer industry, will discover that the answer to at least one of the two questions above is “yes.”

But most of you won’t. Most of you will discover exactly the same thing I did when I ran this experiment with friends and relatives.

The answer I got to the first question was “no,” in most cases, with a few people saying “only if the site is legitimate, like Gutenberg or the Baen Library.”

The answer I got to the second question was rather fascinating. A majority responded “yes”—but when I pressed them for the details, all but one of them got very vague. What it eventually came down to was one or another variation on “well, I figure if you use a search engine and look long enough …”

Which is exactly the point I made in my last essay. Sure—if you look long enough. But only a tiny percentage of people are going to do that, if a publisher or an author makes their books readily available in a user-friendly unencrypted format, and at a reasonable price.

The one person who gave me a clear, firm and positive “yes” to that question, was indeed able to tell me in excruciating detail how he would go about looking for pirated texts, using methods that were far more sophisticated than the brute force method of using a search engine. And don’t ask me for the details, because after the first few words his entire explanation went right over my head. I am computer-literate enough to make a good living working at a computer. But the fact is that, like most people who use computers, I am not particular interested in the hardware and software involved. I am simply interested in the result.

The point being that I don’t know how to steal one of my own books, without wasting a lot of time trying.

If you’re wondering, by the way, the same tech-capable friend responded “no” when I ask him if he actually used the method he described. The reason? “Why bother?” he said. “Most of what I want to read electronically I buy through Baen or Fictionwise. It’s unencrypted, cheap, legal, and it’s no hassle. So why would I screw around just to save a few bucks? It would still take me longer than buying a legal copy, the quality of the text is likely to be lousy—and my time is valuable.”

That will generally prove to be the case. As a rule—there are always exceptions, of course, but not many—people who are well-enough educated technically to be able to devise quick ways to obtain pirated books, are also making a good living and don’t need to fret over a few dollars. They are no more likely to get involved in downloading illegal books—provided they can get what they want in a legal manner—than they are to shoplift a ten or twenty dollar item from a walk-in store.

There’s a very important point here. Don’t ever believe anyone when they insist on either one of the following statements:

1) Someday, when the technology gets good enough, print-on-demand books will become the dominant form of book publishing.

2) Someday, when the technology gets good enough, pirated books will be as easy to find as legitimate books.

Both statement are blithering nonsense, patently untrue, and for exactly the same reason. Push comes to shove, they both defy the laws of thermodynamics. Adherents to these opinions believe in the equivalent of perpetual motion machines and free lunches that are actually free.

Here’s the cold, hard reality:

No matter how advanced the technology of printing becomes, it will never be possible to produce books-on-demand as cheaply as they can be produced in mass production runs. Why? Because of what’s called, in many industries including machining, the “set-up cost.”

It takes just as much time, labor and money for a publisher or a printer to set up a production run of one book as it does a production run of one hundred thousand books. (And note, by the way, that it doesn’t matter whether the set-up is being done by human or purely mechanical labor. Either way, it’s still set-up time and it’s still an expense.) That being the case, the cost of each book in either print run will favor the mass production run.

And, that being true, it follows that any time a publisher thinks a given book will sell a lot of copies—and it’s those books that sustain the entire industry to begin with—they will choose to do a mass production run. In short, print-on-demand will never becomes the dominant branch of the publishing industry. It will always remain a secondary branch. (Not an unimportant one, necessarily. POD has become a very valuable branch of publishing for any text that has a low volume of sales but which should still be kept available to the public.)

And now, here’s the cold, hard reality when it comes to pirated e-books:

No matter how advanced the technology of publishing and text distribution becomes, it will never be as cheap to produce and distribute a book illegally as it is to produce and distribute it legally. Nor, from the customer’s standpoint, will it ever become as easy to obtain an illegal copy as it is to obtain a legal one.

Whatever else it is, theft is also work. Crooks and thieves have to work like anybody else, if they want to make money. The difference is that, by the very nature of being illegal, the work that crooks do is typically very labor-intensive and very time-consuming and very expensive. Why? Well, if for no other reason, because they can’t take advantage of a multitude of labor-saving devices such as are developed for all legitimate industries.

A would-be jewelry thief, for instance, cannot go online and order an Acme Jewel Store Robber’s Kit from www.CrimePays.com. Nor, having robbed the jewelry store, can he find the best price available for stolen jewelry from fences in his area by looking in the yellow pages. Nor, if he decides to cut out the middleman and hawk the stolen jewelry himself, can he go around and plaster his neighborhood with signs inviting everyone to come to the stolen jewelry sale he’s holding in his yard come next Tuesday.

Crime, whatever else it may be, is also one of the crudest and most primitive forms of human labor. It has to be, by the very nature of being illegal.

The same applies to pirated books. A book pirate cannot use any of the following labor-saving devices:

—He cannot set up and maintain a stable web site where people can come, year after year, to get his product. He cannot, in other words, do what Amazon or Fictionwise or Baen Books does.

—To the contrary, he normally has to keep changing his web site. But doing that inevitably makes it far more difficult for his would-be customers to find him.

—Or, he might choose to try to distribute his pirated text by burying it inside a large and complex web site where his illegal stuff is at least partly disguised by legitimate users. But, again, that’s just another way of making things tough on his would-be customers.

This is the reason—I swear, this is not rocket science—that thieves always target items which are very high-value for the labor invested to steal them. It’s simply not worth their time and trouble otherwise.

To put it another way, pirates rob bullion ships. They don’t rob grain ships. (Unless they’re slavers whose target is the crew itself—but that simply illustrates the same point.)

There is only one proviso here. And that’s the clause I put in italics above: Provided they can get what they want in a legal manner.

Here is the truth, which the music recording industry has been trying to deny for years:

Almost all electronic piracy happens because the producers of a given copyrighted product adamantly refuse to give their customers what their customers want. To put it another way, what drives electronic piracy on a mass scale is never greed. The product—whether we’re talking about a CD, a DvD, or a book—simply isn’t that intrinsically valuable to begin with.

No, it’s always scarcity. That scarcity can be measured in several different ways: price, nature of the product, ease of acquiring the product, whatever. Often enough, all those ways combined.

The music recording industry has provided the world with a perfect illustration of the principle. What triggered the mass eruption of illegal music file sharing beginning some years ago?

Was the population suddenly infected with a greed virus that had been dormant previously?

No, obviously not. What happened was that when the time came that the technical means existed for customers being able to obtain what they really wanted, the music recording industry refused to provide it and insisted that their customers had to keep buying the product in a format that the industry found convenient. Naturally and inevitably, since the product desired was being kept legally scarce, people developed illegal ways of obtaining it.

To be specific, most music that people listen to are songs. And, as a rule, a song doesn’t last more than a few minutes. Probably not more than three minutes, on average.

So, once it became technically feasible, the music industry’s customers were no longer—understandably, and with good and legitimate reason—willing to pay $15 or $16 or even $18 to buy an entire CD, when all they really wanted from it was one or two songs.

If you measure this in cost-per-minute of entertainment, the music recording industry insisted that people had to be willing to spend as much as six dollars a MINUTE to enjoy their music.

So long as the technical means didn’t exist to enable people to get around this industry-created obstacle, their customers lived with it. Although, be it noted, there was always a lot of “piracy” going on, and for many years prior to the advent of the digital era. It was quite common for people to record from a vinyl disk or a CD onto a tape deck, for instance. And, somehow, the music industry didn’t go bankrupt.

But, inevitably, once the digital era spread widely enough, the music recording industry found itself overwhelmed by what amount to digital poaching.

I have absolutely no sympathy for them. They are nothing but monopolist gougers who got exactly what they deserved. At any time, with their resources, they could have easily provided their customers with what their customers wanted—and made a profit in the process. They could have easily done what Napster did, to name just one example.

Instead—following their long-standing customs and habits—the music recording industry relied on their lawyers and their stooges in Congress. They got ever-more-Draconian legislation passed, and began filing thousands of lawsuits using these new laws.

Many of these lawsuits were bogus. There have been any number of documented instances where the music recording industry sued the wrong people, and …

Suffered no penalty at all. Once in a while, some particularly stubborn victim eventually—it always takes years—manages to get the industry to pay for their legal costs.

But that’s it. No punitive damages of any kind have ever been leveled against this rapacious industry—which is a truly piratical one—despite the fact that their strategy amounts to nothing more than a legal form of extortion. What they do, in essence, is charge someone with illegal downloading and demand thousands of dollars in money or they’ll take them to court—knowing full well that very few people are in position to fight a long and protracted legal battle, even if the charges are false.

When gangsters do this, it’s called the protection racket. When the Recording Industry Association of America does it, it’s called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

How sweet it is, to be a Friend of Congress.

Yet, despite these Draconian new laws and the supine and servile attitude of the nation’s legislators toward the music recording industry, the RIAA still hasn’t been able to stem the tide.

And no wonder. George Santayana’s famous dictum “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it” is borne out once again.

The fact that the majority of young people today take downloading pirated music and file-sharing for granted has nothing to do with either their age or electronics. It is simply a current manifestation of that ancient human behavior known as poaching or smuggling—which always assumes massive proportions whenever an elite class of people is able to get the laws twisted in their favor.

It’s enough to point out that, over a century and a half ago, Macaulay predicted what would happen to the RIAA:

I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot …

Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

Yes, I know I’ve quoted this before. It cannot be quoted too often.

But the publishing industry, thankfully, is still a long way from this situation. It has still—not yet—crossed the social Rubicon that the RIAA crossed many years ago. That Rubicon, of course, being the point at which the public’s perception of a given industry changes from “legitimate folks” to “bunch of greedy gouging bums.”

Cross that Rubicon and, just as Macaulay predicted, you will find yourself engaged in what amounts to guerrilla warfare with the entire population—or, at least, that segment of it which used to be your customer base. And once you let that genie out of the bottle, you will have a very hard time ever getting it back in again.

The publishing industry has been tagging along behind the music recording and movie industries, when it comes to this issue. But “tagging along” is the right way to put it. Publishers haven’t been leading the charge and, with a few exceptions, have generally kept a low profile in the debate. Probably the best known and most notorious of those exceptions was the absurd attack on libraries for supposedly aiding and abetting online piracy that was launched a few years ago by Patricia Schroeder, the president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers. But that affair didn’t begin to get the publicity that the RIAA’s mass lawsuits have gotten, and it never came to anything anyway.

There have even been some hopeful signs, in the last few years, that at least some publishers are pulling back from the precipice and are deciding not to go over the cliff with the RIAA.

Why has publishing not gone along full-heartedly with the music recording industry?

Well, there are several reasons, I think. The first and possibly the most important is that the standard format for the standard product of the publishing industry doesn’t grate customers the same way the equivalent product of the music recording industry does.

Put simply, the music recording industry sells songs that take three minutes to listen to, and the publishing industry sells books that take a minimum of three hours to read (and usually longer).

That’s a big difference. Even when an e-book is encrypted and over-priced, the book buyer is not being subjected to the same six-dollar-a-minute sheer gouging that they are from the music recording industry.

An aside, here. I’ve never seen a study of this aspect of the problem of music file-sharing, but I’m willing to bet that if a study were made it would discover that there is comparatively little in the way of illegal file-sharing when it comes to classical music. The reason, of course, is that classical music (along with some jazz and some international music) is the one major branch of music whose output is not primarily short songs. The typical classical music CD will contain something like a symphony or a string quartet or a violin concerto—i.e., a piece of music that lasts perhaps half an hour or longer. So, customers who spend $18 for such a CD don’t feel that they’ve been particularly gouged, as does someone who spends $18 just to listen to one three-minute cut on the album.

The second reason, I suspect, is that there is still a much bigger disparity between legal and illegal versions of the same product, when it comes to books compared to music. So I’ve been told, anyway. I’ve never downloaded music, myself, legally or otherwise. But I’ve been told by people who have—legally and otherwise—that the quality of the downloaded product is not usually noticeably different from a version obtained legally.

With books, that’s usually not true. Most pirated texts display significantly greater degradation than do the texts of legitimately produced books. That’s because most pirated texts are obtained by OCR scanning, and OCR scanning is very far from perfect. A scanned text like that has to be proof-read carefully—and proof-reading takes hours and is one of those skills that it is very hard to computerize. In fact, it’s impossible, at least so far.

Typically, a book pirate isn’t willing to put the time and effort into proof-reading, because they are rarely if ever making any money from their illegal actions. Most book piracy today is done by people who get some sort of weird thrill out of it. Super-annuated juvenile delinquents, who think information wanna be fwee as if electrons are marching around holding up placards and demanding their rights. Their behavior is the online equivalent of spray-painting gang logos on garage doors.

Whatever the reasons might be, however, the fact remains. The publishing industry has not yet gone over the DMCA cliff the way the music recording industry has. It’s not even—yet, anyway—perched at the brink.

So, there’s still time to save the critter before it allows itself to be stampeded over the cliff.

Starting with my next essay, I’ll take up the problems and opportunities of the electronic era in publishing from what you might call a positive standpoint, instead of the negative one I’ve been generally taking thus far. By “negative,” simply meaning that I’ve spent most of my time countering the arguments in favor of DRM.

Now let’s move on. Let’s see how authors and publishers can take advantage of the digital era, instead of being scared to death by it.

* * *

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Contents

Scattershot Again

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

1) Harold Ross’s major selling point for The New Yorker whose first issue he published in February of 1925 was that his magazine was definitely “Not for the little old lady in Dubuque.” But of course it was. Just as Raymond Chandler described Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer as “A small guy’s idea of a tough guy,” The New Yorker was a Dubuque guy’s idea of New York City. The magazine was not only for the population of Dubuque, it was edited by people from places symbolized by that city. A provincial publication. Still is, for all of Tina Brown’s four-letter words during her tenure in the 90’s.

The best historical example of this: Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” Published in 1948, the story incited more mail—most of it furious—from its readers than anything published before or since. The story, sixty years later, is still so well known that I doubt if a synopsis is necessary but, very quickly: A rural town somewhere (unspecified) conducts an annual lottery; all adults must draw a card. One card bears a black mark and the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, draws it; she is stoned to death. The reader is never given a rationale for the lottery (it just is) or a historical explanation. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right!” the woman screams as the crowd advances upon her. I suppose that the story can be considered as against a general background of pointless, random persecution as a metaphor for the Holocaust, specific revelations of which were much in the news at that time.

The readership was scandalized. “I think you people have sick minds,” one reader wrote. “Can you tell me what the point of this story is?” many asked. “It just seems to want to be horrible.” “Please cancel my subscription,” hundreds wrote. “Do you think this kind of thing is entertainment?” others wanted to know. And so on. Waves of confusion and fury surged through the magazine’s offices for months.

I read it, unscandalized, in early adolescence and found it to be a work of utter clarity, beyond that little to note. Over the years I have read it several times and it is a well-crafted, economical, mildly visionary story. It was only about ten years ago—which was the last time I looked at it—that I realized that had it been published in Weird Tales, Startling Stories or Thrilling Wonder it would have been utterly unremarkable. The audience would have assimilated it as Shirley Jackson intended and the lettercols no doubt would have given Miss Jackson much egoboo. If John Campbell had published the story in Astounding (*unlikely but 1948 was the year he did publish the equally painful Judith Merril debut story, “That Only A Mother”) it would have fit seamlessly. Two years later, when Fantasy & Science Fiction was into its second year, Anthony Boucher would have taken it without a raised eyebrow. So would Horace Gold for the about-to-be inaugurated Galaxy, “The Lottery” in its deadpan sadistic pessimism and cruelty can in fact be seen as the kind of story which typified Gold’s magazine.

In the provincial New Yorker and to its provincial readership “The Lottery” was bewildering, audacious and scandalous. Meanwhile, the scruffy science fiction audience so despised by Harold Ross, E.B. and Katherine White, Edmund Wilson (if they were to even acknowledge that audience) would have nodded, shrugged, and turned the page. Who’s the little old lady here?

Science fiction editors and readers were always many years ahead. This is a single example; you can find your own. Acquire a copy of the annual Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction anthology from any point in the late fifties and measure it against the same year’s O. Henry Prize Stories. Case closed.

2) Alice Sheldon (of “James Tiptree, Jr.” fame) and Alfred Bester share one important aspect of biography (they also, of course, share excellence; I think that everyone reading this would agree that they would both rank on anyone’s list of the twenty best science fiction writers). They entered science fiction feeling superior to the genre and its practitioners; it was a game for them, and their colleagues a group of interesting, uncaged exotic animals. Bester felt himself to be Madison Avenue and television’s ambassador to this crazy little world (“I never knew a science fiction writer who didn’t have a screw loose,” he wrote in a mid-seventies short memoir) and Sheldon, a serious reader in her childhood, found science fiction an enchanting, bizarre world populated by bizarre, secret friends with whom she could role play in a created identity just as Terry Carr twenty years earlier had played at being “Carl Brandon.” Very strange and interesting people, she wrote an academic mentor, and of course she was keeping the true identity of James Tiptree, Jr. from everyone except him and her husband. Science fiction for these two great writers was an imaginary world. “Fun and games” as my wife says when talking of misfortune.

And science fiction—the act of being science fiction writers—destroyed them both. The monster, their laboratory playmate, broke its bonds (with their willing assistance and ate them alive. Take a look at The Deceivers, Bester’s last novel. Take a look at “Slow Music” by Sheldon. One is a masterpiece and the other a disaster but both are virtually clinical documents of damage.

I’m not proposing that these two great writers didn’t have other problems. In fact science fiction might have been seen by them (at least at the beginning) as a kind of salvation. But what was a game became deadly serious and then they were eaten whole.

You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim.

3) Theodore Sturgeon’s well-known description of Horace Gold’s editing: “Horace could make a poor story good. And he could make a great story good.” Nods and sympathetic laughter from a generation of contributors to that.

But Gold knew what he was about. He was aiming at an absolute unity of voice. His editing, often savage, was an attempt to publish a magazine which would appear to have been written by a single writer, a sardonic, savage, poisonously bitter, occasionally wildly comic presence. In the magazine great writers like Phil Klass or Damon Knight were stylistically indistinguishable from Winston K. Marks, Margaret St. Clair, Jerome Bixby. The 1950-1956 Galaxy was the most stylistically and conceptually unified magazine in the history of consumer publication.

It all fell apart for him, of course. It always does. Writers lost patience; Horace, unchecked, became ever more idiosyncratic; other markets welcomed his contributors and made it possible for many of them to flee. And the audience itself came to tire of the unchanging, sardonic syntax.

But oh boy he had some good years there. The period from the first issue (October 1950) to the issue of December 1954 may be the greatest run a fiction magazine ever had, at least on a level with the 1942-1946 Astounding. And Campbell wasn’t heavily editing his contents to get there as Gold felt he must. “The great task of a magazine editor,” he wrote at the time, “is to produce a publication better than the individual contents offered him.”

I wonder though if I could have put up with it.

—September 2008, New Jersey

THE END

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