The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II
by
Jonathan Strahan

Table of Contents

The Best Science Fiction
and Fantasy of the Year:

Volume Two

Jonathan Strahan

Copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Strahan

This edition of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two © 2008
by Night Shade Books

Cover art © 2008 by John Berkey
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

Introduction, story notes and arrangement © 2008 by Jonathan Strahan.

Copyright Acknowledgements

"The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics," by Daniel Abraham. © 2007 Daniel Abraham. Originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (Bantam Spectra), John Klima ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Last Contact," by Stephen Baxter © 2007 by Stephen Baxter. Originally published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (Solaris Books), George Mann ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Last And Only, or Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French," by Peter S. Beagle. © 2007 Peter S. Beagle. Originally published in Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Night Shade), Jonathan Strahan ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Orm the Beautiful," by Elizabeth Bear. © 2007 Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 4, January 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Coat of Stars," by Holly Black. © 2007 Holly Black. Originally published in So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction (Haworth), Steve Berman ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," by Ted Chiang. © 2007 Ted Chiang. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Valley of the Gardens," by Tony Daniel. © 2007 Tony Daniel. Originally published in The New Space Opera (HarperCollins Publishers), Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Glory," by Greg Egan. © 2007 Greg Egan. Originally published in The New Space Opera (HarperCollins Publishers), Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Dreaming Wind," by Jeffrey Ford. © 2007 Jeffrey Ford. Originally published in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (Viking Children's), Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Witch's Headstone," by Neil Gaiman. © 2007 Neil Gaiman. Originally published in Wizards: Magical Tales from Masters of Modern Fantasy (Berkeley), Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Singing of Mount Abora," by Theodora Goss. © 2007 Theodora Goss. Originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (Bantam Spectra), John Klima ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Dead Horse Point," by Daryl Gregory. © 2007 Daryl Gregory. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Winter's Wife," by Elizabeth Hand. © 2007 Elizabeth Hand. Originally published in Wizards: Magical Tales from Masters of Modern Fantasy (Berkeley), Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Wizard's Six," by Alex Irvine. © 2007 Alex Irvine. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Prophet of Flores," by Ted Kosmatka. © 2007 Ted Kosmatka. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"By Fools Like Me," by Nancy Kress. © 2007 Nancy Kress. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Constable of Abal," by Kelly Link. © 2007 Kelly Link. Originally published in The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (Viking Children's), Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling eds. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Jesus Christ, Reanimator," by Ken Macleod. © 2007 Ken Macleod. Originally published in Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge (Pyr), Lou Anders ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Sorrel's Heart," by Susan Palwick. © 2007 Susan Palwick. Originally published in The Fate of Mice (Tachyon Publications). Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Holiday," by M. Rickert. © 2007 M. Rickert. Originally published in Subterranean #7, Ellen Datlow guest ed. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small," by Chris Roberson. © 2007 Chris Roberson. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Kiosk," by Bruce Sterling. © 2007 Bruce Sterling. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Trunk and Disorderly," by Charles Stross. © 2007 Charles Stross. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, January 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Urdumheim," by Michael Swanwick. © 2007 by Michael Swanwick. Originally published in The Dog Said Bow-wow (Tachyon Publications). Reprinted by permission of the author.

For Sean Williams, teller of tales,
builder of paper spaceships, and dear
friend for these many years.

Acknowledgements

Each year the list of people who need to be thanked for their support in producing this preposterously complicated book grows and grows. This year I'm going to try to keep it as tight as possible. I'd especially like to thank Gary K. Wolfe and Charles N. Brown for sharing their friendship and wisdom while I was assembling this book; Nick Gevers, who has been generous discussing the best fiction of the year; and everyone at Not If You Were the Last Short Story on Earth, especially Alisa Krasnostein and Ben Payne, who were kind and helpful when things got wobbly. I'd also like to thank Howard Morhaim; Justin Ackroyd; Jack Dann; Brian Bieniowski; and Gordon Van Gelder. Thanks also to the following good friends and colleagues without whom this book would have been much poorer, and much less fun to do: Lou Anders, Deborah Biancotti, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Sean Williams, and all of the book's contributors.

As always, my biggest thanks go to Marianne, Jessica, and Sophie. Every moment spent working on this book was a moment stolen from them. I only hope I can repay them.

Also Edited by Jonathan Strahan:

Best Short Novels (2004 through 2007)
Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005
Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume One
Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy
The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows

With Charles N. Brown

The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction

With Jeremy G. Byrne

The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1
The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2
Eidolon 1

With Terry Dowling

The Jack Vance Treasury
The Jack Vance Reader

With Gardner Dozois

The New Space Opera

With Karen Haber

Science Fiction: Best of 2003
Science Fiction: Best of 2004
Fantasy: Best of 2004

Introduction

Jonathan Strahan

I started reading science fiction (SF) when I was quite young. Like many readers, I discovered the magic and wonder of distant stars and epic voyages on the shelves of my local public library where Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, and so many others awaited me. I was, perhaps, seven.

My earliest recollections of reading involve SF and fantasy and, as far as I can remember, it made up the majority of my reading through my youth and on through my days at university. It was only when I hit my twenties, though, that I began to identify myself as an "SF reader." This may not seem a particularly important realization, but it was at that point—around the same time that I first encountered trade journal Locus—that I became aware that SF was a genre with a history and a body of canonical work.

More importantly, there was this idea that works of SF were in dialogue with one another; that writers read the major works of SF being published and wrote new work in response. For example, clearly Joe Haldeman's classic 1974 novel The Forever War was, at least in part, a response to Robert Heinlein's 1959 Hugo Award-winning novel Starship Troopers. This kind of ongoing dialogue gave SF a sense of development, of evolution. A reader could see that modern SF started with something like E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space but progressed to Jack Williamson's The Legion of Space, then to Heinlein's classics and on through the work of Larry Niven, John Varley, Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, and now writers like Ted Kosmatka and Daryl Gregory.

This idea that SF is in dialogue with itself, that it in some sense progresses and evolves, is an important one. It's what gives readers the sense that SF has an evolutionary centre, a core. In SF this dialogue centers on ideas or concepts, and is reflected in how those ideas or concepts are handled in the fiction itself. A good recent example of this is the way that the Vingean singularity has become a commonplace in the field. It is harder to see this kind of dialogue occurring in fantasy. I suspect that there are several reasons for this. First, and most importantly, historically the SF field has involved a small, discrete community of writers who knew one another and discussed their works and ideas regularly. On the surface of it, this seems to have been much less common in fantasy. Secondly, there are definitional problems. Put simply, it's easier to say what SF is and what it's doing, than it is to say what fantasy is and what it's doing. That said, a convincing argument could be made that there is a much less intense and direct dialogue at play, with vampire stories influencing vampire stories, ghost stories influencing ghost stories, and so on.

How does this apply to the book you're now holding? Well, a year's best volume like this one is an attempt by one informed reader to identify the best work published in the field in a given year, to put it in context, and to sketch out where SF and fantasy might be going. There are any number of other ways that the best work in the field can be identified and put in context—through reviews in the pages of magazines like Locus, through awards, and through readers' dialogue with one another—but books like this one are an important part of that process.

Each year, starting in the summer of 2003, I have attempted to read every new SF and fantasy short story published in the English language. I have failed. Locus suggests that there are around 3,000 new stories published every year. I've read close to that number, but each year it has been increasingly clear to me that this only represents a small percentage of the stories being published that could be considered to be SF and fantasy. If you include all of the stories published in books, magazines, newspapers, online, and as audio or visual recordings, there is simply too much material to count, much less consume. This, of course, is not a new observation. It's one I've made myself in introductions to earlier year's best volumes. The real question now is what does that mean for SF or for fantasy? And, how has that enormous increase in the quantity and variety of work being published impacted the book you now hold?

I believe that the flood of new SF and fantasy that has been published over the past decade has played a part in changing the mechanism that allowed SF's dialogue with itself to continue. The enormous volume of work published makes it impossible for a professional writer to keep up with, never mind comment on, the best work in the field. The enormous variety of work being published means that work, no matter how good, is often only relevant to a small part of the work published before it. In effect, the direct dialogue from old to new works has been disrupted, and the nature of the dialogue has broadened enormously. As critic Gary K. Wolfe pointed out to me in conversation last year, there was a time when a novel like Orson Scott Card's Empire would have inspired or provoked any number of works in response. While still a relatively new novel, and while it's still possible that dialogue may still occur, it seems much more likely that it won't. What this means for SF, and to a lesser extent fantasy, is that the centre as we know it can not hold. SF and fantasy are broadening, changing, diverging. I suspect that many of the new movements identified in SF and fantasy over the past few years—steampunk, new space opera, the new weird, and so on—are at least in part a side effect of this.

And you can see it in these pages. A story like Ted Chiang's masterful "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" sits at the boundaries of SF and fantasy. Written in a manner that recalls Scheherazade and her Arabian Nights, we nonetheless get a rigorous, well-thought-out tale of a science fictional device operating in a distant time. Similarly, Daniel Abraham deftly sketches a "fairy tale of economics" that is equally disciplined, while also possessing the stuff of magic, and Theodora Goss happily and effortlessly recasts Coleridge and Kublai Khan in "Singing of Mount Abora." These are stories where you can see the centre not holding, the field broadening.

The purpose of a book like this one is to reflect that change, while also presenting the best in the field. This year's selection of stories covers everything from traditional fantasy with tales of witches, gods, and dragons—in Neil Gaiman's "The Witch's Headstone," Michael Swanwick's "Urdumheim," and Elizabeth Bear's "Orm the Beautiful"—to SF adventures with microcosmic spacecraft, enigmatic alien cultures, and complex personal puzzles—in Greg Egan's "Glory," Chris Roberson's "The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small," and Daryl Gregory's "Dead Horse Point." The stories are in turn dark, funny, adventurous, challenging, and consoling. They do what SF and fantasy are supposed to do.

While I was reading for this book I began to wonder whether the times SF and fantasy are experiencing make The Best SF and Fantasy of the Year more or less relevant and important for readers, and for the field. After twelve months of reading, and far, far too many stories, I'm convinced more than ever than books like this one are important and necessary. Too few readers can afford to, are willing to, or are interested in reading everything published. It's too much, and too hard. But there are still great stories being published, and in these days of dissolution it's more important than ever to try to understand what is happening in the field.

And should all that sound a bit academic, this book, more than anything else, is an attempt to entertain and to engage. The stories collected here are the ones that I enjoyed the most during the year, the best and most delightful. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Jonathan Strahan
Perth, Western Australia
October 2007

The Merchant and the
Alchemist's Gate

Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang published his first short story, "Tower of Babylon," in Omni magazine in 1990. The story won the Nebula Award, and has been followed by just nine more stories in the intervening sixteen years. All but two of those stories, which have won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Sidewise awards, are collected in Stories of Your Life and Others.

More than any other story here, the elegant, masterful tale that follows is emblematic of everything this book stands for. Beautifully written, rigorously argued, it seamlessly combines science fiction and fantasy in a manner that makes clear how integral the one is to the other.

O mighty Caliph and Commander of the Faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence; a man can hope for no greater blessing as long as he lives. The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one's eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.

My name is Fuwaad ibn Abbas, and I was born here in Baghdad, City of Peace. My father was a grain merchant, but for much of my life I have worked as a purveyor of fine fabrics, trading in silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold. I was prosperous, but my heart was troubled, and neither the purchase of luxuries nor the giving of alms was able to soothe it. Now I stand before you without a single dirham in my purse, but I am at peace.

Allah is the beginning of all things, but with Your Majesty's permission, I begin my story with the day I took a walk through the district of metalsmiths. I needed to purchase a gift for a man I had to do business with, and had been told he might appreciate a tray made of silver. After browsing for half an hour, I noticed that one of the largest shops in the market had been taken over by a new merchant. It was a prized location that must have been expensive to acquire, so I entered to peruse its wares.

Never before had I seen such a marvelous assortment of goods. Near the entrance there was an astrolabe equipped with seven plates inlaid with silver, a water-clock that chimed on the hour, and a nightingale made of brass that sang when the wind blew. Farther inside there were even more ingenious mechanisms, and I stared at them the way a child watches a juggler, when an old man stepped out from a doorway in the back.

"Welcome to my humble shop, my lord," he said. "My name is Bashaarat. How may I assist you?"

"These are remarkable items that you have for sale. I deal with traders from every corner of the world, and yet I have never seen their like. From where, may I ask, did you acquire your merchandise?"

"I am grateful to you for your kind words," he said. "Everything you see here was made in my workshop, by myself or by my assistants under my direction."

I was impressed that this man could be so well versed in so many arts. I asked him about the various instruments in his shop, and listened to him discourse learnedly about astrology, mathematics, geomancy, and medicine. We spoke for over an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn, until he mentioned his experiments in alchemy.

"Alchemy?" I said. This surprised me, for he did not seem the type to make such a sharper's claim. "You mean you can turn base metal into gold?"

"I can, my lord, but that is not in fact what most seek from alchemy."

"What do most seek, then?"

"They seek a source of gold that is cheaper than mining ore from the ground. Alchemy does describe a means to make gold, but the procedure is so arduous that, by comparison, digging beneath a mountain is as easy as plucking peaches from a tree."

I smiled. "A clever reply. No one could dispute that you are a learned man, but I know better than to credit alchemy."

Bashaarat looked at me and considered. "I have recently built something that may change your opinion. You would be the first person I have shown it to. Would you care to see it?"

"It would be a great pleasure."

"Please follow me." He led me through the doorway in the rear of his shop. The next room was a workshop, arrayed with devices whose functions I could not guess—bars of metal wrapped with enough copper thread to reach the horizon, mirrors mounted on a circular slab of granite floating in quicksilver—but Bashaarat walked past these without a glance.

Instead he led me to a sturdy pedestal, chest high, on which a stout metal hoop was mounted upright. The hoop's opening was as wide as two outstretched hands, and its rim so thick that it would tax the strongest man to carry. The metal was black as night, but polished to such smoothness that, had it been a different color, it could have served as a mirror. Bashaarat bade me stand so that I looked upon the hoop edgewise, while he stood next to its opening.

"Please observe," he said.

Bashaarat thrust his arm through the hoop from the right side, but it did not extend out from the left. Instead, it was as if his arm were severed at the elbow, and he waved the stump up and down, and then pulled his arm out intact.

I had not expected to see such a learned man perform a conjuror's trick, but it was well done, and I applauded politely.

"Now wait a moment," he said as he took a step back.

I waited, and behold, an arm reached out of the hoop from its left side, without a body to hold it up. The sleeve it wore matched Bashaarat's robe. The arm waved up and down, and then retreated through the hoop until it was gone.

The first trick I had thought a clever mime, but this one seemed far superior, because the pedestal and hoop were clearly too slender to conceal a person. "Very clever!" I exclaimed.

"Thank you, but this is not mere sleight of hand. The right side of the hoop precedes the left by several seconds. To pass through the hoop is to cross that duration instantly."

"I do not understand," I said.

"Let me repeat the demonstration." Again he thrust his arm through the hoop, and his arm disappeared. He smiled, and pulled back and forth as if playing tug-a-rope. Then he pulled his arm out again, and presented his hand to me with the palm open. On it lay a ring I recognized.

"That is my ring!" I checked my hand, and saw that my ring still lay on my finger. "You have conjured up a duplicate."

"No, this is truly your ring. Wait."

Again, an arm reached out from the left side. Wishing to discover the mechanism of the trick, I rushed over to grab it by the hand. It was not a false hand, but one fully warm and alive as mine. I pulled on it, and it pulled back. Then, as deft as a pickpocket, the hand slipped the ring from my finger and the arm withdrew into the hoop, vanishing completely.

"My ring is gone!" I exclaimed.

"No, my lord," he said. "Your ring is here." And he gave me the ring he held. "Forgive me for my game."

I replaced it on my finger. "You had the ring before it was taken from me."

At that moment an arm reached out, this time from the right side of the hoop. "What is this?" I exclaimed. Again I recognized it as his by the sleeve before it withdrew, but I had not seen him reach in.

"Recall," he said, "the right side of the hoop precedes the left." And he walked over to the left side of the hoop, and thrust his arm through from that side, and again it disappeared.

Your Majesty has undoubtedly already grasped this, but it was only then that I understood: whatever happened on the right side of the hoop was complemented, a few seconds later, by an event on the left side. "Is this sorcery?" I asked.

"No, my lord, I have never met a djinni, and if I did, I would not trust it to do my bidding. This is a form of alchemy."

He offered an explanation, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like the holes that worms bore into wood, and how upon finding one he was able to expand and stretch it the way a glassblower turns a dollop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe, and how he then allowed time to flow like water at one mouth while causing it to thicken like syrup at the other. I confess I did not really understand his words, and cannot testify to their truth. All I could say in response was, "You have created something truly astonishing."

"Thank you," he said, "but this is merely a prelude to what I intended to show you." He bade me follow him into another room, farther in the back. There stood a circular doorway whose massive frame was made of the same polished black metal, mounted in the middle of the room.

"What I showed you before was a Gate of Seconds," he said. "This is a Gate of Years. The two sides of the doorway are separated by a span of twenty years."

I confess I did not understand his remark immediately. I imagined him reaching his arm in from the right side and waiting twenty years before it emerged from the left side, and it seemed a very obscure magic trick. I said as much, and he laughed. "That is one use for it," he said, "but consider what would happen if you were to step through." Standing on the right side, he gestured for me to come closer, and then pointed through the doorway. "Look."

I looked, and saw that there appeared to be different rugs and pillows on the other side of the room than I had seen when I had entered. I moved my head from side to side, and realized that when I peered through the doorway, I was looking at a different room from the one I stood in.

"You are seeing the room twenty years from now," said Bashaarat.

I blinked, as one might at an illusion of water in the desert, but what I saw did not change. "And you say I could step through?" I asked.

"You could. And with that step, you would visit the Baghdad of twenty years hence. You could seek out your older self and have a conversation with him. Afterwards, you could step back through the Gate of Years and return to the present day."

Hearing Bashaarat's words, I felt as if I were reeling. "You have done this?" I asked him. "You have stepped through?"

"I have, and so have numerous customers of mine."

"Earlier you said I was the first to whom you showed this."

"This Gate, yes. But for many years I owned a shop in Cairo, and it was there that I first built a Gate of Years. There were many to whom I showed that Gate, and who made use of it."

"What did they learn when talking to their older selves?"

"Each person learns something different. If you wish, I can tell you the story of one such person." Bashaarat proceeded to tell me such a story, and if it pleases Your Majesty, I will recount it here.

The Tale of the Fortunate Rope-maker

There once was a young man named Hassan who was a maker of rope. He stepped through the Gate of Years to see the Cairo of twenty years later, and upon arriving he marveled at how the city had grown. He felt as if he had stepped into a scene embroidered on a tapestry, and even though the city was no more and no less than Cairo, he looked upon the most common sights as objects of wonder.

He was wandering by the Zuweyla Gate, where the sword dancers and snake charmers perform, when an astrologer called to him. "Young man! Do you wish to know the future?"

Hassan laughed. "I know it already," he said.

"Surely you want to know if wealth awaits you, do you not?"

"I am a rope-maker. I know that it does not."

"Can you be so sure? What about the renowned merchant Hassan al-Hubbaul, who began as a rope-maker?"

His curiosity aroused, Hassan asked around the market for others who knew of this wealthy merchant, and found that the name was well known. It was said he lived in the wealthy Habbaniya quarter of the city, so Hassan walked there and asked people to point out his house, which turned out to be the largest one on its street.

He knocked at the door, and a servant led him to a spacious and well-appointed hall with a fountain in the center. Hassan waited while the servant went to fetch his master, but as he looked at the polished ebony and marble around him, he felt that he did not belong in such surroundings, and was about to leave when his older self appeared.

"At last you are here!" the man said. "I have been expecting you!"

"You have?" said Hassan, astounded.

"Of course, because I visited my older self just as you are visiting me. It has been so long that I had forgotten the exact day. Come, dine with me."

The two went to a dining room, where servants brought chicken stuffed with pistachio nuts, fritters soaked in honey, and roast lamb with spiced pomegranates. The older Hassan gave few details of his life: he mentioned business interests of many varieties, but did not say how he had become a merchant; he mentioned a wife, but said it was not time for the younger man to meet her. Instead, he asked young Hassan to remind him of the pranks he had played as a child, and he laughed to hear stories that had faded from his own memory.

At last the younger Hassan asked the older, "How did you make such great changes in your fortune?"

"All I will tell you right now is this: when you go to buy hemp from the market, and you are walking along the Street of Black Dogs, do not walk along the south side as you usually do. Walk along the north."

"And that will enable me to raise my station?"

"Just do as I say. Go back home now; you have rope to make. You will know when to visit me again."

Young Hassan returned to his day and did as he was instructed, keeping to the north side of the street even when there was no shade there. It was a few days later that he witnessed a maddened horse run amok on the south side of the street directly opposite him, kicking several people, injuring another by knocking a heavy jug of palm oil onto him, and even trampling one person under its hooves. After the commotion had subsided, Hassan prayed to Allah for the injured to be healed and the dead to be at peace, and thanked Allah for sparing him.

The next day Hassan stepped through the Gate of Years and sought out his older self. "Were you injured by the horse when you walked by?" he asked him.

"No, because I heeded my older self's warning. Do not forget, you and I are one; every circumstance that befalls you once befell me."

And so the elder Hassan gave the younger instructions, and the younger obeyed them. He refrained from buying eggs from his usual grocer, and thus avoided the illness that struck customers who bought eggs from a spoiled basket. He bought extra hemp, and thus had material to work with when others suffered a shortage due to a delayed caravan. Following his older self's instructions spared Hassan many troubles, but he wondered why his older self would not tell him more. Who would he marry? How would he become wealthy?

Then one day, after having sold all his rope in the market and carrying an unusually full purse, Hassan bumped into a boy while walking on the street. He felt for his purse, discovered it missing, and turned around with a shout to search the crowd for the pickpocket. Hearing Hassan's cry, the boy immediately began running through the crowd. Hassan saw that the boy's tunic was torn at the elbow, but then quickly lost sight of him.

For a moment Hassan was shocked that this could happen with no warning from his older self. But his surprise was soon replaced by anger, and he gave chase. He ran through the crowd, checking the elbows of boys' tunics, until by chance he found the pickpocket crouching beneath a fruit wagon. Hassan grabbed him and began shouting to all that he had caught a thief, asking them to find a guardsman. The boy, afraid of arrest, dropped Hassan's purse and began weeping. Hassan stared at the boy for a long moment, and then his anger faded, and he let him go.

When next he saw his older self, Hassan asked him, "Why did you not warn me about the pickpocket?"

"Did you not enjoy the experience?" asked his older self.

Hassan was about to deny it, but stopped himself. "I did enjoy it," he admitted. In pursuing the boy, with no hint of whether he'd succeed or fail, he had felt his blood surge in a way it had not for many weeks. And seeing the boy's tears had reminded him of the Prophet's teachings on the value of mercy, and Hassan had felt virtuous in choosing to let the boy go.

"Would you rather I had denied you that, then?"

Just as we grow to understand the purpose of customs that seemed pointless to us in our youth, Hassan realized that there was merit in withholding information as well as in disclosing it. "No," he said, "it was good that you did not warn me."

The older Hassan saw that he had understood. "Now I will tell you something very important. Hire a horse. I will give you directions to a spot in the foothills to the west of the city. There you will find within a grove of trees one that was struck by lightning. Around the base of the tree, look for the heaviest rock you can overturn, and then dig beneath it."

"What should I look for?"

"You will know when you find it."

The next day Hassan rode out to the foothills and searched until he found the tree. The ground around it was covered in rocks, so Hassan overturned one to dig beneath it, and then another, and then another. At last his spade struck something besides rock and soil. He cleared aside the soil and discovered a bronze chest, filled with gold dinars and assorted jewelry. Hassan had never seen its like in all his life. He loaded the chest onto the horse, and rode back to Cairo.

The next time he spoke to his older self, he asked, "How did you know where the treasure was?"

"I learned it from myself," said the older Hassan, "just as you did. As to how we came to know its location, I have no explanation except that it was the will of Allah, and what other explanation is there for anything?"

"I swear I shall make good use of these riches that Allah has blessed me with," said the younger Hassan.

"And I renew that oath," said the older. "This is the last time we shall speak. You will find your own way now. Peace be upon you."

And so Hassan returned home. With the gold he was able to purchase hemp in great quantity, and hire workmen and pay them a fair wage, and sell rope profitably to all who sought it. He married a beautiful and clever woman, at whose advice he began trading in other goods, until he was a wealthy and respected merchant. All the while he gave generously to the poor and lived as an upright man. In this way Hassan lived the happiest of lives until he was overtaken by death, breaker of ties and destroyer of delights.

"That is a remarkable story," I said. "For someone who is debating whether to make use of the Gate, there could hardly be a better inducement."

"You are wise to be skeptical," said Bashaarat. "Allah rewards those he wishes to reward and chastises those he wishes to chastise. The Gate does not change how he regards you."

I nodded, thinking I understood. "So even if you succeed in avoiding the misfortunes that your older self experienced, there is no assurance you will not encounter other misfortunes."

"No, forgive an old man for being unclear. Using the Gate is not like drawing lots, where the token you select varies with each turn. Rather, using the Gate is like taking a secret passageway in a palace, one that lets you enter a room more quickly than by walking down the hallway. The room remains the same, no matter which door you use to enter."

This surprised me. "The future is fixed, then? As unchangeable as the past?"

"It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past."

"I have heard that too, but I have not found it to be true."

"I am sorry to hear that," said Bashaarat. "All I can say is that the future is no different."

I thought on this for a while. "So if you learn that you are dead twenty years from now, there is nothing you can do to avoid your death?" He nodded. This seemed to me very disheartening, but then I wondered if it could not also provide a guarantee. I said, "Suppose you learn that you are alive twenty years from now. Then nothing could kill you in the next twenty years. You could then fight in battles without a care, because your survival is assured."

"That is possible," he said. "It is also possible that a man who would make use of such a guarantee would not find his older self alive when he first used the Gate."

"Ah," I said. "Is it then the case that only the prudent meet their older selves?"

"Let me tell you the story of another person who used the Gate, and you can decide for yourself if he was prudent or not." Bashaarat proceeded to tell me the story, and if it pleases Your Majesty, I will recount it here.

The Tale of the Weaver Who Stole from Himself

There was a young weaver named Ajib who made a modest living as a weaver of rugs, but yearned to taste the luxuries enjoyed by the wealthy. After hearing the story of Hassan, Ajib immediately stepped through the Gate of Years to seek out his older self, who, he was sure, would be as rich and as generous as the older Hassan.

Upon arriving in the Cairo of twenty years later, he proceeded to the wealthy Habbaniya quarter of the city and asked people for the residence of Ajib ibn Taher. He was prepared, if he met someone who knew the man and remarked on the similarity of their features, to identify himself as Ajib's son, newly arrived from Damascus. But he never had the chance to offer this story, because no one he asked recognized the name.

Eventually he decided to return to his old neighborhood, and see if anyone there knew where he had moved to. When he got to his old street, he stopped a boy and asked him if he knew where to find a man named Ajib. The boy directed him to Ajib's old house.

"That is where he used to live," Ajib said. "Where does he live now?"

"If he has moved since yesterday, I do not know where," said the boy.

Ajib was incredulous. Could his older self still live in the same house, twenty years later? That would mean he had never become wealthy, and his older self would have no advice to give him, or at least none Ajib would profit by following. How could his fate differ so much from that of the fortunate rope-maker? In hopes that the boy was mistaken, Ajib waited outside the house, and watched.

Eventually he saw a man leave the house, and with a sinking heart recognized him as his older self. The older Ajib was followed by a woman that he presumed was his wife, but he scarcely noticed her, for all he could see was his own failure to have bettered himself. He stared with dismay at the plain clothes the older couple wore until they walked out of sight.

Driven by the curiosity that impels men to look at the heads of the executed, Ajib went to the door of his house. His own key still fit the lock, so he entered. The furnishings had changed, but were simple and worn, and Ajib was mortified to see them. After twenty years, could he not even afford better pillows?

On an impulse, he went to the wooden chest where he normally kept his savings, and unlocked it. He lifted the lid, and saw the chest was filled with gold dinars.

Ajib was astonished. His older self had a chest of gold, and yet he wore such plain clothes and lived in the same small house for twenty years! What a stingy, joyless man his older self must be, thought Ajib, to have wealth and not enjoy it. Ajib had long known that one could not take one's possessions to the grave. Could that be something that he would forget as he aged?

Ajib decided that such riches should belong to someone who appreciated them, and that was himself. To take his older self's wealth would not be stealing, he reasoned, because it was he himself who would receive it. He heaved the chest onto his shoulder, and with much effort was able to bring it back through the Gate of Years to the Cairo he knew.

He deposited some of his new found wealth with a banker, but always carried a purse heavy with gold. He dressed in a Damascene robe and Cordovan slippers and a Khurasani turban bearing a jewel. He rented a house in the wealthy quarter, furnished it with the finest rugs and couches, and hired a cook to prepare him sumptuous meals.

He then sought out the brother of a woman he had long desired from afar, a woman named Taahira. Her brother was an apothecary, and Taahira assisted him in his shop. Ajib would occasionally purchase a remedy so that he might speak to her. Once he had seen her veil slip, and her eyes were as dark and beautiful as a gazelle's. Taahira's brother would not have consented to her marrying a weaver, but now Ajib could present himself as a favorable match.

Taahira's brother approved, and Taahira herself readily consented, for she had desired Ajib, too. Ajib spared no expense for their wedding. He hired one of the pleasure barges that floated in the canal south of the city and held a feast with musicians and dancers, at which he presented her with a magnificent pearl necklace. The celebration was the subject of gossip throughout the quarter.

Ajib reveled in the joy that money brought him and Taahira, and for a week the two of them lived the most delightful of lives. Then one day Ajib came home to find the door to his house broken open and the interior ransacked of all silver and gold items. The terrified cook emerged from hiding and told him that robbers had taken Taahira.

Ajib prayed to Allah until, exhausted with worry, he fell asleep. The next morning he was awoken by a knocking at his door. There was a stranger there. "I have a message for you," the man said.

"What message?" asked Ajib.

"Your wife is safe."

Ajib felt fear and rage churn in his stomach like black bile. "What ransom would you have?" he asked.

"Ten thousand dinars."

"That is more than all I possess!" Ajib exclaimed.

"Do not haggle with me," said the robber. "I have seen you spend money like others pour water."

Ajib dropped to his knees. "I have been wasteful. I swear by the name of the Prophet that I do not have that much," he said.

The robber looked at him closely. "Gather all the money you have," he said, "and have it here tomorrow at this same hour. If I believe you are holding back, your wife will die. If I believe you to be honest, my men will return her to you."

Ajib could see no other choice. "Agreed," he said, and the robber left.

The next day he went to the banker and withdrew all the money that remained. He gave it to the robber, who gauged the desperation in Ajib's eyes and was satisfied. The robber did as he promised, and that evening Taahira was returned.

After they had embraced, Taahira said, "I didn't believe you would pay so much money for me."

"I could not take pleasure in it without you," said Ajib, and he was surprised to realize it was true. "But now I regret that I cannot buy you what you deserve."

"You need never buy me anything again," she said.

Ajib bowed his head. "I feel as if I have been punished for my misdeeds."

"What misdeeds?" asked Taahira, but Ajib said nothing. "I did not ask you this before," she said. "But I know you did not inherit all the money you gained. Tell me: Did you steal it?"

"No," said Ajib, unwilling to admit the truth to her or himself. "It was given to me."

"A loan, then?"

"No, it does not need to be repaid."

"And you don't wish to pay it back?" Taahira was shocked. "So you are content that this other man paid for our wedding? That he paid my ransom?" She seemed on the verge of tears. "Am I your wife then, or this other man's?"

"You are my wife," he said.

"How can I be, when my very life is owed to another?"

"I would not have you doubt my love," said Ajib. "I swear to you that I will pay back the money, to the last dirham."

And so Ajib and Taahira moved back into Ajib's old house and began saving their money. Both of them went to work for Taahira's brother the apothecary, and when he eventually became a perfumer to the wealthy, Ajib and Taahira took over the business of selling remedies to the ill. It was a good living, but they spent as little as they could, living modestly and repairing damaged furnishings instead of buying new. For years, Ajib smiled whenever he dropped a coin into the chest, telling Taahira that it was a reminder of how much he valued her. He would say that even after the chest was full, it would be a bargain.

But it is not easy to fill a chest by adding just a few coins at a time, and so what began as thrift gradually turned into miserliness, and prudent decisions were replaced by tight-fisted ones. Worse, Ajib's and Taahira's affections for each other faded over time, and each grew to resent the other for the money they could not spend.

In this manner the years passed and Ajib grew older, waiting for the second time that his gold would be taken from him.

"What a strange and sad story," I said.

"Indeed," said Bashaarat. "Would you say that Ajib acted prudently?"

I hesitated before speaking. "It is not my place to judge him," I said. "He must live with the consequences of his actions, just as I must live with mine." I was silent for a moment, and then said, "I admire Ajib's candor, that he told you everything he had done."

"Ah, but Ajib did not tell me of this as a young man," said Bashaarat. "After he emerged from the Gate carrying the chest, I did not see him again for another twenty years. Ajib was a much older man when he came to visit me again. He had come home and found his chest gone, and the knowledge that he had paid his debt made him feel he could tell me all that had transpired."

"Indeed? Did the older Hassan from your first story come to see you as well?"

"No, I heard Hassan's story from his younger self. The older Hassan never returned to my shop, but in his place I had a different visitor, one who shared a story about Hassan that he himself could never have told me." Bashaarat proceeded to tell me that visitor's story, and if it pleases Your Majesty, I will recount it here.

The Tale of the Wife and Her Lover

Raniya had been married to Hassan for many years, and they lived the happiest of lives. One day she saw her husband dine with a young man, whom she recognized as the very image of Hassan when she had first married him. So great was her astonishment that she could scarcely keep herself from intruding on their conversation. After the young man left, she demanded that Hassan tell her who he was, and Hassan related to her an incredible tale.

"Have you told him about me?" she asked. "Did you know what lay ahead of us when we first met?"

"I knew I would marry you from the moment I saw you," Hassan said, smiling, "but not because anyone had told me. Surely, wife, you would not wish to spoil that moment for him?"

So Raniya did not speak to her husband's younger self, but only eavesdropped on his conversation, and stole glances at him. Her pulse quickened at the sight of his youthful features; sometimes our memories fool us with their sweetness, but when she beheld the two men seated opposite each other, she could see the fullness of the younger one's beauty without exaggeration. At night, she would lie awake, thinking of it.

Some days after Hassan had bid farewell to his younger self, he left Cairo to conduct business with a merchant in Damascus. In his absence Raniya found the shop that Hassan had described to her, and stepped through the Gate of Years to the Cairo of her youth.

She remembered where he had lived back then, and so was easily able to find the young Hassan and follow him. As she watched him, she felt a desire stronger than she had felt in years for the older Hassan, so vivid were her recollections of their youthful lovemaking. She had always been a loyal and faithful wife, but here was an opportunity that would never be available again. Resolving to act on this desire, Raniya rented a house, and in subsequent days bought furnishings for it.

Once the house was ready, she followed Hassan discreetly while she tried to gather enough boldness to approach him. In the jewelers' market, she watched as he went to a jeweler, showed him a necklace set with ten gemstones, and asked him how much he would pay for it. Raniya recognized it as one Hassan had given to her in the days after their wedding; she had not known he had once tried to sell it. She stood a short distance away and listened, pretending to look at some rings.

"Bring it back tomorrow, and I will pay you a thousand dinars," said the jeweler. Young Hassan agreed to the price, and left.

As she watched him leave, Raniya overheard two men talking nearby:

"Did you see that necklace? It is one of ours."

"Are you certain?" asked the other.

"I am. That is the bastard who dug up our chest."

"Let us tell our captain about him. After this fellow has sold his necklace, we will take his money, and more."

The two men left without noticing Raniya, who stood with her heart racing but her body motionless, like a deer after a tiger has passed. She realized that the treasure Hassan had dug up must have belonged to a band of thieves, and these men were two of its members. They were now observing the jewelers of Cairo to identify the person who had taken their loot.

Raniya knew that since she possessed the necklace, the young Hassan could not have sold it. She also knew that the thieves could not have killed Hassan. But it could not be Allah's will for her to do nothing. Allah must have brought her here so that he might use her as his instrument.

Raniya returned to the Gate of Years, stepped through to her own day, and at her house found the necklace in her jewelry box. Then she used the Gate of Years again, but instead of entering it from the left side, she entered it from the right, so that she visited the Cairo of twenty years later. There she sought out her older self, now an aged woman. The older Raniya greeted her warmly, and retrieved the necklace from her own jewelry box. The two women then rehearsed how they would assist the young Hassan.

The next day, the two thieves were back with a third man, whom Raniya assumed was their captain. They all watched as Hassan presented the necklace to the jeweler.

As the jeweler examined it, Raniya walked up and said, "What a coincidence! Jeweler, I wish to sell a necklace just like that." She brought out her necklace from a purse she carried.

"This is remarkable," said the jeweler. "I have never seen two necklaces more similar."

Then the aged Raniya walked up. "What do I see? Surely my eyes deceive me!" And with that she brought out a third identical necklace. "The seller sold it to me with the promise that it was unique. This proves him a liar."

"Perhaps you should return it," said Raniya.

"That depends," said the aged Raniya. She asked Hassan, "How much is he paying you for it?"

"A thousand dinars," said Hassan, bewildered.

"Really! Jeweler, would you care to buy this one too?"

"I must reconsider my offer," said the jeweler.

While Hassan and the aged Raniya bargained with the jeweler, Raniya stepped back just far enough to hear the captain berate the other thieves. "You fools," he said. "It is a common necklace. You would have us kill half the jewelers in Cairo and bring the guardsmen down upon our heads." He slapped their heads and led them off.

Raniya returned her attention to the jeweler, who had withdrawn his offer to buy Hassan's necklace. The older Raniya said, "Very well. I will try to return it to the man who sold it to me." As the older woman left, Raniya could tell that she smiled beneath her veil.

Raniya turned to Hassan. "It appears that neither of us will sell a necklace today."

"Another day, perhaps," said Hassan.

"I shall take mine back to my house for safekeeping," said Raniya. "Would you walk with me?"

Hassan agreed, and walked with Raniya to the house she had rented. Then she invited him in, and offered him wine, and after they had both drunk some, she led him to her bedroom. She covered the windows with heavy curtains and extinguished all lamps so that the room was as dark as night. Only then did she remove her veil and take him to bed.

Raniya had been flush with anticipation for this moment, and so was surprised to find that Hassan's movements were clumsy and awkward. She remembered their wedding night very clearly; he had been confident, and his touch had taken her breath away. She knew Hassan's first meeting with the young Raniya was not far away, and for a moment did not understand how this fumbling boy could change so quickly. And then of course the answer was clear.

So every afternoon for many days, Raniya met Hassan at her rented house and instructed him in the art of love, and in doing so she demonstrated that, as is often said, women are Allah's most wondrous creation. She told him, "The pleasure you give is returned in the pleasure you receive," and inwardly she smiled as she thought of how true her words really were. Before long, he gained the expertise she remembered, and she took greater enjoyment in it than she had as a young woman.

All too soon, the day arrived when Raniya told the young Hassan that it was time for her to leave. He knew better than to press her for her reasons, but asked her if they might ever see each other again. She told him, gently, no. Then she sold the furnishings to the house's owner, and returned through the Gate of Years to the Cairo of her own day.

When the older Hassan returned from his trip to Damascus, Raniya was home waiting for him. She greeted him warmly, but kept her secrets to herself.

I was lost in my own thoughts when Bashaarat finished this story, until he said, "I see that this story has intrigued you in a way the others did not."

"You see clearly," I admitted. "I realize now that, even though the past is unchangeable, one may encounter the unexpected when visiting it."

"Indeed. Do you now understand why I say the future and the past are the same? We cannot change either, but we can know both more fully."

"I do understand; you have opened my eyes, and now I wish to use the Gate of Years. What price do you ask?"

He waved his hand. "I do not sell passage through the Gate," he said. "Allah guides whom he wishes to my shop, and I am content to be an instrument of his will."

Had it been another man, I would have taken his words to be a negotiating ploy, but after all that Bashaarat had told me, I knew that he was sincere. "Your generosity is as boundless as your learning," I said, and bowed. "If there is ever a service that a merchant of fabrics might provide for you, please call upon me."

"Thank you. Let us talk now about your trip. There are some matters we must speak of before you visit the Baghdad of twenty years hence."

"I do not wish to visit the future," I told him. "I would step through in the other direction, to revisit my youth."

"Ah, my deepest apologies. This Gate will not take you there. You see, I built this Gate only a week ago. Twenty years ago, there was no doorway here for you to step out of."

My dismay was so great that I must have sounded like a forlorn child. I said, "But where does the other side of the Gate lead?" and walked around the circular doorway to face its opposite side.

Bashaarat walked around the doorway to stand beside me. The view through the Gate appeared identical to the view outside it, but when he extended his hand to reach through, it stopped as if it met an invisible wall. I looked more closely, and noticed a brass lamp set on a table. Its flame did not flicker, but was as fixed and unmoving as if the room were trapped in clearest amber.

"What you see here is the room as it appeared last week," said Bashaarat. "In some twenty years' time, this left side of the Gate will permit entry, allowing people to enter from this direction and visit their past. Or," he said, leading me back to the side of the doorway he had first shown me, "we can enter from the right side now, and visit them ourselves. But I'm afraid this Gate will never allow visits to the days of your youth."

"What about the Gate of Years you had in Cairo?" I asked.

He nodded. "That Gate still stands. My son now runs my shop there."

"So I could travel to Cairo, and use the Gate to visit the Cairo of twenty years ago. From there I could travel back to Baghdad."

"Yes, you could make that journey, if you so desire."

"I do," I said. "Will you tell me how to find your shop in Cairo?"

"We must speak of some things first," said Bashaarat. "I will not ask your intentions, being content to wait until you are ready to tell me. But I would remind you that what is made cannot be unmade."

"I know," I said.

"And that you cannot avoid the ordeals that are assigned to you. What Allah gives you, you must accept."

"I remind myself of that every day of my life."

"Then it is my honor to assist you in whatever way I can," he said.

He brought out some paper and a pen and inkpot and began writing. "I shall write for you a letter to aid you on your journey." He folded the letter, dribbled some candle wax over the edge, and pressed his ring against it. "When you reach Cairo, give this to my son, and he will let you enter the Gate of Years there."

A merchant such as myself must be well-versed in expressions of gratitude, but I had never before been as effusive in giving thanks as I was to Bashaarat, and every word was heartfelt. He gave me directions to his shop in Cairo, and I assured him I would tell him all upon my return. As I was about to leave his shop, a thought occurred to me. "Because the Gate of Years you have here opens to the future, you are assured that the Gate and this shop will remain standing for twenty years or more."

"Yes, that is true," said Bashaarat.

I began to ask him if he had met his older self, but then I bit back my words. If the answer was no, it was surely because his older self was dead, and I would be asking him if he knew the date of his death. Who was I to make such an inquiry, when this man was granting me a boon without asking my intentions? I saw from his expression that he knew what I had meant to ask, and I bowed my head in humble apology. He indicated his acceptance with a nod, and I returned home to make arrangements.

The caravan took two months to reach Cairo. As for what occupied my mind during the journey, Your Majesty, I now tell you what I had not told Bashaarat. I was married once, twenty years before, to a woman named Najya. Her figure swayed as gracefully as a willow bough and her face was as lovely as the moon, but it was her kind and tender nature that captured my heart. I had just begun my career as a merchant when we married, and we were not wealthy, but did not feel the lack.

We had been married only a year when I was to travel to Basra to meet with a ship's captain. I had an opportunity to profit by trading in slaves, but Najya did not approve. I reminded her that the Koran does not forbid the owning of slaves as long as one treats them well, and that even the Prophet owned some. But she said there was no way I could know how my buyers would treat their slaves, and that it was better to sell goods than men.

On the morning of my departure, Najya and I argued. I spoke harshly to her, using words that it shames me to recall, and I beg Your Majesty's forgiveness if I do not repeat them here. I left in anger, and never saw her again. She was badly injured when the wall of a mosque collapsed, some days after I left. She was taken to the bimaristan, but the physicians could not save her, and she died soon after. I did not learn of her death until I returned a week later, and I felt as if I had killed her with my own hand.

Can the torments of Hell be worse than what I endured in the days that followed? It seemed likely that I would find out, so near to death did my anguish take me. And surely the experience must be similar, for like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering.

Eventually my period of lamentation ended, and I was left a hollow man, a bag of skin with no innards. I freed the slaves I had bought and became a fabric merchant. Over the years I became wealthy, but I never remarried. Some of the men I did business with tried to match me with a sister or a daughter, telling me that the love of a woman can make you forget your pains. Perhaps they are right, but it cannot make you forget the pain you caused another. Whenever I imagined myself marrying another woman, I remembered the look of hurt in Najya's eyes when I last saw her, and my heart was closed to others.

I spoke to a mullah about what I had done, and it was he who told me that repentance and atonement erase the past. I repented and atoned as best I knew how; for twenty years I lived as an upright man, I offered prayers and fasted and gave alms to those less fortunate and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and yet I was still haunted by guilt. Allah is all-merciful, so I knew the failing to be mine.

Had Bashaarat asked me, I could not have said what I hoped to achieve. It was clear from his stories that I could not change what I knew to have happened. No one had stopped my younger self from arguing with Najya in our final conversation. But the tale of Raniya, which lay hidden within the tale of Hassan's life without his knowing it, gave me a slim hope: perhaps I might be able to play some part in events while my younger self was away on business.

Could it not be that there had been a mistake, and my Najya had survived? Perhaps it was another woman whose body had been wrapped in a shroud and buried while I was gone. Perhaps I could rescue Najya and bring her back with me to the Baghdad of my own day. I knew it was foolhardy; men of experience say, "Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity," and I understood the truth of those words better than most. And yet I dared to hope that Allah had judged my twenty years of repentance sufficient, and was now granting me a chance to regain what I had lost.

The caravan journey was uneventful, and after sixty sunrises and three hundred prayers, I reached Cairo. There I had to navigate the city's streets, which are a bewildering maze compared to the harmonious design of the City of Peace. I made my way to the Bayn al-Qasrayn, the main street that runs through the Fatimid quarter of Cairo. From there I found the street on which Bashaarat's shop was located.

I told the shopkeeper that I had spoken to his father in Baghdad, and gave him the letter Bashaarat had given me. After reading it, he led me into a back room, in whose center stood another Gate of Years, and he gestured for me to enter from its left side.

As I stood before the massive circle of metal, I felt a chill, and chided myself for my nervousness. With a deep breath I stepped through, and found myself in the same room with different furnishings. If not for those, I would not have known the Gate to be different from an ordinary doorway. Then I recognized that the chill I had felt was simply the coolness of the air in this room, for the day here was not as hot as the day I had left. I could feel its warm breeze at my back, coming through the Gate like a sigh.

The shopkeeper followed behind me and called out, "Father, you have a visitor."

A man entered the room, and who should it be but Bashaarat, twenty years younger than when I'd seen him in Baghdad. "Welcome, my lord," he said. "I am Bashaarat."

"You do not know me?" I asked.

"No, you must have met my older self. For me, this is our first meeting, but it is my honor to assist you."

Your Majesty, as befits this chronicle of my shortcomings, I must confess that, so immersed was I in my own woes during the journey from Baghdad, I had not previously realized that Bashaarat had likely recognized me the moment I stepped into his shop. Even as I was admiring his water-clock and brass songbird, he had known that I would travel to Cairo, and likely knew whether I had achieved my goal or not.

The Bashaarat I spoke to now knew none of those things. "I am doubly grateful for your kindness, sir," I said. "My name is Fuwaad ibn Abbas, newly arrived from Baghdad."

Bashaarat's son took his leave, and Bashaarat and I conferred; I asked him the day and month, confirming that there was ample time for me to travel back to the City of Peace, and promised him I would tell him everything when I returned. His younger self was as gracious as his older. "I look forward to speaking with you on your return, and to assisting you again twenty years from now," he said.

His words gave me pause. "Had you planned to open a shop in Baghdad before today?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I had been marveling at the coincidence that we met in Baghdad just in time for me to make my journey here, use the Gate, and travel back. But now I wonder if it is perhaps not a coincidence at all. Is my arrival here today the reason that you will move to Baghdad twenty years from now?"

Bashaarat smiled. "Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false."

"Now as ever, you have given me much to think about," I said.

I thanked him and bid farewell. As I was leaving his shop, I passed a woman entering with some haste. I heard Bashaarat greet her as Raniya, and stopped in surprise.

From just outside the door, I could hear the woman say, "I have the necklace. I hope my older self has not lost it."

"I am sure you will have kept it safe, in anticipation of your visit," said Bashaarat.

I realized that this was Raniya from the story Bashaarat had told me. She was on her way to collect her older self so that they might return to the days of their youth, confound some thieves with a doubled necklace, and save their husband. For a moment I was unsure if I were dreaming or awake, because I felt as if I had stepped into a tale, and the thought that I might talk to its players and partake of its events was dizzying. I was tempted to speak, and see if I might play a hidden role in that tale, but then I remembered that my goal was to play a hidden role in my own tale. So I left without a word, and went to arrange passage with a caravan.

It is said, Your Majesty, that Fate laughs at men's schemes. At first it appeared as if I were the most fortunate of men, for a caravan headed for Baghdad was departing within the month, and I was able to join it. In the weeks that followed I began to curse my luck, because the caravan's journey was plagued by delays. The wells at a town not far from Cairo were dry, and an expedition had to be sent back for water. At another village, the soldiers protecting the caravan contracted dysentery, and we had to wait for weeks for their recovery. With each delay, I revised my estimate of when we'd reach Baghdad, and grew increasingly anxious.

Then there were the sandstorms, which seemed like a warning from Allah, and truly caused me to doubt the wisdom of my actions. We had the good fortune to be resting at a caravanserai west of Kufa when the sandstorms first struck, but our stay was prolonged from days to weeks as, time and again, the skies became clear, only to darken again as soon as the camels were reloaded. The day of Najya's accident was fast approaching, and I grew desperate.

I solicited each of the camel drivers in turn, trying to hire one to take me ahead alone, but could not persuade any of them. Eventually I found one willing to sell me a camel at what would have been an exorbitant price under ordinary circumstances, but which I was all too willing to pay. I then struck out on my own.

It will come as no surprise that I made little progress in the storm, but when the winds subsided, I immediately adopted a rapid pace. Without the soldiers that accompanied the caravan, however, I was an easy target for bandits, and sure enough, I was stopped after two days' ride. They took my money and the camel I had purchased, but spared my life, whether out of pity or because they could not be bothered to kill me I do not know. I began walking back to rejoin the caravan, but now the skies tormented me with their cloudlessness, and I suffered from the heat. By the time the caravan found me, my tongue was swollen and my lips were as cracked as mud baked by the sun. After that I had no choice but to accompany the caravan at its usual pace.

Like a fading rose that drops its petals one by one, my hopes dwindled with each passing day. By the time the caravan reached the City of Peace, I knew it was too late, but the moment we rode through the city gates, I asked the guardsmen if they had heard of a mosque collapsing. The first guardsman I spoke to had not, and for a heartbeat I dared to hope that I had misremembered the date of the accident, and that I had in fact arrived in time.

Then another guardsman told me that a mosque had indeed collapsed just yesterday in the Karkh quarter. His words struck me with the force of the executioner's axe. I had traveled so far, only to receive the worst news of my life a second time.

I walked to the mosque, and saw the piles of bricks where there had once been a wall. It was a scene that had haunted my dreams for twenty years, but now the image remained even after I opened my eyes, and with a clarity sharper than I could endure. I turned away and walked without aim, blind to what was around me, until I found myself before my old house, the one where Najya and I had lived. I stood in the street in front of it, filled with memory and anguish.

I do not know how much time had passed when I became aware that a young woman had walked up to me. "My lord," she said, "I'm looking for the house of Fuwaad ibn Abbas."

"You have found it," I said.

"Are you Fuwaad ibn Abbas, my lord?"

"I am, and I ask you, please leave me be."

"My lord, I beg your forgiveness. My name is Maimuna, and I assist the physicians at the bimaristan. I tended to your wife before she died."

I turned to look at her. "You tended to Najya?"

"I did, my lord. I am sworn to deliver a message to you from her."

"What message?"

"She wished me to tell you that her last thoughts were of you. She wished me to tell you that while her life was short, it was made happy by the time she spent with you."

She saw the tears streaming down my cheeks, and said, "Forgive me if my words cause you pain, my lord."

"There is nothing to forgive, child. Would that I had the means to pay you as much as this message is worth to me, because a lifetime of thanks would still leave me in your debt."

"Grief owes no debt," she said. "Peace be upon you, my lord."

"Peace be upon you," I said.

She left, and I wandered the streets for hours, crying tears of release. All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat's words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

Night fell, and it was then that the city's guardsmen found me, wandering the streets after curfew in my dusty clothes, and asked who I was. I told them my name and where I lived, and the guardsmen brought me to my neighbors to see if they knew me, but they did not recognize me, and I was taken to jail.

I told the guard captain my story, and he found it entertaining, but did not credit it, for who would? Then I remembered some news from my time of grief twenty years before, and told him that Your Majesty's grandson would be born an albino. Some days later, word of the infant's condition reached the captain, and he brought me to the governor of the quarter. When the governor heard my story, he brought me here to the palace, and when your lord chamberlain heard my story, he in turn brought me here to the throne room, so that I might have the infinite privilege of recounting it to Your Majesty.

Now my tale has caught up to my life, coiled as they both are, and the direction they take next is for Your Majesty to decide. I know many things that will happen here in Baghdad over the next twenty years, but nothing about what awaits me now. I have no money for the journey back to Cairo and the Gate of Years there, yet I count myself fortunate beyond measure, for I was given the opportunity to revisit my past mistakes, and I have learned what remedies Allah allows. I would be honored to relate everything I know of the future, if Your Majesty sees fit to ask, but for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this:

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

The Last and Only, or
Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French

Peter S. Beagle

Peter S. Beagle (www.peterbeagle.com) is the author of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn, as well as the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Innkeeper's Song, and Tamsin. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards. His most recent book is collection The Line Between. Upcoming are several new novels, including I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons and Summerlong.

Many fantasy tales involve transformation of one kind or another. In the moving and erudite story which follows, Beagle shows how a seemingly normal man can change from one thing to another, and what that says about how we decide who we are and what it means to the people around us. It is one of the very finest stories of his long, distinguished career.

Once upon a time, there lived in California a Frenchman named George Moscowitz. His name is of no importance—there are old families in France named Wilson and Holmes, and the first president of the Third Republic was named MacMahon—but what was interesting about Mr. Moscowitz was that he had not always been French. Nor was he entirely French at the time we meet him, but he was becoming perceptibly more so every day. His wife, whose name was Miriam, drew his silhouette on a child's blackboard and filled him in from the feet up with tricolor chalk, adding a little more color daily. She was at mid-thigh when we begin our story.

Most of the doctors who examined Mr. Moscowitz agreed that his affliction was due to some sort of bug that he must have picked up in France when he and Mrs. Moscowitz were honeymooning there, fifteen years before. In its dormant stage, the bug had manifested itself only as a kind of pleasant Francophilia: on their return from France, Mr. Moscowitz had begun to buy Linguaphone CDs, and to get up at six in the morning to watch a cable television show on beginner's French. He took to collecting French books and magazines, French music and painting and sculpture, French recipes, French folklore, French attitudes, and, inevitably, French people. As a librarian in a large university, he came in contact with a good many French exchange students and visiting professors, and he went far out of his way to make friends with them—Mr. Moscowitz, shy as a badger. The students had a saying among themselves that if you wanted to be French in that town, you had to clear it with Monsieur Moscowitz, who issued licenses and cartes de séjour. The joke was not especially unkind, because Mr. Moscowitz often had them to dinner at his home, and in his quiet delight in the very sound of their voices they found themselves curiously less bored with themselves, and with one another. Their companions at dinner were quite likely to be the ignorant Marseillais tailor who got all of Mr. Moscowitz's custom, or the Canuck coach of the soccer team, but there was something so touching in Mr. Moscowitz's assumption that all French-speaking people must be naturally at home together that professors and proletariat generally managed to find each other charming and valuable. And Mr. Moscowitz himself, speaking rarely, but sometimes smiling uncontrollably, like an exhalation of joy—he was a snob in that he preferred the culture and manners of another country to his own, and certainly a fool in that he could find wisdom in every foolishness uttered in French—he was marvelously happy then, and it was impossible for those around him to escape his happiness. Now and then he would address a compliment or a witticism to his wife, who would smile and answer softly, "Merci," or "La-la," for she knew that at such moments he believed without thinking about it that she too spoke French.

Mrs. Moscowitz herself was, as must be obvious, a patient woman of a tolerant humor, who greatly enjoyed her husband's enjoyment of all things French, and who believed, firmly and serenely, that this curious obsession would fade with time, to be replaced by bridge or chess, or—though she prayed not—golf. "At least he's dressing much better these days," she told her sister Dina, who lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. "Thank God you don't have to wear plaid pants to be French."

Then, after fifteen years, whatever it was that he had contracted in France, if that was what he had done, came fully out of hiding; and here stood Mr. Moscowitz in one doctor's office after another, French from his soles to his ankles, to his shins, to his knees, and still heading north for a second spring. (Mrs. Moscowitz's little drawing is, of course, only a convenient metaphor—if anything, her husband was becoming French from his bones out.) He was treated with drugs as common as candy and as rare as turtle tears by doctors ranging from Johns Hopkins specialists to a New Guinea shaman; he was examined by herbalists and honey-doctors, and by committees of medical men so reputable as to make illness in their presence seem almost criminal; and he was dragged to a crossroads one howling midnight to meet with a half-naked, foamy-chinned old man who claimed to be the son of Merlin's affair with Nimue, and a colonel in the Marine Reserves besides. This fellow's diagnosis was supernatural possession; his prescribed remedy would cost Mr. Moscowitz a black pig (and the pig its liver), and was impractical, but the idea left Mr. Moscowitz thoughtful for a long time.

In bed that night, he said to his wife, "Perhaps it is possession. It's frightening, yes, but it's exciting too, if you want the truth. I feel something growing inside me, taking shape as it crowds me out, and the closer I get to disappearing, the clearer it becomes. And yet, it is me too, if you understand—I wish I could explain to you how it feels—it is like, 'ow you say . . .."

"Don't say that," Mrs. Moscowitz interrupted with tears in her voice. She had begun to whimper quietly when he spoke of disappearing. "Only TV Frenchmen talk like that."

"Excuse-moi, ma vieille. The more it crowds me, the more it makes me feel like me. I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself. Now I'm pregnant with a whole country, and I'm growing fat with it, and one day—" He began to cry himself then, and the two of them huddled small in their bed, holding hands all night long. He dreamed in French that night, as he had been doing for weeks, but he woke up still speaking it, and he did not regain his English until he had had his first cup of coffee. It took him longer each morning thereafter.

A psychiatrist whom they visited when Mr. Moscowitz's silhouette was French to the waist commented that his theory of possession by himself was a way of sidling up to the truth that Mr. Moscowitz was actually willing his transformation. "The unconscious is ingenious at devising methods of withdrawal," he explained, pulling at his fingertips as though milking a cow, "and national character is certainly no barrier to a mind so determined to get out from under the weight of being an American. It's not as uncommon as you might think, these days."

"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?" whispered Mr. Moscowitz to his wife.

"I have a patient," mused the psychiatrist, "who believes that he is gradually being metamorphosed into a roc, such a giant bird as carried off Sindbad the Sailor to lands unimaginable and riches beyond comprehension. He has asked me to come with him to the very same lands when his change is complete."

"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit? Qu'est-ce que c'est, roc?"

Mrs. Moscowitz shushed her husband nervously and said, "Yes, yes, but what about George? Do you think you can cure him?"

"I won't be around," said the psychiatrist. There came a stoop of great wings outside the window, and the Moscowitzes fled.

"Well, there it is," Mrs. Moscowitz said when they were home, "and I must confess I thought as much. You could stop this stupid change yourself if you really wanted to, but you don't want to stop it. You're withdrawing, just the way he said, you're escaping from the responsibility of being plain old George Moscowitz in the plain old United States. You're quitting, and I'm ashamed of you—you're copping out." She hadn't used the phrase since her own college days at Vassar, and it made her feel old and even less in control of this disturbing situation.

"Cop-out, cop-out," said Mr. Moscowitz thoughtfully. "What charm! I love it very much, the American slang. Cop-out, copping out. I cop out, tu cop out, they all cop out . . .."

Then Mrs. Moscowitz burst into tears, and picking up her colored chalks, she scribbled up and down and across the neat silhouette of her husband until the chalk screamed and broke, and the whole blackboard was plastered red, white, and blue; and as she did this, she cried, "I don't care, I don't care if you're escaping or not, or what you change into. I wouldn't care if you turned into a cockroach, if I could be a cockroach too." Her eyes were so blurred with tears that Mr. Moscowitz seemed to be sliding away from her like a cloud. He took her in his arms then, but all the comfort he offered her was in French, and she cried even harder.

It was the only time she ever allowed herself to break down. The next day she set about learning French. It was difficult for her, for she had no natural ear for language, but she enrolled in three schools at once—one for group study, one for private lessons, and the other online—and she worked very hard. She even dug out her husband's abandoned language CDs and listened to them constantly. And during her days and evenings, if she found herself near a mirror, she would peer at the plump, tired face she saw there and say carefully to it, "Je suis la professeur. Vous êtes l'étudiante. Je suis française. Vous n'êtes pas française." These were the first four sentences that the recordings spoke to her every day. It had occurred to her—though she never voiced the idea—that she might be able to will the same change that had befallen her husband on herself. She told herself often, especially after triumphing over her reflection, that she felt more French daily; and when she finally gave up the pretense of being transformed, she said to herself, "It's my fault. I want to change for him, not for myself. It's not enough." She kept up with her French lessons, all the same.

Mr. Moscowitz, on his part, was finding it necessary to take English lessons. His work in the library was growing more harassing every day: he could no longer read the requests filed by the students—let alone the forms and instructions on his own computer screen—and he had to resort to desperate guessing games and mnemonic systems to find anything in the stacks or on the shelves. His condition was obvious to his friends on the library staff, and they covered up for him as best they could, doing most of his work while a graduate student from the French department sat with him in a carrel, teaching him English as elementary as though he had never spoken it. But he did not learn it quickly, and he never learned it well, and his friends could not keep him hidden all the time. Inevitably, the Chancellor of the university interested himself in the matter, and after a series of interviews with Mr. Moscowitz—conducted in French, for the Chancellor was a traveled man who had studied at the Sorbonne—announced regretfully that he saw no way but to let Mr. Moscowitz go. "You understand my position, Georges, my old one," he said, shrugging slightly and twitching his mouth. "It is a damage, of course, well understood, but there will be much severance pay and a pension of the fullest." The presence of a Frenchman always made the Chancellor a little giddy.

"You speak French like a Spanish cow," observed Mr. Moscowitz, who had been expecting this decision and was quite calm. He then pointed out to the Chancellor that he had tenure and to spare, and that he was not about to be gotten rid of so easily. Even in this imbecile country, a teacher had his rights, and it was on the Chancellor's shoulders to find a reason for discharging him. He requested the Chancellor to show him a single university code, past or present, that listed change of nationality as sufficient grounds for terminating a contract; and he added that he was older than the Chancellor and had given him no encouragement to call him tu.

"But you're not the same man we hired!" cried the Chancellor in English.

"No?" asked Mr. Moscowitz when the remark had been explained to him. "Then who am I, please?"

The university would have been glad to settle the case out of court, and Mrs. Moscowitz pleaded with her husband to accept their offered terms, which were liberal enough; but he refused, for no reason that she could see but delight at the confusion and embarrassment he was about to cause, and a positive hunger for the tumult of a court battle. The man she had married, she remembered, had always found it hard to show anger even to his worst enemy, for fear of hurting his feelings; but she stopped thinking about it at that point, not wanting to make the Chancellor's case for him. "You are quite right, George," she told him, and then, carefully, "Tu as raison, mon chou." He told her—as nearly as she could understand—that if she ever learned to speak French properly she would sound like a Basque, so she might as well not try. He was very rude to the Marseillais tailor these days.

The ACLU appointed a lawyer for Mr. Moscowitz, and, for all purposes but the practical, he won his case as decisively as Darrow defending Darwin. The lawyer laid great and tearful stress on the calamity (hisses from the gallery, where a sizeable French contingent grew larger every day) that had befallen a simple, ordinary man, leaving him dumb and defenseless in the midst of academic piranhas who would strip him of position, tenure, reputation, even statehood, in one pitiless bite. (This last was in reference to a foolish statement by the university counsel that Mr. Moscowitz would have some difficulty passing a citizenship test now, let alone a librarian's examination.) But his main defense was the same as Mr. Moscowitz's before the Chancellor: there was no precedent for such a situation as his client's, nor was this case likely to set one. If the universities wanted to write it into their common code that any man proved to be changing his nationality should summarily be discharged, then the universities could do that, and very silly they would look, too. ("What would constitute proof?" he wondered aloud, and what degree of change would it be necessary to prove? "Fifty per cent? Thirty-three and one-third? Or just, as the French say, a soupçon?") But as matters stood, the university had no more right to fire Mr. Moscowitz for becoming a Frenchman than they would have if he became fat, or gray-haired, or two inches taller. The lawyer ended his plea by bowing deeply to his client and crying, "Vive Moscowitz!" And the whole courthouse rang and thundered then as Americans and French, judge and jury, counsels and bailiffs and the whole audience rose and roared, "Vive Moscowitz! Vive Moscowitz!" The Chancellor thought of the Sorbonne, and wept.

There were newspapermen in the courtroom, and by that last day there were television cameras. Mr. Moscowitz sat at home that night and leaned forward to stare at his face whenever it came on the screen. His wife, thinking he was criticizing his appearance, remarked, "You look nice. A little like Jean Gabin." Mr. Moscowitz grunted. "Le camera t'aime," she said carefully. She answered the phone when it rang, which was often. Many of the callers had television shows of their own. The others wanted Mr. Moscowitz to write books.

Within a week of the trial, Mr. Moscowitz was a national celebrity, which meant that as many people knew his name as knew the name of the actor who played the dashing Gilles de Rais in a new television serial, and not quite as many as recognized the eleven-year-old Racine girl with a forty-inch bust, who sang Christian techno-rap. Mrs. Moscowitz saw him more often on television than she did at home—at seven on a Sunday morning he was invited to discuss post-existential film or France's relations with her former African colonies; at two o'clock he might be awarding a ticket to Paris to the winner of the daily My Ex Will Hate This contest; and at eleven pm, on one of the late-night shows, she could watch him speaking the lyrics to the internationally popular French song, "Je M'en Fous De Tout Ça," while a covey of teenage dancers yipped and jiggled around him. Mrs. Moscowitz would sigh, switch off the set, and sit down at the computer to study her assigned installment of the adventures of the family Vincent, who spoke basic French to one another and were always having breakfast, visiting aunts, or making lists. "Regard Helene," said Mrs. Moscowitz bitterly. "She is in train of falling into the quicksand again. Yes, she falls. Naughty, naughty Helene. She talks too much."

There was a good deal of scientific and political interest taken in Mr. Moscowitz as well. He spent several weekends in Washington, being examined and interviewed, and he met the President, briefly. The President shook his hand, and gave him a souvenir fountain pen and a flag lapel, and said that he regarded Mr. Moscowitz's transformation as the ultimate expression of the American dream, for it surely proved to the world that any American could become whatever he wanted enough to be, even if what he wanted to be was a snail-eating French wimp.

The scientists, whose lingering fear had been that the metamorphosis of Mr. Moscowitz had been somehow accomplished by the Russians or the Iranians, as a practice run before they turned everybody into Russians or Iranians, found nothing in Mr. Moscowitz either to enlighten or alert them. He was a small, suspicious man who spoke often of his rights, and might, as far as they could tell, have been born French. They sent him home at last, to his business manager, to his television commitments, to his endorsements, to his ghostwritten autobiography, and to his wife; and they told the President, "Go figure. Maybe this is the way the world ends, we wouldn't know. And it might not hurt to avoid crêpes for a while."

Mr. Moscowitz's celebrity lasted for almost two months—quite a long time, considering that it was autumn and there were a lot of other public novas flaring and dying on prime time. His high-water mark was certainly reached on the weekend that the officials of at least one cable network were watching one another's eyes to see how they might react to the idea of a George Moscowitz Show. His fortunes began to ebb on Monday morning—public interest is a matter of momentum, and there just wasn't anything Mr. Moscowitz could do for an encore.

"If he were only a nice Frenchman, or a sexy Frenchmen!" the producers and the publishers and the ghostwriters and the A&R executives and the sponsors sighed separately and in conference. "Someone like Jean Reno or Charles Boyer, or Chevalier, or Jacques Pépin, or even Louis Jourdan—somebody charming, somebody with style, with manners, with maybe a little ho-ho, Mimi, you good-for-nothing little Mimi . . ." But what they had, as far as they could see, was one of those surly frogs in a cloth cap who rioted in front of the American Embassy and trashed the Paris McDonald's. Once, on a talk show, he said, taking great care with his English grammar, "The United States is like a very large dog which has not been—qu'est-ce que c'est le mot?—housebroken. It is well enough in its place, but its place is not on the couch. Or in the Mideast, or in Africa, or in a restaurant kitchen." The television station began to get letters. They suggested that Mr. Moscowitz go back where he came from.

So Mr. Moscowitz was whisked out of the public consciousness as deftly as an unpleasant report on what else gives mice cancer or makes eating fish as hazardous as bullfighting. His television bookings were cancelled; he was replaced by reruns, motivational speakers, old John Payne musicals, or one of the less distressing rappers. The contracts for his books and columns and articles remained unsigned, or turned out to conceal escape clauses, elusive and elliptical, but enforceable. Within a week of his last public utterance—"American women smell bad, they smell of fear and vomit and l'ennui"—George Moscowitz was no longer a celebrity. He wasn't even a Special Guest.

Nor was he a librarian anymore, in spite of the court's decision. He could not be discharged, but he certainly couldn't be kept on in the library. The obvious solution would have been to find him a position in the French department, but he was no teacher, no translator, no scholar; he was unqualified to teach the language in a junior high school. The Chancellor graciously offered him a departmental scholarship to get a degree in French, but he turned it down as an insult. "At least, a couple of education courses—" said the Chancellor. "Take them yourself," said Mr. Moscowitz, and he resigned.

"What will we do now, George?" asked his wife. "Que ferons-nous?" She was glad to have her husband back from the land of magic, even though he was as much a stranger to her now as he sometimes seemed to be to himself. ("What does a butterfly think of its chrysalis?" she wondered modestly, "Or of milkweed?") His fall from grace seemed to have made him kind again. They spent their days together now, walking, or reading Chateaubriand aloud; often silent, for it was hard for Mrs. Moscowitz to speak truly in French, and her husband could not mutter along in English for long without becoming angry. "Will we go to France?" she asked, knowing his answer.

"Yes," Mr. Moscowitz said. He showed her a letter. "The French government will pay our passage. We are going home." He said it many times, now with joy, now with a certain desperation. "We are going home."

The French of course insisted on making the news of Mr. Moscowitz's departure public in America, and the general American attitude was a curious mix of relief and chagrin. They were glad to have Mr. Moscowitz safely out of the way, but it was "doubtless unpleasant," as a French newspaper suggested, "to see a recognizable human shape insist on emerging from the great melting pot, instead of eagerly dissolving away." Various influences in the United States warned that Mr. Moscowitz was obviously a spy for some international conspiracy, but the President, who had vaguely liked him, said, "Well, good for him, great. Enjoy, baby." The government made up a special loose-leaf passport for Mr. Moscowitz, with room for other changes of nationality, just in case.

Mrs. Moscowitz, who made few demands on her husband, or anyone else, insisted on going to visit her sister Dina in Scottsdale before the move to France. She spent several days being taught to play video games by her nephew and enjoying countless tea parties with her two nieces, and sitting up late with Dina and her sympathetic husband, talking over all the ramifications of her coming exile. "Because that's the way I know I see it," she said, "in my heart. I try to feel excited—I really do try, for George's sake—but inside, inside . . ." She never wept or broke down at such points, but would pause for a few moments, while her sister fussed with the coffee cups and her brother-in-law looked away. "It's not that I'll miss that many people," she would go on, "or our life—well, George's life—around the university. Or the apartment, or all the things we can't take with us—that doesn't really matter, all that. Maybe if we had children, like you . . ." and she would fall silent again, but not for long, before she burst out, "But me, I'll miss me! I don't know who I'll be, living in France, but it'll be someone else, it won't ever be me again. And I did . . .I did like me the way I was, and so did George, no matter what he says now." But in time, as they knew she would, she would recover her familiar reliable calmness and decide, "Oh, it will be all right, I'm sure. I'm just being an old stick-in-the-mud. It will be an adventure, after all."

The French government sent a specially chartered jet to summon the Moscowitzes; it was very grand treatment, Mrs. Moscowitz thought, but she had hoped they would sail. "On a boat, we would be nowhere for a few days," she said to herself, "and I do need to be nowhere first, just a little while." She took her books and CDs about the Vincent family along with her, and she drew a long breath and held onto Mr. Moscowitz's sleeve when the plane doors opened onto the black and glowing airfield, and they were invited to step down among the roaring people who had been waiting for two days to welcome them. "Here we go," she said softly. "Allons-y. We are home."

France greeted them with great pride and great delight, in which there was mixed not the smallest drop of humor. To the overwhelming majority of the French press, to the poets and politicians, and certainly to the mass of the people—who read the papers and the poems, and waited at the airport—it seemed both utterly logical and magnificently just that a man's soul should discover itself to be French. Was it not possible that all the souls in the world might be French, born in exile but beginning to find their way home from the cold countries, one by one? Think of all the tourists, the wonderful middle-aged tourists—where will we put them all? Anywhere, anywhere, it won't matter, for all the world will be France, as it should have been long ago, when our souls began to speak different languages. Vive Moscowitz then, vive Moscowitz! And see if you can get him to do a spread in Paris-Match, or on your television program, or book him for a few weeks at the Olympia. Got to make your money before Judgment Day.

But the government had not invited Mr. Moscowitz to France to abandon him to free enterprise—he was much too important for that. His television appearances were made on government time; his public speeches were staged and sponsored by the government; and he would never have been allowed, even had he wished, to endorse a soft drink that claimed that it made the imbiber twenty-two per cent more French. He was not for rent. He traveled—or, rather, he was traveled—through the country, from Provence to Brittany, gently guarded, fenced round in a civilized manner; and throngs of people came out to see him. Then he was returned to Paris.

The government officials in charge of Mr. Moscowitz found a beautiful apartment in safe, quiet Passy for him and his wife, and let them understand that the rent would be paid for the rest of their lives. There was a maid and a cook, both paid for, and there was a garden that seemed as big as the Bois de Boulogne to the Moscowitzes, and there was a government chauffeur to take them wherever they wanted to go, whenever. And finally—for the government understood that many men will die without work—there was a job ready for Mr. Moscowitz when he chose to take it up, as the librarian of the Benjamin Franklin library, behind the Odeon. He had hoped for the Bibliothèque nationale, but he was satisfied with the lesser post. "We are home," he said to his wife. "Having one job or another—one thing or another—only makes a difference to those who are not truly at home. Tu m'comprends?

"Oui," said Mrs. Moscowitz. They were forever asking each other that, Do you understand me? and they both always said yes. He spoke often of home and of belonging, she noticed; perhaps he meant to reassure her. For herself, she had come to realize that all the lists and journeys of the family Vincent would never make her a moment more French than she was, which was not at all, regardless. Indeed, the more she studied the language—the government had provided a series of tutors for her—the less she seemed to understand it, and she lived in anxiety that she and Mr. Moscowitz would lose this hold of one another, like children separated in a parade. Yet she was not as unhappy as she had feared, for her old capacity for making the best of things surfaced once again, and actually did make her new life as kind and rewarding as it could possibly have been, not only for her, but for those with whom she came in any sort of contact. She would have been very surprised to learn this last.

But Mr. Moscowitz himself was not happy for long in France. It was certainly no one's fault but his own. The government took the wisest care of him it knew—though it exhibited him, still it always remembered that he was a human being, which is hard for a government—and the people of France sent him silly, lovely gifts and letters of welcome from all across the country. In their neighborhood, the Moscowitzes were the reigning couple without really knowing it. Students gathered under their windows on the spring nights to sing to them, and the students' fathers, the butchers and grocers and druggists and booksellers of Passy, would never let Mrs. Moscowitz pay for anything when she went shopping. They made friends, good, intelligent, government-approved friends—and yet Mr. Moscowitz brooded more and more visibly, until his wife finally asked him, "What is it, George? What's the matter?"

"They are not French," he said. "All these people. They don't know what it is to be French."

"Because they live like Americans?" she asked gently. "George—" she had learned to pronounce it Jhorj, in the soft French manner—"everyone does that, or everyone will. To be anything but American is very hard these days. I think they do very well."

"They are not French," Mr. Moscowitz repeated. "I am French, but they are not French. I wonder if they ever were." She looked at him in some alarm. It was her first intimation that the process was not complete.

His dissatisfaction with the people who thought they were French grew more apparent every day. Friends, neighbors, fellow employees, and a wide spectrum of official persons passed in turn before his eyes; and he studied each one and plainly discarded them. Once he had been the kind of man who said nothing, rather than lie; but now he said everything he thought, which is not necessarily more honest. He stalked through the streets of Paris, muttering, "You are not French, none of you are—you are imposters! What have you done with my own people, where have they gone?" It was impossible for such a search to go unnoticed for long. Children as well as grown men began to run up to him on the street, begging, "Monsieur Moscowitz, regardez-moi, je suis vraiment français!" He would look at them once, speak or say nothing, and stride on. The rejected quite often wept as they looked after him.

There were some Frenchman, of both high and low estate, who became furious with Mr. Moscowitz—who was he, a first generation American, French only by extremely dubious mutation, to claim that they, whose ancestors had either laid the foundations of European culture, or died, ignorant, in its defense, were not French? But in the main, a deep sadness shadowed the country. An inquisitor had come among them, an apostle, and they had been found wanting. France mourned herself, and began wondering if she had ever existed at all; for Mr. Moscowitz hunted hungrily through all recorded French history, searching for his lost kindred, and cried at last that from the days of the first paintings in the Dordogne caves, there was no evidence that a single true Frenchman had ever fought a battle, or written a poem, or built a city, or comprehended a law of the universe. "Dear France," he said with a kind of cold sorrow, "for all the Frenchmen who have ever turned your soil, you might have remained virgin and empty all these centuries. As far back in time as I can see, there has never been one, until now."

The President of France, a great man, his own monument in his own time, a man who had never wavered in the certainty that he himself was France, wrote Mr. Moscowitz a letter in which he stated: "We have always been French. We have been Gauls and Goths, Celts and Franks, but we have always been French. We, and no one else, have made France live. What else should we be but French?"

Mr. Moscowitz wrote him a letter in answer, saying, "You have inhabited France, you have occupied it, you have held it in trust if you like, and you have served it varyingly well—but that has not made you French, nor will it, any more than generations of monkeys breeding in a lion's empty cage will become lions. As for what else you may truly be, that you will have to find out for yourselves, as I had to find out."

The President, who was a religious man, thought of Belshazzar's Feast. He called on Mr. Moscowitz at his home in Passy, to the awe of Mrs. Moscowitz, who knew that ambassadors had lived out their terms in Paris without ever meeting the President face to face. The President said, "M. Moscowitz, you are denying us the right to believe in ourselves as a continuity, as part of the process of history. No nation can exist without that belief."

"Monsieur le Président, je suis désolée," answered Mr. Moscowitz. He had grown blue-gray and thin, bones hinting more and more under the once-genial flesh.

"We have done you honor," mused the President, "though I admit before you say it that we believed we were honoring ourselves. But you turn us into ghosts, Monsieur Moscowitz, homeless figments, and our grip on the earth is too precarious at the best of times for me to allow you to do this. You must be silent, or I will make you so. I do not want to, but I will."

Mr. Moscowitz smiled, almost wistfully, and the President grew afraid. He had a sudden vision of Mr. Moscowitz banishing him and every other soul in France with a single word, a single gesture; and in that moment's vision it seemed to him that they all went away like clouds, leaving Mr. Moscowitz to dance by himself in cobwebbed Paris on Bastille Day. The President shivered and cried out, "What is it that you want of us? What should we be? What is it, to be French, what does the stupid word mean?"

Mr. Moscowitz answered him. "I do not know, any more than you do. But I do not need to ask." His eyes were full of tears and his nose was running. "The French are inside me," he said, "singing and stamping to be let out, all of them, the wonderful children that I will never see. I am like Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land, but never set his own foot down there. All fathers are a little like Moses."

The next day, Mr. Moscowitz put on his good clothes and asked his wife to pack him a lunch. "With an apple, please," he said, "and the good Camembert, and a whole onion. Two apples." His new hat, cocked at a youthful angle, scraped coldly beside her eye when he kissed her. She did not hold him a moment longer than she ever had when he kissed her goodbye. Then Mr. Moscowitz walked away from her, and into legend.

No one ever saw him again. There were stories about him, as there still are; rumors out of Concarneau, and Sète, and Lille, from misty cities and yellow villages. Most of the tales concerned strange, magic infants, as marvelous in the families that bore them as merchildren in herring nets. The President sent out his messengers, but quite often there were no such children at all, and when there were they were the usual cases of cross-eyes and extra fingers, webbed feet and cauls. The President was relieved, and said so frankly to Mrs. Moscowitz. "With all respectful sympathy, Madame," he told her, "the happiest place for your husband now is a fairy story. It is warm inside a myth, and safe, quite safe, and the company is of the best. I envy him, for I will never know such companions. I will get politicians and generals."

"And I will get his pension and his belongings," Mrs. Moscowitz said to herself. "And I will know solitude."

The President went on, "He was mad, of course, your husband, but what a mission he set himself! It was worthy of one of Charlemagne's paladins, or of your—" he fumbled through his limited stock of nonpartisan American heroes—"your Johnny Appleseed. Yes."

The President died in the country, an old man, and Mrs. Moscowitz in time died alone in Passy. She never returned to America, even to visit, partly out of loyalty to Mr. Moscowitz's dream, and partly because if there is one thing besides cheese that the French do better than any other people, it is the careful and assiduous tending of a great man's widow. She wanted for nothing to the end of her days, except her husband—and, in a very real sense, France was all she had left of him.

That was a long time ago, but the legends go on quietly, not only of the seafoam children who will create France, but of Mr. Moscowitz as well. In Paris and the provinces, anyone who listens long enough can hear stories of the American who became French. He wanders through the warm nights and the cold, under stars and streetlamps, walking with the bright purpose of a child who has slipped out of his parents' sight and is now free to do as he pleases. In the country, they say that he is on his way to see how his children are growing up, and perhaps there are mothers who lull their own children with that story, or warn them with it when they behave badly. But Parisians like to dress things up, and as they tell it, Mr. Moscowitz is never alone. Cyrano is with him, and St. Joan, Roland, D'Artagnan, and Villon—and there are others. The light of them brightens the road for Mr. Moscowitz to see his way.

But even in Paris there are people, especially women, who say that Mr. Moscowitz's only companion on his journey is Mrs. Moscowitz herself, holding his arm or running to catch up. And she deserves to be there, they will tell you, for she would have been glad of any child at all; and if he was the one who dreamed and loved France so much, still and all, she suffered.

Trunk and Disorderly

Charles Stross

Charles Stross's (www.antipope.org/charlie/) first story appeared in the Fall 1986 issue of Interzone, but he first attracted wider attention with 2001 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award nominee "Antibodies" and novella "A Colder War." His major work to date is the "Accelerando" sequence of stories, published as the novel Accelerando, which detail the lives of three generations in a family making its way through a Vingean Singularity. Stross's first collection Toast: And Other Rusted Futures was published in 2002, and second novel and Hugo nominee Singularity Sky appeared in 2003. His short story "The Concrete Jungle" won the Hugo Award in 2005. Almost overwhelmingly prolific, Stross has published fourteen novels including most recently The Merchants' War and Halting State. Upcoming is a new science fiction novel, Saturn's Children.

Over the past several years, Stross has developed into one of the most interesting and entertaining science fiction writers working today. The very funny story that follows takes the humor of P. G. Wodehouse and deftly sets it in the social whirl of a far future Asteroid Belt community.

1. In which Laura Departs and Fiona makes a Request

"I want you to know, darling, that I'm leaving you for another sex robot—and she's twice the man you'll ever be," Laura explained as she flounced over to the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil behind her.

Our arguments always began like that: this one was following the script perfectly. I followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I'd missed this time. "Laura—"

She stopped abruptly, a faint whine coming from her ornately sculpted left knee. "I'm leaving," she told me, deliberately pitching her voice in a modish mechanical monotone. "You can't stop me. You're not paying my maintenance. I'm a free woman, and I don't have to put up with your moods!"

The hell of it is, she was right. I'd been neglecting her lately, being overly preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. "I'm terribly sorry," I said. "But can we talk about this later? You don't have to walk out right this instant—"

"There's nothing to talk about." She jerked into motion again, reaching for the door handle. "You've been ignoring me for months, darling: I'm sick of trying to get through to you! You said last time that you'd try not to be so distant, but look how that turned out." She sighed and froze the pose for a moment, the personification of glittering mechanistic melodrama. "You didn't mean it. I'm sick of waiting for you, Ralph! If you really loved me you'd face up to the fact that you're an obsessive-compulsive, and get your wetware fixed so that you could pay me the attention I deserve. Until then, I'm out of here!"

The door opened. She spun on one chromed stiletto heel, and swept out of my life in a swish of antique Givenchy and ozone.

"Dash it all, not again!" I leaned my forehead against the wall. "Why now, of all times?" Picking a fight, then leaving me right before a drop was one of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually came back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from witnessing me scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never failed to make me feel like an absolute bounder at the time; it's a low blow to strike a cove right before he tries to drill a hole in the desert at Mach twenty-five, what? But you can't take femmes for granted, whether they be squish or clankie, and her accusation wasn't, I am bound to admit, entirely baseless.

I wandered into the parlor and stood between the gently rusting ancestral space suits, overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless tension. I couldn't decide whether I should go back to the simulator and practice my thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab of ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric re-entry, a searing blow-torch flare of hot plasma surging past, bare centimeters beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate dilemmas; there's something terribly non-U about having to actually think about things.

You can never get in too much practice before a freestyle competition, and I had seen enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the desert that I was under no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as this race was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand, Laura's walk-out had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and I'm never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a long, hot bath and a bottle of sake would get me over it so I could practice later; but tonight was the pre-drop competitors' dinner. The club prefers members to get their crashing and burning done before the race—something to do with minimizing our third-party insurance premium, I gather—so it's fried snacks all round, then a serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old fire water all night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple or topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat obtrusively.

"Ralph? Ralphie? Are you all right?"

I didn't need the screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical of her to call at a time like this. "Yes," I said wearily.

"You don't sound it!" she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative emotions are an indicator of felonious intent.

"Laura just walked out on me again and I've got a drop coming up tomorrow," I moaned.

"Oh Ralphie, stop angsting! She'll be back in a week when she's run the script. You worry too much about her, she can look after herself. I was calling to ask, are you going to be around next week? I've been invited to a party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country skiing season on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in pregnant unexpectedly and my herpetologist is having another sex change so I was just hoping you'd be able to look after Jeremy for me while I'm gone, just for a couple of days or maybe a week or two—"

Jeremy was Fiona's pet dwarf mammoth, an orange-brown knee-high bundle of hairy malevolence. Last time I'd looked after Jeremy he puked in my bed—under the duvet—while Laura and I were hosting a formal orgy for the Tsarevitch of Ceres, who was traveling incognito to the inner system because of some boring edict by the Orthodox Patriarch condemning the fleshpits of Venus. Then there's the time Jeremy got at the port, then went on the rampage and ate Cousin Branwyn's favorite skirt when we took him to Landsdown Palace for a weekend with Fuffy Morgan, even though we'd locked him in one of the old guard towers with a supply of whatever it is that dwarf mammoths are supposed to eat. You really can't take him anywhere—he's a revolting beast. Not to mention an alcoholic one.

"Must I?" I asked.

"Don't whine!" Fi said brightly. "Nobody will ever take you seriously if you whine, Ralphie. Anyway, you owe me a favor. Several favors, actually. If I hadn't covered up for you that time when Boris Oblomov and you got drunk and took Uncle Featherstonehaugh's yacht out for a spin around the moon without checking the anti-matter reserve in the starboard gravity polarizer . . .."

"Yes, Fi," I said wearily, when she finally let me get a word in edge-ways: "I surrender. I'll take Jeremy. But I don't promise I'll be able to look after him if I die on the drop. You realize it's under mortal jeopardy rules? And I can't guarantee I'll be able to protect him from Laura if she shows up again running that bestiality mod your idiot pal Larry thought it would be a good idea to install on her when she was high on pink noise that time—"

"That's enough about Larry," Fi said in a voice dripping liquid helium. "You know I'm not walking out with him anymore. You'll look after Jeremy for two weeks and that's enough for me. He's been a little sulky lately but I'm sure you'd know all about that. I'll make certain he's backed up first then I'll drop him off on my way to Saó Paolo skyport, right?"

"What ho," I said dispiritedly, and put the phone down. Then I snapped my fingers for a chair, sat down, and held my head in my hands for a while. My sister was making a backup of her mammoth's twisted little psyche to ensure Jeremy stayed available for future torments: nevertheless she wouldn't forgive me if I killed the brute. Femmes! U or non-U, they're equally demanding. The chair whimpered unhappily as it massaged my tensed-up spine and shoulders, but there was no escaping the fact that I was stressed-out. Tomorrow was clearly going to be one of those days, and I hadn't even scheduled the traditional pre-drop drink with the boys yet . . ..

2. The New Butler calls

I was lying on the bottom of the swimming pool in the conservatory at the back of Chateau Pookie, breathing alcohol-infused air through a hose and feeling sorry for myself, when the new butler found me. At least, I think that's what I was doing. I was pretty far-gone, conflicted between the need to practice my hypersonic p-waggling before the drop and the urge to drink Laura's absence out of my system. All I remember is a vague rippling blue curtain of sunlight on scrolled ironwork—the ceiling—and then a huge, stark shadow looming over me, talking in the voice of polite authority.

"Good afternoon, Sir. According to the diary, Sir is supposed to be receiving his sister's mammoth in the front parlor in approximately twenty minutes. Would Sir care to be sober for the occasion? And what suit should Sir like to wear?"

This was about four more sirs than I could take lying down. "Nnngk gurgle," I said, sitting up unsteadily. The breather tube wasn't designed for speech. Choking, I spat it out. "M'gosh and please excuse me, but who the hell are you?"

"Alison Feng." She bowed stiffly, from the waist. "The agency sent me, to replace your last, ah, man." She was dressed in the stark black and white of a butler, and she did indeed have the voice—some very expensive training, not to mention discreet laryngeal engineering, went into producing that accent of polite condescension, the steering graces that could direct even the richest and most irritable employer in directions less conducive to their social embarrassment. But—

"You're my new butler?" I managed to choke out.

"I believe so." One chiseled eyebrow signaled her skepticism.

"Oh, oh jolly good, then, that squishie." A thought, marinating in my sozzled subconscious, floated to the surface. "You, um, know why my last butler quit?"

"No, sir." Her expression didn't change. "In my experience it is best to approach one's prospective employers with an open mind."

"It was my sister's mammoth's fault," I managed to say before a fit of coughing overcame me. "Listen, just take the bloody thing and see it's locked in the number three guest dungeon, the one that's fitted out for clankie doms. It can try'n destroy anything it bally likes in there, it won't get very far an' we can fix it later. Hic. Glue the door shut, or weld it or something—one of her boyfriends trained the thing to pick locks with its trunk. Got a sober-up?"

"Of course, Sir." She smiled and snapped her fingers, and blow me if there wasn't one of those devilish red capsules balanced between her white-gloved digits.

"Ugh." I took it and dry-swallowed, then hiccupped. "Fiona's animal tamer'll probably drop the monster off in the porch but I'd better get up'n'case sis shows." I hiccupped again, acid indigestion clenching my stomach. "Urgh. Wossa invitation list for tonight?"

"Everything is perfectly under control," my new butler said, a trifle patronizingly. "Now if Sir would care to step inside the dryer while I lay out your suit—"

I surrendered to the inevitable. After all, once you've accepted delivery of a dwarf mammoth on behalf of your sister nothing worse can happen to you all day, can it?

Unfortunately, I was wrong. Fiona's chauffeuse did indeed deposit Jeremy, but on a schedule of her own choosing. She must have already been on the way while Fi was nattering on the blower. While Miss Feng was introducing herself, she was sneakily decanting the putrid proboscidean into the ornamental porch via her limousine's airlock. She accomplished this with stealth and panache, and made a successful retreat, but not before she completed my sister's act of domestic sabotage by removing the frilly pink restraining rope that was all that kept Jeremy from venting his spleen on everything within reach. Which he commenced to do all over Great-uncle Arnold's snooker table, which I was only looking after while he was out-system on business. It was the triumphant squeaking that clued me in that we had problems—normally Jeremy manages to achieve a preternaturally silent approach while he sneaks up on one with mischief in what passes for his mind—as I headed toward the stairs to my dressing room.

"Help me," I said, gesturing at the porch, from which a duet for Hell's piccolo and bull in a china shop was emanating.

The butler immediately rose in my estimation by producing a bolas. "Would this serve?" she asked.

"Yes. Only she's a bit short for a mammoth—"

Too late. Miss Feng's throw was targeted perfectly, and it would have succeeded if Jeremy had been built to the scale of a typical pachyderm. Alas, the whirling balls flew across the room and tangled in the chandelier while Jeremy, trumpeting and honking angrily, raised his tusks and charged at my kneecaps. "Oh dear," said the new butler.

I blinked and began to move. I was too slow, the sober-up still fighting the residual effects of the alcohol in my blood. Jeremy veered toward me, tusks raised menacingly to threaten the old family jewels. I began to turn, and was just raising my arms to fend off the monster (who appeared dead-set on editing the family tree to the benefit of Fiona's line) when Miss Feng leaned sideways and in one elegant gesture ripped the ancient lace curtains right off the rail and swiped them across my assailant's tusks.

The next minute remains, mercifully, a confused blur. Somehow my butler and I mammoth-handled the kicking and struggling—not to mention squealing and secreting—Jeremy up the rear staircase and into the second best guest suite's dungeon. Miss Feng braced herself against the door while I rushed dizzily to the parlor and returned with a tube of InstaSteel Bulkhead Bond, with which we reinforced the stout oak partition. Finally my stomach rebelled, quite outraged by the combination of sober-up and adrenaline, at which point Miss Feng diffidently suggested I proceed to the master bathroom and freshen up while she dealt with the porch, the pachyderm, and my suit in descending order of priorities.

By the time I'd cleaned up, Miss Feng had laid a freshly manufactured suit for me on the dresser. "I took the liberty of arranging for a limousine to your club, Sir," she said, almost apologetically. "It is approaching eighteen o'clock: one wouldn't want to be late."

"Eighteen—" I blinked. "Oh dear, that's dashed awkward."

"Indeed." She watched me cautiously. "Ah, about the agency—"

I waved my hand dismissively. "If you can handle Jeremy I see no reason why you couldn't also handle Great-uncle Arnold when he gets back from Proxima Tau Herpes or wherever he's gone. Not to mention the Dread Aunts, bless 'em. Assuming, that is, you want the job—"

Miss Feng inclined her head. "Certainly one is prepared to assume the role for the duration of the probationary period." Sotto voce she added, almost too quietly for me to catch: "Although continuing thereafter presupposed that one or both of us survives the experience . . .."

"Well, I'm glad that's sorted." I sniffed. "I'd better trot! If you could see the snooker table goes for repair and look to the curtains, I'll be off, what-what?"

"Indeed, Sir." She nodded as if about to say something else, thought better of it, and then held the door open for me. "Good night, Sir."

3. The Dangerous Drop Club

I spent the evening at the Dangerous Drop Club, tackling a rather different variety of dangerous drop from the one I'd be confronting on the morrow. I knew perfectly well at the time that this was stupid (not to mention rash to the point of inviting the attention of the Dread Aunts, those intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic), but I confess I was so rattled by the combination of Laura's departure, my new butler's arrival, and the presence of the horrible beast in room six that for the life of me I simply couldn't bring myself to engage in any activity more constructive than killing my own brain cells.

Boris Kaminski was present of course, boasting in a low-key manner about how he was going to win the race and buy everyone who mattered—the other competitors, in other words—as many drinks as they would accept. That was his prerogative, for, as the ancients would put it, there's no prize for second place; he wasn't the only one attempting to seduce his comrades into suicide through self-indulgence. "We fly tomorrow, chaps, and some of us might not be coming back! Crack open the vaults and sample the finest vintages. Otherwise you may never know . . . ." Boris always gets a bit like that before a drop, morbidly maudlin in a gloating kind of way. Besides, it's a good excuse for draining the cellars, and Boris's credit is good for it—"Kaminski" is not his real name but the name he uses when he wants to be a fabulously rich playboy with none of the headaches and anxieties that go with his rank. This evening he was attired in an outrageous outfit modeled on something Tsar Putin the First might have worn when presiding over an acid rave in the barbaric dark ages before the re-enlightenment. He'd probably found it in the back of his big brother's wardrobe.

"We know you only want to get us drunk so you can take unfair advantage of us," joshed Tolly Forsyth, raising his glass of Chateau !Kung, "but I say let's drink a toast to you! Feet cold and bottoms down."

"Glug glug," buzzed Toadsworth, raising a glass with his telescoping sink-plunger thingie. Glasses were ceremoniously drained. (At least, that's what I think he said—his English is rather sadly deficient, and one of the rules of the club is: no neural prostheses past the door. Which makes it a bit dashed hard when you're dealing with fellows who can't tell a fuck from a frappé I can tell you, like some high-bandwidth clankie heirs, but that's what you get for missing out on a proper classical education, undead languages and all, say I.) Goblets were ceremonially drained in a libation to the forthcoming toast race.

"It's perfectly all right to get me drunk," said Marmaduke Bott, his monocle flashing with the ruby fire of antique stock-market ticker displays. "I'm sure I won't win, anyway! I'm sitting this one out in the bleachers."

"Drink is good," agreed Edgestar Wolfblack, injecting some kind of hideously fulminating fluorocarbon lubricant into one of his six knees. Most of us in the club are squishies, but Toadsworth and Edgestar are both clankies. However, while the Toadster's knobbly conical exterior conceals what's left of his old squisher body, tucked decently away inside his eye-turret, Edgestar has gone the whole hog and uploaded himself into a ceramic exoskeleton with eight or nine highly specialized limbs. He looks like the bastard offspring of a multi-tool and a mangabot. "Carbon is the new—" his massively armored eyebrows furrowed—"black?" He's a nice enough chappie and he went to the right school, but he was definitely at the back of the queue the day they were handing the cortical upgrades out.

"Another wee dram for me," I requested, holding out my snifter for a passing bee-bot to vomit the nectar into. "I got a new butler today," I confided. "Nearly blew it, though. Sis dumped her pet mammoth on me again and the butler had to clean up before I'd even had time to fool her into swearing the oath of allegiance."

"How totally horrible," Abdul said in a tone that prompted me to glance at him sharply. He smirked. "And how is dear Fiona doing this week? It's ages since she last came to visit."

"She said something about the Olympic skiing season, I think. And then she's got a few ships to launch. Nothing very important aside from that, just the après ski salon circuit." I yawned, trying desperately to look unimpressed. Abdul is perhaps the only member of the club who genuinely outranks Boris. Boris is constrained to use a nom de guerre because of his position as heir to the throne of all the Russias—at least, all the Russias that lie between Mars and Jupiter—but Abdul doesn't even bother trying to disguise himself. He's the younger brother of His Excellency the Most Spectacularly Important Emir of Mars, and when you've got that much clout you get to do whatever you want. Especially if it involves trying to modify the landscape at Mach twenty rather than assassinating your elder siblings, the traditional sport of kings. Abdul is quite possibly certifiably insane, having graduated to orbital freestyle re-entry surfing by way of technical diving on Europa and naturist glacier climbing on Pluto—and he doesn't even have my unfortunate neuroendocrine disorder as an excuse—but he's a fundamentally sound chappie at heart.

"Hah. Well, we'll just have to invite her along to the party afterward, won't we?" He chuckled.

"Par-ty?" Toadsworth beeped up.

"Of course. It'll be my hundredth drop, and I'm having a party." Abdul smirked some more—he had a very knowing smirk—and sipped his eighty-year Inverteuchtie. "Everyone who survives is invited! Bottoms up, chaps?"

"Bottoms up," I echoed, raising my glass. "Tally ho!"

4. The Sport of Kings

The day of the drop dawned bright and cold—at least it was bright and cold when I went out on the balcony beside the carport to suit up for my ride.

Somewhat to my surprise, Miss Feng was already up and waiting for me with a hot flask of coffee, a prophylactic sober-up, and a good-luck cigar. "Is this competition entirely safe, Sir?" she enquired as I chugged my espresso.

"Oh, absolutely not," I reassured her, "but I'll feel much better afterward! Nothing like realizing you're millimeters away from flaming meteoritic death to get the old blood pumping, what?"

"One couldn't say." Miss Feng looked doubtful as she accepted the empty flask. "One's normal response to incendiary situations that get the blood pumping is a wound dressing and an ambulance. Or to keep the employer from walking into the death trap in the first place. Ahem. I assume Sir intends to survive the experience?"

"That's the idea." I grinned like an idiot, feeling the familiar pulse of excitement. It takes a lot to drive off the black dog of depression, but dodging the bullet tends to send it to the kennels for a while. "By the way, if Laura calls could you tell her I'm dying heroically to defend her virtue or something? I'll see her after—oh, that reminds me! Abdul al-Matsumoto has invited us—all the survivors, I mean—to a weekend party at his place on Mars. So if you could see that the gig is ready to leave after my drop as soon as I've dressed for dinner, and I don't suppose you could make sure there's a supply of food for the little monster, could you? If we leave him locked in the garret dungeon he can't get into trouble, not beyond eating the curtains—"

Miss Feng cleared her throat and looked at me reproachfully. "Sir did promise his sister to look after the beast in person, didn't he?"

I stared at her, somewhat taken aback. "Dash it all, are you implying . . . ?"

Miss Feng handed me my pre-emptive victory cigar. She continued, in a thoughtful tone of voice: "Has Sir considered that it might be in his best interests—should he value the good opinion of his sister—to bring Jeremy along? After all, Lady Fiona's on Mars, too, even if she's preoccupied with the après ski circuit. If by some mischance she were to visit the Emir's palace and find Sir sans Jeremy it might be more than trivially embarrassing."

"Dash it, you're right. I suppose I'll have to pack the bloody pachyderm, won't I? What a bore. Will he fit in the trunk?"

Miss Feng sighed, very quietly. "I believe that may be a remote theoretical possibility. I shall endeavor to find out while Sir is enjoying himself not dying."

"Try beer," I called as I picked up my surfboard and climbed aboard the orbital delivery jitney. "Jeremy loves beer!" Miss Feng bowed as the door closed. I hope she doesn't give him too much, I thought. Then the gravity squirrelizer chittered to itself angrily, decided it was on the wrong planet, and tried to rectify the situation in its own inimitable way. I lay back and waited for orbit. I wasn't entirely certain of the wisdom of my proposed course of action—there are few predicaments as grim as facing a mammoth with a hangover across the breakfast table—but Miss Feng seemed like a competent sort, and I supposed I'd just have to trust her judgment. So I took a deep breath, waited another sixty seconds (until the alarm chimed), then opened the door and stepped off the running board over three hundred kilometers of hostile vacuum.

The drop went smoothly—as I suppose you guessed, or I wouldn't be here to bend your ear with the story, what? The adrenaline rush of standing astride a ten-centimeter-thick surfboard as it bumps and vibrates furiously in the hypersonic air-flow, trying to throw you off into the blast-furnace tornado winds of re-entry, is absolutely indescribable. So is the sight of the circular horizon flattening and growing, coming up to batter at your feet with angry fists of plasma. Ah, what rhapsody! What delight! I haven't got a poetic bone in my body, but when you tap into Toadsworth outside of the clubhouse's suppressor field that's the kind of narcotic drivel he'll feed you. I think he's a jolly good poet, for an obsessive-compulsive clankie with a staircase phobia and knobbly protrusions; but, at any rate, a more accurate description of competitive orbital re-entry diving I haven't heard from anyone recently.

A drop doesn't take long. The dangerous stage lasts maybe twenty minutes from start to finish, and only the last five minutes is hot. Then you slow to subsonic velocity and let go of your smoldering surfboard, and pray to your ancestors that your parachute is folded smartly, because it would be mortifying to have to be rescued by the referee's skiff. Especially if they don't get to you until after you complete your informal enquiry into lithobraking, eh?

There was a high overcast as I came hurtling in across Utah, and I think I might have accidentally zigged instead of zagging a little too firmly as I tried to see past a wall of cloud ahead and below me, because when my fireball finally dissipated I found myself skidding across the sky about fifty kilometers off course. This would be embarrassing enough on its own, but then my helmet helpfully highlighted three other competitors—Abdul among them!—who were much closer to the target zone. I will confess I muttered an unsportingly rude word at that juncture, but the game's the thing and it isn't over 'til it's over.

In the end I touched down a mere thirty-three thousand meters off-base, and a couple of minutes later the referees ruled I was third on target. Perry O'Peary—who had been leading me—managed to make himself the toast of the match before he reached the tropopause by way of a dodgy ring seal on his left knee. Dashed bad play, that, but at least he died with his boots on—even if they were glowing red-hot and welded to his ankles.

I caught a lift the rest of the way to the drop base from one of the referee skiffs. As I tromped across the dusty desert floor in my smoldering armor, feeling fully alive for the first time in weeks, I found the party already in full swing. Abdul's entourage, all wearing traditional kimonos and burnooses, had brought along a modified camel that widdled champagne in copious quantities. He held up a huge platinum pitcher: "Drinks are on me!" he yodeled as Tolly Forsyth and some rum cove of a Grand Vizier—Toshiro Ibn Cut-Throat, I think—hoisted him atop their shoulders and danced a victory mazurka.

"Jolly good show, old son!" I called, ditching my helmet and gloves gratefully and pouring a beaker of bubbly over my steaming head. "Bottoms up!"

"B'm's up undeed!" Abdul sprayed camel flux everywhere in salute. He was well into the spirit of things, I could tell; indeed, the spirit of things was well into him.

Ibn Cut-Throat's kid brother sidled up behind me. "If Ralphie-sama would care to accompany me to His Majesty's brother's pleasure barge, we will be departing for Mars as soon as the rest of the guests arrive," he intimated.

"Rest of the guests? Capital, capital!" I glanced round in search of my clankie doxy, but there was no sign of Laura. Which was dashed strange, for she'd normally be all over me by this point in the proceedings: my nearly being turned off in front of an audience usually turned her on like a knife-switch. "Who else is coming?"

"Lots of people." Ibn Cut-Throat Junior looked furtive: "It's a very big party, as befits the prince's birthday. Did you know it was his birthday . . . ? It's a theme party, of course, in honor of the adoptive ancestors of his ancient line, the house of Saud."

Abdul al-Matsumoto is as much an authentic prince of Araby as I am a scion of the MacGregor, but that's the price we all pay for being descended from the nouveau riche who survived the Great Downsizing hundreds of years ago. Our ancestors bought the newly vacated titles of nobility, and consequently we descendants are forced to learn the bally traditions that go with them. I spent years enduring lessons in dwarf-tossing and caber-dancing, not to mention damaging my hearing learning to play the electric bagpipes, but Abdul has it worse: he's required by law to go around everywhere with a tea-towel on his head and to refrain from drinking fermented grape juice unless it's been cycled through the kidneys of a re-engineered dromedary. This aristocracy lark has its down side, you mark my words.

"A theme party," I mused, removing my face from my cup. "That sounds like fun. But I was planning on taking my gig. Is that okey-dokey, as they say? Is there room in the imperial marina?"

"Of course," said the vizier, leering slightly as a shapely femme wearing a belly-dancer's costume sashayed past. I noticed with distaste his hairless face and the pair of wizened testicles on a leather cord around his neck: some people think too much testosterone makes a cove stupid, but there's such a thing as going too far, what? "Just remember, it's a fancy-dress party. The theme is the thousand nights and one night, in honor of and for the selection of His Excellency's newest concuboid. His Excellency says you should feel free to bring a guest or two if you like. If you need an outfit—"

"I'm sure my household wardrobe will be able to see to my needs," I said, perhaps a trifle sharply. "See you there!"

Ibn Cut-Throat bowed and scraped furiously as he backed away from me. Something odd's going on here, I realized, but before I could put my finger on it there was a whoosh and I saw the familiar sight of my gig—well, actually it's Uncle Featherstonehaugh's, but as he's not due back for six years I don't think that matters too much—descending to a perfect three-point landing.

I walked over to it slowly, lost in thought, only to meet Miss Feng marching down the ramp. "I didn't know you could fly," I said.

"My usual employer requires a full pilot's qualification, Sir. Military unrestricted license with interstellar wings and combat certification." She cleared her throat: "Among other skills." She took in my appearance, from scorched ablative boots to champagne hairstyle: "I've taken the liberty of laying out Sir's smoking jacket in the master stateroom. Can I suggest a quick shower might refresh the parts that Sir's friends' high spirits have already reached?"

"You may suggest anything you like, Miss Feng, I have complete confidence in your professional discretion. I should warn you I have a guest tagging along, but he won't be any trouble. If you show him to the lounge while I change, we shall be able to depart promptly. I don't suppose you've heard anything from Laura?"

She shook her head minutely. "Not so much as a peep, Sir." She stepped aside. "So, I'm to set course for Mars as soon as the guest is aboard? Very good, Sir. I shall be on the bridge if you need me."

It appeared that Miss Feng was not only an accomplished butler, but a dashed fine pilot as well. Would miracles never cease?

5. Miss Feng serves the Wrong Beer

Uncle Featherstonehaugh's boat is furnished in white oak panels with brass trim, ochre crushed velvet curtains, and gently hissing gas lamps. A curving sofa extends around the circumference of the lounge, and for those tiresome long voyages to the outer system there are cozy staterooms accessible through hidden sliding panels in the walls. It is a model of understated classical luxury in which a cove and his fellows can get discreetly bladdered while watching the glorious relativistic fireworks in the crystal screen that forms the ceiling. However, for the journey to Abdul's pleasure dome on Mars it suffered from three major drawbacks. For one thing, in a fit of misplaced bonhomie I'd offered Edgestar Wolfblack a lift, and old Edgy wasn't the best company for a post-drop pre-prandial, on account of his preferred tipples being corrosive or hypergolic, or both. Secondly, Laura was still making her absence felt. And finally, as the icing on the cake, so to speak, Miss Feng had locked Jeremy in the luggage compartment. He was kicking up a racket as only a sober dwarf mammoth with a hangover can, and I could barely hear myself think over the din.

"Dash it all, how much beer did you give him?" I asked my butler.

"Two liters, Sir," Miss Feng replied. "Of the rather elderly Bragote from the back of your uncle's laboratory. I judged it the least likely to be missed."

"Oh dear God!" I cried.

"Bragh-ought?" echoed Edgy, as a plaintive squeal and a loud thud echoed from the under floor bay. By the sound of things Jeremy was trying to dash his brains out on the undercarriage. (Unfortunately a dwarf mammoth's skull is thick enough to repel meteors and small anti-matter weapons.)

"Was that a mistake?" Miss Feng enquired, unexpectedly tentatively.

I sighed. "You're new to the household, so I suppose you weren't to know this, but anything Uncle Featherstonehaugh brewed is best treated as an experiment in creative chemical warfare. He was particularly keen on the Bragote: it's a mediaeval recipe and it requires a few years to mature to the consistency of fine treacle, but once you dilute the alcohol it's an excellent purgative. Or so I'm told," I added hastily, not wanting to confess to any teenage indiscretions.

"Oh dear." Her brow wrinkled. "One suspected it was a little past its prime. There is another firkin in the hold, just in case it becomes necessary to sedate Jeremy again."

"I don't think that will work," I said regretfully. "He's not entirely stupid. Uncle was working on a thesis that the Black Death of 1349 wasn't actually a plague but a hangover."

"Blackdeath? Is no posthuman of that nomenclature in my clade," Edgy complained.

BUMP went the floor beneath my feet, causing my teeth to vibrate. "Only two hours to Mars," Miss Feng observed. "If Sir will excuse me, I have to see to his costume before arrival." She retreated into one of the staterooms, leaving me alone with old Edgy and the pachydermal punctuation.

6. Pleasure Domes of Mars: A Primer

I arrived on Mars somewhat rattled, but physically none the worse for wear. Miss Feng had rustled up a burnoose, djellaba, and antique polyester two-piece for me from somewhere, so that I looked most dashing, absolutely in character as a highly authentic Leisure Suit Larry of Arabia. I tried to inveigle her into costume, but she demurred: "I am your butler, Sir, not a partygoer in my own capacity. It wouldn't be right," she said, tucking an emergency vial of after-shave in my breast pocket. It's hard to argue with such certainty, although I have a feeling that she only said it because she didn't approve of the filmy harem pants and silver chainmail brassiere I'd brought along in hope of being able to tempt Laura into them. Edgestar we dressed in a rug and trained to spit on demand: he could be my camel, just as long as nobody expected him to pass champagne through his reactor's secondary coolant circuit. Jeremy emerged from storage pallid and shaking, so Miss Feng and I improvised a leash and decided to introduce him as the White Elephant. Not that a real White Elephant would have menaced the world with such a malign, red-rimmed glare—or have smelled so unpleasantly fusty—but you can't have everything.

A word about Abdul's digs. Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger brother of the Emir of Mars, lives in a madly gothic palace on the upper slopes of Elysium Mons, thirteen kilometers above the dusty plain. Elysium Mons is so big you'd hardly know you were on a mountain, so at some time in the preceding five centuries one of Abdul's more annoying ancestors vandalized the volcano by carving out an areophysical folly, a half-scale model of Mount Everest protruding from the rim of the caldera. Thus, despite the terraforming that has turned the crumbly old war god into a bit of a retirement farm these days, Abdul's pleasure dome really is a dome, of the old-fashioned do not break glass, do not let air out (unless you want to die) variety.

Ground Control talked Miss Feng down into the marina below the sparkly glass facets of the dome, then sent a crawler tunnel to lock on to the door before old Edgy could leap out onto the surface and test his vacuum seals.

The door opened with a clunk. "Let's go, what?" I asked Jeremy. Jeremy sat down, swiveled one jaundiced eye toward me, and emitted a plaintive honk. "Be like that, then," I muttered, bending to pick him up. Dwarf mammoths are heavy, even in Martian gravity, but I managed to tuck him under my arm and, thus encumbered, led the way down the tube toward Abdul's reception.

If you are ever invited to a party by a supreme planetary overlord's spoiled playboy of a younger brother, you can expect to get tiresomely lost unless you remember to download a map of the premises into your monocle first. Abdul's humble abode boasts 2,428 rooms, of which 796 are bedrooms, 915 are bathrooms, 62 are offices, and 147 are dungeons. (There is even a choice of four different Planetary Overlord Command Bunkers, each with their own color-coordinated suite of Doomsday Weapon Control Consoles, for those occasions on which one is required to entertain multiple planetary overlords.)

If the palace was maintained the old-fashioned way—by squishie servants—it would be completely unmanageable: but it was designed in the immediate aftermath of the Martian hyper-scabies outbreak of 2407 that finished off those bits of the solar system that hadn't already been clobbered by the Great Downsizing. Consequently it's full of shiny clicky things that scuttle about when you're not watching and get underfoot as they polish the marble flags and repair the amazingly intricate lapis lazuli mosaics and re-fill the oil lamps with extra-virgin olive oil. It still needs a sizable human staff to run it, but not the army you'd expect for a pile several sizes larger than the Vatican Hilton.

I bounced out of the boarding tube into the entrance hall and right into the outstretched arms of Abdul, flanked by two stern, silent types with swords, and a supporting cast of houris, hashishin, and hangers-on. "Ralphie-san!" he cried, kissing me on both cheeks and turning to show me off to the crowd. "I want you all to meet my honored guest, Ralph MacDonald Suzuki of MacDonald, Fifth Earl of That Clan, a genuine Japanese Highland Laird from old Scotland! Ralphie is a fellow skydiver and all-around good egg. Ralph, this is—harrumph!—Vladimir Illich of Ulianov, Chief Commissar of the Soviet Onion." Ulianov grinned: under the false pate I could see it was our old drinking chum Boris the Tsarevitch. "And this—why, Edgy! I didn't recognize you in that! Is it a llama? How very realistic!"

"No, is meant to be a monkey," explained Wolfblack, twirling so that his false camel-skin disguise flapped about. I opened my mouth to tell him that the barrel Miss Feng had strapped to his back to provide support for the hump had slipped, but he turned to Abdul: "You like?"

"Jolly good, that outfit!"

"Pip-pip," said Toadsworth, whirring alongside with a glass of the old neurotoxins gripped in one telescoping manipulator. I think it might have been a high-bandwidth infoburst rather than a toast, but due to my unfortunate hereditary allergy to implants I'm very bad at spotting that kind of thing. "Which way to the bar, old fellow?"

"That way," suggested Ibn Cut-Throat, springing from a hidden trapdoor behind a Ming vase. He pointed through an archway at one side of the hall. "Be seeing you!" His eyeballs gleamed with villainous promise.

A black-robed figure in a full veil was staring at me from behind two implausibly weaponized clankie hashishin at the back of the party. I got an odd feeling about them, but before I could say anything Toadsworth snagged my free hand in his gripper and began to tug me toward the old tipple-station. "Come-on! Inebriate!" He buzzed: "All enemies of sobriety must be inebriated! Pip-pip!" Jeremy let out a squealing trumpet blast close to my ear and began to kick. Not having a third hand with which to steady him, I let go and he shot off ahead of us, stubby ears flapping madly in the low Martian gravity.

"Oh dear," said Miss Feng.

"Why don't you just run along and see to my chambers?" I asked, irritated by the thought that the bloody elephant might poop in the punchbowl (or worse, dip his whistle in it) before I got there. "Leave the beast to me, I'll sort him out later."

"Inebriate! Inebriate!" cried Toadsworth, hurtling forward, the lights on his cortical turret flashing frantically. "To the par-ty!"

7. In which Ralph explains the nature of his relationship with Laura

Now dash it all, it behooves a young fellow to remain discreet and close-lipped about matters of an embarrassingly personal nature. But it's also true to say that this story won't make a lot of sense without certain intimate understandings—a nod's as good as a wink to a deaf robot and all that—and in any event, ever since the minutiae of my personal affairs became part of the public gossip circuit following the unfortunate affair involving the clankie dominatrix, the cat burglar, and the alien hive-mind, it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to stand upon my privacy. So where a more modest cove might hesitate, allow me to step in it and, at risk of offending your sensibilities, explain something about my complex relationship with Laura.

I sometimes fancy that life must have been so much simpler back in the days of classical Anglo-American civilization, when there were only two openly acknowledged genders and people didn't worry about whether their intimate affairs were commutative, transitive, or reflexive. No clankie/squishie, no U or non-U, nothing but the antique butch/femme juxtaposition, and that was pretty much determined by the shape of the external genitalia you were born with. Perverts dashed well knew what they were, and life was simple. Modern life is enough to drive a cove to drugs in my opinion, but as a Butch U Squishie of impeccable ancestry I have the social option of maintaining a mistress, not to mention the money, and that's where Laura comes in.

Laura is very clankie and very frilly femme with it, but with a squishie core and sufficiently non-U to make a casual relationship just barely acceptable to polite society on the usual sub-rosa Morganatic basis. We met on a shooting weekend at one of the Pahlavi girls' ranches on Luna, doing our bit for evolution by helping thin the herd of rampaging feral bots during their annual migration across the Sea of Tranquility. I'm not sure what she was doing there, but I think it was something to do with working her way around the solar system on a cut-price non-U grand tour: laboring as a courtesy masseuse in Japan and a topiarist on Ceres while saving up the price of her next interplanetary jaunt. Her maternity factory or mother or whoever was sending her a small allowance to help pay her way, I think, but she was having to work as well to make ends meet, a frightfully non-U thing for a cute little clankie princess to have to do. Our eyes met over the open breech of her silver-chased Purdey over-and-under EMP cannon, and as soon as I saw her delicately wired eyelashes and the refractive sheen on her breasts, simultaneously naked and deliciously inaccessible in the vacuum, I knew I had to have her. "Why, I do declare I'm out of capacitors!" She fluttered at me, and I bent over backwards to offer her my heart, and the keys to the guest room.

There is something more than a little bit perverse about a squish who chases clankie skirt: even, one might suppose, something of the invert about them; but I can cope with sly looks in public, and our butch/femme U/non-U tuple is sufficiently orthodox to merely Outrage the Aunts, rather than crossing the line and causing Offence. If she showed more squish while being less non-U, I suppose it would be too risqué to carry on in public—but I digress. I trust you can sympathize with my confusion? What else is a healthy boy to do when his lusts turn in a not-quite-respectable direction?

Of course, I was younger and rather more foolish when I first clapped eyes on the dame, and we've had our ups and downs since then. She was, to be fair, unaware of my unfortunate neurohormonal problems: and I wasn't entirely clear on the costs, both mechanical and emotional, of maintaining a clankie doxie in the style to which she would want to become accustomed. Nor did I expect her to be so enthusiastic a proponent of personality patches, or so prone to histrionic fits and thermionic outrages. I expect I had some surprises for her, too. But we mostly seemed to bump along all right—until that last pre-drop walk-out, and her failure to turn up at the drop zone.

8. Jeremy Runs Amok; A Dreadful Discovery before Dinner

Among the various manners of recovering from the neurasthenic tension that accompanies a drop, I must admit that the one old Abdul had laid on for us took first prize for decadent (that means good) taste. It's hard to remain stressed out while reclining on a bed of silks in a pleasure palace on Mars, with nubile young squishies to drop pre-fermented grapes into your open mouth, your very own mouth-boy to keep the hookah smoldering, and a clankie band plangently plucking its various organs in the far corner of the room.

Dancers whirled and wiggled and undulated across the stage at the front of the hall, while a rather fetching young squishie lad in a gold lamé loin cloth and peacock feather turban waited at my left shoulder to keep my cocktail glass from underflowing. Candied fruits and jellied Europan cryoplankton of a most delightful consistency were of course provided. "What-ho, this is the life, isn't it?" I observed in the general direction of Toadsworth. My bot buddy was parked adjacent to my bower, his knobbly mobility unit sucking luxuriously conditioned juice from a discreet outlet while the still squishie bits of his internal anatomy slurped a remarkably subtle smoked Korean soy ale from a Klein stein by way of a curly straw.

"Beep beep," he responded. Then, expansively and slowly, "You seem a little melancholy about something, old chap. In fact, if you had hyperspectral imagers like me, you might notice you were a little drawn. Like this: pip." He said it so emphatically that even my buggy-but-priceless family heirloom amanuensis recognized it for an infoburst and misfiled it somewhere. "Indiscretions aside, if there's anything a cove can do to help you—enemies you want inebriated, planets you want conquered—feel free to ask the Toadster, what?"

"You're a jolly fine fellow and I may just do that," I said. "But I'm afraid it's probably nothing you can help with. I'm in a bit of a blue funk—did you know Laura left me? She's done it before several times, of course, but she always comes back after the drop. Not this time, though, I haven't seen gear nor sprocket of her since the day before yesterday and I'm getting a bit worried."

"I shall make inquiries right away, old chap. The clankie grapevine knows everything. If I may make so bold, she probably just felt the need to get away for a while and lube her flaps: she'll be back soon enough." Toadsworth swiveled his ocular turret, monospectral emitters flashing brightly. "Bottoms up!"

I made no comment on the evident fact that if the Toadster ever did get himself arse over gripper he'd be in big trouble righting himself, but merely raised my glass in salute. Then I frowned. It was empty! "Boy? Where's my drink?" I glanced round. A furry brown sausage with two prominently flared nostrils was questing about the edge of the bower where my cocktail boy had been sitting a moment before.

"Grab him!" I swore at the lad, but I fear it wasn't his fault: Jeremy had already done him a mischief, and he was doubled over in a ball under the nearest curtain, meeping pathetically. Jeremy sucked the remains of my Saturnian ring ice-water margarita up his nose with a ghastly slurping noise, and winked at me: then he sneezed explosively. An acrid eructation of margarita slapped my face. "Vile creature!" I raged, "What do you think you're doing?"

I'm told that I am usually quite good with small children and other animals, but I have a blind spot when it comes to Jeremy. He narrowed his eyes, splayed his ears wide, and emitted a triumphant—not to say alcohol-saturated—trumpet-blast at me. Got you, he seemed to be saying. Why should you two-legs have all the fun? I made a grab for his front legs but he was too fast for me, nipping right under my seat and out the other side, spiking my unmentionables on the way as I flailed around in search of something to throw at him.

"Right! That does it!" People to either side were turning to stare at me, wondering what was going on. "I'm going to get you—" I managed to lever myself upright just in time to see Jeremy scramble out through one of the pointy-looking archways at the back of the hall, then found myself eyeball to hairy eyeball with Ibn Cut-Throat's administrative assistant.

"Please not to create so much of a noise, Ralphie-san," said the junior under-vizier. "His Excellency has an announcement to make."

And it was true. Human flunkies were discreetly passing among the audience, attracting the guests' attention and quieting down the background of chit-chat. The band had settled down and was gently serenading us with its plucked vocal chords. I glanced after Jeremy one last time: "I'll deal with you later," I muttered. Even by Jeremy's usual standards, this behavior was quite intolerable; if I didn't know better, I'd swear there was something up with the blighter. Then I looked back at the stage at the front of the room.

The curtain sublimed in a showy flash of velvet smoke, revealing a high throne cradled in a bower of hydroponically rooted date palms. His Excellency Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger sibling of the Emir of Mars, rose from his seat upon the throne; naked eunuch bodyguards, their skins oiled and gleaming, raised their katanas in salute to either side. "My friends," old Abdul droned in a remarkably un-Abdul-like monotone: "It makes me more happy than I can tell you to welcome you all to my humble retreat tonight."

Abdul wore robes of blinding white cotton, and a broad gold chain—first prize for atmosphere diving from the club, I do believe. Behind him, a row of veiled figures in shapeless black robs nudged each other. His wives? I wondered, Or his husbands? "Tonight is the first of my thousand nights and one night," He continued, looking more than slightly glassy-eyed. "In honor of my sort-of ancestor, the Sultan Schahriar, and in view of my now being, quote, too old to play the field, my elder brother, peace be unto him, has decreed a competition for my hand in marriage. For this night and the next thousand, lucky concubines of every appropriate gender combination will vie for the opportunity to become my sole and most important sultana."

"That's right, it's not just a date!" Added Ibn Cut-Throat, from the side-lines.

"I shall take the winner's hand in marriage, along with the rest of their body. The losers—well, that's too boring and tiresome to go into here, but they won't be writing any kiss-and-tell stories: they should have made backups before entering the competition, that's not my problem. Meanwhile, I ask you to raise a toast with me to the first seven aspiring princesses of Mars, standing here behind me, and their intelligence and courage in taking up Scheherazade's wager." He sounded bored out of his skull, as if his mind was very definitely busy elsewhere.

Everyone raised a toast to the competitors, but I was losing my appetite even before Ibn Cut-Throat stepped to the front of the stage to explain the terms of the competition, which would begin after the banquet. I may come from a long line of Japanese pretenders to the throne of a sheep-stealing bandit, but we'd never consider anything remotely as blood-thirsty and mediaeval as this. The prospect of spending a night with dashing young Abdul gave a whole new and unwelcome meaning to losing your head for love, as I suppose befitted a pretender to the crown of Ibn Saud—never mind the Sassanid empire—by way of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. "I don't think this is very funny," I mumbled to Toadsworth. "I wish Laura were here."

Toadsworth nudged me with his Inebriator. "I don't think you need to worry about that, old chap. I spy with my little hyperspectral telescopic imager—"

—Ibn Cut-Throat was coming to the climax of his spiel: "Gaze upon the faces of the brave beauties!" he crowed. "Ladies, drop your veils!"

I gaped like a fool as the row of black-garbed femmes behind the prince threw back their veils and bared their faces to the audience. For there, in the middle of the row, was a familiar set of silver eyelashes!

"Isn't that your mistress, old boy?" Toadsworth nudged me with his Inebriator attachment. "Jolly rum do, her showing up here, what?"

"But she can't be!" I protested. "Laura can't be that stupid! And I always forget to remind her to take her backups, and she never remembers, so—"

"'M 'fraid it's still her on the stage, old boy," commiserated the Toadster. "There's no getting around it. Do you suppose she answered an advertisement or went through a talent agency?"

"She must have been on the rebound! This is all my fault," I lamented.

"I disagree, old fellow, she's not squishie enough to bounce. Her head, anyway."

I glanced up at the stage, despondent. The worst part of it was, this was all my fault. If I'd actually bothered to pull myself out of my pre-drop funk and talked to her, she wouldn't be standing on stage, glancing nervously at the court executioners standing to either side. Then I saw her turn her head. She was looking at me! She mouthed something, and it didn't take a genius of lip-reading to realize that she was saying get me out of here.

"I'll rescue you, Laura," I promised, collapsing in a heap of cushions. Then my mouth-boy stuck a hookah in the old cake-hole and the situation lost its urgent edge. Laura wasn't number one on the old chop-chop list, it appeared. There'd be time to help her out of this fix after dinner.

9. An After-Dinner Show; Discussions of Horticulture

Dinner took approximately four hours to serve, and consisted of tiresomely symbolic courses prepared by master chefs from the various dominions of the al-Matsumoto empire—all sixty of them. The resulting cultural mélange was certainly unique, and the traditional veal tongue sashimi on a bed of pickled jellyfish couscous a l'Olympia lent a certain urgency to my inter-course staggers to the vomitorium. But I digress: I barely tasted a single bite, so deeply concerned was I for the whereabouts of my cyberdoxy.

After the last platter of chili-roast bandersnatch in honey sauce was cleared and the desert wine piped to our tables, the game show began. And what a game show! I sat there shuddering through each round, hoping against hope that Laura wouldn't be called this time. Ibn Cut-Throat was master of ceremonies, with two dusky-skinned eunuchs to keep track of the score cards. "Contestant Number One, Bimzi bin Jalebi, your next question is: What is His Excellency the Prince's principal hobby?"

Bimzi rested one elaborately be-ringed fingertip on her lower lip and frowned fetchingly at the audience. "Surfing?"

"A-ha ha ha!" crowed Ibn Cut-Throat. "Not quite wrong, but I think you'd all agree she had a close shave there." The audience howled, not necessarily with joy: "So we'll try again. Bimzi bin Jalebi, what do you think His Excellency the Prince will see in you?"

Bimzi rested one elegant hand on a smoothly curved hip and jiggled seductively at the audience: "My unmatched belly-dancing skills and—" wink—"pelvic floor musculature?"

"I'm asking the questions around here!" mugged the vizier, leering at the audience. Everybody ooh'd. "Did you hear a question?" Everybody ooh'd even louder.

"Pip-pip," said Toadsworth, quietly. He continued: "I detect speech stress analyzers concealed in the pillars, old boy. And something else."

"Let me remind you," oozed the Vizier, "that you are attending the court of His Excellency the Prince, and that any untruth told before me, in my capacity as grand high judicar before his court, may be revealed and treated as perjury. And—" he paused while a ripple of conversation sped around the room—"now we come to the third and final cut-off question before you spend a night of delight and jeopardy with His Royal Highness. What do you, Bimzi bin Jalebi, see in my Prince? Truthfully now, we have lie detectors and we know how to use them!"

"Um." Bimzi bin Jalebi smiled, coyly and winningly, at the audience, then decided that honesty combined with speed was the best policy: "A-mountain-of-gold-but-that's-not-my-only—"

"Enough!" Cut-Throat Senior clapped his hands together and her a-borning speech was arrested by the snicker-snack of eunuch katanas and a bright squirt of arterial blood. "To cut a long story short, his Excellency can't stand wafflers. Or gold-diggers, for that matter." He glanced at one particular section of the audience who, standing under guard, were white with shock, and smiled toothily: "And so, now that we're all running neck and neck, who'd like to go first?"

"I can't bear this," I groaned quietly.

"Don't worry, old fellow, it'll be all right on the night," Toadster nudged me.

To prove him wrong, Ibn Cut-Throat hunted through the herd of candidates and—by the same nightmare logic that causes toast to always land buttered-side down except when you're watching it with a notepad and counter—who should his gaze fall on but Laura.

"You! Yes, you! It could be you!" cried the ghastly little fellow: "Step right up, my dear! And what's your name? Laura bin, ah, Binary? Ah, such a fragrant blossom, so redolent of machine oil and ceramics! I'd spin her cams any day of the week if I still had my undercarriage," he confided to the crowd as my pale person of pulchritude clutched a filmy veil around her and flinched. "First question! Are you the front end of an ass?"

Laura shook her head. The crowd fell silent. I tensed, balling my hands into fists. If only there was something I could do!

"Second question! Are you the back end of an ass?"

Laura shook her head again, silently. I tried to catch her eye, but she didn't look my way. I quailed, terrified. Laura is at her most dangerous when she goes quiet.

"Well then! Let me see. If you're not the front end of an ass, and you're not the back end of an ass, doesn't that mean you're no end of an ass?"

Laura gave him the old fish-eye for an infinitely long ten seconds then drawled, in her best Venusian butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth accent: "Why, I do declare, what is this 'ass' you speak of, human, and why are you so eager for a piece of it when you don't have any balls?"

I was on my feet, staggering uncertainly toward the stage, as Ibn Cut-Throat raised his fists above his head: "We have a winner!" he declared, and the crowd went wild. "You, my fragrant rose, have passed the first test and go forward to the second round! My gentles, let it be known that Laura Binary has earned the right to an unforgettable night of ecstasy in the company of His Excellency the Prince!" Sotto voce to the audience: "Such a shame she won't live long enough to forget it afterward."

I saw red, of course: Dash it, what else is a cove to do but stand up for his lady's honor? But before I could take a step forward, meaty hands descended on each of my shoulders. "Bed time," rumbled the guard holding my left arm. I glanced at his mate, who favored me with a suggestive leer as he fingered the edge of his blade.

"Flower bed time," he echoed.

"Ahem." I glanced at the stage, where Laura was struggling vainly as a cadre of guards as grotesquely overaugmented as old Edgy wrapped her in delicate silver manacles: "If you don't mind, old fellow, I've got a jolly good mind to tell your master he can take your daisies and push them—"

"Bed time," Miss Feng hissed urgently behind my right ear. "We need to talk," she added.

"Okay, bed time," I agreed, nodding like a fool.

Guard number two sighed dispiritedly as he sheathed his sword. "Petunias."

"What?"

"Not daisies. Petunias."

"Bed time!" guard number one said brightly. I think he had a one-track mind.

"We were supposed to bury you under the petunias if you resisted," guard number two explained. "It's so hard on the poor things, they don't get enough sunlight out here and the soil is too acidic—"

"No, no, see, he's quite right, if we bury him he's supposed to be pushing up daisies," said guard number one, finally getting hold of the conversation. "So! Are you going to bed or are we going to have to tuck you—"

"I'm going, I'm going," I said. The homicidal horticulturalists let go of me with visible reluctance. "I'm gone," I whimpered.

"Not yet, Sir," said Miss Feng, politely but forcefully propelling me away from the ring of clankie guards surrounding the stage. "Let's talk about it in private, shall we?"

10. Miss Feng makes a series of Observations

The guards escorted me out of the dining pavilion and up two flights of stairs, then along a passageway to a palatial guest suite which had been made available for the members of the Club. Miss Feng followed, outwardly imperturbable, although I heard her swear very quietly when the guards locked and barred the main door.

"Dash it all." I stumbled and sat down on a pile of cushions. "I've got to rescue her before it's too late!"

Miss Feng looked at me oddly. "Indubitably, Sir. Although we appear to be locked in a guest suite on the second floor of a heavily fortified palace built by a paranoid lunatic, with guards standing outside the door to prevent any unscheduled excursions. Perhaps Sir would consider an after-dinner digestif and a post-prandial nap instead?"

But I was too far gone in my funk to notice: "This is my fault! If only I'd talked to her instead, she wouldn't be here. This isn't like Abdul, either. I know him, he's a good egg. There must be some mistake!"

"If Sir will listen to me for a minute—" Miss Feng drew a deep and exasperated breath, her chest swelling beneath her traditional black jacket in a most fetching manner—"I believe the key to the problem is not rescuing Miss Laura, but making a successful escape afterward. Sir will perhaps recall the planetary defense grasers and orbital arbalests dug into the walls of the caldera? While I am an adequate pilot, I would much prefer our departure from the second-most-heavily fortified noble house on Mars to be facilitated by traffic rather than fire control. And—" she raised one eyebrow, infinitesimally—"Sir did promise his sister to take care of her mammoth."

"Dash it all to hell and back!" I bounced to my feet unsteadily. "Who cares about Jeremy?"

Miss Feng fixed me with a steely gaze: "You will, if your sister thinks you've mislaid him on purpose, sir."

"Oh." I nodded, crestfallen, and ambled over to the screen of intricately carved soapstone fretwork that separated the central lounge from the inner servants' corridor. Small thingumabots buzzed and clicked outside, scurrying hither and yon about their menial tasks. "I suppose you're right. Well, then. We need to rescue Laura, retrieve Jeremy from whatever drunken escapade he's got himself into, and talk our way out of this. Bally nuisance, why can't life be simple?"

"I couldn't possibly comment, Sir. Compared to covering for one of Prince W the thirteenth's little escapades this should be a piece of cake. Incidentally, did you notice anything odd about the Sheikh Abdul tonight?"

"What? Apart from his rum desire to butcher my beloved—"

"I was thinking more along the lines of the spinal parasite crab someone has enterprisingly planted on him since the race, Sir."

"The spinal what? Dear me, are you telling me he's caught something nasty? Do I need to take precautions?"

"Only if Sir wishes to avoid having his brain hijacked by a genetically engineered neural parasite, his prefrontal lobes scooped out and eaten, and his body turned into a helpless meat puppet. Mr al-Matsumoto's burnoose covered it incompletely, and I saw it when he turned round: you might have noticed he's not quite himself right now. I believe it is being controlled by Toshiro ibn-Rashid, the vizier."

"Oops." I paused a moment in silent sympathy. "Bloody poor show, that."

"I've seen more than one attempted coup d'état in my time, Sir, and it occurs to me that this is an unhealthy situation to be in. The banquet continues for three more days, and Sir might usefully question the wisdom of staying to the end. After all, His Excellency's puppet master didn't throw a party and invite all of the prince's personal friends along for no good reason, did he?"

"Then I suppose we'll just have to rescue Laura and make our escape." I stopped. "Um. But how?"

"I have a plan, Sir. If you'd start by taking this sober-up, then I'll explain . . . ."

11. A meeting in the tunnels

Miss Feng's Plan was certainly everything you could ask for. One might even suspect her of black ops training, but experience has taught me that it is best to never knowingly underestimate the lethality of a sufficiently determined butler. I confess I harbored certain misgivings about the nature of her proposed offensive—but with stakes this high I was prepared to work to any plan, however rare.

However, it was after midnight before we could start, when the guards opened the doors to direct a shambolically intoxicated Edgestar and a thoroughly inebriated Toadsworth into our company. "Pip Paaarrrrrp," Toadsworth burped, drifting to a bumpy halt in the middle of the floor: his cortical turret spun round twice with the force of the belch, as his lights strobed down through the spectrum and went dark.

"Am being pithed," said Edgestar, shambling into a pillar and collapsing onto two legs. "Huuuurk!"

"Let me help you with that," I said, stepping forward to relieve him of his camel-hair coat—and the full firkin of Bragote that Miss Feng had secreted beneath it. I nearly dropped the cask: nine gallons of ale is quite an armful, especially when it's bottled up in corrosion-proof steel and biohazard warning stickers.

"Aaah, that's better," mumbled Edgestar, another leg retracting with a hiss of hydraulics and a brief stink of chlorine. "'M tired. G'night."

"Quietly," Miss Feng reminded me, as I lowered the deadly cylinder to the tiles. "Excellent. I'll take care of this." She rolled it on its side, directing it toward the door, as she palmed a pre-emptive sober-up. "I'm sure it will be quite the hit at the squishie servants' party," she added, with something very like a shudder.

I tiptoed away from the door as she knocked on it, then dived into my room to hide as the bolts rattled. As a servant, Miss Feng stood a better chance of avoiding suspicion than I—but she had other tasks in mind for which Edgestar, Toadsworth, and I were clearly well-suited. And so I swallowed my misgivings, picked up the sober-up spray, and approached Toadsworth.

"Excuse me old chap," I essayed, "but are you up for a jolly jape?"

"Bzzzt—" The cortical turret turned toward me and I confronted a red-rimmed eye stalk: "In-ebriate? Par-ty?"

"Jolly good show, Toadster. But I think you might enjoy this first, what?" I flicked the sober-up at him. "Don't want to let the side down, do we?"

There was a muffled explosion, his cortical turret spun round three times, and steam hissed from under his gasket. "You unspeakable bounder!" he buzzed at me. "That was below the belt!" His lights flashed ominously. "I've a good mind to—"

"Whoa!" I held up a hand. "I'm terribly sorry, and I'll happily demonstrate the depth of my gratitude by groveling in any way you can imagine afterward, but we need to rescue Laura from the hareem, and then we need to make our escape from the evil vizier and his mind control minions."

"Really?" The Toadster froze in place for a moment. "Did you say evil vizier? With minions? My favorite kind!"

"Top hat, old boy, top hat!" I waved my hands encouragingly. "All we need to do is get old Edgy awake—"

"Some'buddy mention nominative identifier?" With a whine of overstrained hydraulics Edgestar Wolfblack began to unfold from his heap on the floor. One foot skidded out from under him and ended up scuttling around the skirting board, barking furiously until the Toadster was forced to shoot it to death with his Inebriator. "Hurrrrk. Query vertical axis of orientation?"

"That way," I said, pointing at the ceiling. Edgy groaned, and began to quiver and fold in on himself, legs and arms retracting and strange panels extending to reveal a neat set of chromed wheels.

"Vroom," he said uncertainly. "Where to?"

"To the hareem! To rescue Laura and the other contestants, while Miss Feng poisons the squishie servants with Uncle Featherstonehaugh's Bragote," I explained. "If you'd be so good as to follow me, chaps . . . ."

I pulled on the black abaya Miss Feng had procured for me, then bent down to tap on the robot servitor's hatch, clutching the identity beacon Miss Feng had acquired from one of the waitrons during dinner. The hatch deigned to recognize the beacon and opened, for which I was duly grateful.

The servants' tunnel was built to a more-than-human scale: not all the bots were small bleepy things. I screwed my monocle firmly into place and hurried along the dank, roughly finished tunnel, blessing my foresight in remembering to download the map. I don't mind admitting that I was sweating with fright, but at least I was in good company, with Edgestar whizzing alongside like a demented skateboard and the Toadster gliding menacingly through the darkened tunnel, his trusty Inebriator raised and ready to squirt.

Miss Feng's Plan was clear. The unlucky ladies would almost certainly be languishing under lock and key in the hareem. Moreover, the hareem's main entrance would be guarded by palace eunuchs, or possibly chaperone-bots. However, she speculated, the servants' passage would still be open—if we could get past the inevitable guard on the back passage. We would find the chaperone-bot, I would pretend to be a fainting, misplaced maiden, and Edgy and the Toadster would play the part of palace security guards who had found me and were taking me back inside. Getting out would be a little harder, but by then Uncle Featherstonehaugh's tipple should have taken effect . . . .

Something moved in the tunnel ahead of me and I froze, knock-kneed in fear. I don't lack moral fiber, it just gives me the runs: I swore under my breath and stopped dead in my tracks as Toadsworth ran over my hem. "What is it?" he buzzed, quietly.

"I don't know. Shh."

Holding my breath, I listened. There was a faint shuffling noise, a breathy whistling, and then a clicking noise from the dark recesses of a twisty little side-passage. A shadow moved across the floor, and paused. I sniffed, smelling an unholy foulness of stale sweat and something else, something familiar—I then blinked, as two evil, red-rimmed orbs brimming with pure, mindless hate loomed out of the darkness toward me.

"Jeremy!" The delinquent dwarf reared back, waving his tusks drunkenly in my face, and I could see his trunk begin to flare, ready to blow a betraying blast on the old blower. There was only one thing for it—I reached out and grabbed. "Hush, you silly old thing! If they hear you, they'll kill you, too!"

Grabbing a mammoth by the trunk—even a hung-over miniature mammoth who's three sheets to the wind and tiddly to the point of winking is not an act I can recommend to the dedicated follower of the quiet life. However, rather than responding with his usual murderous rage at the universe for having made him sixteen sizes too small, Jeremy blinked at me tipsily and sat down. For a moment I dared to hope that the incident would pass without upset—but then the gathering toute came out suite, and the foul little beast sneezed a truly elephantine blast of beer-smelling spray in my direction. I let go instinctively: he struggled back to his feet and began to reverse shambolically into the tunnel, with a mistrustful glare directed over my left shoulder. I tried to scuttle after him, only to be brought up short by the Toadster, who was still parked on my skirt. "Dash it all, men, follow that mammoth!"

With a brain-rattling crash, a fiendishly stealthed black chaperone-bot jumped over my suddenly stationary form, slipped on the snot-lubed floor, tumbled head-over-heels into the far wall, and crashed to the ground in a shower of spiked armor and vicious stabby things. I nearly jumped right out of my skin—indeed, I believe separating me from my integument had been the sole purpose of its acrobatic display.

Before I could gather my disguise and my wits and run, Edgestar revved up to speed and whizzed past me. Vrooming like a very vroomy thing, he jumped on the bally bot in a most unfriendly manner! It was a sight to see, I can assure you. The chaperone-bots of al-Matsumoto look a lot like Edgestar in humanoid form, only less convivial and disinclined to a discreet afternoon tipple when they could be out and about, briskly ripping unfortunates limb from limb. But being bots, they lack the true élan and esprit of a clankie, and even a hung-over tea-trolley posthumanoid is a fearsome thing to behold when it gets its cricket box on. Jeremy scampered off into the bowels of the palace honking tunelessly; meanwhile, old Edgy bounced up and down on the combat robot's abdomen, squeaking furiously and spinning his wheels. They had cute little cutting disks on their inner rims! The chaperone-bot lay on its back, stiletto-tipped legs curling over and inward to stab repeatedly at the assailant on its abdomen, but Edgy was too fast for it. Presently it stabbed too enthusiastically for its own good—and Edgestar yanked hard, pulling the stinger under the edge of a gaping inspection panel. With a triumphant squeal of brakes he leapt off the chaperone-bot just in time, transforming back into humanoid form in midair as sparks began to fly and an acrid smoke poured from its joints.

"Jolly good show, that transformer!" I exclaimed.

"Pip-pip!" said the Toadster, regaining some of his joie de vivre.

I consulted my map again. "The back door to the hareem is just around the corner! I say old chap, I think you've cleared the last obstacle. Let's shuftie, shall we? If we're to be home by tea it behooves us to get our move on."

12. I find Laura in Questionable Company

Well, to cut a long story short, there I was in the hareem of the Emir of Mars's younger brother, surrounded by adoring femmes, while my two fellows from the Club made themselves scarce. "Darling," Laura trilled, reclining in my arms, "I do confess, I am so touched! Hic."

"I know, my dear, but we can't stay here." I quickly outlined what I knew. "Miss Feng thinks the evil vizier is conspiring to build resentment against the oppressive and harsh autocracy of the al-Matsumoto clan, and intends to use it to foment a revolt."

"But the al-Matsumotos aren't harsh and autocratic!" complained one of the ladies, a cute blonde bimbettebot in filmy harem pants and tank top: "They're cute!" The room descended into giggles, but I frowned, for this was no laughing matter.

"They'll be harsh and autocratic by the time Ibn Cut-Throat's spinal crab is through with Abdul! Dash it all, do you want to be decapitated? Because that's what's going to happen if the vizier seizes power! He won't have any use for you—he's the chief eunuch! He's an ex-man, and his special power is chopping off heads! He probably thinks testosterone is something you catch from sitting too many exams."

"Oh, I'm sure I can fix that," a dusky six-armed beauty informed me with a flick of her aristocratic nose: "I didn't study regenerative medicine for nothing." Her arch look took in Laura: "Why don't you take yourself and your tin-plate tart and leave us to sort out the matter of succession? She was only going to go down hard in the talent show round, anyway."

"Pip-pip!" called Toadsworth, sailing from one vaulted side-chamber to another in pursuit of a giggling conical debutante, a silk favor knotted around his monocular. "Party back at my pad, old chap! Bring a knobbly pal! Inseminate! Inseminate! Bzzt!" I looked away before the sight of his new plug-in could scar my retinas for life. You can't take these clankie stallions anywhere in polite company, they can't so much as wink at a well-lubed socket without wanting to interface with it—

"She's right, darling, we must be going." Laura laid her elegant head on my shoulder and sighed. "Oh I do declare, my feet are killing me." I scooped her up in my arms, trying to see over a faceful of frills.

"I've missed you so much," I told her. "But what are you doing here anyway?"

"Hush." She kissed me, and for a moment the world went away: "My brave, butch, bullish, Ralphie!" She sighed again. "I was going to hold out until after the race! But I had just checked into the Hilton when I received a telephone call saying there was a gentleman waiting to see me in the lobby."

Jealousy stabbed at me. "Who was it?" I asked, cringing and glancing away as Edgestar rolled past, having transformed himself into a tentacularly enhanced chaise lounge for the amusement of the blonde bimbettebot, who appeared to be riding him around the room using his unmentionables as a joystick.

"I don't remember," she said dreamily. "I woke up here, waiting for my prince—you! I do declare—but Toshiro said he was arranging a surprise for you, and there'd be a party, and then it all went a little vague—"

I can tell you, I was freezing inside as I began to realize just how disoriented she was. "Laura, what's gotten into you?"

"Not you, not lately!" she said sharply, then lapsed back into dreamy incoherence: "But you came to rescue me, Ralphie, oh! He said you would. I swoon for you! Be my love rocket again!"

I saw a small, silver receptacle on a nearby table, and my heart sank: she'd clearly been at the happy juice. Then I sneaked a peek at the sockets on the back of her neck, under her hairline, and gasped. Someone had planted a hedonism chip and a mandatory override on her! No wonder she was acting out of sorts.

I plucked the ghastly thing out and dropped it on the floor. "Laura, stand up!" I cajoled. "We've got to be leaving. There's a party to be going to, don't you know? Let's go."

"But my—" She wobbled, then toppled against me: "Whoops!" She giggled. "Hic." I might have pulled the chips out of the fryer but my fish was still thoroughly pickled.

I hadn't expected this, but Miss Feng had insisted I take a reset pill, just in case. I hated to use the thing on her—or rather, Laura hated it, and this invariably led to a fight afterward—but sobriety is a lesser evil than being trapped in a castle by a mad vizier while subjected to mood-altering implants, what? So I pressed the silver cap against the side of her neck and pushed the button.

Laura's jaws closed with an audible click, and she tensed in my arms for a second. "Ouch," she said, very quietly. "You bastard, you know I hate that. What's going on?"

"You're on Mars and we're in a bally fix, that's what's going on. This Ibn Cut-Throat fellow's a thoroughly bad egg. He's sneaked a spinal crab onto old Abdul, I think he picked you up because he wants a handle on me, and doubtless that's why the rest of the Club's all here—we'd be first to notice a change in our boy Abdul's behavior, wouldn't we? The cad's obviously set up the sticky wicket so he can bowl us all out in one inning."

"Dear me." Laura stood up straight and took a step away from me. "Well, then we'd better be going, darling." She straightened her attire and looked around, raising one sculpted eyebrow at my dishevelment. "Do you know how to get out of here?"

"Certainly." I took her hand in mine, and led her toward the central lounge. "I'm sure there must be a way out around here somewhere . . .."

"Over there," offered bin-Sawbones, pointing: "You can't miss it, head for the two hulking eunuchs and the evil vizier." She pushed me hard in the small of my back. "Sorry, but business is business and when you're trying to marry the second richest man on Mars you can't be too picky, eh?"

13. Jeremy pulls it off

The exit was unfortunately obstructed by Ibn Cut-Throat and his merry headsmen—with Abdul in tow, glassy-eyed and arms outstretched, muttering about brains. And Ibn Cut-Throat had spotted us!

One thing I will credit the blighter with: his sense of spectacle was absolutely classical. "Ah, Mister MacDonald!" he cried, menacingly twirling the anti-chemwar vibrissae glued to his upper lip. "How disappointing to see you here! I must confess I hoped you'd have sense enough to stay in your room and keep out of trouble. I suppose now you hope I'm going to tell you all my plans, then lock you in an inadequately secured cell so you can escape? I'm afraid not: I shall simply have you cut off shortly, chop-chop. My game's afoot, and none will stop it now, for the ineluctable dialectic of history is on my side!"

"I don't care what your dastardly scheme is, I have a bone to pick with you, my man!" I cried. The two headsmen took a step forward, and Laura clung to me in fear—whether feigned or otherwise I could not tell. "How dare you kidnap my concubine on the eve of a drop! That's not cricket, or even baseball, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I see you in any of my clubs, even by the tradesmen's entrance!" Meanwhile, Laura thrust a shapely arm inside my abaya and was fumbling with something in my dinner jacket pocket; but my attention was fixed on the villain before me.

"Clubs." The word dropped from his lips with stony disinterest. "As if the degenerate recreations of the class enemy would be of any interest to me!" I shuddered: it's always a bad sign when the hired help starts talking in polysyllables. One of his nostrils flared angrily. "Clubs and sports and jolly capers, that's all you parasites think of as you gobble down our surplus wealth like the monstrous leeches you are!" I'd struck a nerve, as I could see from the throbbing vein in his temple to the set of his jaw. "Bloated ticks languishing in the lap of luxury and complaining about your parties and fashions while millions slave for your banquets! Bah." Laura unwrapped her arm from my robe and covered her face, evidently to shield herself from the scoundrel's accusations. "When we strive to better ourselves you turn your faces away and sneer and when we give up you use us as beasts of burden! Well, I've had enough. It's time to return your stolen loot to the toiling non-U proletarian masses."

My jaw dropped. "Dash it all, man, you can't be serious! Are you telling me you're a . . .?"

"Yes," he grated, his eyes aflame with vindictive glee: "The crisis of capitalism is finally at hand, at long last! It's about seven centuries and a Great Downsizing overdue, but it's time to bring about the dictatorship of the non-U and the resurrection of the proletariat! And your friend Abdul al-Matsumoto is going to play a key role in bringing about the final raising of class consciousness by fertilizing the soil of Olympus with the blood of a thousand maidens, and then crown himself Big Brother and institute a reign of terror that will—"

Unfortunately I can't tell you how the Ibn Cut-Throat Committee for the Revolution intended to proceed, because we were simultaneously interrupted by two different people: namely, by Laura, who extended her shapely hand and spritzed him down with after-shave, and then by Jeremy.

Now, it helps to be aware that hareems are not exactly noted for their testosterone-drenched atmosphere. I was, of course, the odd squishie out. Old Edgy was clearly hors de combat or combat des whores (if you'll strangle my French) and the Toadster was also otherwise engaged, exploring conic sections with the fembot he'd been chasing earlier. But aside from myself and Ibn Cut-Throat—and, I suppose, Abdul, if he was still at home upstairs what with that crab-thingie plastered to his noggin—we were the only remotely butch people present.

Jeremy had been in smelly, sullen retreat for the past week. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was in musth, that state in which a male mammoth or elephant hates and resents other males because the universe acquires a crystal clarity and his function in life is to  . . . well, Edgestar and Toadsworth got there first, minus the trumpeting and displays of aggression, but I'm sure you understand? There were no other small male mammals present, but Jeremy was well aware of his enemy, and his desperate need to assert his alpha-male dominance before he could go in search of cows to cover—and more importantly, there was one particular scent he associated with the enemy from long mutual acquaintance. His enemy smelled like me. But I was shrouded in a blackly occlusive robe, while Ibn Cut-Throat had just been doused in my favorite splash. And whatever Jeremy's other faults, he's never been slow to jump to a conclusion.

I do not know what passed through the 80 percent of Jeremy's cranial capacity that serves as target acquisition and fire control, but he made his choice almost instantly and launched himself straight for where Ibn Cut-Throat's crown jewels had once resided. Proboscideans are not usually noted for their glide ratio, but, in the weaker than accustomed Martian gravity, Jeremy was positively aerobatic, as he jumped with grace and elegance and tusks, straight for Toshiro's tushie.

"Tally ho, old boy!" I shouted, giving him the old school best, as Laura took two steps smartly forward and, raising her skirts, daintily kick-boxed headsman number one in the forehead with one of her most pointed assets—for her ten centimeter stiletto heels are not only jolly fine pins, they're physical extensions of her chrome-plated ankles.

Now I confess that things looked dicey when headsman number two turned on me with his axe and bared his teeth at me. But I'm not the Suzuki of MacDonald for nothing, and I know a thing or two about fighting! I threw the abaya back over my head to free my arms, and pointed Toadsworth's Inebriator—which he had earlier entrusted to my safe keeping in order to free up a socket for his Inseminator—at the villain. "Drop it! Or I'll drop you!" I snarled.

My threat didn't work. The thug advanced on me, and as he raised his blade I discovered to my horror that the Toadster must have some very double-jointed fingers in order to work that trigger. But just as the barber of Baghdad was about to trim my throat, a svelte black silhouette drew up behind him and poured a canister of vile brown ichor over his head! Screaming and burbling imprecations, he sank to the floor clawing at his eyes, just in time for Laura to finish him off with a flamenco stomp.

Miss Feng cleared her throat apologetically as she lowered the empty firkin to the floor. (The brightly painted tiles began to blur and run where its damp rim rested on them.) "Sir might be pleased to note that one has taken the liberty of moving his yacht round to the tradesmen's entrance and disabling the continental defense array in anticipation of Sir's departure. Was Sir planning to stay for the bombe surprise, or would he agree that this is one party that he would prefer to cut short?"

I glanced at Ibn Cut-Throat, who was still writhing in agony under Jeremy's merciless onslaught, and then at the two pithed headsmen. "I think it's a damned shame to outstay our welcome at any party, don't you agree?" (Laura nodded enthusiastically and knelt to tickle Jeremy's trunk.) "By all means, let's leave. If you'd be so good as to pour a bucket of cold water over Edgy and the Toadster, I'll take Abdul in hand and we can drop him off at a discreet clinic where they treat spinal crabs, what-what?"

"That's a capital idea, Sir. I shall see to it at once." Miss Feng set off to separate the miscreants from their amorous attachments.

I turned to Laura, who was still tickling Jeremy—who by now was lying on his back, panting—and raised an eyebrow. "Isn't he sweet?" she sang.

"If you say so. You're carrying him, though," I said, ungratefully. "Let's hie thee well and back to Castle Pookie. This has been altogether too much of the wrong kind of company for me, and I could do with a nightcap in civilized company."

"Darling!" She grabbed me enthusiastically by the trousers: "And we can watch a replay of your jump together!"

And indeed, to cut a long story short, that's exactly what we did—but first I took the precaution of locking Jeremy in the second best guest suite's dungeon with a bottle of port, and gave Miss Feng the night off.

After all, two's company but three's jolly confusing, what?

Glory

Greg Egan

Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) published his first story in 1983, and followed it with more than fifty short stories and seven novels, including Permutation City, Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, and Schild's Ladder. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction—mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes—that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction. His work has won the Hugo, John W. Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. Upcoming is a new novel, Incandescence.

Having written very little during the first half of the decade, Egan has returned to science fiction recently with a handful of excellent stories, arguably the best of which is this rich, strange space opera that follows.

1

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a metre long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check.

The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into the space that had separated the original ingots. First neutrons, then antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters were ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering their constituents and preventing them from annihilating their counterparts. The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.

The gamma ray lasers shut down, the Zeno effect withdrew its prohibitions. For the time it took a beam of light to cross a neutron, the needle sat motionless in space. Then it began to burn, and it began to move.

The needle was structured like a meticulously crafted firework, and its outer layers ignited first. No external casing could have channelled this blast, but the pattern of tensions woven into the needle's construction favoured one direction for the debris to be expelled. Particles streamed backwards; the needle moved forwards. The shock of acceleration could not have been borne by anything built from atomic-scale matter, but the pressure bearing down on the core of the needle prolonged its life, delaying the inevitable.

Layer after layer burnt itself away, blasting the dwindling remnant forward ever faster. By the time the needle had shrunk to a tenth of its original size it was moving at ninety-eight percent of light-speed; to a bystander this could scarcely have been improved upon, but from the needle's perspective there was still room to slash its journey's duration by orders of magnitude.

When just one thousandth of the needle remained, its time, compared to the neighbouring stars, was passing five hundred times more slowly. Still the layers kept burning, the protective clusters unravelling as the pressure on them was released. The needle could only reach close enough to light-speed to slow down time as much as it required if it could sacrifice a large enough proportion of its remaining mass. The core of the needle could survive only for a few trillionths of a second, while its journey would take two hundred million seconds as judged by the stars. The proportions had been carefully matched, though: out of the two kilograms of matter and antimatter that had been woven together at the launch, only a few million neutrons were needed as the final payload.

By one measure, seven years passed. For the needle, its last trillionths of a second unwound, its final layers of fuel blew away, and at the moment its core was ready to explode it reached its destination, plunging from the near-vacuum of space straight into the heart of a star.

Even here, the density of matter was insufficient to stabilise the core, yet far too high to allow it to pass unhindered. The core was torn apart. But it did not go quietly, and the shock waves it carved through the fusing plasma endured for a million kilometres: all the way through to the cooler outer layers on the opposite side of the star. These shock waves were shaped by the payload that had formed them, and though the initial pattern imprinted on them by the disintegrating cluster of neutrons was enlarged and blurred by its journey, on an atomic scale it remained sharply defined. Like a mould stamped into the seething plasma it encouraged ionised molecular fragments to slip into the troughs and furrows that matched their shapes, and then brought them together to react in ways that the plasma's random collisions would never have allowed. In effect, the shock waves formed a web of catalysts, carefully laid out in both time and space, briefly transforming a small corner of the star into a chemical factory operating on a nanometre scale.

The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding the last traces of the shock wave's momentum: a few nanograms of elaborate, carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave. Travelling at seven hundred kilometres per second, a fraction below the velocity needed to escape from the star completely, they climbed out of its gravity well, slowing as they ascended.

Four years passed, but the molecules were stable against the ravages of space. By the time they'd travelled a billion kilometres they had almost come to a halt, and they would have fallen back to die in the fires of the star that had forged them if their journey had not been timed so that the star's third planet, a gas giant, was waiting to urge them forward. As they fell towards it, the giant's third moon moved across their path. Eleven years after the needle's launch, its molecular offspring rained down onto the methane snow.

The tiny heat of their impact was not enough to damage them, but it melted a microscopic puddle in the snow. Surrounded by food, the molecular seeds began to grow. Within hours, the area was teeming with nanomachines, some mining the snow and the minerals beneath it, others assembling the bounty into an intricate structure, a rectangular panel a couple of metres wide.

From across the light-years, an elaborate sequence of gamma ray pulses fell upon the panel. These pulses were the needle's true payload, the passengers for whom it had merely prepared the way, transmitted in its wake four years after its launch. The panel decoded and stored the data, and the army of nanomachines set to work again, this time following a far more elaborate blueprint. The miners were forced to look farther afield to find all the elements that were needed, while the assemblers laboured to reach their goal through a sequence of intermediate stages, carefully designed to protect the final product from the vagaries of the local chemistry and climate.

After three months' work, two small fusion-powered spacecraft sat in the snow. Each one held a single occupant, waking for the first time in their freshly minted bodies, yet endowed with memories of an earlier life.

Joan switched on her communications console. Anne appeared on the screen, three short pairs of arms folded across her thorax in a posture of calm repose. They had both worn virtual bodies with the same anatomy before, but this was the first time they had become Noudah in the flesh.

"We're here. Everything worked," Joan marvelled. The language she spoke was not her own, but the structure of her new brain and body made it second nature.

Anne said, "Now comes the hard part."

"Yes." Joan looked out from the spacecraft's cockpit. In the distance, a fissured blue-grey plateau of water ice rose above the snow. Nearby, the nanomachines were busy disassembling the gamma ray receiver. When they had erased all traces of their handiwork they would wander off into the snow and catalyse their own destruction.

Joan had visited dozens of planet-bound cultures in the past, taking on different bodies and languages as necessary, but those cultures had all been plugged into the Amalgam, the metacivilisation that spanned the galactic disk. However far from home she'd been, the means to return to familiar places had always been close at hand. The Noudah had only just mastered interplanetary flight, and they had no idea that the Amalgam existed. The closest node in the Amalgam's network was seven light-years away, and even that was out of bounds to her and Anne now: they had agreed not to risk disclosing its location to the Noudah, so any transmission they sent could be directed only to a decoy node that they'd set up more than twenty light-years away.

"It will be worth it," Joan said.

Anne's Noudah face was immobile, but chromatophores sent a wave of violet and gold sweeping across her skin in an expression of cautious optimism. "We'll see." She tipped her head to the left, a gesture preceding a friendly departure.

Joan tipped her own head in response, as if she'd been doing so all her life. "Be careful, my friend," she said.

"You too."

Anne's ship ascended so high on its chemical thrusters that it shrank to a speck before igniting its fusion engine and streaking away in a blaze of light. Joan felt a pang of loneliness; there was no predicting when they would be reunited.

Her ship's software was primitive; the whole machine had been scrupulously matched to the Noudah's level of technology. Joan knew how to fly it herself if necessary, and on a whim she switched off the autopilot and manually activated the ascent thrusters. The control panel was crowded, but having six hands helped.

2

The world the Noudah called home was the closest of the system's five planets to their sun. The average temperature was one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius, but the high atmospheric pressure allowed liquid water to exist across the entire surface. The chemistry and dynamics of the planet's crust had led to a relatively flat terrain, with a patchwork of dozens of disconnected seas but no globe-spanning ocean. From space, these seas appeared as silvery mirrors, bordered by a violet and brown tarnish of vegetation.

The Noudah were already leaving their most electromagnetically promiscuous phase of communications behind, but the short-lived oasis of Amalgam-level technology on Baneth, the gas giant's moon, had had no trouble eavesdropping on their chatter and preparing an updated cultural briefing which had been spliced into Joan's brain.

The planet was still divided into the same eleven political units as it had been fourteen years before, the time of the last broadcasts that had reached the node before Joan's departure. Tira and Ghahar, the two dominant nations in terms of territory, economic activity, and military power, also occupied the vast majority of significant Niah archaeological sites.

Joan had expected that they'd be noticed as soon as they left Baneth—the exhaust from their fusion engines glowed like the sun—but their departure had triggered no obvious response, and now that they were coasting they'd be far harder to spot. As Anne drew closer to the homeworld, she sent a message to Tira's traffic control centre. Joan tuned in to the exchange.

"I come in peace from another star," Anne said. "I seek permission to land."

There was a delay of several seconds more than the light-speed lag, then a terse response. "Please identify yourself and state your location."

Anne transmitted her coordinates and flight plan.

"We confirm your location, please identify yourself."

"My name is Anne. I come from another star."

There was a long pause, then a different voice answered. "If you are from Ghahar, please explain your intentions."

"I am not from Ghahar."

"Why should I believe that? Show yourself."

"I've taken the same shape as your people, in the hope of living among you for a while." Anne opened a video channel and showed them her unremarkable Noudah face. "But there's a signal being transmitted from these coordinates that might persuade you that I'm telling the truth." She gave the location of the decoy node, twenty light-years away, and specified a frequency. The signal coming from the node contained an image of the very same face.

This time, the silence stretched out for several minutes. It would take a while for the Tirans to confirm the true distance of the radio source.

"You do not have permission to land. Please enter this orbit, and we will rendezvous and board your ship."

Parameters for the orbit came through on the data channel. Anne said, "As you wish."

Minutes later, Joan's instruments picked up three fusion ships being launched from Tiran bases. When Anne reached the prescribed orbit, Joan listened anxiously to the instructions the Tirans issued. Their tone sounded wary, but they were entitled to treat this stranger with caution, all the more so if they believed Anne's claim.

Joan was accustomed to a very different kind of reception, but then the members of the Amalgam had spent hundreds of millennia establishing a framework of trust. They also benefited from a milieu in which most kinds of force had been rendered ineffectual; when everyone had backups of themselves scattered around the galaxy, it required a vastly disproportionate effort to inconvenience someone, let alone kill them. By any reasonable measure, honesty and cooperation yielded far richer rewards than subterfuge and slaughter.

Nonetheless, each individual culture had its roots in a biological heritage that gave rise to behaviour governed more by ancient urges than contemporary realities, and even when they mastered the technology to choose their own nature, the precise set of traits they preserved was up to them. In the worst case, a species still saddled with inappropriate drives but empowered by advanced technology could wreak havoc. The Noudah deserved to be treated with courtesy and respect, but they did not yet belong in the Amalgam.

The Tirans' own exchanges were not on open channels, so once they had entered Anne's ship Joan could only guess at what was happening. She waited until two of the ships had returned to the surface, then sent her own message to Ghahar's traffic control.

"I come in peace from another star. I seek permission to land."

3

The Ghahari allowed Joan to fly her ship straight down to the surface. She wasn't sure if this was because they were more trusting, or if they were afraid that the Tirans might try to interfere if she lingered in orbit.

The landing site was a bare plain of chocolate-coloured sand. The air shimmered in the heat, the distortions intensified by the thickness of the atmosphere, making the horizon waver as if seen through molten glass. Joan waited in the cockpit as three trucks approached; they all came to a halt some twenty metres away. A voice over the radio instructed her to leave the ship; she complied, and after she'd stood in the open for a minute, a lone Noudah left one of the trucks and walked towards her.

"I'm Pirit," she said. "Welcome to Ghahar." Her gestures were courteous but restrained.

"I'm Joan. Thank you for your hospitality."

"Your impersonation of our biology is impeccable." There was a trace of skepticism in Pirit's tone; Joan had pointed the Ghahari to her own portrait being broadcast from the decoy node, but she had to admit that in the context her lack of exotic technology and traits would make it harder to accept the implications of that transmission.

"In my culture, it's a matter of courtesy to imitate one's hosts as closely as possible."

Pirit hesitated, as if pondering whether to debate the merits of such a custom, but then rather than quibbling over the niceties of interspecies etiquette she chose to confront the real issue head-on. "If you're a Tiran spy, or a defector, the sooner you admit that the better."

"That's very sensible advice, but I'm neither."

The Noudah wore no clothing as such, but Pirit had a belt with a number of pouches. She took a handheld scanner from one and ran it over Joan's body. Joan's briefing suggested that it was probably only checking for metal, volatile explosives, and radiation; the technology to image her body or search for pathogens would not be so portable. In any case, she was a healthy, unarmed Noudah down to the molecular level.

Pirit escorted her to one of the trucks, and invited her to recline in a section at the back. Another Noudah drove while Pirit watched over Joan. They soon arrived at a small complex of buildings a couple of kilometres from where the ship had touched down. The walls, roofs, and floors of the buildings were all made from the local sand, cemented with an adhesive that the Noudah secreted from their own bodies.

Inside, Joan was given a thorough medical examination, including three kinds of full-body scans. The Noudah who examined her treated her with a kind of detached efficiency devoid of any pleasantries; she wasn't sure if that was their standard bedside manner, or a kind of glazed shock at having been told of her claimed origins.

Pirit took her to an adjoining room and offered her a couch. The Noudah anatomy did not allow for sitting, but they liked to recline.

Pirit remained standing. "How did you come here?" she asked.

"You've seen my ship. I flew it from Baneth."

"And how did you reach Baneth?"

"I'm not free to discuss that," Joan replied cheerfully.

"Not free?" Pirit's face clouded with silver, as if she were genuinely perplexed.

Joan said, "You understand me perfectly. Please don't tell me there's nothing you're not free to discuss with me."

"You certainly didn't fly that ship twenty light-years."

"No, I certainly didn't."

Pirit hesitated. "Did you come through the Cataract?"  The Cataract was a black hole, a remote partner to the Noudah's sun; they orbited each other at a distance of about eighty billion kilometres. The name came from its telescopic appearance: a dark circle ringed by a distortion in the background of stars, like some kind of visual aberration. The Tirans and Ghahari were in a race to be the first to visit this extraordinary neighbour, but as yet neither of them were quite up to the task.

"Through the Cataract? I think your scientists have already proven that black holes aren't shortcuts to anywhere."

"Our scientists aren't always right."

"Neither are ours," Joan admitted, "but all the evidence points in one direction: black holes aren't doorways, they're shredding machines."

"So you travelled the whole twenty light-years?"

"More than that," Joan said truthfully, "from my original home. I've spent half my life travelling."

"Faster than light?" Pirit suggested hopefully.

"No. That's impossible."

They circled around the question a dozen more times, before Pirit finally changed her tune from how to why?

"I'm a xenomathematician," Joan said. "I've come here in the hope of collaborating with your archaeologists in their study of Niah artifacts."

Pirit was stunned. "What do you know about the Niah?"

"Not as much as I'd like to." Joan gestured at her Noudah body. "As I'm sure you've already surmised, we've listened to your broadcasts for some time, so we know pretty much what an ordinary Noudah knows. That includes the basic facts about the Niah. Historically they've been referred to as your ancestors, though the latest studies suggest that you and they really just have an earlier common ancestor. They died out about a million years ago, but there's evidence that they might have had a sophisticated culture for as long as three million years. There's no indication that they ever developed space flight. Basically, once they achieved material comfort, they seem to have devoted themselves to various art forms, including mathematics."

"So you've travelled twenty light-years just to look at Niah tablets?" Pirit was incredulous.

"Any culture that spent three million years doing mathematics must have something to teach us."

"Really?" Pirit's face became blue with disgust. "In the ten thousand years since we discovered the wheel, we've already reached halfway to the Cataract. They wasted their time on useless abstractions."

Joan said, "I come from a culture of spacefarers myself, so I respect your achievements. But I don't think anyone really knows what the Niah achieved. I'd like to find out, with the help of your people."

Pirit was silent for a while. "What if we say no?"

"Then I'll leave empty-handed."

"What if we insist that you remain with us?"

"Then I'll die here, empty-handed." On her command, this body would expire in an instant; she could not be held and tortured.

Pirit said angrily, "You must be willing to trade something for the privilege you're demanding!"

"Requesting, not demanding," Joan insisted gently. "And what I'm willing to offer is my own culture's perspective on Niah mathematics. If you ask your archaeologists and mathematicians, I'm sure they'll tell you that there are many things written in the Niah tablets that they don't yet understand. My colleague and I"—neither of them had mentioned Anne before, but Joan was sure that Pirit knew all about her—"simply want to shed as much light as we can on this subject."

Pirit said bitterly, "You won't even tell us how you came to our world. Why should we trust you to share whatever you discover about the Niah?"

"Interstellar travel is no great mystery," Joan countered. "You know all the basic science already; making it work is just a matter of persistence. If you're left to develop your own technology, you might even come up with better methods than we have."

"So we're expected to be patient, to discover these things for ourselves . . . but you can't wait a few centuries for us to decipher the Niah artifacts?"

Joan said bluntly, "The present Noudah culture, both here and in Tira, seems to hold the Niah in contempt. Dozens of partially excavated sites containing Niah artifacts are under threat from irrigation projects and other developments. That's the reason we couldn't wait. We needed to come here and offer our assistance, before the last traces of the Niah disappeared forever."

Pirit did not reply, but Joan hoped she knew what her interrogator was thinking: Nobody would cross twenty light-years for a few worthless scribblings. Perhaps we've underestimated the Niah. Perhaps our ancestors have left us a great secret, a great legacy. And perhaps the fastest—perhaps the only—way to uncover it is to give this impertinent, irritating alien exactly what she wants.

4

The sun was rising ahead of them as they reached the top of the hill. Sando turned to Joan, and his face became green with pleasure. "Look behind you," he said.

Joan did as he asked. The valley below was hidden in fog, and it had settled so evenly that she could see their shadows in the dawn light, stretched out across the top of the fog layer. Around the shadow of her head was a circular halo like a small rainbow.

"We call it the Niah's light," Sando said. "In the old days, people used to say that the halo proved that the Niah blood was strong in you."

Joan said, "The only trouble with that hypothesis being that you see it around your head . . .and I see it around mine." On Earth, the phenomenon was known as a "glory." The particles of fog were scattering the sunlight back towards them, turning it one hundred and eighty degrees. To look at the shadow of your own head was to face directly away from the sun, so the halo always appeared around the observer's shadow.

"I suppose you're the final proof that Niah blood has nothing to do with it," Sando mused.

"That's assuming I'm telling you the truth, and I really can see it around my own head."

"And assuming," Sando added, "that the Niah really did stay at home, and didn't wander around the galaxy spreading their progeny."

They came over the top of the hill and looked down into the adjoining riverine valley. The sparse brown grass of the hillside gave way to a lush violet growth closer to the water. Joan's arrival had delayed the flooding of the valley, but even alien interest in the Niah had only bought the archaeologists an extra year. The dam was part of a long-planned agricultural development, and however tantalising the possibility that Joan might reveal some priceless insight hidden among the Niah's "useless abstractions," that vague promise could only compete with more tangible considerations for a limited time.

Part of the hill had fallen away in a landslide a few centuries before, revealing more than a dozen beautifully preserved strata. When Joan and Sando reached the excavation site, Rali and Surat were already at work, clearing away soft sedimentary rock from a layer that Sando had dated as belonging to the Niah's "twilight" period.

Pirit had insisted that only Sando, the senior archaeologist, be told about Joan's true nature; Joan refused to lie to anyone, but had agreed to tell her colleagues only that she was a mathematician and that she was not permitted to discuss her past. At first this had made them guarded and resentful, no doubt because they assumed that she was some kind of spy sent by the authorities to watch over them. Later it had dawned on them that she was genuinely interested in their work, and that the absurd restrictions on her topics of conversation were not of her own choosing. Nothing about the Noudah's language or appearance correlated strongly with their recent division into nations—with no oceans to cross, and a long history of migration they were more or less geographically homogeneous—but Joan's odd name and occasional faux pas could still be ascribed to some mysterious exoticism. Rali and Surat seemed content to assume that she was a defector from one of the smaller nations, and that her history could not be made explicit for obscure political reasons.

"There are more tablets here, very close to the surface," Rali announced excitedly. "The acoustics are unmistakable." Ideally they would have excavated the entire hillside, but they did not have the time or the labour, so they were using acoustic tomography to identify likely deposits of accessible Niah writing, and then concentrating their efforts on those spots.

The Niah had probably had several ephemeral forms of written communication, but when they found something worth publishing, it stayed published: they carved their symbols into a ceramic that made diamond seem like tissue paper. It was almost unheard of for the tablets to be broken, but they were small, and multitablet works were sometimes widely dispersed. Niah technology could probably have carved three million years' worth of knowledge onto the head of a pin—they seemed not to have invented nanomachines, but they were into high-quality bulk materials and precision engineering—but for whatever reason they had chosen legibility to the naked eye above other considerations.

Joan made herself useful, taking acoustic readings farther along the slope, while Sando watched over his students as they came closer to the buried Niah artifacts. She had learnt not to hover around expectantly when a discovery was imminent; she was treated far more warmly if she waited to be summoned. The tomography unit was almost foolproof, using satellite navigation to track its position and software to analyse the signals it gathered; all it really needed was someone to drag it along the rock face at a suitable pace.

From the corner of her eye, Joan noticed her shadow on the rocks flicker and grow complicated. She looked up to see three dazzling beads of light flying west out of the sun. She might have assumed that the fusion ships were doing something useful, but the media was full of talk of "military exercises," which meant the Tirans and the Ghahari were engaging in expensive, belligerent gestures in orbit, trying to convince each other of their superior skills, technology, or sheer strength of numbers. For people with no real differences apart from a few centuries of recent history, they could puff up their minor political disputes into matters of the utmost solemnity. It might almost have been funny, if the idiots hadn't incinerated hundreds of thousands of each other's citizens every few decades, not to mention playing callous and often deadly games with the lives of the inhabitants of smaller nations.

"Jown! Jown! Come and look at this!" Surat called to her. Joan switched off the tomography unit and jogged towards the archaeologists, suddenly conscious of her body's strangeness. Her legs were stumpy but strong, and her balance as she ran came not from arms and shoulders but from the swish of her muscular tail.

"It's a significant mathematical result," Rali informed her proudly when she reached them. He'd pressure-washed the sandstone away from the near-indestructible ceramic of the tablet, and it was only a matter of holding the surface at the right angle to the light to see the etched writing stand out as crisply and starkly as it would have a million years before.

Rali was not a mathematician, and he was not offering his own opinion on the theorem the tablet stated; the Niah themselves had had a clear set of typographical conventions which they used to distinguish between everything from minor lemmas to the most celebrated theorems. The size and decorations of the symbols labelling the theorem attested to its value in the Niah's eyes.

Joan read the theorem carefully. The proof was not included on the same tablet, but the Niah had a way of expressing their results that made you believe them as soon as you read them; in this case the definitions of the terms needed to state the theorem were so beautifully chosen that the result seemed almost inevitable.

The theorem itself was expressed as a commuting hypercube, one of the Niah's favourite forms. You could think of a square with four different sets of mathematical objects associated with each of its corners, and a way of mapping one set into another associated with each edge of the square. If the maps commuted, then going across the top of the square, then down, had exactly the same effect as going down the left edge of the square, then across: either way, you mapped each element from the top-left set into the same element of the bottom-right set. A similar kind of result might hold for sets and maps that could naturally be placed at the corners and edges of a cube, or a hypercube of any dimension. It was also possible for the square faces in these structures to stand for relationships that held between the maps between sets, and for cubes to describe relationships between those relationships, and so on.

That a theorem took this form didn't guarantee its importance; it was easy to cook up trivial examples of sets and maps that commuted. The Niah didn't carve trivia into their timeless ceramic, though, and this theorem was no exception. The seven-dimensional commuting hypercube established a dazzlingly elegant correspondence between seven distinct, major branches of Niah mathematics, intertwining their most important concepts into a unified whole. It was a result Joan had never seen before: no mathematician anywhere in the Amalgam, or in any ancestral culture she had studied, had reached the same insight.

She explained as much of this as she could to the three archaeologists; they couldn't take in all the details, but their faces became orange with fascination when she sketched what she thought the result would have meant to the Niah themselves.

"This isn't quite the Big Crunch," she joked, "but it must have made them think they were getting closer." The 'Big Crunch' was her nickname for the mythical result that the Niah had aspired to reach: a unification of every field of mathematics that they considered significant. To find such a thing would not have meant the end of mathematics—it would not have subsumed every last conceivable, interesting mathematical truth—but it would certainly have marked a point of closure for the Niah's own style of investigation.

"I'm sure they found it," Surat insisted. "They reached the Big Crunch, then they had nothing more to live for."

Rali was scathing. "So the whole culture committed collective suicide?"

"Not actively, no," Surat replied. "But it was the search that had kept them going."

"Entire cultures don't lose the will to live," Rali said. "They get wiped out by external forces: disease, invasion, changes in climate."

"The Niah survived for three million years," Surat countered. "They had the means to weather all of those forces. Unless they were wiped out by alien invaders with vastly superior technology." She turned to Joan. "What do you think?"

"About aliens destroying the Niah?"

"I was joking about the aliens. But what about the mathematics? What if they found the Big Crunch?"

"There's more to life than mathematics," Joan said. "But not much more."

Sando said, "And there's more to this find than one tablet. If we get back to work, we might have the proof in our hands before sunset."

5

Joan briefed Halzoun by video link while Sando prepared the evening meal. Halzoun was the mathematician Pirit had appointed to supervise her, but apparently his day job was far too important to allow him to travel. Joan was grateful; Halzoun was the most tedious Noudah she had encountered. He could understand the Niah's work when she explained it to him, but he seemed to have no interest in it for its own sake. He spent most of their conversations trying to catch her out in some deception or contradiction, and the rest pressing her to imagine military or commercial applications of the Niah's gloriously useless insights. Sometimes she played along with this infantile fantasy, hinting at potential superweapons based on exotic physics that might come tumbling out of the vacuum, if only one possessed the right Niah theorems to coax them into existence.

Sando was her minder too, but at least he was more subtle about it. Pirit had insisted that she stay in his shelter, rather than sharing Rali and Surat's; Joan didn't mind, because with Sando she didn't have the stress of having to keep quiet about everything. Privacy and modesty were nonissues for the Noudah, and Joan had become Noudah enough not to care herself. Nor was there any danger of their proximity leading to a sexual bond; the Noudah had a complex system of biochemical cues that meant desire only arose in couples with a suitable mixture of genetic differences and similarities. She would have had to search a crowded Noudah city for a week to find someone to lust after, though at least it would have been guaranteed to be mutual.

After they'd eaten, Sando said, "You should be happy. That was our best find yet."

"I am happy." Joan made a conscious effort to exhibit a viridian tinge. "It was the first new result I've seen on this planet. It was the reason I came here, the reason I travelled so far."

"Something's wrong, though, I think."

"I wish I could have shared the news with my friend," Joan admitted. Pirit claimed to be negotiating with the Tirans to allow Anne to communicate with her, but Joan was not convinced that she was genuinely trying. She was sure that Pirit would have relished the thought of listening in on a conversation between the two of them—while forcing them to speak Noudah, of course—in the hope that they'd slip up and reveal something useful, but at the same time she would have had to face the fact that the Tirans would be listening too. What an excruciating dilemma.

"You should have brought a communications link with you," Sando suggested. "A home-style one, I mean. Nothing we could eavesdrop on."

"We couldn't do that," Joan said.

He pondered this. "You really are afraid of us, aren't you? You think the smallest technological trinket will be enough to send us straight to the stars, and then you'll have a horde of rampaging barbarians to deal with."

"We know how to deal with barbarians," Joan said coolly.

Sando's face grew dark with mirth. "Now I'm afraid."

"I just wish I knew what was happening to her," Joan said. "What she was doing, how they were treating her."

"Probably much the same as we're treating you," Sando suggested. "We're really not that different." He thought for a moment. "There was something I wanted to show you." He brought over his portable console, and summoned up an article from a Tiran journal. "See what a borderless world we live in," he joked.

The article was entitled "Seekers and Spreaders: What We Must Learn from the Niah." Sando said, "This might give you some idea of how they're thinking over there. Jaqad is an academic archaeologist, but she's also very close to the people in power."

Joan read from the console while Sando made repairs to their shelter, secreting a molasses-like substance from a gland at the tip of his tail and spreading it over the cracks in the walls.

There were two main routes a culture could take, Jaqad argued, once it satisfied its basic material needs. One was to think and study: to stand back and observe, to seek knowledge and insight from the world around it. The other was to invest its energy in entrenching its good fortune.

The Niah had learnt a great deal in three million years, but in the end it had not been enough to save them. Exactly what had killed them was still a matter of speculation, but it was hard to believe that if they had colonised other worlds they would have vanished on all of them. "Had the Niah been Spreaders," Jaqad wrote, "we might expect a visit from them, or them from us, sometime in the coming centuries."

The Noudah, in contrast, were determined Spreaders. Once they had the means, they would plant colonies across the galaxy. They would, Jaqad was sure, create new biospheres, reengineer stars, and even alter space and time to guarantee their survival. The growth of their empire would come first; any knowledge that failed to serve that purpose would be a mere distraction. "In any competition between Seekers and Spreaders, it is a Law of History that the Spreaders must win out in the end. Seekers, such as the Niah, might hog resources and block the way, but in the long run their own nature will be their downfall."

Joan stopped reading. "When you look out into the galaxy with your telescopes," she asked Sando, "how many reengineered stars do you see?"

"Would we recognise them?"

"Yes. Natural stellar processes aren't that complicated; your scientists already know everything there is to know about the subject."

"I'll take your word for that. So  . . . you're saying Jaqad is wrong? The Niah themselves never left this world, but the galaxy already belongs to creatures more like them than like us?"

"It's not Noudah versus Niah," Joan said. "It's a matter of how a culture's perspective changes with time. Once a species conquers disease, modifies their biology, and spreads even a short distance beyond their homeworld, they usually start to relax a bit. The territorial imperative isn't some timeless Law of History; it belongs to a certain phase."

"What if it persists, though? Into a later phase?"

"That can cause friction," Joan admitted.

"Nevertheless, no Spreaders have conquered the galaxy?"

"Not yet."

Sando went back to his repairs; Joan read the rest of the article. She'd thought she'd already grasped the lesson demanded by the subtitle, but it turned out that Jaqad had something more specific in mind.

"Having argued this way, how can I defend my own field of study from the very same charges as I have brought against the Niah? Having grasped the essential character of this doomed race, why should we waste our time and resources studying them further?

"The answer is simple. We still do not know exactly how and why the Niah died, but when we do, that could turn out to be the most important discovery in history. When we finally leave our world behind, we should not expect to find only other Spreaders to compete with us, as honourable opponents in battle. There will be Seekers as well, blocking the way: tired, old races squatting uselessly on their hoards of knowledge and wealth.

"Time will defeat them in the end, but we already waited three million years to be born; we should have no patience to wait again. If we can learn how the Niah died, that will be our key, that will be our weapon. If we know the Seekers' weakness, we can find a way to hasten their demise."

6

The proof of the Niah's theorem turned out to be buried deep in the hillside, but over the following days they extracted it all.

It was as beautiful and satisfying as Joan could have wished, merging six earlier, simpler theorems while extending the techniques used in their proofs. She could even see hints of how the same methods might be stretched further to yield still stronger results. The "Big Crunch" had always been a slightly mocking, irreverent term, but now she was struck anew by how little justice it did to the real trend that had fascinated the Niah. It was not a matter of everything in mathematics collapsing in on itself, with one branch turning out to have been merely a recapitulation of another under a different guise. Rather, the principle was that every sufficiently beautiful mathematical system was rich enough to mirror in part—and sometimes in a complex and distorted fashion—every other sufficiently beautiful system. Nothing became sterile and redundant, nothing proved to have been a waste of time, but everything was shown to be magnificently intertwined.

After briefing Halzoun, Joan used the satellite dish to transmit the theorem and its proof to the decoy node. That had been the deal with Pirit: anything she learnt from the Niah belonged to the whole galaxy, as long as she explained it to her hosts first.

The archaeologists moved across the hillside, hunting for more artifacts in the same layer of sediment. Joan was eager to see what else the same group of Niah might have published. One possible eight-dimensional hypercube was hovering in her mind; if she'd sat down and thought about it for a few decades she might have worked out the details herself, but the Niah did what they did so well that it would have seemed crass to try to follow clumsily in their footsteps when their own immaculately polished results might simply be lying in the ground, waiting to be uncovered.

A month after the discovery, Joan was woken by the sound of an intruder moving through the shelter. She knew it wasn't Sando; even as she slept an ancient part of her Noudah brain was listening to his heartbeat. The stranger's heart was too quiet to hear, which required great discipline, but the shelter's flexible adhesive made the floor emit a characteristic squeak beneath even the gentlest footsteps. As she rose from her couch she heard Sando waking, and she turned in his direction.

Bright torchlight on his face dazzled her for a moment. The intruder held two knives to Sando's respiratory membranes; a deep enough cut there would mean choking to death, in excruciating pain. The nanomachines that had built Joan's body had wired extensive skills in unarmed combat into her brain, and one scenario involving a feigned escape attempt followed by a sideways flick of her powerful tail was already playing out in the back of her mind, but as yet she could see no way to guarantee that Sando came through it all unharmed.

She said, "What do you want?"

The intruder remained in darkness. "Tell me about the ship that brought you to Baneth."

"Why?"

"Because it would be a shame to shred your colleague here, just when his work was going so well." Sando refused to show any emotion on his face, but the blank pallor itself was as stark an expression of fear as anything Joan could imagine.

She said, "There's a coherent state that can be prepared for a quark-gluon plasma in which virtual black holes catalyse baryon decay. In effect, you can turn all of your fuel's rest mass into photons, yielding the most efficient exhaust stream possible." She recited a long list of technical details. The claimed baryon decay process didn't actually exist, but the pseudophysics underpinning it was mathematically consistent, and could not be ruled out by anything the Noudah had yet observed. She and Anne had prepared an entire fictitious science and technology, and even a fictitious history of their culture, precisely for emergencies like this; they could spout red herrings for a decade if necessary, and never get caught out contradicting themselves.

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" the intruder gloated.

"What now?"

"You're going to take a trip with me. If you do this nicely, nobody needs to get hurt."

Something moved in the shadows, and the intruder screamed in pain. Joan leapt forward and knocked one of the knives out of his hand with her tail; the other knife grazed Sando's membrane, but a second tail whipped out of the darkness and intervened. As the intruder fell backwards, the beam of his torch revealed Surat and Rali tensed beside him, and a pick buried deep in his side.

Joan's rush of combat hormones suddenly faded, and she let out a long, deep wail of anguish. Sando was unscathed, but a stream of dark liquid was pumping out of the intruder's wound.

Surat was annoyed. "Stop blubbing, and help us tie up this Tiran cousin-fucker."

"Tie him up? You've killed him!"

"Don't be stupid, that's just sheath fluid." Joan recalled her Noudah anatomy; sheath fluid was like oil in a hydraulic machine. You could lose it all and it would cost you most of the strength in your limbs and tail, but you wouldn't die, and your body would make more eventually.

Rali found some cable and they trussed up the intruder. Sando was shaken, but he seemed to be recovering. He took Joan aside. "I'm going to have to call Pirit."

"I understand. But what will she do to these two?" She wasn't sure exactly how much Rali and Surat had heard, but it was certain to have been more than Pirit wanted them to know.

"Don't worry about that, I can protect them."

Just before dawn someone sent by Pirit arrived in a truck to take the intruder away. Sando declared a rest day, and Rali and Surat went back to their shelter to sleep. Joan went for a walk along the hillside; she didn't feel like sleeping.

Sando caught up with her. He said, "I told them you'd been working on a military research project, and you were exiled here for some political misdemeanour."

"And they believed you?"

"All they heard was half of a conversation full of incomprehensible physics. All they know is that someone thought you were worth kidnapping."

Joan said, "I'm sorry about what happened."

Sando hesitated. "What did you expect?"

Joan was stung. "One of us went to Tira, one of us came here. We thought that would keep everyone happy!"

"We're Spreaders," said Sando. "Give us one of anything, and we want two. Especially if our enemy has the other one. Did you really think you could come here, do a bit of fossicking, and then simply fly away without changing a thing?"

"Your culture has always believed there were other civilisations in the galaxy. Our existence hardly came as a shock."

Sando's face became yellow, an expression of almost parental reproach. "Believing in something in the abstract is not the same as having it dangled in front of you. We were never going to have an existential crisis at finding out that we're not unique; the Niah might be related to us, but they were still alien enough to get us used to the idea. But did you really think we were just going to relax and accept your refusal to share your technology? That one of you went to the Tirans only makes it worse for the Ghahari, and vice versa. Both governments are going absolutely crazy, each one terrified that the other has found a way to make its alien talk."

Joan stopped walking. "The war games, the border skirmishes? You're blaming all of that on Anne and me?"

Sando's body sagged wearily. "To be honest, I don't know all the details. And if it's any consolation, I'm sure we would have found another reason if you hadn't come along."

Joan said, "Maybe I should leave." She was tired of these people, tired of her body, tired of being cut off from civilisation. She had rescued one beautiful Niah theorem and sent it out into the Amalgam. Wasn't that enough?

"It's up to you," Sando replied. "But you might as well stay until they flood the valley. Another year isn't going to change anything. What you've done to this world has already been done. For us, there's no going back."

7

Joan stayed with the archaeologists as they moved across the hillside. They found tablets bearing Niah drawings and poetry, which no doubt had their virtues but to Joan seemed bland and opaque. Sando and his students relished these discoveries as much as the theorems; to them, the Niah culture was a vast jigsaw puzzle, and any clue that filled in the details of their history was as good as any other.

Sando would have told Pirit everything he'd heard from Joan the night the intruder came, so she was surprised that she hadn't been summoned for a fresh interrogation to flesh out the details. Perhaps the Ghahari physicists were still digesting her elaborate gobbledygook, trying to decide if it made sense. In her more cynical moments she wondered if the intruder might have been Ghahari himself, sent by Pirit to exploit her friendship with Sando. Perhaps Sando had even been in on it, and Rali and Surat as well. The possibility made her feel as if she were living in a fabricated world, a scape in which nothing was real and nobody could be trusted. The only thing she was certain that the Ghaharis could not have faked was the Niah artifacts. The mathematics verified itself; everything else was subject to doubt and paranoia.

Summer came, burning away the morning fogs. The Noudah's idea of heat was very different from Joan's previous perceptions, but even the body she now wore found the midday sun oppressive. She willed herself to be patient. There was still a chance that the Niah had taken a few more steps towards their grand vision of a unified mathematics, and carved their final discoveries into the form that would outlive them by a million years.

When the lone fusion ship appeared high in the afternoon sky, Joan resolved to ignore it. She glanced up once, but she kept dragging the tomography unit across the ground. She was sick of thinking about Tiran-Ghahari politics. They had played their childish games for centuries; she would not take the blame for this latest outbreak of provocation.

Usually the ships flew by, disappearing within minutes, showing off their power and speed. This one lingered, weaving back and forth across the sky like some dazzling insect performing an elaborate mating dance. Joan's second shadow darted around her feet, hammering a strangely familiar rhythm into her brain.

She looked up, disbelieving. The motion of the ship was following the syntax of a gestural language she had learnt on another planet, in another body, a dozen lifetimes ago. The only other person on this world who could know that language was Anne.

She glanced towards the archaeologists a hundred metres away, but they seemed to be paying no attention to the ship. She switched off the tomography unit and stared into the sky. I'm listening, my friend. What's happening? Did they give you back your ship? Have you had enough of this world, and decided to go home?

Anne told the story in shorthand, compressed and elliptic. The Tirans had found a tablet bearing a theorem: the last of the Niah's discoveries, the pinnacle of their achievements. Her minders had not let her study it, but they had contrived a situation making it easy for her to steal it, and to steal this ship. They had wanted her to take it and run, in the hope that she would lead them to something they valued far more than any ancient mathematics: an advanced spacecraft, or some magical stargate at the edge of the system.

But Anne wasn't fleeing anywhere. She was high above Ghahar, reading the tablet, and now she would paint what she read across the sky for Joan to see.

Sando approached. "We're in danger, we have to move."

"Danger? That's my friend up there! She's not going to shoot a missile at us!"

"Your friend?" Sando seemed confused. As he spoke, three more ships came into view, lower and brighter than the first. "I've been told that the Tirans are going to strike the valley, to bury the Niah sites. We need to get over the hill and indoors, to get some protection from the blast."

"Why would the Tirans attack the Niah sites? That makes no sense to me."

Sando said, "Nor me, but I don't have time to argue."

The three ships were menacing Anne's, pursuing her, trying to drive her away. Joan had no idea if they were Ghahari defending their territory, or Tirans harassing her in the hope that she would flee and reveal the nonexistent shortcut to the stars, but Anne was staying put, still weaving the same gestural language into her manoeuvres even as she dodged her pursuers, spelling out the Niah's glorious finale.

Joan said, "You go. I have to see this." She tensed, ready to fight him if necessary.

Sando took something from his tool belt and peppered her side with holes. Joan gasped with pain and crumpled to the ground as the sheath fluid poured out of her.

Rali and Surat helped carry her to the shelter. Joan caught glimpses of the fiery ballet in the sky, but not enough to make sense of it, let alone reconstruct it.

They put her on her couch inside the shelter. Sando bandaged her side and gave her water to sip. He said, "I'm sorry I had to do that, but if anything had happened to you I would have been held responsible."

Surat kept ducking outside to check on the "battle," then reporting excitedly on the state of play. "The Tiran's still up there, they can't get rid of it. I don't know why they haven't shot it down yet."

Because the Tirans were the ones pursuing Anne, and they didn't want her dead. But for how long would the Ghahari tolerate this violation?

Anne's efforts could not be allowed to come to nothing. Joan struggled to recall the constellations she'd last seen in the night sky. At the node they'd departed from, powerful telescopes were constantly trained on the Noudah's homeworld. Anne's ship was easily bright enough, its gestures wide enough, to be resolved from seven light-years away—if the planet itself wasn't blocking the view, if the node was above the horizon.

The shelter was windowless, but Joan saw the ground outside the doorway brighten for an instant. The flash was silent; no missile had struck the valley, the explosion had taken place high above the atmosphere.

Surat went outside. When she returned she said quietly, "All clear. They got it."

Joan put all her effort into spitting out a handful of words. "I want to see what happened."

Sando hesitated, then motioned to the others to help him pick up the couch and carry it outside.

A shell of glowing plasma was still visible, drifting across the sky as it expanded, a ring of light growing steadily fainter until it vanished into the afternoon glare.

Anne was dead in this embodiment, but her backup would wake and go on to new adventures. Joan could at least tell her the story of her local death: of virtuoso flying and a spectacular end.

She'd recovered her bearings now, and she recalled the position of the stars. The node was still hours away from rising. The Amalgam was full of powerful telescopes, but no others would be aimed at this obscure planet, and no plea to redirect them could outrace the light they would need to capture in order to bring the Niah's final theorem back to life.

8

Sando wanted to send her away for medical supervision, but Joan insisted on remaining at the site.

"The fewer officials who get to know about this incident, the fewer problems it makes for you," she reasoned.

"As long as you don't get sick and die," he replied.

"I'm not going to die." Her wounds had not become infected, and her strength was returning rapidly.

They compromised. Sando hired someone to drive up from the nearest town to look after her while he was out at the excavation. Daya had basic medical training and didn't ask awkward questions; he seemed happy to tend to Joan's needs, and then lie outside daydreaming the rest of the time.

There was still a chance, Joan thought, that the Niah had carved the theorem on a multitude of tablets and scattered them all over the planet. There was also a chance that the Tirans had made copies of the tablet before letting Anne abscond with it. The question, though, was whether she had the slightest prospect of getting her hands on these duplicates.

Anne might have made some kind of copy herself, but she hadn't mentioned it in the prologue to her aerobatic rendition of the theorem. If she'd had any time to spare, she wouldn't have limited herself to an audience of one: she would have waited until the node had risen over Ghahar.

On her second night as an invalid, Joan dreamed that she saw Anne standing on the hill looking back into the fog-shrouded valley, her shadow haloed by the Niah light.

When she woke, she knew what she had to do.

When Sando left, she asked Daya to bring her the console that controlled the satellite dish. She had enough strength in her arms now to operate it, and Daya showed no interest in what she did. That was naive, of course: whether or not Daya was spying on her, Pirit would know exactly where the signal was sent. So be it. Seven light-years was still far beyond the Noudah's reach; the whole node could be disassembled and erased long before they came close.

No message could outrace light directly, but there were more ways for light to reach the node than the direct path, the fastest one. Every black hole had its glory, twisting light around it in a tight, close orbit and flinging it back out again. Seventy-four hours after the original image was lost to them, the telescopes at the node could still turn to the Cataract and scour the distorted, compressed image of the sky at the rim of the hole's black disk to catch a replay of Anne's ballet.

Joan composed the message and entered the coordinates of the node. You didn't die for nothing, my friend. When you wake and see this, you'll be proud of us both.

She hesitated, her hand hovering above the send key. The Tirans had wanted Anne to flee, to show them the way to the stars, but had they really been indifferent to the loot they'd let her carry? The theorem had come at the end of the Niah's three-million-year reign. To witness this beautiful truth would not destroy the Amalgam, but might it not weaken it? If the Seekers' thirst for knowledge was slaked, their sense of purpose corroded, might not the most crucial strand of the culture fall into a twilight of its own? There was no shortcut to the stars, but the Noudah had been goaded by their alien visitors, and the technology would come to them soon enough.

The Amalgam had been goaded too: the theorem she'd already transmitted would send a wave of excitement around the galaxy, strengthening the Seekers, encouraging them to complete the unification by their own efforts. The Big Crunch might be inevitable, but at least she could delay it, and hope that the robustness and diversity of the Amalgam would carry them through it, and beyond.

She erased the message and wrote a new one, addressed to her backup via the decoy node. It would have been nice to upload all her memories, but the Noudah were ruthless, and she wasn't prepared to stay any longer and risk being used by them. This sketch, this postcard, would have to be enough.

When the transmission was complete she left a note for Sando in the console's memory.

Daya called out to her, "Jown? Do you need anything?"

She said, "No. I'm going to sleep for a while."

Dead Horse Point

Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory (www.darylgregory.com) is an exciting new writer who published his first story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1990. Since then he has published a handful of science fiction and fantasy stories, mostly in Asimov's and F&SF. His first novel, Pandemonium, will be published later this year.

The story that follows, one of two very fine stories Gregory published during the year, is a James Tiptree Jr. influenced tale of love, friendship, and responsibility.

Twenty-three years of silence and all it takes is one call. Not even a conversation, just a thirty-second message on her voicemail. Come now, Julia's voice says. Come now before it's too late. From anyone else it would have sounded melodramatic, but Julia never exaggerates; she's always careful with her words. Venya books a flight to Utah the next morning.

Later she'll think, wasn't it just like Julia to say it like a command. As if Venya had no choice but to come.

The park ranger tells her where to find their campsite but the RV is locked, nobody home. She sits in the rental car for an hour with the engine on and air conditioning blasting, reading park maps and informational pamphlets and squinting out at the hard sunlight, until she sees the two figures walking down the campground road toward her. They look like they've been on a long hike. Kyle's shirt is tied around his waist and his chest shines with sweat. Julia, following in his wake, wears hiking shorts and a webbed belt, plastic water bottles at her hips like six-guns. Both of them walk head down, lost in thought.

Venya steps out of the car but it's another minute before Kyle looks up and sees her. At first the only expression on his face is exhaustion, but then he recognizes her and puts on a smile, becoming the winning boy she met decades ago.

"Oh my God," he says, loud enough for her to hear, and laughs. He glances behind him at his sister but she doesn't look up.

Kyle reaches Venya and holds up his hands. "I can't hug you, I'm too sweaty!" he says, but Venya steps in and hugs him anyway. The last time she saw him he was a pale, hyper kid of twenty. He's in his mid-forties now, but still tanned and fit, hair grown to messiah-length and sun-streaked. Only his face hints at his age, and that is masked by his wild smile.

"I can't believe it," he says. "How on earth did you find us?" He steps out of the way. "Julia, it's Venya."

Julia doesn't raise her head. She frowns in concentration at a point somewhere past Venya's right hip. Her hair is gray shot with black, a negative of two decades ago. Kyle must have decided to have it cut into something short and easy to maintain; Julia wouldn't have had an opinion.

"How you doing, Jay?" Venya says to her.

Her eyes remain fixed on empty air.

"The same," Kyle says.

He pulls a key from his shorts pocket and unlocks the RV. Julia follows him inside automatically. It's cooler inside, but not by much, and the air smells of ripening fruit. Kyle starts the RV's engine to boost the air conditioning.

The vehicle looks new—probably a rental—but Kyle and Julia seem to have been living in it for several weeks. The counters are crowded with food wrappers, unopened groceries, and stacks of paper plates. Books and papers cover the little table and most of the seats.

Julia sits at the kitchen table. Kyle fills a plastic cup with ice from the small fridge, pours in some water from a collapsible jug, and sets it down in front of her. She lifts it to her lips without blinking.

"How about you?" Kyle says. "I've got beer, bourbon, juice—"

"Some of that water would be good." Venya restacks some books that have spilled across the bench seat and sits down opposite Julia.

Kyle fills a cup for Venya, then opens a bag of dried apricots and sets it down on the table facing his sister. Without shifting her gaze from the tabletop, Julia reaches into the bag and puts an apricot in her mouth.

"I was driving out here from the airport," Venya says. Kyle gulps down a cup of water and starts refilling it. "I'd forgotten how empty the highways are. I'd look down at the dash and realize I'd covered forty miles without realizing it. I thought, this must be what it's like for Julia. Autopilot."

"Julia's driving a lot these days," he says. "And I'm still the road she follows." He finishes the second cup-full. "I'm going to get a clean shirt on. You okay with her?" Before she can answer he says, "What am I talking about, you did it for seven years."

What he doesn't say: seven years, not twenty-three.

Watching Julia eat is still an unnerving experience. She chews methodically, swallows, and reaches for another piece of fruit, automatic as eating movie popcorn in the dark. The entire time her eyes are focused on some inner landscape.

"How long has it been since the last time she was awake?" Venya calls back.

"Three weeks?" A note of embarrassment in his voice. "Maybe three and a half."

"That can't be," Venya says.

Kyle comes back into the main cabin wearing a faded blue t-shirt. "It's gotten a lot worse since you were with her, Venya. At Stanford she was never gone longer than what, a couple of days?"

"Julia called me two nights ago," Venya says. "A voicemail message. She said she was calling from the Dead Horse parking lot."

"That's impossible." But he's looking at Julia. "She must have come awake at night. I don't leave her alone—" He shakes his head. "I don't. She must have come awake in the middle of the night and snuck out."

Julia lifts her plastic cup and sets it down without sipping; it's empty. Kyle takes it from her and refills it.

"What did she say?" he asks. "On the phone." From the middle of the mess on the counter he picks up a glass—a real glass, not plastic—and blows into it.

"Not much. She said you two were staying here at the park. She's working on a hard problem. Something important."

He unscrews the cap from a half-full bottle of Canadian Mist and pours a couple of inches. "That's true. Then again . . ." He smiles.

Then again, Julia is always working on a hard problem. Even in undergrad, when she resurfaced from one of her "away" times, she'd start writing furiously, page after page, as if she'd memorized a book she'd written in her head and had to get it down before it evaporated. She'd talk as she wrote—explaining, elaborating, answering Venya's questions—making Venya feel that she was part of the solution, some necessary element in the equation.

Kyle holds up the bottle but Venya shakes her head. He shrugs and sips from his glass.

Venya says, "She said she needed me to come down, before it was too late."

Kyle's grin falters, and for a moment he looks a decade older.

"How bad is it?" Venya asks. "How much is she gone?"

"Ah." He turns the glass in his fingers. He takes a big sip, then presses his lips together. "The past couple of years she's been away more than she's been awake," he says finally. "The trend line's pretty clear. We always knew lock-in was the probable end point." He says it matter-of-factly, as if he's practiced saying it out loud.

"This has to be tough on you," Venya says.

He shrugs, and the smile is back. "She's my sister. And her work is important. She really does need someone to help her organize it and get it out there."

"I read your book," Venya says. "The cover had her name on it, but I knew those sentences were yours."

He laughs, nods. "Julia's much too addicted to passive voice for pop science." He lifts his glass. "Thank you, and congratulations—you're the only one of our thirteen readers to have seen through the charade." He tosses back his drink, sets down the glass, and claps his hands. "But enough about us imposters! Let me get you settled in, and we'll do some barbecue."

Julia stares at the tabletop as if it holds an equation about to unravel.

The cement shower stalls of the campground washhouse remind Venya of the first semester in college, the year she met Julia. Venya stands in the cold stall for a long while with her head bowed, letting the hot water drum the crown of her skull and pool around her veined feet. She thinks, This is exactly how I found Julia that day.

They'd only been roommates for a few weeks, two first-year women assigned to each other by the University of Illinois mainframe. Julia came from money, her clothes made that clear. She was pale and beautiful and solemn, like one of those medieval portraits of a saint. She rarely spoke, and only an occasional, fragile smile betrayed her nervousness.

Venya was a little put out by the girl's reserve. She'd come to school with the idea, picked up from God knows where, that college roommates were automatically best friends. They'd decide on posters together, share clothes and shots of Southern Comfort, hold back each other's hair when they puked. But after a few days of trying to get the skinny, quiet girl to open up, Venya had almost gotten used to the idea that Julia was going to be little more than a silent reading machine that lived on the other side of the room.

One morning during the third week, Venya woke up late, dashed into the big bathroom they shared with the other girls on the floor, and quickly brushed her teeth to get rid of the dead-shoe taste of stale beer in her mouth. As usual, Julia had gotten up before her, and Venya saw the girl's green robe hanging outside one of the stalls, the shower running. Venya went off to her back-to-back morning classes, then to lunch. It was 12:30 or 1:00 before she went back up to her floor to drop off her books and take a pee.

Julia's green robe still hung on the hook, and the shower was still running.

Venya must have called Julia's name—that would have been the natural thing—but she only remembered running to the rubber curtain and yanking it aside. Julia stood under the spray, looking down at her feet. The water was still running hot, thanks to the industrial-sized boilers in the building, but the woman still shivered. When Venya grabbed her arm, Julia immediately stepped out of the stall to stand beside her.

Venya couldn't get her to speak, make eye contact, or even change expression. But Julia obligingly allowed herself to be dried off, led back to the room, and tucked into bed. She lay there with her eyes open, staring past the ceiling.

Venya's first thought was that someone had dropped LSD into Julia's breakfast. But the symptoms were all wrong—no acid trip, good or bad, was this calm—and in fact the symptoms didn't match any drug she had experience with (and she'd experienced more than her share). She didn't want to get Julia in trouble, but she finally decided to call the R.A., who called the paramedics, who took Julia to the ER.

Julia snapped out of it sometime during the night. She suddenly sat up in the hospital bed, looked over at Venya, and asked for pen and paper. The doctor on duty shook his head disbelievingly; he made it clear to Venya that he thought Julia had been faking the whole thing. Julia apologized, but kept scribbling.

At four a.m. her family arrived. A thirteen-year-old boy bounded into the room and jumped onto the bed next to Julia. Her father and mother came next. Professor Dad, as Venya instantly decided to call him, shook her hand, thanked her for staying with his daughter. Professor Mom sat down in the chair next to the window, holding a silver pen in her fingers like a cigarette she was dying to light. Julia said hello to each of them, and immediately returned to her writing. The boy kept up a running comedic monologue: about Julia's gown, the age of the hospital, the fat nurse by the front desk. Even then Kyle was the entertainer, the performer, the distracter. So it took Venya some time to figure out that the parents were arguing. It took her even longer to realize that the argument had been going on for years.

Professor Dad made oblique references to Julia's room at home; Professor Mom scowled and shook her head. "She needs help," she said at one point. "Professional help." There were no questions, no talk about what had happened in the shower: Julia had "disappeared" before, evidently, and would disappear again.

Later Venya would hear the whole medical history, how when Julia was a child they diagnosed her mental absences as petit mal seizures. After CAT scans turned up nothing, they called it mild autism. As she grew older and the gaps grew longer, they started calling it Dissociative Identity Disorder, which was just a fancy name for multiple personalities. One psychiatrist thought there was a "monitor" personality who could perform daily tasks while the Julia personality went somewhere else. But Julia never bought the Sybil explanation. When she "woke up" she remembered most of what had happened while she was out. It didn't feel like there was another personality in her. And she knew the difference between the two states—she knew when she'd been out.

The way Julia described it, her condition was the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder: she couldn't stop paying attention. An idea would occur to her, and then she'd hop on that train of thought and follow it right out of Dodge. She was missing some neurochemical switchman who could move her attention from reverie to awareness of the outside world.

But in the hospital, Venya understood only that Dad wanted Julia to come home, and Mom wanted her to stay in a hospital, any hospital.

And Julia?

The girl stopped writing. She put down the pen, folded the papers in half, then in half again. Her expression was tight, and her eyes shone with unshed tears. "I can do this," she said finally.

They didn't seem to hear her. Her father and mother continued to argue in their cool, knife-edged voices.

Kyle turned to Venya and silently mouthed: Do something.

Venya looked away, but the idea had been planted. A terrible, awful, stupid idea.

She raised her hand, and the professors dutifully stopped talking. "How often?" Venya asked. They turned their attention to her, as if regarding her from podiums at the far end of a great lecture hall. "How often does this happen?"

Professor Dad shrugged. "Hardly ever, anymore. She made it through senior year without—"

"That's not true," Julia said quietly. She caught Venya's eye and held her gaze. "Three or four times a week, a couple hours at a time. But they're getting longer."

Venya nodded, as if this made perfect sense. She stared at the shiny hospital floor so she wouldn't have to see the entire family looking at her.

Keep your mouth shut, she told herself. This is not your problem.

"Okay," she said. "I'll do it." She offered to watch over Julia for the rest of that semester. Only a semester.

Venya still doesn't know why she did it.

There was nothing in their relationship to that point that obligated her to help. The offer made sense only in terms of what came after, as if the next seven years—in which she led Julia through undergrad and grad school, and along the way became Julia's best friend and then, eventually, her lover—caused her to speak at that moment.

Julia accepted Venya's offer without comment.

They eat their dinner at the picnic table, in the shadow cast by the bulk of the RV. Six p.m. in September and it's still in the nineties, but the lack of humidity makes for a 20-degree difference between sun and shade. All around the campground, people fire up grills and pull open bags of chips. At the campsite next to them a van full of twenty-something Germans laugh and argue. The sky hangs over them, huge and blue and cloudless.

"It's beautiful out here," Venya says. "I can see why you came."

"I figured Julia could work anywhere, and if she came awake maybe she'd like seeing this place again." He dabs mustard from Julia's cheek and she continues to chew her chicken breast obliviously. "This was the last vacation our family took together before Mom died."

Professor Mom killed herself when Julia was in grad school; Venya went with Julia to the funeral. Professor Dad checked out in a completely different way. He took a position in Spain, and soon after found a new wife. Everyone in the family, Venya thinks, has a talent for absence. Everyone except Kyle.

"What about you?" Kyle says. "Did you ever make a family? Two kids, cocker spaniel, house in the suburbs?"

"I have a son," she says. "He started college last year. His mom and I broke up a few years ago, but we all get along. He's a good kid."

"A son? That's great!" he says, meaning it. "It sounds like you've had a good life."

"Good enough. And what about you? Ever find someone?"

"Julia's the only woman in my life." He laughs, forcing it a little. "Well, I've had a few relationships. I'm just not very good at keeping them going, and with Julia . . . I stay pretty busy. Here, I want to show you something."

He went into the RV and came out with a fresh bottle of Canadian Mist and two glasses in the fingers of one hand, and a big three-ring binder under his arm. "You remember this?" He sets down the bottle and glasses and shows her the binder cover: "HOW TO DO IT."

"My God," Venya says, and takes it from him.

"It's not the same cover, had to change that a couple times. But some of the original stuff you put in is still there. Still accurate."

When Venya decided she had to leave, she gave Kyle a binder like this. Operating instructions for Julia. Names of doctors, prescription dosages, favorite foods, sleeping schedule, shoe and clothing sizes . . . everything, down to the kind of toothpaste Julia liked. The binder is much thicker now.

"It's all there," he says. "The trust fund accounts, computer passwords, insurance papers."

Venya isn't sure what to say. "You're a good brother."

"Yeah, well. I am my sister's keeper." He sets the binder at the end of the table.

They lapse into silence. Venya pushes the last of the baked beans around on her paper plate. Kyle drinks.

"You have something you want to say," Kyle says.

Venya exhales. "True." She takes the remaining glass and splashes a bit of the whiskey into it. She swirls it around, inhaling the sharp scent, watching the liquid ride the sides of the glass. She's never particularly liked hard liquor.

"When she comes out of it," Venya begins. "Do you talk about how she's feeling?" He waits for her to explain. "You said the absences were growing longer. Eventually . . . You called it lock-in. She's got to think about that. Does she feel trapped?"

He smiles, tight-lipped. "I don't think so."

"Kyle, you can tell me."

"I would know," he says. "We've always understood each other. We don't have to talk about it." He sips from his glass. "When Julia comes back, all she wants to talk about is her work. Non-stop Q.M. She just starts scribbling, because she doesn't have much time before she goes away again. Even before she resigned from New Mexico I was helping her write up her papers—not just the layman stuff, the journal articles." He gestured toward the RV. "I should show you the stuff she's turning out now. She's dismantling Everett-Wheeler and the other interpretations. I can't follow the math anymore, but that's not important. The job now is to organize the notes and get it into the hands of people who can understand her. This is her chance to get into the history books, Venya. She wants to follow it."

"What if she follows it so far she can't find her way back?" she says. "What if she can't stop from disappearing for good?"

"I don't think she'd mind," he says. "In there, that's where her real life is. Everything out here is just . . . distraction."

"You don't know that," Venya says. "When we were together, she was afraid of getting lost. We talked about it. We didn't call it 'lock-in' then, but that's what she was afraid of."

"So?"

"So, I made her a promise."

He stares at her.

"I think that's why she called me, Kyle. Because she's getting close." Because she's afraid you won't be able to do what she needs.

He puts up his hands. His laugh is brittle. "Don't take my word for it, then. Ask her yourself."

Venya smoothes back a stray hair blowing across Julia's eyes. "I'll need some matches," she says.

Venya clears a length of the RV counter and sets out the baggie of grass and the rolling papers. A bong would be better—cooled smoke is best—but Venya didn't want to put one through airport security. It was nerve-wracking enough just to pack the marijuana, rolled up and hidden in her tampon box.

She shakes out a little of the grass onto the paper. She hasn't rolled a joint in years, but motor memory guides her hands. In the end she spills only a little of the pot.

"This is your plan?" Kyle says. "Get my sister high."

"It worked in college." Twenty-five, thirty years ago. Marijuana screwed with Julia's focus, derailed the train—if the concentration of THC was high enough. Venya's co-worker assured her that the pot was near-medical-grade, but there was no way to know if it would be enough.

Venya sits cross-legged on the floor of the vehicle, almost under the table. Kyle guides Julia until she's lying face up on the floor with her head on Venya's lap, staring at the ceiling. Kyle lights the joint for her, and Venya breathes with it to get it going.

"Pinch her nose," she says, then takes a long drag and holds the smoke in her mouth. She lifts Julia's head, and holding the glowing joint away from their bodies, bends to place her lips against Julia's. Venya exhales, a long sigh. Smoke eddies above Julia's mouth, then slowly drifts across her eyes. Julia blinks, but doesn't shift her focus from the ceiling.

"It may take a while," Venya says. She draws on the joint again, thinking about the first time they kissed. Julia seemed so afraid, as if she didn't know how to live in her own body.

After a few minutes Venya's lower back and shoulders begin to ache from the awkward position. Even though she's trying not to inhale she feels light-headed. The pot is indeed strong, or else Venya is indeed old. She suspects both.

Julia never liked marijuana. Or any of the prescription drugs the doctors tried on her in the early days. None of them worked for very long once she developed a tolerance, most of them had uncomfortable side effects, and all of them, Julia said, made her stupid. She couldn't bear stupid.

The smoke alarm goes off. Venya jerks, and Kyle, laughing, reaches up to the RV's low ceiling. He pulls off the alarm's plastic cover and yanks out the battery.

Julia hasn't moved.

"I don't think this is working," Kyle says. The joint's already burned down half its length.

"Look, her eyes are closed," Venya says. She tugs one of Julia's ear lobes. "Come on now, Sleeping Beauty."

Julia opens her eyes. She looks up at Kyle, then turns her gaze to Venya. Her hand lifts and touches Venya's cheek.

Julia smiles. "My Princess Charming."

Kyle helps the two women to their feet. Julia laughs, coughs, then recovers, smiling. "We're both old women!"

"Fifty is the new seventy, Jay." But Julia's wrong, Venya thinks. Or half wrong. Julia awake seems as beautiful to her as when they first met.

Julia looks around at the cabin, at the stacks of paper in the slanting light. "I need to write some things down," she says quietly, then catches herself. "But not now. What time is it—seven? We can watch the sunset."

"If we leave now," Kyle says.

"Vee, you better roll another one of those before I go away again."

Kyle passes out flashlights for the way back, then leads them out of the campground. After a hundred yards or so they step off the park road and onto a well-traveled hiking trail. Julia smokes as they walk, putting the joint down by her side when they pass people coming back from the point to the campground. The trail runs across sandy ground, then over patches of slick rock where the trail is marked by small cairns.

Julia puts her arm in Venya's. "I'm so glad you came," she says.

"You called," Venya says simply. She doesn't know what she can say in Kyle's presence. Julia called her without telling her brother, without even telling him that she'd woken up while he slept. "Kyle says you're working on something important. Something about dismantling the many-worlds interpretation."

"You remember Everett?"

"A little. I proof-read a lot of your papers, Jay."

"You kept correcting my semicolons," Julia says. She takes a hit from the joint and grimaces. "It's not just Everett, and the Deutschian spin-offs of that. I'm also taking down Zurek's many-histories, and Albert's many-minds, and Bohm's pilot waves. The Copenhagen Interpretation already died with the failure of complementarity."

"You don't say," Venya says. In two seconds Julia's zoomed years beyond her reading. "And your idea is . . .?"

"Wheeler-Feynman's absorber theory, but fully extended into QED." QED is quantum electrodynamics—Venya remembers that much—but she's never heard of the absorber theory. "With a few of my own twists," Julia adds.

She's animated, waving the lit joint like a sparkler. Venya takes it from her and squeezes it out. There are matches in her pocket if they need to relight it.

"There's no need for an observer to collapse the wave," Julia says. "No need for parallel universes sprouting out of control. The universe is not a growing thing, it's already complete. From the moment of the big bang, all the work has already been done. It's whole and seamless, going backward and forward in time. There's no 'now' and 'then.' Everything's now. Everything's happening at once. Look—"

Julia stoops to pick up a small rock, and scrapes an upside down V on the sandy ground. "A particle going forward in time meets an anti-particle going forward in time." She scratches a minus sign on the left-hand segment and a plus sign on the other segment.

"Oh God, more Feynman diagrams," Kyle says.

Julia digs into the intersection of the two lines. "That's an electron colliding with a positron. They're destroyed, and emit two photons that fly off in opposite directions." She draws two lines extending from the intersection, making an X. "It doesn't matter which way time's arrow is pointing. We can read the diagram from any perspective and it's equally true. Read it from left to right and you can say that electron meets a photon and emits a photon and a positron. Or from the top, two photons collide and emit an electron and a positron. All are correct. All happen."

"Okay . . ." Venya says. She looks at Kyle, her expression saying, How do you put up with this stuff? She has no idea where Julia is going with this, but after hours with the absent version of the woman, it's a pleasure to be with a Julia so present.

"But it's equally true," Julia says, "to say that an electron strikes two photons and emits a positron that travels backward in time." Julia looks Venya in the eye to see if she's following. "Time's arrow doesn't matter. If the map is true, it's true for any point in time. It's a map of the world, for all space-time. The future is as set as the past, for everyone. The territory doesn't change."

"For particles, not people."

"What do you mean, not people? Schrödinger's Cat, Venya. The EPR paradox. People, and their choices, are already factored into the equation."

"But people have free will."

"That reminds me of a joke," Kyle says.

Julia tosses the rock away. "Free will just means that you don't know what's on the map. You don't create the future, it's already there, waiting for you like a Christmas present. All you have to do on Christmas morning is see what's inside."

"A Calvinist dies and goes to heaven," Kyle says.

"What?" Venya says.

"Ignore him," Julia says. "I do."

The trail runs through a narrow neck, perhaps thirty yards wide, with sky on either side of them. The park pamphlet said that cowboys would fence the narrows and corral wild horses out on the lookout. The legend is that one winter the cowboys left for home and forgot to take down the fence. Naming the point came easy after that.

The land widens again, but then the trail ends in sheer cliff. Julia gestures toward a nose of rock jutting into the air. "My favorite spot," she says. She walks onto it like a veteran high diver. Venya's stomach tightens to see her standing on that slender platform, sky above and below.

Suicide runs in the family, Venya thinks. Maybe she isn't here to help Julia kill herself, but witness it. Or help Kyle cope with it.

But then Julia sits down and slides forward so that her legs hang over the edge. Venya cautiously follows Kyle onto the shelf. They sit down on either side of Julia with their flashlights between their thighs, letting their feet dangle over a thousand feet of empty air.

They face south, looking out toward hazy mountains fifty or sixty miles away. Between Dead Horse and the mountains are 5,000 square miles of canyon country the park maps call Islands in the Sky. A good name. Venya looks down on an ocean of air, a stone basin walled by raked cliffs over 2,000 feet high. The bottom of the basin is a vast labyrinth of stone: mile-deep chasms; sharp reefs and table-flat mesas; crenellated buttes like castles surrounded by invisible moats.

At the very bottom flows the only water visible in this stone country, the olive green coil of the Colorado. The river winds out of the south, aiming lazily for Dead Horse Point. Two miles before it reaches the point, the river abruptly goosenecks, bending 180 degrees around a butte shaped like the prow of a ship, and disappears again into the southern maze of canyons.

Venya thinks of those horses, dying of thirst within sight of the river.

"Wow," she says.

"Mmm hmm," Julia answers.

They sit in companionable silence. In the fading light the land seems to flex and shift. The cliffs to their right are already in twilight, but the eastern faces glow with deep reds and smoldering oranges. Shadows run down the cracks and seams, pooling 2,000 feet below at the darkened feet of the cliffs.

"This Calvinist goes to heaven," Kyle says.

Julia sighs, and then starts chuckling to herself.

"But instead of the pearly gates, there's a fork in the road, and a sign pointing down each path. One sign says 'Believers in Predestination' and the other says 'Believers in Free Will.'" Julia shakes her head, and Venya wonders how many times she's heard this joke—and whether she heard it while awake, or as background chatter while she was thinking of something else.

"The guy's always believed in predestination, so he goes down that road, and eventually he comes to a huge wall and a big door with the word 'PREDESTINATION' written over the top. He knocks, and an angel opens the door and says, 'What brings you to my door, mortal?' And the guy says, 'Well, there were these two signs, and I chose the one that said predestination.' The angel says, 'You chose it? You can't come in here, Bub,' and slams the door. The guy's heartbroken. Finally he trudges back to the crossroads and goes down the other road. Eventually he comes to another giant wall and a door that says 'FREE WILL.' He knocks and another angel opens the door and says, 'Why did you come this way, mortal?' And the guy says, 'I had no choice!'"

"Slam," Julia says, and laughs.

Venya laughs with them, but she wonders at these two odd, grown children. Orphans, really. Maybe they like the joke because they share the certainty that the universe will screw them over. No—that it already has.

Venya scootches forward and leans out over her knees, staring down. A thousand feet below is a pink shelf perhaps two miles wide and perhaps another thousand feet above the river.

"That's the White Rim Trail," Kyle says. He means the pale thin track that runs along the shelf like an old surgical scar. "Jeep road from the uranium-fever days. I always meant to drive that. I've never even gotten down to the rim."

"There's always the quick way down," Venya says, and Kyle laughs. "One gust of wind."

"Stop it," Julia says.

Kyle says, "When we were here when I was a kid I used to scare myself by thinking of the rock snapping off under my feet, like in a Roadrunner cartoon. I'd hang there in the air for minute, then thwip! A little puff of dust where I hit."

"Bury you right there in your silhouette-shaped hole," Venya says.

"With a gravestone that says, 'Ouch!'"

"Stop it, both of you!" Julia says. She pushes back from the edge and her flashlight topples and starts to roll. Kyle snags it before it reaches the edge.

"Careful," he says.

Venya says, "Jay, what's the matter?"

"We should head back now," she says evenly.

Kyle doesn't answer.

"It's getting cold," Julia says.

"I'm fine," Kyle says. "I'd like to stay out here a while longer."

"Let me take her," Venya says to him, and realizes she's slipped back into talking about Julia as if she isn't there. She quickly adds, "Jay and I need to talk some more physics, right Jay?"

Kyle laughs. "Liar." He squeezes Venya's arm, a silent thanks. The man's been on duty for more than twenty years, Venya thinks. Walking Julia home is the least she can do. And she and Julia do need to talk: the light is fading, and the pot probably won't last much longer.

"Are you sure?" Julia says to Kyle.

"Of course. Here, take my jacket." He starts to untie the gray fleece from around his waist.

Julia walks behind him and squeezes his neck. "Always the good little brother." She bends and kisses the crown of his head.

Venya's forgotten how quickly darkness falls in the desert. The sun drops behind some far ridge and suddenly Venya can barely see Julia beside her.

Venya clicks on her flashlight and plays it over the trail. After a few minutes of walking she says, "You sounded scared when you called me, Jay."

Julia doesn't answer. For a moment Venya thinks she's disappeared again, but then she makes a sound like a sob. "I'm so sorry, Vee. It wasn't fair to call you."

Venya wants to see her face, but resists the urge to lift the flashlight. "I promised to come back," Venya says. "If you ever got lost." So lost in her head that she'd never be able to tell anyone when she wanted out, when she wanted to end it. "You said you were afraid of not having a choice."

"That's not what I'm afraid of anymore," Julia says.

"What, then?"

Julia walks on in silence. She still hasn't turned on her flashlight. Venya feels for the lump of the joint in her jeans pocket. "You want me to light up?" she asks.

After a few seconds Julia says, "Sorry, I . . . When I woke up and saw we were at Dead Horse, I knew what he was thinking about. The last good time we had."

"He told me about that," Venya says. "The vacation before your mom died."

Another long silence. Venya thinks they're passing through the narrows, but it's hard to judge in the twilight. She thinks of the mustangs, made stupid by a simple barrier of crossed logs, unable to escape without someone to guide them.

Venya touches her arm, and Julia says, "The path out is the same as the path back. It's laid out like a map . . ."

"Stay with me, Hon. No math now. Tell me why you called me."

"He's so tired," Julia says. "You can't see it—he's being Kyle for you. But you can't see him like I do. It's like time travel. Every time I come back, he seems to be aging so much faster."

"Julia?"

Julia stumbles against something on the trail and rights herself. "He couldn't tell me, of course. He knows how important the work is to me. But I was so afraid he'd leave me before you got here, and without him . . . I'm very close, Venya."

Venya stops but Julia keeps walking automatically, her voice growing softer. "The math is . . . the math is laid out like . . ."

Venya seizes her arm, jerks her to a halt. "Julia!"

She says nothing.

"Julia, I need you to snap out of it. Listen to me." She shines the flashlight in her face, but Julia's staring into nothing. No, not nothing. The map of the world.

Venya pushes down on her shoulders. "Sit here. Don't follow me. I'll be right back." Julia lowers to the ground, her knees up by her chin. "Good girl. I'll be right back."

Soon, Venya will find his flashlight on the shelf of rock, turned on and pointing into empty air. Sometime after that, when the park rangers and police have finished with their questions and she's signed the papers that Julia cannot, she'll find the binder that Kyle set out for her. She'll turn to the pages about meals, and make Julia her breakfast.

Now Venya turns and begins to jog back the way they came, the flashlight beam jumping from rock to bush to gnarled juniper. Behind her, Julia rises and begins to follow.

The Dreaming Wind

Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford (14theditch.livejournal.com) published his first story in John Gardner's MSS magazine in 1981. He has published six novels, including World Fantasy Award-winning The Physiognomy, book one of the 'Well-Built City' trilogy, and two collections of short fiction. His other notable books include The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque and The Girl in the Glass. Upcoming is a new novel, The Shadow Year, and a new collection, The Night Whiskey.

The story that follows first appeared in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's fine anthology of trickster stories, The Coyote Road, and looks at the importance of dreams and asks what might happen if we lost them.

Each and every year, in that brief time when summer and autumn share the same bed—the former, sunburned and exhausted, drifting toward sleep, the latter, rousing to the crickets' call and the gentle brush of the first falling leaves against its face—the Dreaming Wind swept down from somewhere in the distant north, heading somewhere to the distant south, leaving everywhere in its wake incontrovertible proof of the impossible.

Our town, like the others lying directly in the great gale's path, was not exempt from the bizarre changes wrought by its passing. We prepared ourselves as best we could, namely in our hearts and minds, for there was no place to hide from it even though you might crawl into the crawl space beneath your house and pull a blanket over your head. No manner of boarding windows, stuffing towels beneath the doors, turning out the lights, or jumping into a lead-lined coffin and pulling shut the lid, made a whit's worth of difference. Somehow it always found you and had its crazy way.

So it was that each year, often on a deep blue afternoon in late August or early September, some of us noticed the leaves in the trees begin to rustle and heard amid their branches, just a whisper at first, the sound of running water. Then we knew to warn the others. "The Wind, the Wind," was the cry throughout the streets of town, and Hank Garrett, our constable, climbed up to the platform on the roof of his house and turned the crank handle siren to alert farmers out in the fields of the valley that the blowing chaos was on its way. The citizens of Lipara scurried home, powerless to effect any protection, but determined to share the burden of strangeness with loved ones and bolster the faith of the young that it wouldn't last forever.

In a heartbeat, in an eye-blink, the wind was upon us, bending saplings, rattling windows, lifting dust devils in the town square, as though it had always been there, howling throughout our lives. Even down in a root cellar, thick oaken door barred above, hiding in the dark, you heard it and once you heard it you felt it upon your face and the back of your neck, your arms, like some invisible substance gently embracing you. That's when you knew the wind was beginning to dream you.

The human body seemed its favorite plaything, and in reaction to its weird catalyst I'd seen flesh turn every color in the rainbow, melt and reform into different shapes, so that a head swelled to the size of a pumpkin or legs stretched to lift their owner above the house tops. Tongues split or turned to knives and eyes shot flame, swirled like pinwheels, popped, or became mirrors to reflect the thing that I'd become—once a salamander man with an ibis head, once a bronze statue of the moon. In my wedding year, my wife Lyda's long hair took on a mind and life of its own, tresses grabbing cups from a cupboard and smashing them upon the floor. Mayor Meersch ran down Gossin Street the year I was ten, with his rear end upon his shoulders and muffled shouts issuing from the back of his trousers.

Eyes slipped from the face and wound up in the palm, and mouths traveled to the kneecap—arms for legs, elbows for feet, a big toe nose, and wiggling index finger ears. Men became green monkeys and donkeys and dogs, and dogs took on the heads of cats, whose legs became pipe cleaners and whose tails changed instantly to sausage links with tiny biting faces at their tips. Once three generations of a family's females, from little girls to wrinkled matrons, sprouted black feathers and flew up to circle the church steeple, croaking poetry in some foreign language. Pastor Hinch became part pig, Mavis Toth, the schoolmarm, became a chair with a lampshade head, and this . . . this was not a hundredth of it, for there is no way to encompass in language the inexhaustible creative energy and crackpot genius that was the Dreaming Wind.

While our citizens suffered bodily these sea changes, bellowing with fear, crying out in torment at being still themselves inside but something wholly other outward, the landscape also changed around them. Monumental gusts loosened leaves that flew away from branches to become a school of striped fish, darting, as if with one mind, through the atmosphere, and trees turned to rubber, undulating wildly, or became the long necks of giraffes. Clouds slowly fell, wads of a violet, airy confection, and bounced off chimneys, rolled along the ground like giant tumbleweeds. Streets came to life and slithered away, windows winked, houses became glass bubbles that burst into thousand-petaled roses with doors and roofs. The grass never remained green, the sky never blue but became other colors and sometimes different consistencies like water, or jam, or once, a golden gas that coalesced our exhalations into the spectral forms of dead relatives who danced the Combarue in the town square. And all of this was accompanied by a discordant symphony comprised of a myriad of sounds: breaking glass, a tin whistle, a sneeze, a hammer claw ripping nails from green board, the sighs of ancient pachyderms, water swirling down a drain . . .

Chaos and jumblement, the overall discombobulation of reality—the effect lasted two or three hours, and then, as quickly as it came, it went. The force of the gale decreased incrementally, and as it did, so did its insane changes. People slowly began to re-form into themselves as they'd been before the wind. The streets slunk guiltily back to their normal places, the houses re-achieved their househood, the clouds blanched to their original puffy white and ascended as slowly as they'd fallen. By night, the wind had moved on to disrupt the lives of the good citizens in towns to the south of Lipara.

Some might ask, "Well, why did your ancestors stay in that spot and not move after they saw it was a yearly event?" The answer was simple. Come to Lipara and see for yourself that it's the most beautiful spot in the world: wide blue lakes, deep green forests teeming with game, and farmland of rich, wormy soil. Besides, to escape the wind's course one would have had to move to the west, which was desert, or to the east, where lay the ocean. Hearing this, some might say, "Well, all's well that ends well, and once the wind had passed, all was guaranteed to return to its former state." Yes and no. What I mean is most times this was true, and besides the upset of having yourself stretched or shrunk or turned temporarily into a nightmarish creature for a few hours, the entire rest of the year was very good living. Remember, I said, "Most of the time."

There were instances, exceedingly rare, mind you, wherein the Dreaming Wind's mischief remained behind after it had blown south. There was an old oak tree at the edge of town that never lost its ability to—at midsummer—bear a strange yellow fruit, the fragile consistency of fine china and the size of a honeydew melon, that upon ripening, fell off, broke against the ground, and hatched small blue bats that lived for two weeks and feasted upon field mice. And Grandmother Young's talking parrot, Colonel Pudding, once touched by the fickle finger of the wind, had its head replaced with that of her great-granddaughter's baby doll—a cute little bisque visage, whose blue glass eyes had lids that winked and closed when it lay down. The bird still spoke but prefaced every screeching utterance with a breathy, mechanical rendition of the word "Mama."

Perhaps the parrot was somewhat put out, but no terrible harm was done in these two incidents. Still, the possibility of unremitting permanence represented by their changes stayed alive in the minds of the citizens of Lipara, its threat continuously resurfacing and growing to monstrous proportions in all imaginations as each summer neared its end. It was one thing to be a goat-headed clown with feather-duster arms and carrot legs for a few hours, but to remain in that condition for a lifetime was something else entirely. The Dreaming Wind was playful, it was insane, it was chaotic, and it could be dangerous. Little did any of us suspect for generations past and for most of my long life that it could be anything else.

Then, a few years ago, the strange wind did something so unusual it shocked even us veterans of its mad work. It was nearing the end of a long lazy summer, memorable for its blue days and cool nights, and the leaves were beginning to curl on the elm trees, the first few early crickets were beginning to chirp their Winter's Tale. Each of us, in our own particular way, was steeling ourselves for the yearly onslaught, of the mischievous event, offering up prayers to God or reassuring ourselves by reassuring others that as certain as the wind would come, it would pass, and we would again enjoy the normal pleasures of life in Lipara. Constable Garrett did as he had always done, and chose three reliable children, paying them a dime a day, to go to the edge of the forest and listen intently for a few hours after school for the sound of water running through the tree tops. Everywhere, families made plans as to where they would meet up, what room they would weather the storm in, what songs they would sing together to quell their collective fear.

The end of August came and went without incident, and the delay heightened the apprehension of the arrival of the Dreaming Wind. We older folks reminded the younger that it was known to have come as late as the middle of the second week in September and that it was to be remembered that the wind could not be dictated to but had a definite mind of its own. During these days, every curtain lifting in a breeze, every gust dispersing the gossamer seed of a dandelion skeleton, caused blood pressures to rise and neck hairs to stand on end. By the middle of the first week in September the alarm had been falsely raised four times, and Constable Garrett, whose gamey knee was beginning to bother him from the long climbs to his roof, jokingly said he might just as well set out a sleeping bag up there.

By the end of the second week in September, nerves were frayed, tempers flared, and children cried for no reason. The aura of anxiety produced by the anticipation of the wind had begun to make Lipara a little mad even before its arrival. Miss Toth, standing in front of her class one day, could not remember for the life of her what 57 divided by 19 was no matter how many times she tapped her ruler against the black board. She had to have Peggy Frushe, one of the older girls, run across the square to the apothecary's shop to inquire as to the answer to the problem.

Beck Harbuth, the apothecary, couldn't help out just then even though he knew the answer was 3, for he had absentmindedly filled a prescription for Grandmother Young with a bottle full of laxative pills instead of the usual heart medicine, and had to brush past Peg and chase the old woman down the street. In his pursuit, he collided with Mildred Johnson who was riding her chicken eggs to the market on the front of her bike. Sitting in the road amidst the cracked shell and splattered yoke debris of their sudden meeting, Harbuth apologized to Mildred for the accident and she merely replied in a loud, disgusted tone, "Don't worry, Beck, it's all the fault of the damn wind."

Grandmother Young was only a few paces ahead of the collision of the apothecary and the egg woman, and because her hearing was weak, she never noticed a thing, but Colonel Pudding, who was riding his usual perch atop the left shoulder of his owner, did. He lit into the sky, carrying with him the last phrase he'd heard, which was "the damn wind," and, as was his practice when he heard a phrase that caught his fancy, began screeching this alarm in the mimicked voice of she who had uttered it. Constable Garrett, sitting in his office with the window open, heard someone cry, "Mama, the damn wind," sighed, slowly rose from his chair, and started for a fifth time up the steps toward his roof.

And so it went, a comedy of errors caused by troubled minds—but no one was laughing. Things got worse and worse, until the start of October when the last squadrons of southbound geese passed overhead. The collective worriment of the citizens of Lipara reached a crescendo, nerves snarling like balls of twine in the paws of kittens, and then all fell into a kind of blank exhaustion. Still the wind had not come. A few weeks later, when the first snow fell, blowing down from the north on a mundane autumnal gale, we knew for certain that the Dreaming Wind had done something undreamt of. The realization came to all of us all at once that our strange visitor from the north wasn't coming, and in that instant we froze for a moment, wondering what would become of us.

The sky grew overcast and stayed that muskrat gray for days on end, the temperature dropped to a bitter low, and the lake froze over as if the absence of the wind had plunged the world, itself, into a sodden depression. Cows gave half their normal measure of milk, roosters didn't bother signaling the dawn, dogs howled at noon, and cats were too weary to chase the mice that invaded Lipara's houses. The citizens, who had always surmised that the elimination of the Dreaming Wind would fill them with a sense of relief that might border on a kind of spiritual rebirth, now went about their daily tasks as if in mourning. Woven in with the gloom was a pervasive sense of guilt, as if we were being punished for not having appreciated the uniqueness of the blowing insanity when it was upon us.

The winter, blanketed in snow and set fast in ice, presented in its seemingly static freeze the very opposite of change. Grandmother Young took to her sick bed, complaining she no longer had the energy to go on. Colonel Pudding was beside himself with concern for his owner, and stayed all day in her room with her, pacing back and forth along the headboard of the bed, his fixed-fast bisque lips repeatedly murmuring the word "Mama." Constable Garrett's bad knee was now worse than ever, or so he claimed, and instead of going out on his daily rounds, making sure the town was safe, he stayed at his office desk, playing endless rounds of Solitaire and losing. Pastor Hinch preached a sermon one Sunday in the midst of Lipara's rigor mortis that exhorted all of the town's citizens to wake up and effect their own changes, but when it came time for his congregation to answer him in a prayer, two-thirds of the response he received was unbridled snoring. Lyda and I sat at the kitchen table, sipping tea, staring just past each other, each of us waiting for the other to begin a conversation and listening to the wind that was not a Dreaming Wind howl outside our door.

Eventually, with the spring thaw, things picked up somewhat as people returned to the act of living. There was a rote, joyless, hum-drummery to it, though. All seemed drained of interest and beauty. I think it was actually Beck Harbuth, the apothecary, who first mentioned to a customer that he'd noticed he no longer dreamed at night. The customer thought for a moment and then nodded and said that he also could not remember having dreamed since the end of the summer. This observation made the rounds for a week or two, was discussed in all circles, and agreed upon. Eventually Mayor James Meersch III called an emergency town meeting, the topic of which would be the epidemic of dreamless sleep. It was to be held in the town hall on the following Thursday evening at 7:00 p.m.

The meeting never took place, because in the intervening time after the Mayor set the date and agenda for that Thursday many people began to realize, now that they were concentrating on the matter, that in fact they were dreaming. What it was, as articulated by Beck Harbuth—the one who started it all—is that nothing unusual was happening in their dreams. The dreams that were dreamt in the days following the failure of the wind were of a most pedestrian nature—eating breakfast, walking to work, reading yesterday's newspaper, making the bed. There were no chimerical creatures or outlandish happenings to be found in the land of sleep anymore.

The second reason the meeting was cancelled was that Grandmother Young passed away on the Tuesday prior to the day of the meeting, and although she had grown very frail of recent years, the entire town was surprised and saddened by her passing. She was Lipara's oldest citizen, one hundred twenty-five years, and we all loved her. True to her no-nonsense approach to life, her last words spoken to my wife, who, along with a group of other neighbors were taking shifts watching over her in her final hours, were, "Death has got to be less dull than Lipara these days." Her funeral was as grand as we could muster in our downtrodden condition, and the mayor allocated funds so that a special monument could be erected to her in the town square. As her coffin was lowered into the ground, Colonel Pudding, sitting on a perch we'd positioned near the grave for him, shed baby doll tears and announced his one word eulogy, "Mama." Then he spread his wings, took off into the sky, and flew out of sight.

The days passed into summer and we dreamt our dreams of eating peas and clipping our toenails. It seemed nothing would break the spell that had settled upon the town. We sleepwalked through the hours and greeted each other with half-nods and feeble grins. Not even the big fleecy clouds that passed in the blue sky took on the shapes of dragons or pirate ships as they had once upon a time. Just when the stasis became almost intolerable, something happened one night. It wasn't much, but we clung to it like ants on a twig swept down river.

Mildred Johnson was sitting up late reading a new book she'd recently acquired concerning the egg-laying habits of yellow hens. Her husband had already gone to bed, as had her daughter, Jessica. The reading wasn't the most exciting, and she'd dozed off in her chair. Some time later, she woke very suddenly to the sound of low murmuring coming from her daughter's room. She got up and went to the half-open door of the bedroom to check that all was fine, but when she peeked in, she saw, in a shaft of moonlight that bathed the scene, something moving on the bed next to Jessica's pillow. Her first thought was that it was a rat and she screamed. The thing looked up, startled, and in that moment, before it flew out the window, she saw the smooth, fixed, baby-doll expression of Colonel Pudding.

The parrot's return and the unusual particulars of the sighting could not exactly be classified as bizarre, but there was enough of an oddness to it to engender a mild titillation of the populace. Where had the bird been hiding since the funeral? What was its midnight message? Was it simply lost and had wandered in the open window or was there some deeper purpose to its actions? These were some of the questions that set off a spark or two in the otherwise dimmed minds of Lipara. As speculation grew, there were more reports of Colonel Pudding visiting the rooms of the town's sleeping children. It was advised by the pastor at Sunday mass that all windows of youngsters' bedrooms be kept closed at night, and the congregation nodded, but just the opposite was practiced, seeing as how parents and children alike all secretly wanted to be involved in the mystery.

Beyond his nighttime visits, the parrot began to be spotted also in broad daylight, flitting here and there just above the rooftops of the town. And one sighting reported that he landed on the left shoulder of Mavis Toth of a Monday afternoon the first week of summer vacation and perched there, yammering into her ear, as she walked from her house out by the lake all the way to the bank. Something was going on, we were sure of it, but what it was no one had the slightest idea. Or I should say, no adults had a clue. The children of Lipara, on the other hand, took to whispering, gathering in groups, and talking excitedly until a grownup drew near. Even usual truants of the school year, like the master of spitballs, Alfred Lessert, began spending whole days at the school under the pretense of doing math problems for fun. It was the belief of some that a conspiracy was afoot. Parents slyly tried to coax their children into divulging a morsel of information, but their sons and daughters stared quizzically, either pretending not to know what their folks were getting at or really not knowing. Miss Toth came under scrutiny as well, and instead of really answering questions, she nodded a great deal, played with the chain that held her reading glasses, and forced a laugh when nothing else would do.

The intrigue surrounding the schoolhouse and the town's children remained of mild interest to the adults throughout the summer, but as always, the important tasks of business and household chores took precedence and finally overwhelmed their attention, so that they did not mark the vanishing of old newspapers and cups of flour. As the first anniversary of the wind's failure to appear drew closer we tried to pull tight the reins of our speculation as to what would happen. In our private minds we all wondered whether the present state of limbo would be split by the gale again howling through town, or if the time would pass without incident and give further proof that the dreaming weirdness had run its course for good, never to return.

Friday morning of the second to last week in August, I went to the mailbox and found only an odd message with no envelope. It was a piece of folded paper, colored green and cut into the shape of a parrot feather. I opened it and read: Colonel Pudding Invites You to the Festival of the Dreaming Wind. The date was the very next day, the time, sundown, and the location, the town square. It went on to announce: Bring Only Your Dreams. I smiled for the first time since the end of the previous summer, and I was so out of practice that the muscles of my face ached slightly. As old and slow as I was, I ran up the path, calling to Lyda. When she saw the invitation, she actually laughed and clapped her hands.

Late the next afternoon, just before twilight, we left the house and walked to the town square. It was a beautiful evening—pink, orange, and purple in the west where the sun was half below the horizon. The sky above was dark blue and already the stars were beginning to show themselves. A slight breeze blew, enough to keep the gnats and mosquitoes at home. We held hands and walked in silence. As we passed along, we saw our neighbors leaving their houses and heading in the direction of the festival.

The town square had been transformed. Streamers of gold paper draped upon the picket fences and snaked around the light posts. In the southern corner, rows of folding chairs had been set up facing a slightly raised, makeshift stage that was formed from the wooden pallets where the town's brickmakers stacked their wares. Two tall poles on either side supported a patchwork curtain comprised of a number of old comforters safety-pinned together. Six lit torches had been set up around the performance area, casting a soft glow that became increasingly magical as the sky darkened. Constable Garrett, big cigar in the corner of his mouth, dressed in a colorful muumuu and wearing a bow in his hair, played the usher, making us form a line a short distance from the seating. We complimented him on his outfit, telling him how lovely he looked, and he nodded wearily as usual and answered, "What did you expect?"

All around the festival area, Lipara's children moved busily, with purpose, and in the middle of this bustle of activity stood Miss Toth, her skin blue, her hair a wig of rubber snakes, whispering directions and leaning down to put her ear closer to the ideas and questions of her students. Suddenly all was quiet and still but for the flickering of the torch flames. "Please have your tickets ready," said Garrett, and he held his hand up and waved us on. Before taking our seats, we were directed to three long tables upon which lay painted papier-mâché masks of animal heads, household items, seashells, and anything else you could possibly imagine. They had, attached to either side, long strands of thick wire with half-loops at the ends so that you could put on the disguise like a pair of glasses. Mixed in amidst the masks were newspaper hats, and at the end of each table was a stack of fans made of sticks with a round piece of cardboard attached.

I settled on a mask that made my head a can of beans, and my wife took on the visage of a barnyard chick. Mildred Johnson's face became a bear paw; her husband's a bright yellow sun. Beck Harbuth chose a dog mask, and Mayor James Meersch III turned away from the table a green monkey. Once everyone was something else, we took our fans and went to sit before the stage. The show started promptly. Miss Toth appeared from behind the curtain, carrying a hat rack, which she set down next to her. She welcomed us all and thanked us for coming, introduced Colonel Pudding—creator and founder of the Festival of the Dreaming Wind—and walked off the stage. A moment later, from over our heads, there came the sound of flapping wings, and Colonel Pudding landed on the top of the hat rack. He screeched three times, lifted his wings, bobbed his head twice, and said, "Mama, the tale of the dreaming wind. Once upon a time . . ." before flying away. Jessica Johnson ran out from behind the curtain, whisked the perch off the stage, and the play began.

The play was about a great wizard who lived, with his wife and daughter, in a castle way up north in the mountains. He was a good wizard, practicing only white magic, and for anyone who made the arduous journey to see him, he would grant a wish as long as it was meant for someone else. The only two wishes he would not grant were those of riches or power. A chorus of younger children sang songs that filled us in on the details of life upon the mountain. White confetti blew across the stage, becoming snow, to mark the passage of time.

Then the wizard's wife, whom he loved very much, caught a chill that progressed into pneumonia. It soon became clear that she was dying, and no matter what spells of enchantment he tried to work, nothing could cure her. When finally she died, he was deeply saddened, as was his daughter. He began to realize that there were things in the world his magic couldn't control, and he became very protective of his daughter, fearing she would succumb to the same fate as her mother. He had promised his wife that he would always love the girl and keep her safe. This responsibility grew in his mind to overshadow everything, and the least little cut to her finger or scraped knee caused him great anguish.

Time passed and the girl grew older and developed a mind of her own. She wanted to go down the mountain and visit with other people. The wizard knew that there were all manner of dangers waiting for her out there in the world. Before she got to the age where he knew he could no longer stop her from leaving, he cast a spell on her that put her into a profound sleep. To protect her, he encased her in a large seed pod with a window so that he could see her face when he needed to. There she slept, her age unchanging, and he finally felt some relief.

He noticed at the end of the first year of her protective sleep that she must be dreaming, because he could see through the window the figures and forms of her dreams swirling around her. It became clear to him that if he didn't find some way to siphon out the dreams, they would eventually fill the seed to bursting; so, using his magic, he cast a spell that added a spigot to the top of the structure. Once a year, when summer led into fall, he'd climb a stepladder and release her pent-up dreams. They sprayed forth from within like a geyser, gathering themselves up into a kind of cloud that, when fully formed, rushed out of the castle window. The mountain winds caught her dreams and drove them south, where their vitality affected everything they touched.

As the story unfolded on the stage before me, I was amazed at the quality of the production and how ingenious the props were. The seed pod that contained the wizard's daughter was a large luggage bag covered with glitter, and a window cut to reveal the girl's face. To show her dreams swirling within, they must have cut from colored paper small figures of different animals and people and things and attached them to thin sticks that the daughter, played wonderfully by the beautiful Peggy Frushe, controlled with her hands, hidden from sight, and made sail gracefully before her closed eyes. When the dreams were released by the turning of the spigot, they took the form of younger children, donned in costumes, who whirled madly around the stage and then gathered together before blowing south. And what was even more amazing was that the errant Alfred Lessert, with his freckles and shock of red hair, played the troubled wizard with a pathos that transcended drama and stepped neatly into reality.

While I sat there, noting the remainder of the play, wherein a youth comes to the far north to beg for a wish to be granted, discovers the girl and frees her, does battle with her father, who just before killing the lad with a deadly spell succumbs to his daughter's pleas and spares him, letting the young couple flee down the mountain toward freedom, I was preoccupied, seeing my own years in Lipara unfold on a wooden-palette stage in my mind. Before I knew it the action transpiring in front of me had rushed on, and the wizard was delivering his final soliloquy, a blessing for the couple, amid a blizzard of falling snow. "Out there in the world, my dear," he said, calling after his daughter, and scanning the crowd to look into each set of our eyes, "the wind will blow both beautiful and bitter, and there's no telling which it will be each time the boughs bend and the leaves rustle. There is no certainty but that there is no certainty. Hold tight to each other and don't be afraid, for sometimes, in the darkest night, that wind may even bring you dreams."

At the end of the production, the players bowed to thundering applause. We were then instructed to hold high our fans and to wave them as hard as we could. Everyone in the audience and on stage paddled the air with all they had, creating two hundred small gusts of wind that joined together to form a great gale that gave comfort and left no one unchanged. Afterward, some danced the Combarue to the sound of Constable Garrett's harmonica while the children played hide and seek in the dark. We all drank punch and talked and laughed late into the night until the torches burned out.

On our walk home by the light of the stars, Lyda turned to me and divulged how when she and some of the other neighbors were clearing out Grandmother Young's house so that it could be sold to a new couple moving into town, she'd discovered, beneath the bed, a set of loose papers that held the plans for the festival and the outline of the play. "By then the Colonel was putting the scheme she'd taught him into action, and so I kept it a secret from everyone so as not to ruin the surprise," she said. I told her I was glad she did, just as we passed the bench in the shadow of the strange old oak that gave birth to blue bats, and we caught sight of Alfred Lessert and Peggy Frushe sharing a kiss. "Some things never change," I whispered.

Wearily, we crawled into bed that night, and I lay for a long time with my eyes closed, listening to Lyda's steady breathing and the sound of a breeze sifting through the screen of our open window. My thoughts, at first, were filled with the sights and sounds of the festival—the glow of the torches, the masks, the laughter—but these eventually gave way to the sole image of that old wizard, alone on his mountain in the far north. Through the falling snow, I noticed his beard and recognized his wrinkled face. Murmuring some incantation, he lifted his wand. Then he nodded once, granting me my wish, and I realized I must be dreaming.

The Coat of Stars

Holly Black

Holly Black (www.blackholly.com) is the author of the bestselling "The Spiderwick Chronicles." Her first story appeared in 1997, but she first got attention with her debut novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. She has written six "Spiderwick" novels and two novels in her "Modern Faerie Tale" sequence, including Andre Norton Award winner Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie. Black's most recent book is the first in a second series of Spiderwick novels, The Nixie's Song.

Science fiction and fantasy are about changing our perceptions, about making us question the world around us. In the moving story that follows, Black re-imagines the quest beyond the hill to recover a lost love from the distant lands of faerie in thoroughly modern terms.

Rafael Santiago hated going home. Home meant his parents making a big fuss and a special dinner and him having to smile and hide all his secret vices, like the cigarettes he had smoked for almost sixteen years now. He hated that they always had the radio blaring salsa and the windows open and that his cousins would come by and try to drag him out to bars. He hated that his mother would tell him how Father Joe had asked after him at Mass. He especially hated the familiarity of it, the memories that each visit stirred up.

For nearly an hour that morning he had stood in front of his dressing table and regarded the wigs and hats and masks—early versions or copies of costumes he'd designed—each item displayed on green glass heads that stood in front of a large, broken mirror. They drooped feathers, paper roses, and crystal dangles, or curved up into coiled, leather horns. He had settled on wearing a white tank top tucked into bland gray Dockers but when he stood next to all his treasures, he felt unfinished. Clipping on black suspenders, he looked at himself again. That was better, almost a compromise. A fedora, a cane, and a swirl of eyeliner would have finished off the look, but he left it alone.

"What do you think?" he asked the mirror, but it did not answer. He turned to the unpainted plaster face casts resting on a nearby shelf; their hollow eyes told him nothing either.

Rafe tucked his little phone into his front left pocket with his wallet and keys. He would call his father from the train. Glancing at the wall, his gaze rested on one of the sketches of costumes he'd done for a postmodern ballet production of Hamlet. An award hung beside it. This sketch was of a faceless woman in a white gown appliquéd with leaves and berries. He remembered how dancers had held the girl up while others pulled on the red ribbons he had had hidden in her sleeves. Yards and yards of red ribbon could come from her wrists. The stage had been swathed in red. The dancers had been covered in red. The whole world had become one dripping gash of ribbon.

The train ride was dull. He felt guilty that the green landscapes that blurred outside the window did not stir him. He only loved leaves if they were crafted from velvet.

Rafael's father waited at the station in the same old blue truck he'd had since before Rafe had left Jersey for good. Each trip his father would ask him careful questions about his job, the city, Rafe's apartment. Certain unsaid assumptions were made. His father would tell him about some cousin getting into trouble or, lately, his sister Mary's problems with Marco.

Rafe leaned back in the passenger seat, feeling the heat of the sun wash away the last of the goose bumps on his arms. He had forgotten how cold the air conditioning was on the train. His father's skin, sun-darkened to deep mahogany, made his own seem sickly pale. A string-tied box of crystallized ginger pastries sat at his feet. He always brought something for his parents: a bottle of wine, a tarte tatin, a jar of truffle oil from Balducci's. The gifts served as a reminder of the city and that his ticket was round-trip, bought and paid for.

"Mary's getting a divorce," Rafe's father said once he'd pulled out of the parking lot. "She's been staying in your old room. I had to move your sewing stuff."

"How's Marco taking it?" Rafe had already heard about the divorce; his sister had called him a week ago at three in the morning from Cherry Hill, asking for money so she and her son Victor could take a bus home. She had talked in heaving breaths and he'd guessed she'd been crying. He had wired the money to her from the corner store where he often went for green tea ice cream.

"Not good. He wants to see his son. I told him if he comes around the house again, your cousin's gonna break probation but he's also gonna break that loco sonofabitch's neck."

No one, of course, thought that spindly Rafe could break Marco's neck.

The truck passed people dragging lawn chairs into their front yards for a better view of the coming fireworks. Although it was still many hours until dark, neighbors milled around, drinking lemonade and beer.

In the back of the Santiago house, smoke pillared up from the grill where Cousin Gabriel scorched hamburger patties smothered in hot sauce. Mary lay on the blue couch in front of the TV, an ice mask covering her eyes. Rafael walked by as quietly as he could. The house was dark and the radio was turned way down. For once, his greeting was subdued. Only his nephew, Victor, a sparkler twirling in his hand, seemed oblivious to the somber mood.

They ate watermelon so cold that it was better than drinking water; hot dogs and hamburgers off the grill with more hot sauce and tomatoes; rice and beans; corn salad; and ice cream. They drank beer and instant iced tea and the decent tequila that Gabriel had brought. Mary joined them halfway through the meal and Rafe was only half-surprised to see the blue and yellow bruise darkening her jaw. Mostly, he was surprised how much her face, angry and suspicious of pity, reminded him of Lyle.

When Rafe and Lyle were thirteen, they had been best friends. Lyle had lived across town with his grandparents and three sisters in a house far too small for all of them. Lyle's grandmother told the kids terrible stories to keep them from going near the river that ran through the woods behind their yard. There was the one about the phooka, who appeared like a goat with sulfurous yellow eyes and great curling horns and who shat on the blackberries on the first of November. There was the kelpie that swam in the river and wanted to carry off Lyle and his sisters to drown and devour. And there were the trooping faeries that would steal them all away to their underground hills for a hundred years.

Lyle and Rafe snuck out to the woods anyway. They would stretch out on an old, bug-infested mattress and "practice" sex. Lying on his back, Lyle'd showed Rafe how to thrust his penis between Lyle's pressed-together thighs in "pretend" intercourse.

Lyle had forbidden certain conversations. No talk about the practicing, no talk about the bruises on his back and arms, and no talk about his grandfather, ever, at all. Rafe thought about that, about all the conversations he had learned not to have, all the conversations he still avoided.

As fireworks lit up the black sky, Rafe listened to his sister fight with Marco on the phone. He must have been accusing her about getting the money from a lover because he heard his name said over and over. "Rafael sent it," she shouted. "My fucking brother sent it." Finally, she screamed that if he didn't stop threatening her she was going to call the police. She said her cousin was a cop. And it was true; Teo Santiago was a cop. But Teo was also in jail.

When she got off the phone, Rafe said nothing. He didn't want her to think he'd overheard.

She came over anyway. "Thanks for everything, you know? The money and all."

He touched the side of her face with the bruise. She looked at the ground but he could see that her eyes had grown wet.

"You're gonna be okay," he said. "You're gonna be happier."

"I know," she said. One of the tears tumbled from her eye and shattered across the toe of his expensive leather shoe, tiny fragments sparkling with reflected light. "I didn't want you to hear all this shit. You're life is always so together."

"Not really," he said, smiling. Mary had seen his apartment only once, when she and Marco had brought Victor up to see The Lion King. Rafe had sent her tickets; they were hard to get so he thought that she might want them. They hadn't stayed long in his apartment; the costumes that hung on the walls had frightened Victor.

She smiled too. "Have you ever had a boyfriend this bad?"

Her words hung in the air a moment. It was the first time any of them had ventured a guess. "Worse," he said, "and girlfriends too. I have terrible taste."

Mary sat down next to him on the bench. "Girlfriends too?"

He nodded and lifted a glass of iced tea to his mouth. "When you don't know what you're searching for," he said, "you have to look absolutely everywhere."

The summer that they were fourteen, a guy had gone down on Rafe in one of the public showers at the beach and he gloried in the fact that for the first time he had a story of almost endless interest to Lyle. It was also the summer that they almost ran away.

"I saw grandma's faerys," Lyle had said the week before they were supposed to go. He told Rafe plainly, like he'd spotted a robin outside the window.

"How do you know?" Rafe had been making a list of things they needed to bring. The pen in his hand had stopped writing in the middle of spelling "colored pencils." For a moment, all Rafe felt was resentment that his blowjob story had been trumped.

"They were just the way she said they'd be. Dancing in a circle and they glowed a little, like their skin could reflect the moonlight. One of them looked at me and her face was as beautiful as the stars."

Rafe scowled. "I want to see them too."

"Before we get on the train we'll go down to where I saw them dancing."

Rafe added "peanut butter" to his list. It was the same list he was double-checking six days later, when Lyle's grandmother called. Lyle was dead. He had slit his wrists in a tub of warm water the night before they were supposed to leave for forever.

Rafe had stumbled to the viewing, cut off a lock of Lyle's blond hair right in front of his pissed-off family, stumbled to the funeral, and then slept stretched out on the freshly filled grave. It hadn't made sense. He wouldn't accept it. He wouldn't go home.

Rafe took out his wallet and unfolded the train schedule from the billfold. He had a little time. He was always careful not to miss the last train. He looked at the small onyx and silver ring on his pinkie. It held a secret compartment inside, so well hidden that you could barely see the hinge. When Lyle had given it to him, Rafe's fingers had been so slender that it had fit on his ring finger as easily as the curl of Lyle's hair fit inside of it.

As Rafe rose to kiss his mother and warn his father that he would have to be leaving, Mary thrust open the screen door so hard it banged against the plastic trashcan behind it.

"Where's Victor? Is he inside with you? He's supposed to be in bed."

Rafe shook his head. His mother immediately put down the plate she was drying and walked through the house, still holding the dishrag, calling Victor's name. Mary showed them the empty bed.

Mary stared at Rafe as though he hid her son from her. "He's not here. He's gone."

"Maybe he snuck out to see some friends," Rafe said, but it didn't seem right. Not for a ten-year-old.

"Marco couldn't have come here without us seeing him," Rafe's father protested.

"He's gone," Mary repeated, as though that explained everything. She slumped down in one of the kitchen chairs and covered her face with her hands. "You don't know what he might do to that kid. Madre de Dios."

Rafe's mother came back in the room and punched numbers into the phone. There was no answer at Marco's apartment. The cousins came in from the backyard. They had mixed opinions on what to do. Some had kids of their own and thought that Mary didn't have the right to keep Victor away from his father. Soon everyone in the kitchen was shouting. Rafe got up and went to the window, looking out into the dark backyard. Kids made up their own games and wound up straying farther than they meant to.

"Victor!" he called, walking across the lawn. "Victor!"

But he wasn't there, and when Rafe walked out to the street, he could not find the boy along the hot asphalt length. Although it was night, the sky was bright with a full moon and clouds enough to reflect the city lights.

A car slowed as it came down the street. It sped away once it was past the house and Rafe let out the breath he didn't even realize that he had held. He had never considered his brother-in-law crazy, just bored and maybe a little resentful that he had a wife and a kid. But then, Lyle's grandfather had seemed normal too.

Rafe thought about the train schedule in his pocket and the unfinished sketches on his desk. The last train would be along soon and if he wasn't there to meet it, he would have to spend the night with his memories. There was nothing he could do here. In the city, he could call around and find her the number of a good lawyer—a lawyer that Marco couldn't afford. That was the best thing, he thought. He headed back to the house, his shoes clicking like beetles on the pavement.

His oldest cousin had come out to talk to him in the graveyard the night after Lyle's funeral. It had clearly creeped Teo to find his little cousin sleeping in the cemetery.

"He's gone." Teo had squatted down in his blue policeman uniform. He sounded a little impatient and very awkward.

"The faerys took him," Rafe had said. "They stole him away to Faeryland and left something else in his place."

"Then he's still not in this graveyard." Teo had pulled on Rafe's arm and Rafe had finally stood.

"If I hadn't touched him," Rafe had said, so softly that maybe Teo didn't hear.

It didn't matter. Even if Teo had heard, he probably would have pretended he hadn't.

This time when Rafe walked out of the house, he heard the distant fireworks and twirled his father's keys around his first finger. He hadn't taken the truck without permission in years.

The stick and clutch were hard to time and the engine grunted and groaned, but when he made it to the highway, he flicked on the radio and stayed in fifth gear the whole way to Cherry Hill. Marco's house was easy to find. The lights were on in every room and the blue flicker of the television lit up the front steps.

Rafe parked around a corner and walked up to the window of the guest bedroom. When he was thirteen, he had snuck into Lyle's house lots of times. Lyle had slept on a pull-out mattress in the living room because his sisters shared the second bedroom. The trick involved waiting until the television was off and everyone else had gone to bed. Rafe excelled at waiting.

When the house finally went silent and dark, Rafe pushed the window. It was unlocked. He slid it up as far as he could and pulled himself inside.

Victor turned over sleepily and opened his eyes. They went wide.

Rafe froze and waited for him to scream, but his nephew didn't move. "It's your uncle," Rafe said softly. "From The Lion King. From New York." He sat down on the carpet. Someone had once told him that being lower was less threatening.

Victor didn't speak.

"Your mom sent me to pick you up."

The mention of his mother seemed to give Victor the courage to say: "Why didn't you come to the door?"

"Your dad would kick my ass," Rafe said. "I'm not crazy."

Victor half-smiled.

"I could drive you back," Rafe said. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and put it on the comforter by Victor. "You can call your mom and she'll tell you I'm okay. Not a stranger."

The boy climbed out of bed and Rafe stuffed it with pillows that formed a small boy-shape under the blankets.

"What are you doing?" the boy asked as he punched the numbers into the tiny phone.

"I'm making a pretend you that can stay here and keep on sleeping." The words echoed for a long moment before Rafe remembered that he and Victor had to get moving.

On the drive back, Rafe told Victor a story that his mother had told him when he was little, about a king who fed a louse so well on royal blood that it swelled up so large that it no longer fit in the palace. The king had the louse slaughtered and its hide tanned to make a coat for his daughter, the princess, and told all her suitors that they had to guess what kind of skin she wore before their proposal could be accepted.

Victor liked the part of the story where Rafe pretended to hop like a flea and bite his nephew. Rafe liked all fairy tales with tailors in them.

"Come inside," his mother said. "You should have told us you were going to take the car. I needed to go to the store and get some—"

She stopped, seeing Victor behind Rafael.

Rafe's father stood up from the couch as they came in. Rafe tossed the keys and his father caught them.

"Tough guy." His father grinned. "I hope you hit him."

"Are you kidding? And hurt this delicate hand?" Rafe asked, holding it up as for inspection.

He was surprised by his father's laugh.

For the first time in almost fifteen years, Rafe spent the night. Stretching out on the lumpy couch, he turned the onyx ring again and again on his finger. Then, for the first time in more than ten years, he thumbed open the hidden compartment, ready to see Lyle's golden hair. Crumbled leaves fell onto his chest instead.

Leaves. Not hair. Hair lasted; it should be there. Victorian mourning ornaments braided with the hair of the long-dead survived decades. Rafe had seen such a brooch on the scarf of a well-known playwright. The hair was dulled by time, perhaps, but it had hardly turned to leaves.

He thought of the lump of bedclothes that had looked like Victor at first glance. A "pretend me," Victor had said. But Lyle's corpse wasn't pretend. He had seen it. He had cut off a lock of its hair.

Rafe ran his fingers through the crushed leaves on his chest. Hope swelled inside of him, despite the senselessness of it. He didn't like to think about Faeryland lurking just over a hill or beneath a shallow river, as distant as a memory. But if he could believe that he could pass unscathed from the world of the city into the world of the suburban ghetto and back again, then couldn't he go further? Why couldn't he cross into the world of shining people with faces like stars that were the root of all his costumes?

Marco had stolen Victor; but Rafe had stolen Victor back. Until that moment, Rafe hadn't considered he could steal Lyle back from Faeryland.

Rafe kicked off the afghan.

At the entrance to the woods, Rafe stopped and lit a cigarette. His feet knew the way to the river by heart.

The mattress was filthier than he remembered, smeared with dirt and damp with dew. He sat, unthinking, and whispered Lyle's name. The forest was quiet and the thought of faerys seemed a little silly. Still, he felt close to Lyle here.

"I went to New York, just like we planned," Rafe said, his hand stroking over the blades of grass as though they were hairs on a pelt. "I got a job in a theatrical rental place, full of these antiqued candelabras and musty old velvet curtains. Now I make stage clothes. I don't ever have to come back here again."

He rested his head against the mattress, inhaled mold and leaves and earth. His face felt heavy, as though already sore with tears. "Do you remember Mary? Her husband hits her. I bet he hits my nephew too, but she wouldn't say." His eyes burned with unexpected tears. The guilt that twisted his gut was fresh and raw as it had been the day Lyle died. "I never knew why you did it. Why you had to die instead of come away with me. You never said either."

"Lyle," he sighed, and his voice trailed off. He wasn't sure what he'd been about to say. "I just wish you were here, Lyle. I wish you were here to talk to."

Rafe pressed his mouth to the mattress and closed his eyes for a moment before he rose and brushed the dirt off his slacks.

He would just ask Mary what happened with Marco. If Victor was all right. If they wanted to live with him for a while. He would tell his parents that he slept with men. There would be no more secrets, no more assumptions. There was nothing he could do for Lyle now, but there was still something he could do for his nephew. He could say all the things he'd left unsaid and hope that others would too. As Rafe stood, lights sprung up from nothing, like matches catching in the dark.

Around him, in the woods, faerys danced in a circle. They were bright and seemed almost weightless, hair flying behind them like smoke behind a sparkler. Among them, Rafe thought he saw a kid, so absorbed in dancing that he did not hear Rafe gasp or shout. He started forward, hand outstretched. At the center of the circle, a woman in a gown of green smiled a cold and terrible smile before the whole company disappeared.

Rafe felt his heart beat hard against his chest. He was frightened as he had not been at fourteen, when magical things seemed like they could be ordinary and ordinary things were almost magical.

On the way home, Rafe thought of all the other fairy tales he knew about tailors. He thought of the faery woman's plain green gown and about desire. When he got to the house, he pulled his sewing machine out of the closet and set it up on the kitchen table. Then he began to rummage through all the cloth and trims, beads, and fringe. He found crushed panne velvet that looked like liquid gold and sewed it into a frockcoat studded with bright buttons and appliquéd with blue flames that lapped up the sleeves. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever made. He fell asleep cradling it and woke to his mother setting a cup of espresso mixed with condensed milk in front of him. He drank the coffee in one slug.

It was easy to make a few phone calls and a few promises, change around meetings and explain to his bewildered parents that he needed to work from their kitchen for a day or two. Of course Clio would feed his cats. Of course his client understood that Rafe was working through a design problem. Of course the presentation could be rescheduled for the following Friday. Of course. Of course.

His mother patted his shoulder. "You work too hard."

He nodded, because it was easier than telling her he wasn't really working.

"But you make beautiful things. You sew like your great-grandmother. I told you how people came from miles around to get their wedding dresses made by her."

He smiled up at her and thought of all the gifts he had brought at the holidays—cashmere gloves and leather coats and bottles of perfume. He had never sewn a single thing for her. Making gifts had seemed cheap, like he was giving her a child's misshapen vase or a card colored with crayons. But the elegant, meaningless presents he had sent were cold, revealing nothing about him and even less about her. Imagining her in a silk dress the color of papayas—one he might sew himself—filled him with shame.

He slept most of the day in the shadowed dark of his parents' bed with the shades drawn and the door closed. The buzz of cartoons in the background and the smell of cooking oil made him feel like a small child again. When he woke it was dark outside. His clothes had been cleaned and were folded at the foot of the bed. He put the golden coat on over them and walked to the river.

There, he smoked cigarette after cigarette, dropping the filters into the water, listening for the hiss as the river smothered the flame and drowned the paper. Finally, the faerys came, dancing their endless dance, with the cold faery woman sitting in the middle.

The woman saw him and walked through the circle. Her eyes were green as moss and, as she got close, he saw that her hair flowed behind her as though she were swimming through water or like ribbons whipped in a fierce wind. Where she stepped, tiny flowers bloomed.

"Your coat is beautiful. It glows like the sun," the faery said, reaching out to touch the fabric.

"I would give it to you," said Rafe. "Just let me have Lyle."

A smile twisted her mouth. "I will let you spend tonight with him. If he remembers you, he is free to go. Will that price suit?"

Rafe nodded and removed the coat.

The faery woman caught Lyle's hand as he spun past, pulling him out of the dance. He was laughing, still, as his bare feet touched the moss outside the circle and he aged. His chest grew broader, he became taller, his hair lengthened, and fine lines appeared around his mouth and eyes. He was no longer a teenager.

"Leaving us, even for a time, has a price," the faery woman said. Standing on her toes, she bent Lyle's head to her lips. His eyelids drooped and she steered him to the moldering mattress. He never even looked in Rafe's direction; he just sank down into sleep.

"Lyle," Rafe said, dropping down beside him, smoothing the tangle of hair back from his face. There were braids in it that knotted up with twigs and leaves and cords of thorny vines. A smudge of dirt highlighted one cheekbone. Leaves blew over him, but he did not stir.

"Lyle," Rafe said again. Rafe was reminded of how Lyle's body had lain in the casket at the funeral, of how Lyle's skin had been pale and bluish as skim milk and smelled faintly of chemicals, of how his fingers were threaded together across his chest so tightly that when Rafe tried to take his hand, it was stiff as a mannequin's. Even now, the memory of that other, dead Lyle seemed more real than the one that slept beside him like a cursed prince in a fairy tale.

"Please wake up," Rafe said. "Please. Wake up and tell me this is real."

Lyle did not stir. Beneath the lids, his eyes moved as if he saw another landscape.

Rafe shook him and then struck him, hard, across the face. "Get up," he shouted. He tugged on Lyle's arm and Lyle's body rolled toward him.

Standing, he tried to lift Lyle, but he was used to only the weight of bolts of cloth. He settled for dragging him toward the street where Rafe could flag down a car or call for help. He pulled with both his hands, staining Lyle's shirt and face with grass, and scratching his side on a fallen branch. Rafe dropped his hand and bent over him in the quiet dark.

"It's too far," Rafe said. "Far too far."

He stretched out beside Lyle, pillowing his friend's head against his chest and resting on his own arm.

When Rafe woke, Lyle no longer lay beside him, but the faery woman stood over the mattress. She wore the coat of fire and, in the light of the newly risen sun, she shone so brightly that Rafe had to shade his eyes with his hand. She laughed and her laugh sounded like ice cracking on a frozen lake.

"You cheated me," Rafe said. "You made him sleep."

"He heard you in his dreams," said the faery woman. "He preferred to remain dreaming."

Rafe stood and brushed off his pants, but his jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth hurt.

"Come with me," the faery said. "Join the dance. You are only jealous that you were left behind. Let that go. You can be forever young and you can make beautiful costumes forevermore. We will appreciate them as no mortal does and we will adore you."

Rafe inhaled the leaf-mold and earth smells. Where Lyle had rested, a golden hair remained. He thought of his father laughing at his jokes, his mother admiring his sewing, his sister caring enough to ask him about boyfriends even in the middle of a crisis. Rafe wound the hair around his finger so tightly that it striped his skin white and red. "No," he told her.

His mother was sitting in her robe in the kitchen. She got up when Rafe came in.

"Where are you going? You are like a possessed man." She touched his hand and her skin felt so hot that he pulled back in surprise.

"You're freezing! You have been at his grave."

It was easier for Rafe to nod than explain.

"There is a story about a woman who mourned too long and the specter of her lover rose up and dragged her down into death with him."

He nodded again, thinking of the faery woman, of being dragged into the dance, of Lyle sleeping like death.

She sighed exaggeratedly and made him a coffee. Rafe had already set up the sewing machine by the time she put the mug beside him.

That day he made a coat of silver silk, pleated at the hips and embroidered with a tangle of thorny branches and lapels of downy white fur. He knew it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever made.

"Who are you sewing that for?" Mary asked when she came in. "It's gorgeous."

He rubbed his eyes and gave her a tired smile. "It's supposed to be the payment a mortal tailor used to win back a lover from Faeryland."

"I haven't heard of that story," his sister said. "Will it be a musical?"

"I don't know yet," said Rafe. "I don't think the cast can sing."

His mother frowned and called Mary over to chop up a summer squash.

"I want you and Victor to come live with me," Rafe said as his sister turned away from him.

"Your place is too small," Rafe's mother told him.

She had never seen his apartment. "We could move, then. Go to Queens. Brooklyn."

"You won't want a little boy running around. And Mary has the cousins here. She should stay with us. Besides, the city is dangerous."

"Marco is dangerous," Rafe said, his voice rising. "Why don't you let Mary make up her own mind?"

Rafe's mother muttered under her breath as she chopped, Rafe sighed and bit his tongue and Mary gave him a sisterly roll of the eyes. It occurred to him that that had been the most normal conversation he had had with his mother in years.

All day he worked on the coat and that night Rafe, wearing the silvery coat, went back to the woods and the river.

The dancers were there as before and when Rafe got close, the faery woman left the circle of dancers.

"Your coat is as lovely as the moon. Will you agree to the same terms?"

Rafe thought of objecting, but he also thought of the faery woman's kiss and that he might be able to change the course of events. It would be better if he caught her off-guard. He shouldered off his coat. "I agree."

As before, the faery woman pulled Lyle from the dance.

"Lyle!" Rafe said, starting toward him before the faery could touch his brow with her lips.

Lyle turned to him and his lips parted as though he were searching for a name to go with a distant memory, as if Lyle didn't recall him after all.

The faery woman kissed him then, and Lyle staggered drowsily to the mattress. His drooping eyelashes nearly hid the gaze he gave Rafe. His mouth moved, but no sound escaped him and then he subsided into sleep.

That night Rafe tried a different way of rousing Lyle. He pressed his mouth to Lyle's slack lips, to his forehead as the faery woman had done. He kissed the hollow of Lyle's throat, where the beat of his heart thrummed against his skin. He ran his hands over Lyle's chest. He touched his lips to the smooth, unscarred expanse of Lyle's wrists. Again and again, he kissed Lyle, but it was as terrible as kissing a corpse.

Before he slept, Rafe took the onyx and silver ring off his own pinkie, pulled out a strand of black hair from his own head and coiled it inside the hollow of the poison ring. Then he pushed the ring onto Lyle's pinkie.

"Remember me. Please remember me," Rafe said. "I can't remember myself unless you remember me."

But Lyle did not stir and Rafe woke alone on the mattress. He made his way home in the thin light of dawn.

That day he sewed a coat from velvet as black as the night sky. He stitched tiny black crystals onto it and embroidered it with black roses, thicker at the hem and then thinning as they climbed. At the cuffs and neck, ripped ruffles of thin smoky purples and deep reds reminded him of sunsets. Across the back, he sewed on silver beads for stars. Stars like the faery woman's eyes. It was the most beautiful thing Rafael had ever created. He knew he would never make its equal.

"Where do you get your ideas from?" his father asked as he shuffled out to the kitchen for an evening cup of decaf. "I've never been much of a creative person."

Rafe opened his mouth to say that he got his ideas from everywhere, from things he'd seen and dreamed and felt, but then he thought of the other thing his father said. "You made that bumper for the old car out of wood," Rafe said. "That was pretty creative."

Rafe's father grinned and added milk to his cup.

That night Rafe donned the shimmering coat and walked to the woods. The faery woman waited for him. She sucked in her breath at the sight of the magnificent coat.

"I must have it," she said. "You shall have him as before."

Rafael nodded. Tonight if he could not rouse Lyle, he would have to say good-bye. Perhaps this was the life Lyle had chosen—a life of dancing and youth and painless memory—and he was wrong to try and take him away from it. But he wanted to spend one more night beside Lyle.

She brought Lyle to him and he knelt on the mattress. The faery woman bent to kiss his forehead, but at the last moment, Lyle turned his head and the kiss fell on his hair.

Scowling, she rose.

Lyle blinked as though awakening from a long sleep, then touched the onyx ring on his finger. He turned toward Rafe and smiled tentatively.

"Lyle?" Rafe asked. "Do you remember me?"

"Rafael?" Lyle asked. He reached a hand toward Rafe's face, fingers skimming just above the skin. Rafe leaned into the heat, butting his head against Lyle's hand and sighing. Time seemed to flow backward and he felt like he was fourteen again and in love.

"Come, Lyle," said the faery woman sharply.

Lyle rose stiffly, his fingers ruffling Rafe's hair.

"Wait," Rafe said. "He knows who I am. You said he would be free."

"He's as free to come with me as he is to go with you," she said.

Lyle looked down at Rafe. "I dreamed that we went to New York and that we performed in a circus. I danced with the bears and you trained fleas to jump through the eyes of needles."

"I trained fleas?"

"In my dream. You were famous for it." His smile was tentative, uncertain. Maybe he realized that it didn't sound like a great career.

Rafe thought of the story he had told Victor about the princess in her louse-skin coat, about locks of hair and all the things he had managed through the eyes of needles.

The faery woman turned away from them with a scowl, walking back to the fading circle of dancers, becoming insubstantial as smoke.

"It didn't go quite like that." Rafe stood and held out his hand. "I'll tell you what really happened."

Lyle clasped Rafe's fingers tightly, desperately, but his smile was wide and his eyes were bright as stars. "Don't leave anything out."

The Prophet of Flores

Ted Kosmatka

Ted Kosmatka (www.tedkosmatka.com) is a twenty-first century writer. His first stories appeared in 2005, and he has published a small handful of thoughtful, challenging science fiction tales like "The God Engine" and "Bitterseed" in venues like Asimov's Science Fiction. According to his website, he lives not far from the dunes of Lake Michigan in a house shaped, vaguely, like a ship.

The challenging alternate history that follows takes a piece of recent history—the discovery of the manlike "hobbit" on the island of Flores—and turns it on its head, setting it in a world where Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection was disproven decades ago.

If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?

—Voltaire

When Paul was a boy, he played God in the attic above his parents' garage. That's what his father called it, playing God, the day he found out. That's what he called it the day he smashed it all down.

Paul built the cages out of discarded two-by-fours he'd found behind the garage, and quarter-inch mesh he bought from the local hardware store. While his father was away speaking at a scientific conference on divine cladistics, Paul began constructing his laboratory from plans he'd drawn during the last day of school.

Because he wasn't old enough to use his father's power tools, he had to use a handsaw to cut the wood for the cages. He used his mother's sturdy black scissors to snip the wire mesh. He borrowed hinges from old cabinet doors, and he borrowed nails from the rusty coffee can that hung over his father's unused workbench.

One evening his mother heard the hammering and came out to the garage. "What are you doing up there?" she asked, speaking in careful English, peering up at the rectangle of light that spilled down from the attic.

Paul stuck his head through the opening, all spiky black hair and sawdust. "I'm just playing around with some tools," he said. Which was, in some sense, the truth. Because he couldn't lie to his mother. Not directly.

"Which tools?"

"Just a hammer and some nails."

She stared up at him, her delicate face a broken Chinese doll—pieces of porcelain re-glued subtly out of alignment. "Be careful," she said, and he understood she was talking both about the tools, and about his father.

"I will."

The days turned into weeks as Paul worked on the cages. Because the materials were big, he built the cages big—less cutting that way. In reality, the cages were enormous, over-engineered structures, ridiculously outsized for the animals they'd be holding. They weren't mouse cages so much as mouse cities—huge tabletop-sized enclosures that could have housed German shepherds. He spent most of his paper-route money on the project, buying odds and ends that he needed: sheets of plexi, plastic water bottles, and small dowels of wood he used for door latches. While the other children in the neighborhood played basketball or wittedandu, Paul worked.

He bought exercise wheels and built walkways; he hung loops of yarn the mice could climb to various platforms. The mice themselves he bought from a pet store near his paper route. Most were white feeder mice used for snakes, but a couple were of the more colorful, fancy variety. And there were even a few English mice—sleek, long-bodied show mice with big tulip ears and glossy coats. He wanted a diverse population, so he was careful to buy different kinds.

While he worked on their permanent homes, he kept the mice in little aquariums stacked on a table in the middle of the room. On the day he finished the last of the big cages, he released the mice into their new habitats one by one—the first explorers on a new continent. To mark the occasion, he brought his friend John Long over, whose eyes grew wide when he saw what Paul had made.

"You built all this?" John asked.

"Yeah."

"It must have taken you a long time."

"Months."

"My parents don't let me have pets."

"Neither do mine," Paul answered. "But anyway, these aren't pets."

"Then what are they?"

"An experiment."

"What kind of experiment?"

"I haven't figured that out yet."

Mr. Finley stood at the projector, marking a red ellipse on the clear plastic sheet. Projected on the wall, it looked like a crooked half-smile between the X and Y axis.

"This represents the number of daughter atoms. And this . . ." He drew the mirror image of the first ellipse. "This is the number of parent atoms." He placed the marker on the projector and considered the rows of students. "Can anyone tell me what the point of intersection represents?"

Darren Michaels in the front row raised his hand. "It's the element's half-life."

"Exactly. Johnson, in what year was radiometric dating invented?"

"1906."

"By whom?"

"Rutherford."

"What method did he use?"

"Uranium lead—"

"No. Wallace, can you tell us?"

"He measured helium as an intermediate decay product of uranium."

"Good, so then who used the uranium-lead method?"

"That was Boltwood, in 1907."

"And how were these initial results viewed?"

"With skepticism."

"By whom?"

"By the evolutionists."

"Good." Mr. Finley turned to Paul. "Carlson, can you tell us what year Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species?"

"1867," Paul said.

"Yes, and in what year did Darwin's theory finally lose the confidence of the larger scientific community?"

"That was 1932." Anticipating his next question, Paul continued. "When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating. The new dating method proved the Earth wasn't as old as the evolutionists thought."

"And in what year was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?"

"1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel prize in 1960 when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the Earth was 5,800 years old."

Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father's old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul's father was a doctor, the PhD kind. He was blond and big and successful. He'd met Paul's mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm. They had worked on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul's father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.

Paul's father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; and the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul's mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.

Paul's father was a force of nature, a cataclysm; as unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. The attic was a good place to hide, and Paul threw himself into his hobby.

Paul studied his mice as though they were Goodall's chimps. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. He found that, within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Paul learned, could kill each other.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations expanded to fill the new worlds he'd created for them. The babies were born pink and blind, but as their fur came in, Paul began documenting colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, and banded, and broken marked. In later generations, colors appeared that he hadn't purchased, and he knew enough about genetics to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.

Paul was fascinated by the concept of genes, the stable elements through which God provided for the transfer of heritable characteristics from one generation to the next. In school they called it divine transmission.

Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well-mapped and well-understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. But it wasn't enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He wanted to do real science. And because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas.

Mice, he quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand. The electronic scale, however, proved useful. He weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics, but he wasn't sure what characteristics to look for.

He was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date, but a mouse—the 17th mouse born in January. He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. There was nothing really special about the mouse. It was made different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he'd written there. Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he'd ever weighed.

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God's words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G. That's not why Paul did it though, to get closer to God. He did it for the simplest reason, because he was curious.

It was early spring before his father asked him what he spent his time doing in the attic.

"Just messing around."

They were in his father's car on the way home from piano lessons. "Your mother said you built something up there."

Paul fought back a surge of panic. "I built a fort a while ago."

"You're almost twelve now. Aren't you getting a little old for forts?'

"Yeah, I guess I am."

"I don't want you spending all your time up there."

"All right."

"I don't want your grades slipping."

Paul, who hadn't gotten a B in two years, said, "All right."

They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.

He watched his father's hands on the steering wheel. Though large for his age, like his father, Paul's features still favored his Asian mother; and he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn't help being what he was.

Paul watched his father's hands on the steering wheel, and years later, when he thought of his father, even after everything that happened, that's how he thought of him. That moment frozen. Driving in the car, big hands on the steering wheel, a quiet moment of foreboding that wasn't false, but was merely what it was, the best it would ever be between them.

"What have you done?" There was wonder in John's voice. Paul had snuck him up to the attic, and now Paul held Bertha up by her tail for John to see. She was a beautiful golden brindle, long whiskers twitching.

"She's the most recent generation, an F4."

"What does that mean?"

Paul smiled. "She's kin to herself."

"That's a big mouse."

"The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty."

Paul put the mouse on John's hand.

"What have you been feeding her?" John asked.

"Same as the other mice. Look at this." Paul showed him the charts he'd graphed, like Mr. Finley, a gentle upward ellipse between the X and Y axis—the slow upward climb in body weight from one generation to the next.

"One of my F2s tipped the scales at forty-five grams, so I bred him to the biggest females, and they made more than fifty babies. I weighed them all at a hundred days and picked the biggest four. I bred them and did the same thing the next generation, choosing the heaviest hundred-day weights. I got the same bell-curve distribution—only the bell was shifted slightly to the right. Bertha was the biggest of them all."

John looked at Paul in horror. "That works?"

"Of course it works. It's the same thing people have been doing with domestic livestock for the last five thousand years."

"But this didn't take you thousands of years."

"No. Uh, it kind of surprised me it worked so well. This isn't even subtle. I mean, look at her, and she's only an F4. Imagine what an F10 might look like."

"That sounds like evolutionism."

"Don't be silly. It's just directional selection. With a diverse enough population, it's amazing what a little push can do. I mean, when you think about it, I hacked off the bottom 95% of the bell-curve for five generations in a row. Of course the mice got bigger. I probably could have gone the other way if I wanted, made them smaller. There's one thing that surprised me though, something I only noticed recently."

"What?"

"When I started, at least half of the mice were albino. Now it's down to about one in ten."

"Okay."

"I never consciously decided to select against that."

"So?"

"So, when I did culls . . .when I decided which ones to breed, sometimes the weights were about the same, and I'd just pick. I think I just happened to pick one kind more than the other."

"So what's your point?"

"So what if it happens that way in nature?"

"What do you mean?"

"It's like the dinosaurs. Or woolly mammoths, or cavemen. They were here once; we know that because we find their bones. But now they're gone. God made all life about six thousand years ago, right?"

"Yeah."

"But some of it isn't here anymore. Some died out along the way."

It happened on a weekend. Bertha was pregnant, obscenely, monstrously. Paul had isolated her in one of the aquariums, an island unto herself, sitting on a table in the middle of the room. A little tissue box sat in the corner of her small glass cage, and Bertha had shredded bits of paper into a comfortable nest in which to give birth to the next generation of goliath mice.

Paul heard his father's car pull into the garage. He was home early. Paul considered turning off the attic lights but knew it would only draw his father's suspicion. Instead he waited, hoping. The garage was strangely quiet—only the ticking of the car's engine. Paul's stomach dropped when he heard the creak of his father's weight on the ladder.

There was a moment of panic then—a single hunted moment when Paul's eyes darted for a place to hide the cages. It was ridiculous; there was no place to go.

"What's that smell?" his father asked as his head cleared the attic floor. He stopped and looked around. "Oh."

And that was all he said at first. That was all he said as he climbed the rest of the way. He stood there like a giant, taking it in. The single bare bulb draped his eyes in shadow. "What's this?" he said finally. His dead voice turned Paul's stomach to ice.

"What's this?" Louder now, and something changed in his shadow eyes. Paul's father stomped toward him, above him.

"What's this?" The words more shriek than question now, spit flying from his mouth.

"I, I thought—"

A big hand shot out and slammed into Paul's chest, balling his t-shirt into a fist, yanking him off his feet.

"What the fuck is this? Didn't I tell you no pets?" The bright light of the family, the famous man.

"They're not pets, they're—"

"God, it fucking stinks up here. You brought these things into the house? You brought this vermin into the house? Into my house!"

The arm flexed, sending Paul backward into the cages, toppling one of the tables—wood and mesh crashing to the floor, the squeak of mice and twisted hinges, months and months and months of work.

His father saw Bertha's aquarium and grabbed it. He lifted it high over his head—and there was a moment when Paul imagined he could almost see it, almost see Bertha inside, and the babies inside her, countless generations that would never be born. Then his father's arms came down like a force of nature, like a cataclysm. Paul closed his eyes against exploding glass, and all he could think was, this is how it happens. This is exactly how it happens.

Paul's father died two weeks after Paul's nineteenth birthday, the summer of Paul's sophomore year at Stanford.

At Stanford he double-majored in genetics and anthropology, taking eighteen credit hours a semester. He studied transcripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Apocryphal verses; he took courses in Comparative Interpretation and Biblical Philosophy. He studied fruit flies, and amphioxus; and while still an undergraduate, won a prestigious summer internship working under renowned geneticist Michael Poore.

Paul sat in classrooms while men in dark suits spun theories about Kibra and T-variants; about microcephalin-1 and haplogroup D. He learned researchers had identified structures within a family of proteins called AAA+ that were shown to initiate DNA replication, and he learned these genetic structures were conserved across all forms of life, from men to archaebacteria—the very calling card of the great designer.

Paul also studied the banned texts. He studied balancing equilibriums and Hardy-Weinburg; but alone at night, walking the dark halls of his own head, it was the trade-offs that fascinated him most. Paul was a young man who understood trade-offs.

He learned of the recently discovered Alzheimer's gene, APOE4—a gene common throughout much of the world; and he learned theories about how deleterious genes grew to such high frequencies. Paul learned that although APOE4 caused Alzheimer's, it also protected against the devastating cognitive consequences of early childhood malnutrition. The gene that destroys the mind at seventy, saves it at seven months. He learned that people with sickle cell trait are resistant to malaria; and heterozygotes for cystic fibrosis are less susceptible to cholera; and people with type A blood survived the plague at higher frequencies than other blood types, altering forever, in a single generation, the frequency of blood types in Europe. A process, some said, now being slow-motion mimicked by the gene CKR5 and HIV.

In his anthropology courses, Paul learned that all humans alive today could trace their ancestry back to Africa, to a time almost six thousand years ago when the whole of human diversity existed within a single small population. And there had been at least two dispersions out of Africa, his professors said, if not more—a genetic bottleneck in support of the Deluvian Flood Theory. But each culture had its own beliefs. Muslims called it Allah. Jews, Yahweh. The science journals were careful not to call it God anymore; but they spoke of an intelligent designer—an architect, lowercase "a". Though in his heart of hearts, Paul figured it all amounted to the same thing.

Paul learned they'd scanned the brains of nuns, looking for the God spot, and couldn't find it. He learned about evolutionism. Although long debunked by legitimate science, adherents of evolutionism still existed—their beliefs enjoying near immortality among the fallow fields of pseudo-science, cohabitating the fringe with older belief systems like astrology, phrenology, and acupuncture. Modern evolutionists believed the various dating systems were all incorrect; and they offered an assortment of unscientific explanations for how the isotope tests could all be wrong. In hushed tones, some even spoke of data tampering and conspiracies.

The evolutionists ignored the accepted interpretation of the geological record. They ignored the miracle of the placenta and the irreducible complexity of the eye.

During his junior and senior years, Paul studied archaeology. He studied the ancient remains of Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis. He studied the un-Men; he studied afarensis, and Australopithecus, and Pan.

In the world of archeology, the line between Man and un-Man could be fuzzy—but it was never unimportant. To some scientists, Homo erectus was a race of Man long dead, a withered branch on the tree of humanity. To those more conservative, he wasn't Man at all; he was other, a hiccup of the creator, an independent creation made from the same tool box. But that was an extreme viewpoint. Mainstream science, of course, accepted the use of stone tools as the litmus test. Men made stone tools. Soulless beasts didn't. Of course there were still arguments, even in the mainstream. The fossil KNM ER 1470, found in Kenya, appeared so perfectly balanced between Man and un-Man that a new category had to be invented: near-Man. The arguments could get quite heated, with both sides claiming anthropometric statistics to prove their case.

Like a benevolent teacher swooping in to stop a playground fight, the science of genetics arrived on the scene. Occupying the exact point of intersection between Paul's two passions in life—genetics and anthropology—the field of paleometagenomics was born.

Paul received a bachelor's degree in May and started a graduate program in September. Two years and an advanced degree later, he moved to the East Coast to work for Westin Genomics, one of the foremost genetics research labs in the world.

Three weeks after that, he was in the field in Tanzania, learning the proprietary techniques of extracting DNA from bones 5,800 years-old. Bones from the very dawn of the world.

Two men stepped into the bright room.

"So this is where the actual testing is done?" It was a stranger's voice, the accent urban Australian.

Paul lifted his eyes from the microscope and saw his supervisor accompanied by an older man in a gray suit.

"Yes," Mr. Lyons said.

The stranger shifted weight to his teak cane. His hair was short and gray, parted neatly on the side.

"It never ceases to amaze," the stranger said, glancing around. "How alike laboratories are across the world. Cultures who cannot agree on anything agree on this: how to design a centrifuge, where to put the test tube rack, what color to paint the walls—white, always. The bench tops, black."

Mr. Lyons nodded. Mr. Lyons was a man who wore his authority like a uniform two sizes too large; it required constant adjustment to look presentable.

Paul stood, pulled off his latex gloves.

"Gavin McMaster," the stranger said, sticking out a hand. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Carlson."

They shook.

"Paul. You can call me Paul."

"I apologize for interrupting your work," Gavin said.

"It's time I took a break anyway."

"I'll leave you two to your discussion," Mr. Lyons said and excused himself.

"Please," Paul said, gesturing to a nearby worktable. "Take a seat."

Gavin sank onto the stool and set his briefcase on the table. "I promise I won't take much of your time," he said. "But I did need to talk to you. We've been leaving messages for the last few days and—"

"Oh." Paul's face changed. "You're from—"

"Yes."

"This is highly unusual for you to contact me here."

"I can assure you these are very unusual circumstances."

"Still, I'm not sure I like being solicited for one job while working at another."

"I can see there's been a misunderstanding."

"How's that?"

"You called it a job. Consider it a consulting offer."

"Mr. McMaster, I'm very busy with my current work. I'm in the middle of several projects, and to be honest, I'm surprised Westin let you through the door."

"Westin is already onboard. I took the liberty of speaking to the management before contacting you today."

"How did you . . ." Paul looked at him, and Gavin raised an eyebrow. With corporations, any question of "how" was usually rhetorical. The answer was always the same. And it always involved dollar signs.

"Of course, we'll match that bonus to you, mate." McMaster slid a check across the counter. Paul barely glanced at it.

"As I said, I'm in the middle of several projects now. One of the other samplers here would probably be interested."

McMaster smiled. "Normally I'd assume that was a negotiating tactic. But that's not the case here, is it?"

"No."

"I was like you once. Hell, maybe I still am."

"Then you understand." Paul stood.

"I understand you better than you think. It makes it easier, sometimes, when you come from money. Sometimes I think that only people who come from it realize how worthless it really is."

"That hasn't been my experience. If you'll excuse me." Politeness like a wall, a thing he'd learned from his mother.

"Please," Gavin said. "Before you leave, I have something for you." He opened the snaps on his briefcase and pulled out a stack of glossy 8x10 photographs.

For a moment Paul just stood there. Then he took the photos from Gavin's extended hand. Paul looked at the pictures. Paul looked at them for a long time.

Gavin said, "These fossils were found last year on the island of Flores, in Indonesia."

"Flores," Paul whispered, still studying the photos. "I heard they found strange bones there. I didn't know anybody had published."

"That's because we haven't. Not yet, anyway."

"These dimensions can't be right. A six inch ulna."

"They're right."

Paul looked at him. "Why me?" And just like that, the wall was gone. What lived behind it had hunger in its belly.

"Why not?"

It was Paul's turn to raise an eyebrow.

"Because you're good," Gavin said.

"So are others."

"Because you're young and don't have a reputation to risk."

"Or one to stand on."

Gavin sighed. "Because I don't know if archaeology was ever meant to be as important as it has become. Will that do for an answer? We live in a world where zealots become scientists. Tell me, boy, are you a zealot?"

"No."

"That's why. Or close enough."

There were a finite number of unique creations at the beginning of the world—a finite number of species which has, since that time, decreased dramatically through extinction. Speciation is a special event outside the realm of natural processes, a phenomena relegated to the moment of creation, and to the mysteries of Allah.

—Expert witness, heresy trials, Ankara, Turkey.

The flight to Bali was seventeen hours, and another two to Flores by chartered plane—then four hours by Jeep over the steep mountains and into the heart of the jungle. To Paul, it might have been another world. Rain fell, stopped, then fell again, turning the road into a thing which had to be reasoned with.

"Is it always like this?" Paul asked.

"No," Gavin said. "In the rainy season, the roads are much worse."

Flores, isle of flowers. From the air it had looked like a long ribbon of jungle thrust from blue water, part of a rosary of islands between Australia and Java. The Wallace Line—a line more real than any on a map—lay kilometers to the west, toward Asia and the empire of placental mammals. A stranger emperor ruled here.

Paul was exhausted by the time they pulled into Ruteng. He rubbed his eyes. Children ran alongside the Jeep, their faces some combination of Malay and Papuan—brown skin, strong white teeth like a dentist's dream. The hill town crouched one foot in the jungle, one on the mountain. A valley flung itself from the edge of the settlement, a drop of kilometers.

The men checked into their hotel. Paul's room was basic, but clean, and Paul slept like the dead. The next morning he woke, showered and shaved. Gavin met him in the lobby.

"It's a bit rustic, I apologize." Gavin said.

"No, it's fine." Paul said. "There was a bed and a shower. That's all I needed."

"We use Ruteng as a kind of base camp for the dig. Our future accommodations won't be quite so luxurious."

Back at the Jeep, Paul checked his gear. It wasn't until he climbed into the passenger seat that he noticed the gun, its black leather holster duct-taped to the driver's door. It hadn't been there the day before.

Gavin caught him staring. "These are crazy times we live in, mate. This is a place history has forgotten till now. Recent events have made it remember."

"Which recent events are those?"

"Religious events to some folks' view. Political to others." Gavin waved his hand. "More than just scientific egos are at stake with this find."

They drove north, descending into the valley and sloughing off the last pretense of civilization. "You're afraid somebody will kidnap the bones?" Paul asked.

"Yeah, that's one of the things I'm afraid of."

"One?"

"It's easy to pretend that it's just theories we're playing with—ideas dreamed up in some ivory tower between warring factions of scientists. Like it's all some intellectual exercise." Gavin looked at him, his dark eyes grave. "But then you see the actual bones; you feel their weight in your hands, and sometimes theories die between your fingers."

The track down to the valley floor was all broken zigzags and occasional, rounding turns. For long stretches, overhanging branches made a tunnel of the roadway—the jungle a damp cloth slapping at the windshield. But here and there that damp cloth was yanked aside, and out over the edge of the drop you could see a valley like Hollywood would love, an archetype to represent all valleys, jungle floor visible through jungle haze. In those stretches of muddy road, a sharp left pull on the steering wheel would have gotten them there quicker, deader.

"Liange Bua," Gavin called their destination. "The Cold Cave." And Gavin explained that was how they thought it happened—the scenario. This steamy jungle all around, so two or three of them went inside to get cool, to sleep. Or maybe it was raining, and they went in the cave to get dry—only the rain didn't stop, and the river flooded, as it sometimes still did, and they were trapped inside the cave by the rising waters, their drowned bodies buried in mud and sediment.

The men rode in silence for awhile before Gavin said it, a third option Paul felt coming. "Or they were eaten there."

"Eaten by what?"

"Homo homini lupus est." Gavin said. "Man is wolf to man."

They crossed a swollen river, water rising to the bottom of the doors. For a moment Paul felt the current grab the Jeep, pull, and it was a close thing, Gavin cursing and white-knuckled on the wheel, trying to keep them to the shallows. When they were past it he said, "You've got to keep it to the north; if you slide a few feet off straight, the whole bugger'll go tumbling downriver."

Paul didn't ask him how he knew.

Beyond the river was the camp. Researchers in wide-brimmed hats or bandanas. Young and old. Two or three shirtless. A dark-haired woman in a white shirt sat on a log outside her tent. The one feature unifying them all, good boots.

Every head followed the Jeep, and when the jeep pulled to a stop, a small crowd gathered to help unpack. Gavin introduced him around. Eight researchers, plus two laborers still in the cave. Australian mostly. Indonesian. One American.

"Herpetology, mate," one of them said when he shook Paul's hand. Small, stocky, red-bearded; he couldn't have been more than twenty-two. Paul forgot his name the moment he heard it, but the introduction, "Herpetology, mate," stuck with him. "That's my specialty," the small man continued. "I got mixed up in this because of Professor McMaster here. University of New England, Australia." His smile was two feet wide under a sharp nose that pointed at his own chin. Paul liked him instantly.

When they'd finished unpacking the Jeep, Gavin turned to Paul. "Now I think it's time we made the most important introductions," he said.

It was a short walk to the cave. Jag-toothed limestone jutted from the jungle, an overhang of vine, and beneath that, a dark mouth. The stone was the brown-white of old ivory. Cool air enveloped him, and entering Liange Bua was a distinct process of stepping down. Once inside, it took Paul's eyes a moment to adjust. The chamber was thirty meters wide, open to the jungle in a wide crescent—mud floor, low-domed ceiling. There was not much to see at first. In the far corner, two sticks angled from the mud, and when he looked closer, Paul saw the hole.

"Is that it?"

"That's it."

Paul took off his backpack and stripped the white paper suit out of its plastic wrapper. "Who else has touched it?"

"Talford, Margaret, me."

"I'll need blood samples from everybody for comparison assays."

"DNA contamination?"

"Yeah."

"We stopped the dig when we realized the significance."

"Still. I'll need blood samples from anybody who has dug here, anybody who came anywhere near the bones. I'll take the samples myself tomorrow."

"I understand. Is there anything else you need?"

"Solitude." Paul smiled. "I don't want anybody in the cave for this part."

Gavin nodded and left. Paul broke out his tarps and hooks. It was best if the sampler was the person who dug the fossils out of the ground—or better yet, if the DNA samples were taken when the bones were still in the ground. Less contamination that way. And there was always contamination. No matter what precautions were taken, no matter how many tarps, or how few people worked at the site, there was still always contamination.

Paul slid down into the hole, flashlight strapped to his forehead, white paper suit slick on the moist earth. From his perspective, he couldn't tell what the bones were—only that they were bones, half-buried in earth. From his perspective, that's all that mattered. The material was soft, un-fossilized; he'd have to be careful.

It took nearly seven hours. He snapped two dozen photographs, careful to keep track of which samples came from which specimens. Whoever these things were, they were small. He sealed the DNA samples into small, sterile lozenges for transport.

It was night when he climbed from under the tarp.

Outside the cave, Gavin was the first to find him in the firelight. "Are you finished?"

"For tonight. I have six different samples from at least two different individuals. Shouldn't take more than a few more days."

McMaster handed him a bottle of whiskey.

"Isn't it a little early to celebrate?"

"Celebrate? You've been working in a grave all night. In America, don't they drink after funerals?"

That night over the campfire, Paul listened to the jungle sounds and to the voices of scientists, feeling history congeal around him.

"Suppose it isn't." Jack was saying. Jack was thin and American and very drunk. "Suppose it isn't in the same lineage with us, then what would that mean?"

The red-bearded herpetologist groaned. His name was James. "Not more of that doctrine of descent bullshit," he said.

"Then what is it?" someone added.

They passed the drink around, eyes occasionally drifting to Paul like he was a priest come to grant absolution—his sample kit just an artifact of his priestcraft. Paul swigged the bottle when it came his way. They'd finished off the whiskey long ago; this was some local brew brought by laborers, distilled from rice. Paul swallowed fire.

Yellow-haired man saying, "It's the truth," but Paul had missed part of the conversation, and for the first time he realized how drunk they all were; and James laughed at something, and the woman with the white shirt turned and said, "Some people have nicknamed it the 'hobbit.'"

"What?"

"Flores Man—the hobbit. Little people three feet tall."

"Tolkien would be proud," a voice contributed.

"A mandible, a fairly complete cranium, parts of a right leg and left innominate."

"But what is it?"

"Hey, are you staying on?"

The question was out there for two beats before Paul realized it was aimed at him. The woman's eyes were brown and searching across the fire. "Yeah," he said. "A few more days."

Then the voice again, "But what is it?"

Paul took another swallow—trying to cool the voice of panic in his head.

Paul learned about her during the next couple of days, the girl with the white shirt. Her name was Margaret. She was twenty-eight. Australian. Some fraction aborigine on her mother's side, but you could only see it for sure in her mouth. The rest of her could have been Dutch, English, whatever. But that full mouth: teeth like Ruteng children, teeth like dentists might dream. She tied her brown hair back from her face, so it didn't hang in her eyes while she worked in the hole. This was her sixth dig, she told him. "This is the one." She sat on the stool while Paul took her blood, a delicate index finger extended, red pearl rising to spill her secrets. "Most archaeologists go a whole lifetime without a big find," she said. "Maybe you get one. Probably none. But this is the one I get to be a part of."

"What about the Leakeys?" Paul asked, dabbing her finger with cotton.

"Bah." She waved at him in mock disgust. "They get extra. Bloody Kennedys of Archaeology."

Despite himself, Paul laughed.

This brings us to the so-called doctrine of common descent, whereby each species is seen as a unique and individual creation. Therefore all men, living and dead, are descended from a common one-time creational event. To be outside of this lineage, no matter how similar in appearance, is to be other than Man.

—Journal of Heredity

That evening, Paul helped Gavin pack the Jeep for a trek back up to Ruteng. "I'm driving our laborers back to town," Gavin told him. "They work one week on, one off. You want me to take your samples with me?"

Paul shook his head. "Can't. There are stringent protocols for chain of possession."

"Where are they now?"

Paul patted the cargo pocket of his pant leg.

"So when you get those samples back, what happens next?"

"I'll hand them over to an evaluation team."

"You don't test them yourself?"

"I'll assist, but there are strict rules. I test animal DNA all the time, and the equipment is all the same. But genus Homo requires a license and oversight."

"All right, mate, then I'll be back tomorrow evening to pick you up." Gavin went to the Jeep and handed Paul the sat phone. "In case anything happens while I'm gone."

"Do you think something will?"

"No," Gavin said. Then, "I don't know."

Paul fingered the sat phone, a dark block of plastic the size of a shoe. "What are you worried about?"

"To be honest, bringing you here has brought attention we didn't want yet. I received a troubling call today. So far, we've shuffled under the radar, but now . . .now we've flown in an outside tech, and people want to know why."

"What people?"

"Official people. Indonesia is suddenly very interested."

"Are you worried they'll shut down the dig?"

Gavin smiled. "Have you studied theology?

"Why?"

"I've long been fascinated by the figure of Abraham. Are you familiar with Abraham?"

"Of course," Paul said, unsure where this was going.

"From this one sheepherder stems the entire natural history of monotheism. He's at the very foundation of all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When Jews, Christians, and Muslims get on their knees for their One True God, it is to Abraham's God they pray." Gavin closed his eyes. "And still there is such fighting over steeples."

"What does this have to do with the dig?"

"The word 'prophet' comes from the Greek, prophetes. In Hebrew, the word is nabi. I think Abraham Heschel said it best when he wrote 'the prophet is the man who feels fiercely.' What do you think, Paul? Do you think prophets feel fiercely?"

"Why are you asking me this?"

"Oh, never mind." Gavin smiled again and shook his head. "It's just the rambling of an old man."

"You never answered if you thought they'd shut down the dig."

"We come onto their land, their territory; we come into this place and we find bones that contradict their beliefs; what do you think might happen? Anything."

"Contradict their beliefs?" Paul said. "What do you believe about these bones? You've never said."

"I don't know. They could be pathological."

"That's what they said about the first Neanderthal bones. Except they kept finding them."

"It could be microcephaly."

"What kind of microcephaly makes you three feet tall?"

"The odd skull shape and small body-size could be unrelated. Pygmies aren't unknown to theses islands."

"There are no pygmies this small."

"But perhaps the two things together . . .perhaps the bones are a microcephalic representation of . . ." his voice trailed off. Gavin sighed. He looked suddenly defeated.

"That's not what you believe, is it?" Paul said.

"These are the smallest bones discovered that look anything like us. Could they just be pathological humans? I don't know. Maybe. Pathology could happen anywhere, so you can't rule it out when you've only got a few specimens to work with. But what my mind keeps coming back to is that these bones weren't found just anywhere."

"What do you mean?"

"These bones weren't found in Africa, or Asia. These tiny bones were found on a tiny island. Near the bones of dwarf elephants. And that's a coincidence? They hunted dwarf elephants, for God's sake."

"So if not pathological, what do you believe they were? You still haven't said."

"That's the powerful thing about genetics, my friend. One does not have to believe. One can know. And that's precisely what is so dangerous."

"Strange things happen on islands." Margaret's white shirt was gone. She sat slick-armed in overalls. Skin like a fine coat of gloss. The firelight beat the night back, lighting candles in their eyes. It was nearly midnight, and the researchers sat in a circle, listening to the crackle of the fire. Listening to the jungle.

"Like the Galapagos," she said. "The finches."

"Oh come on," James said. "The skulls we found are small, with brains the size of chimps. Island dwarfing of genus Homo; is that what you're proposing? Some sort of local adaptation over the last five thousand years?"

"It's the best we have."

"Those bones are too different. They're not of our line."

"But they're younger than the other archaics. It's not like erectus, some branch cut down at the dawn of time. These things survived here for a long time. The bones aren't even fossilized."

"It doesn't matter, they're still not us. Either they share common descent from Man, or they were a separate creation at the beginning. There is no in-between. And they're only a meter tall don't forget."

"That's just an estimate."

"A good estimate."

"Achondroplasia—"

"Those skulls are as achondroplastic as I am. I'd say the sloped frontal bone is anti-achondroplastic."

"Some kind of growth hormone deficiency would—"

"No," Paul said, speaking for the first time. Every face turned toward him.

"No, what?"

"Pygmies have normal growth hormone levels," Paul said. "Every population studied—the negritos, the Andaman, the Congolese. All normal."

The faces stared. "It's the circulating domain of their receptors that are different," Paul continued. "Pygmies are pygmies because of their GH receptors, not the growth hormone itself. If you inject a pygmy child with growth hormone, you still get a pygmy."

"Well still," Margaret said. "I don't see how that impacts whether these bones share common descent or not."

James turned to the circle of faces. "So are they on our line? Are they us, or other?"

"Other."

"Other."

"Other."

Softly, the girl whispered in disbelief, "But they had stone tools."

The faces turned to Paul, but he only watched the fire and said nothing.

The next morning started with a downpour. The dig team huddled in tents, or under the tarped lean-to near the fire pit. Only James braved the rain, stomping off into the jungle. He was back in an hour, smiling ear to ear.

"Well, will you look at that," James said, holding something out for Paul to see.

"What is it?"

"Partially eaten monitor. A species only found here."

Paul saw now that it was a taloned foot that James held. "That's a big lizard."

"Oh, no. This was just a juvenile. Mother nature is odd this side of the Wallace Line. Not only are most of the species on this side not found anywhere else. A lot of them aren't even vaguely related to anything else. It's like God started from scratch to fill all the niches."

"How'd you get interested in herpetology?" Paul asked.

"By His creations shall ye know God."

"McMaster mentioned a dwarf elephant."

"Yeah, stegadon. They're extinct now though."

"What killed them off?"

"Same thing that killed off a lot of the ancient fauna on the island. Classic catastrophism, a volcanic eruption. We found the ash layer just above the youngest bones."

Once, lying in bed with a woman, Paul had watched the moon through the window. The woman traced his scars with her finger.

"Your father was brutal."

"No," Paul had said. "He was broken, that's all."

"There's a difference?"

"Yeah."

"What?"

"He was always sorry afterward."

"That mattered?"

"Every single time."

A: Incidences of local adaptation have occurred, sure. Populations adapt to changing conditions all the time.

Q: Through what process?

A: Differential reproductive success. Given genetic variability, it almost has to happen. It's just math and genes. Fifty-eight hundred years is a long time.

Q: Can you give an example?

A: Most dogs would fall into this category, having been bred by man to suit his needs. While physically different from each other, when you study their genes, they're all one species—though admittedly divided into several distinct clades.

Q: So you're saying God created the original dog, but Man bred the different varieties?

A: You called it God, not me. And for the record, honey, God created the gray wolf. Man created dogs.

—excerpted from the trial of geneticist Michael Poore.

It came the next morning in the guise of police action. It came in shiny new Daihatsus with roll-bars and off-road tires. It came with guns. Mostly, it came with guns.

Paul heard them before he saw them, men shouting in a language he could not understand. He was with James at the cave's entrance. When Paul saw the first assault rifle, he sprinted for the tents. He slid the DNA lozenges into a pouch in his belt and punched numbers on the sat phone. Gavin picked up on the second ring. "The police are here," Paul said.

"Good Lord, I just spoke to officials today," Gavin said. There was shouting outside the tents—angry shouts. "They assured me nothing like this would happen."

"They lied."

Behind him, James said, "This is bad. This is very bad."

"Where are you?" Paul asked.

"I'm still in Ruteng," Gavin said.

"Then this will be over by the time you can get here."

"Paul, it's not safe for you th—"

Paul hung up. Tell me something I don't know.

He took his knife from his sample kit and slit the back of the tent open. He slid through, James following close behind. Paul saw Margaret standing uncertain at the edge of the jungle. Their eyes met and Paul motioned toward the Jeeps; on the count of three, they all ran for it.

They climbed in and shut the doors. The soldiers—for that's what Paul knew they were now—the soldiers didn't notice them until Paul started the engine. Malay faces swung around, mouths open in shouts of outrage.

"You'll probably want your seatbelts on for this," Paul said. Then he gunned it, spitting dirt.

"Don't shoot," James whispered in the backseat, eyes closed in prayer.

"What?" Paul said.

"If they shoot, they're not police."

A round smashed through the rear window and blew out a chunk of the front windshield, spidering the safety glass.

"Shit!" Margaret screamed.

A quick glance in the rear-view, and Paul saw soldiers climbing into one of the Daihatsus. Paul yanked the wheel right.

"Not that way!" Margaret shouted. Paul ignored her and floored the accelerator.

Jungle whipped past, close enough to touch. Ruts threatened to buck them from the cratered roadway. The Daihatsu whipped into view behind them. Shots rang out, a sound like Chinese fire-crackers, the ding of metal. They rounded the bend, and the river came into view—big and dumb as the sky. Paul gunned the engine.

"We're not going to make it across!" James shouted.

"We only need to get halfway."

Another shot slammed into the back of the Jeep.

They hit the river like a slow-speed crash, water roaring up and over the broken windshield—the smell of muck suddenly overpowering.

Paul stomped his foot to the floor.

The Jeep chugged, drifted, caught gravel. They got about halfway across before Paul yanked the steering wheel to the left. The world came unstuck and started to shift. The right front fender came up, rocking with the current. The engine died. They were floating.

Paul looked back. The pursuing vehicle skidded to a halt at the shoreline, and men jumped out. The Jeep heaved, one wheel pivoting around a submerged rock.

"Can you swim?" Paul asked.

"Now you ask us?"

"I'd unbuckle if I were you."

The Jeep hit another rock, metal grinding on stone, then sky traded places with water, and everything went dark.

They dragged themselves out of the water several miles downriver, where a bridge crossed the water. They followed the dirt road to a place called Rea. From there they took a bus. Margaret had money.

They didn't speak about it until they arrived at Bajawa.

"Do you think they're okay?" Margaret asked.

"I think it wouldn't serve their purpose to hurt the dig team. They only wanted the bones."

"They shot at us."

"Because they assumed we had something they wanted. They were shooting at the tires."

"No," she said. "They weren't."

Three rented nights in the hotel room, and James couldn't leave—that hair like a great big handle anybody could pick up and carry, anybody with eyes and a voice. Some of the locals hadn't seen red hair in their lives, and James' description was prepackaged for easy transport. Paul, however, blended—just another vaguely Asian set of cheekbones in the crowd, even if he was a half a foot taller than the locals.

That night, staring at the ceiling from one of the double beds, James said, "If those bones aren't us . . .then I wonder what they were like."

"They had fire and stone tools," Paul said. "They were probably a lot like us."

"We act like we're the chosen ones, you know? But what if it wasn't like that?"

"Don't think about it," Margaret said.

"What if God had all these different varieties . . .all these different walks, these different options at the beginning, and we're just the ones who killed the others off?"

"Shut up," she said.

"What if there wasn't just one Adam, but a hundred Adams?

"Shut the fuck up, James."

There was a long quiet, the sound of the street filtering through the thin walls. "Paul," James said. "If you get your samples back to your lab, you'll be able to tell, won't you?"

Paul was silent. He thought of the evaluation team and wondered.

"The winners write the history books," James said. "Maybe the winners write the bibles, too. I wonder what religion died with them."

The next day, Paul left to buy food. When he returned Margaret was gone.

"Where is she?"

"She left to find a phone. She said she'd be right back."

"Why didn't you stop her?"

"I couldn't."

Day turned into evening. By darkness, they both knew she wasn't coming back.

"How are we going to get home?" James asked.

"I don't know."

"And your samples. Even if we got to an airport, they'd never let you get on the plane with them. You'll be searched. They'll find them."

"We'll find a way once things have settled down."

"Thing's are never going to settle down."

"They will."

"No, you still don't get it. When your entire culture is predicated on an idea, you can't afford to be proven wrong."

Out of deep sleep, Paul heard it. Something.

He'd known this was coming, though he hadn't been aware that he'd known, until that moment. The creak of wood, the gentle breeze of an open door. Shock and awe would have been better—an inrush of soldiers, an arrest of some kind, expulsion, deportation, the legal system. A silent man in the dark meant many things. None of them good. The word assassin rose up in his mind.

Paul breathed. There was a cold in him—a part of him that was dead, a part of him that could never be afraid. A part of him his father had put there. Paul's eyes searched the shadows and found it, the place where shadow moved, a breeze that eased across the room. If there was only one of them, then there was a chance.

Paul thought of making a run for it, sprinting for the door, leaving the samples and this place behind; but James, still sleeping, stopped him. He made up his mind.

Paul exploded from the bed, flinging the blanket ahead of him, wrapping that part of the darkness; and a shape moved, darkness like a puma's spots, black on black—there even though you can't see it. And Paul knew he'd surprised him, that darkness, and he knew, instantly, that it wouldn't be enough. A blow rocked Paul off his feet, forward momentum carrying him into the wall. The mirror shattered, glass crashing to the floor.

"What the fuck?" James hit the light, and suddenly the world snapped into existence, a flashbulb stillness—and the assassin was Indonesian, preternatural silence coming off him like a heat shimmer. He carried endings with him, nothingness in a long blade. The insult of it hit home. The shocking fucking insult, standing there, knees bent, bright blade in one hand—blood on reflective steel. That's when Paul felt the pain. It was only then he realized he'd already been opened.

And the Indonesian moved fast. He moved so fast. He moved faster than Paul's eyes could follow, covering distance like thought, across the room to James, who had time only to flinch before the knife parted him. Such a professional, and James' eyes went wide in surprise. Paul moved using the only things he had, size, strength, momentum. He hit the assassin like a linebacker, sweeping him into his arms, crushing him against the wall. Paul felt something snap, a twig, a branch, something in the Indonesian's chest—and they rolled apart, the assassin doing something with his hands; the rasp of blade on bone, a new blackness, and Paul flinched from the blow, feeling the steel leave his eye socket.

There was no anger. It was the strangest thing. To be in a fight for his life and not be angry. The assassin came at him again, and it was only Paul's size that saved him. He grabbed the arm and twisted, bringing the fight to the floor. A pushing down of his will into three square inches of the Indonesian's throat—a caving-in like a crumpling aluminum can, but Paul still held on, still pushed until the lights went out of those black eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry."

Paul rolled off him and collapsed to the floor. He crawled over to James. It wasn't a pool of blood. It was a swamp, the mattress soggy with it. James lay on the bed, still conscious.

"Don't bleed on me, man." James said. "No telling what you Americans might carry. Don't want to have to explain it to my girlfriend."

Paul smiled at the dying man, crying and bleeding on him, wiping the blood from his beard with a pillowcase. He held James' hand until he stopped breathing.

Paul's eye opened to white. He blinked. A man in a suit sat in the chair next to the hospital bed. A man in a police uniform stood near the door. "Where am I?" Paul asked. He didn't recognize his own voice. It was an older man. Who'd eaten glass.

"Maumere," the suited man said. He was white, mid-thirties, lawyer written all over him.

"How long?"

"A day."

Paul touched the bandage over his face. "Is my eye . . ."

"I'm sorry."

Paul took the news with a nod. "How did I get here?"

"They found you naked in the street. Two dead men in your room."

"So what happens now?"

"Well that depends on you." The man in the suit smiled. "I'm here at the behest of certain parties interested in bringing this to a quiet close."

"Quiet?"

"Yes."

"Where is Margaret? Mr. McMaster?"

"They were put on flights back to Australia this morning."

"I don't believe you."

"Whether you believe or not is of no consequence to me. I'm just answering your questions."

"What about the bones?"

"Confiscated for safekeeping, of course. The Indonesians have closed down the dig. It is their cave after all."

"What about my DNA samples in the hotel room, the lozenges?"

"They've been confiscated and destroyed."

Paul sat quietly.

"How did you end up in the street?" the suit asked.

"I walked."

"How did you end up naked?"

"I figured it was the only way they'd let me live. The only way to prove I didn't have the samples. I was bleeding out. I knew they'd still be coming."

"You are a smart man, Mr. Carlson. So you figured you'd let them have the samples?"

"Yeah," Paul said.

The suited man stood and left the room.

"Mostly." Paul said.

On the way to the airport, Paul told the driver to pull over. He paid the fare and climbed out. He took a bus to Bengali, and from there took a cab to Rea.

He climbed on a bus in Rea, and as it bore down the road, Paul yelled, "Stop!"

The driver hit the breaks. "I'm sorry," Paul said. "I've forgotten something." He climbed off the bus and walked back to town. No car followed.

Once in town, down one of the small side streets, he found it, the flower pot with the odd pink plant. He scooped dirt out of the base.

The old woman shouted something at him. He held out money, "For the plant," he said. "I'm a flower lover." She might not have understood English, but she understood money.

He walked with the plant under his arm. James had been right about some things. Wrong about others. Not a hundred Adams, no. Just two. All of Australoid creation like some parallel world. And you shall know God by His creations. But why would God create two Adams? That's what Paul had wondered. The answer was that He wouldn't.

Two Adams. Two gods. One on each side of the Wallace Line.

Paul imagined it began as a competition. A line drawn in the sand, to see whose creations would dominate.

Paul understood the burden Abraham carried, to witness the birth of a religion.

As Paul walked through the streets he dug his fingers through the dirt. His fingers touched it, and he pulled the lozenge free. The lozenge no evaluation team would ever lay eyes on. He would make sure of that.

He passed a woman in a doorway, an old woman with a beautiful, full mouth. He thought of the bones in the cave, and of the strange people who had once crouched on this island.

He handed her the flower. "For you," he said.

He hailed a cab and climbed inside. "Take me to the airport."

As the old cab bounced along the dusty roads, Paul took off his eye-patch. He saw the cabby glance into his rear-view and then look away, repulsed.

"They lied, you see," Paul told the cabbie. "About the irreducible complexity of the eye. Oh, there are ways."

The cabbie turned his radio up, keeping his face forward. Paul grimaced as he unpacked his eye, pulling white gauze out in long strips—pain exploding in his skull.

"A prophet is one who feels fiercely," he said, then slid the lozenge into his empty eye socket.

Wizard's Six

Alex Irvine

Alex Irvine (www.alexirvine.net) published his first story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1998. It was quickly followed by debut fantasy novel, A Scattering of Jades, which won him considerable acclaim. Winner of the Locus, International Horror Guild, and Crawford awards, Irvine has published two further fantasy novels, One King, One Soldier and The Narrows, and two collections of short fiction. A versatile writer, Irvine has also written a number of comic and media-related works.

There is so much discussion these days about interstitial fiction and the crossing of this genre boundary or that genre boundary, that it's almost a relief to encounter a fine, moving fantasy like the one that follows, where a ruthless man finds there is more to achieving a task than simply accepting it.

1

In the spring Paulus set out north from The Fells, hunting the apprentice Myros. He cannot be allowed to collect his six, the wizard had said. If you cannot find his track, you must kill whichever of the six he has already selected. It did Paulus' conscience no good to kill people whose only fault was being collected by an aspiring wizard, but he would be only the first of many hunters. Without the guild's protection, a wizard's six were like baby turtles struggling toward the sea. Best to spare them a life of being hunted.

The apprentice had spent enough time in the Agate Tower to know that there would be pursuit. He was moving fast and had four months' head start; Paulus moved faster, riding through nights and spring storms, fording spring-swollen rivers, asking quiet questions over bottles in public houses along the only road over the mountains. He killed the first of the apprentice's collection on a farm between a bend in the road and a ripple of foothills: a small boy with a dirty face and a stick in his hand.

Yes, mister, a man passed by here in the winter.

Yes, mister, he had a ring over his glove. I was feeding the pig, and he told me I was a likely boy. Are you looking for him?

Can I see your sword?

They weren't supposed to choose children, Paulus was thinking as he rode on. Even apart from the cultural sanction, children's magic was powerful but unpredictable, tricky to harness. No wonder the guild was after this one.

In a public house that evening, the day's chill slowly ebbing from his feet, Paulus said a prayer for the boy's parents. He hoped they hadn't sent anyone after him. It was bad enough to kill children; he had even less desire to take the lives of vengeful bumpkins. Best to keep moving. Already he had gained a month on the apprentice, who was moving fast for a normal man but not fast enough to stay ahead of Paulus, who had once been one of the king's rangers. Upstairs in his room, Paulus watched a thin drift of snow appear on the windowsill, spilling onto the plank floor. His prayer beads worked through his fingers. Go, boy, he thought. Speed your way to heaven. He dreamed of turtles, and of great birds that flew at night.

In the morning the snow had stopped, and Paulus cut a piece of cheese from a wheel left out in the kitchen. He stuck the knife in the remaining cheese and set a coin next to it, then left through the back door and saddled his horse without waking the stable boy. He rode hard, into the mountains and over the first of the passes where the road lay under drifted snow taller than a man on horseback. The horse picked out the track; like Paulus, it had been this way before. It was blowing hard by noon, when they had come to the bottom of a broad valley dotted with farms and a single manor house. Paulus rode to the gates of the manor and waited to be noticed.

The gate creaked open, revealing a choleric elder in threadbare velvet, huddled under a bearskin cloak. "Who comes to the house of Baron Branchefort?"

Paulus dismounted and let the seneschal see the sigil of the Agate Tower dangling from the horse's bridle. "I ride on an errand from the wizards' guild in The Fells," he said. "Has an apprentice traveled through this valley?"

"And how would I know an apprentice?"

"He would wear a ring over the glove on his right hand. He is called Myros."

The elder nodded. "Aye, he was here. Visited the Baron, asking permission to gather plant lore."

"Was this granted?"

"It was. He was our guest for a week and a day, then rode to the head of the valley."

"Did he gather any herbs?"

"I did not observe."

"You wouldn't have. His errand has nothing to do with plants. He travels to collect children."

The elder held Paulus' gaze for a long moment. "This is why you follow him."

"It is. Are there children in your house?"

"No. The Baron nears his eightieth year. We have few servants, and no children."

Paulus offered up a prayer of thanks that he would not have to enter the manor. He had seen more than enough of noble houses fallen into somnolence. Standing at the gate of this one, his chest constricted and he thought of his brother.

"Where," he asked, "are the houses in this valley with children?"

The elder looked up at the sky, then down at the ground between his feet. "Many children come into this world," he said. "Few survive. Only one of the Baron's vassals has children below marriageable age. He is called Philo, and his house is the last before the road rises into the mountains again."

Paulus nodded and mounted his horse again.

"You will ease Philo's mind, I pray," the elder said.

"What ease I can give, I will give," Paulus said, and rode north.

Philo's house lay in the shadow of a double peak, across the saddle of which lay Paulus' route over the mountains. As Paulus rode up, the sun rested between the peaks. A man about Paulus' age, but with the caved-in chest and stooped neck of too much work and not enough food, was drawing water. A girl of seven or eight years stood waiting with an empty bucket.

"Philo," Paulus said.

"That is my name," Philo said, without looking up at Paulus, as he hauled a full bucket over the edge of the well. He emptied it into the bucket his daughter set on the ground at his feet. "And this is my daughter Sophia. Now you know what of us is worth knowing."

"A young man wearing a ring over his glove has been here," Paulus said.

Philo dropped the bucket back into the well. "He has."

"He spoke to your daughter."

"That's right, sir, he did. Told her she was a likely girl. She's always seemed so to me, but if I was any judge of men or girls I wouldn't be here." Still Philo had not met Paulus' gaze. Paulus began to wonder what had passed between him and Myros; or was his demeanor caused by the Brancheforts?

No matter.

"I come from The Fells," Paulus said. "My instructions are to gather the girl he spoke to. For service at the Agate Tower."

At this, Philo looked up at Paulus and put a hand around his daughter's thin shoulders. Now it was Paulus who wanted to look away. He forced himself to hold Philo's eye. "She's my only, sir," Philo said. "And my wife, we're too old to have another."

"Philo," Paulus said. "I have no quarrel with you. My errand is my errand."

He watched the awful calculus of the peasant on Philo's face. One fewer mouth to feed. Giving his daughter over to a life of service with the wizards of The Fells, where she would spend the rest of her days forgetting what it was like to go to bed hungry. And against that . . ..

"May we visit her, sir?"

"When she has been gone a year," Paulus said. He was a poor liar, but this provision he remembered from his own journey to The Fells as a boy, when he had been taken into the king's acrobats.

His mother had never come. After a year he had stopped expecting her.

"Before that," he said, "she will still long for home. You may write as long as you do not ask her to return. Censors at the guild will destroy your letters if you do."

Philo was nodding slowly. "We do love her, sir," he said. "She's our only."

And through all this, the girl Sophia spoke not a word.

"I will return in the morning," Paulus said.

The ruse had cost him a day, and cost him, too, any chance of a better meal than jerky eaten under a tree. Paulus had started back to the manor house, then veered away from the road into a copse of beech and spruce. He had already lied more that day than during the previous ten years, and could no more maintain his fabrications than strike down young Sophia of Branchefort Valley in her father's presence. So he hobbled his horse, found dry ground beneath the spreading branches of a spruce tree, and prayed until sleep came. Then he dreamed of his mother, refusing to look at him as he craned his neck to see through the wagon gate and cried out Mama, good-bye, Mama.

In the morning, Sophia was waiting in the lambskin coat Philo had been wearing the afternoon before. Rabbit fur wrapped her feet, and she held a small satchel in both hands. Philo and her mother stood behind her, each with a hand on her; the woman's hand moved to smooth the coat's collar, tug a tangle out of Sophia's hair. Philo reached down and took his daughter's hand.

"May she write us?" the woman said.

"After a year, ma'am," answered Paulus. "Should she prove unsuitable, I will bring her back myself, with no dishonor to you. It's many a child isn't meant for the wizards' service."

"Not unsuitable, not our Sophia," Philo said. He swallowed.

"Philo," Paulus said. "Can you spare this coat? She will be warm on the journey."

"I'd like her to have it," Philo said. "It's all we can give her."

Paulus could come up with no convincing reply. "There's fresh eggs and bread in the bag," Sophia's mother said.

"I thank you, ma'am," Paulus said. "I am Paulus. Your man and I met yesterday."

"I am Clio, sir," she said. She was looking hard at him—seeing, Paulus knew, the scars on his hands and the long sword on his right hip.

"Your daughter has her destiny, Clio," Paulus said. "I am here to take her to it."

Baby turtles, he told himself. Another might have killed all three by now, and moved on. The thought gave him no ease. He averted his eyes as Philo and Clio made their farewells. Braver than either, Sophia took Paulus' hand and climbed onto the saddle in front of him. A tremor ran through her small body, but she reached out to get her fists into the horse's mane. She looked back at her parents as Paulus spurred the horse northward, and he wondered what she saw.

When she spoke, much later when the northern pass out of Branchefort Valley was behind them, Paulus didn't register her voice at first. He was thinking about the boy who had been feeding his pig when Myros came. How easily children died. "Sir?" the girl said. "What do you call the horse?"

"I never named him," Paulus said.

"Can I call him Brown?"

"All right."

"Your name is Brown," Sophia told the horse.

He could kill her at any time, could have killed her at any moment since crossing the pass. Could, for that matter, have cut her down with the empty bucket in her hands while her father was drawing water. Hesitation kills, Paulus thought.

"What are the wizards like?" she asked.

"They are wizards," Paulus said. "Not like men. But not cruel."

"How long until we get there?"

"A little while yet," Paulus said. He was silent after that, and they rode the edge of a canyon in which night fell early and forced them to make camp while the sky above was still light.

At times, Paulus knew, he was slow to apprehend the consequences of his actions. Now he realized that he had complicated his task first by concocting a story and then by taking the girl. She was one of the apprentice's six; Myros might well know that Paulus had her, and if he also knew about the boy he might be provoked into retaliation. Better to have killed her quickly and ridden on. Regardless of the wizard's injunction, Paulus could not afford to carry her with him in his pursuit of Myros. Nor could he return her, now that his mouth had run away with his reason and pronounced that she might be returned if she did not satisfy the wizards. He could easily imagine what such a stigma might mean to a child in a place like Branchefort Valley. He stirred Philo's eggs over the fire and damned himself for losing sight of his task.

Over the sound of the night breeze in the canyon, he heard Sophia crying quietly. End this, he thought, and rose into a crouch.

"I'm afraid," she said, and the sound of her voice destroyed his resolve. He sat next to her. Paulus had no knowledge of children. He had none of his own and had been taken from his own home at about Sophia's age, leaving behind three younger sisters whom he had never seen again.

"Never been out of the valley before?" he asked her.

She shook her head and wiped at her nose before tearing a piece of bread from the loaf and scooping eggs out of the bowl. Cowardice was a thick, bitter syrup in Paulus' throat. The boy with the stick in his hand had fallen without a sound, face still bearing traces of his smile at seeing Paulus' sword—yet Paulus knew that in the dying reaches of the boy's brain had been the knowledge of his murder. He found that he could not bear the idea of Sophia dying with that same knowledge. Her name, he thought. If I had not learned her name . . ..

"Let me tell you a story," Paulus said, and then he fell silent because he couldn't remember any stories. He remembered the sound of his father's voice telling him stories when he was a small boy, but he couldn't hear any of the words. "There was a little girl who dreamed that she was a bird," he began, and he let his voice follow the idea of that bird until Sophia was asleep. In the morning he buried the crusts of the bread with her, and burned the coat over her grave. As he climbed out of the canyon into sunlight, a wind sharp with snow raised gooseflesh on his arms. He filled his lungs and held his breath until the edges of his vision faded into red, then exhaled slowly, slowly, feeling his mind start to fade. At the point of unconsciousness he let himself breathe again, deeply and freely. He did not remember where he had learned the exercise, but it cleared his mind, and as his horse—Brown—picked his way across frosted scree below a peak like the head of a boil, Paulus let his mind wander. During the short time he had slept the night before, he had dreamed of being a dog, in a warm room with thick rugs and two great stone chairs too high for him to leap onto. There had been a kind woman and an old, old man, and another man who would not look at him but spoke gently. O queen, he thought; and after that, O brother.

The motion of a hare bounding between rocks drew his attention. He slipped an old throwing knife from its sheath at the small of his back and waited for it to move again, thinking that now he was over the first high ridge of peaks and in this expanse of alpine valleys, game would be more plentiful. In the high country, above treeline, was nothing but pikas and the occasional adventuresome goat. He wished he had brought a bow, but the truth was that no one had ever mistaken him for a skillful archer; his boyhood circus training, though, had served him well where knives were concerned. When the hare made its move, Paulus flicked his wrist. Simple. Five minutes later, the hare was dressed and dangling from his saddle. He rode on, trying not to think of sopping up the hare's fat with Sophia's bread. Skill with knives or no, Paulus knew that hunger was going to be a close companion as he moved farther from settled regions. The hermits and occasional isolated hamlets huddled in the valleys would not all be as hospitable as the Brancheforts had been.

Sparser settlements also meant that it would be harder to track Myros—although Myros would have his own problems, chief among them finding four more children to collect. Paulus had no doubt that all six of Myros' collection would be children, and the certainty had come so quietly that he was reluctant to examine it too closely. He mistrusted his own intuition, feeling that it was often fueled by whatever it was he had paid the wizard to make him forget, and he feared breaking the spell by looking too closely at the workings of his mind.

There was the problem, too, of where Myros was going—and why. Moving north as fast as feet could carry him, moving deeper and deeper into the winter that had already left the lowlands, Myros fled as if frantic to go backward in time. If he kept heading north, he would reach the marshes and tundras that gave onto the ice-choked Mare Ultima. What would Myros want with the tribes who followed the whales and caribou?

A stirring in Paulus' mind set his fingers tingling with more than the cold. I can block the memories of your mind, the wizard had said, but the body's memories are beyond my reach. Paulus looked at his hands and wondered what they remembered. He had paid good silver for his forgetfulness, but no wizard had yet charmed the curiosity out of man or woman, or the desire. Paulus' brother was ample evidence of that.

2

Days passed, and fell from memory with the sunset. Paulus saw no one, and stopped remembering his dreams. He was well into the second range of mountains, leading Brown on a foot trail skirting snow-buried canyons, when he found the apprentice's third. He saw smoke funneling out of a crevice on the canyon wall, and found a cave entrance below it. Calling in, he roused an old hermit and described Myros. "Yes," the hermit nodded, and invited Paulus in for hot water and flat bread. "He was here. And yes, he spoke to my lad and moved on. Quite a soft one to be this deep in the mountains."

Paulus thought, but did not say, that there were many kinds of hardness.

"And he would not eat, nor drink," the hermit went on. Paulus watched his fingers, how they moved through the silent catechism of the hermit's god. Nine beads on a catgut string, a sacred abacus ticking off the arithmetic of holiness. I will pray after, Paulus thought. Not now.

"I thank you for your welcome," he said.

The hermit did not acknowledge this. "Wizards," he grumbled, and spat into the fire.

"Myros is not yet a wizard," Paulus said. "I am sent to make sure he never will be."

In the hermit's eyes, Paulus saw suspicion. And something else; their expression teased at a memory, irritating like a hair on the back of the tongue. Eyes like gray stones, they put him in mind of something, stirred echoes of a kind of love that he could not remember feeling since he was a boy.

"If you are following him," the hermit said, "what does it matter whether he spoke to my lad?"

You have not been gone from inhabited places as long as all that, old man, thought Paulus. "I need to know if he is collecting," he said, and might have said more but the hermit threw hot water in his face and at the same time someone caught hold of his hair from behind. He threw a forearm across his throat and felt the impact of the blade, and then burning as the hermit kicked the embers of the fire across his leggings. Paulus scissored his legs, scattering the coals back toward the hermit, and with his left hand gripped the wrist of whoever had hold of his hair. The blade caught him on the cheek, and with an animal roar he squeezed until he felt bones snap. The grip on his hair loosened, and he pivoted to his feet, twisting the arm and breaking it again before he saw that he held a long-haired boy of perhaps thirteen, face twisted with hate and fear and pain. Paulus let him go, and the boy sprang up with the knife again. Stepping to his right, Paulus slapped the knife hand down and punched the boy hard on the left temple, knocking him straight down into the packed-earth floor, where he lay motionless save for a slow movement of his lips.

Looking over his shoulder, Paulus saw the hermit brandishing a burning branch. I have tried lies, and I have tried truth, he thought. This time he did not speak at all.

The next morning, in the sunny mouth of a snow cave near a frozen creek, Paulus ran his fingers carefully along his wounds. He had done this the night before, but could not credit what his fingertips reported. His cheek was unmarked, though his tongue felt a chipped molar where the thrust of the boy's blade had landed, and on his forearm a deep cut ran for three inches or so, then stopped for slightly more, then began again before tapering into a scratch near the outside of his elbow. Paulus probed the skin between the two cuts as he reconstructed the fight in his mind. One blow across the arm, one blow to the cheek, then he had turned. Could he have forgotten a third strike? It seemed impossible. The uncut skin felt normal to the touch, but when he pressed the point of a knife into it, he could not leave a mark. An odd smell filled his nostrils, raising the hair on his forearms and shrinking his testicles though he could not identify it and did not know why he should be afraid. The forgetting, he thought. Perhaps the body cannot forget any more than a bird can forget to fly south.

Well. Put it from your mind, he told himself. You paid for the forgetting, and must have had a good reason.

More important was the fact that Myros knew he was being pursued. The hermit's ambush made that clear, and that meant that at the time Paulus had killed the boy on the farm, Myros had not yet collected the hermit's acolyte. So, Paulus reasoned, I am closing on him, but he will have laid traps where time and circumstances allow. Hesitation kills, and even more fatal is the failure to learn from mistakes. Three of Myros' collection remained. Each, no doubt, would pose more risk than the last—and Myros himself could not be underestimated. The time for a budding wizard to gather his collection came near the end of his studies, when he could go no further without the actual performance of magic. Together, the sparks of magic in each of the six merged into a wizard's strength, and in fact his life, since a wizard lived only as long as one of his collection survived. Paulus wasn't sure which would be more difficult, eliminating the six or confronting Myros after he had completed his collection. The apprentice would not have completed his studies, but he would have learned enough in the Agate Tower to be a difficult opponent.

Paulus had killed wizards before. He could do it again. He could also fail, and although he did not fear death, he feared dying and believed that knowledge of the difference between the two was the true wellspring of courage. Having taken money from the wizards' guild, however, Paulus knew better than to abandon his mission. He finished the flat bread he had taken from the hermit's cave, and gnawed the last of the rabbit, and went on.

He came to tundra, and found a thin track that followed the course of a north-flowing river. Memories threatened, and Paulus held his breath until they went away. Five days he walked, eating little and haunted by the prospect of remembering. Often he thought of his brother, dead these four years, and of the strange sacrifice his brother had made. More often still he thought of the king whose father had killed Paulus' father, and who had taken Paulus into his service and transformed him from an acrobat into the man he now was. Something slippery and vast remained just out of reach in his mind, and although he fought the impulse, he could not help grasping after it. Nor could he help tracking his fingers across the blank patch of skin between the two healing cuts, or the bearded cheek that had not parted for the acolyte's dagger. The magic is faltering, he thought, and was glad that he might be whole again but afraid that he might find his failures more complete as well.

A village of thatched huts hugged the sandy inside of a bend in the river. Four men came out to meet him, careful not to point their spears too directly at him, and speaking a language that Paulus knew only in fragments from fellow soldiers. They recognized the sigil of the king on the hilt of his sword, and the figure of the Agate Tower on the medallion tied to Brown's bridle, and when he asked about the apprentice who wore a ring over his glove they nodded and pointed to a lean-to of driftwood and sod downstream of the village.

When he knocked at the crooked sticks of the door, it fell in, and before Paulus could draw his sword he was set upon by dogs. A ringing rose in his ears and he killed them, one at a time while the others tore at his legs and leapt snarling at his face. Before they were all dead a spear struck a glancing blow across the back of his head; Paulus caught the last dog, ran it through, and used its body as a shield to catch the thrust of the next spear. He twisted the dog's body, jerking the spear from the hands of the villager who had held it, and killed him. The other three spread into a semicircle around him. Blood warm on the back of his neck, Paulus said, "He was dead when Myros came here and you did not set your dogs on him. Where is he?"

The answer was three spears, driven at once toward his gut. He stepped to his left, between two of them, and struck down the two villagers before they could regain their balance. "You're not killing caribou now," Paulus said to the last of them. "Leave off."

It wasn't working. Paulus looked into the last man's face and saw a look he had come to know well in his days with the king's army. May I never come to the point, he prayed, when I am willing to die for the sake of not being shamed by my failure to kill myself uselessly. A shouting pierced the ringing in his ears, and he looked to his left, upstream, where an old man and a younger woman stood with two children, a boy and a girl. Naked. Twins. The children stared wide-eyed at Paulus, streaked in blood and holding the carcass of a dog. They stared at the three dead men sprawled around him, and at the dead dogs fanning out from the open doorway of the driftwood lean-to. Their expressions did not change as the elder, standing behind them and looking Paulus in the eye, held up a bone knife and cut their throats before the eyes of the village. First the girl, then the boy, knelt and looked down at the blood running down their bellies. They put their hands over their wounds. The boy coughed, and sucked in a huge breath before choking blood out of his mouth. The girl's mouth opened and her tongue came out as if she had tasted something bad. Then both of them, almost at once, put out a bloody hand to the ground and used it to guide their bodies down to rest.

Something broke inside Paulus. The ringing in his ears disappeared, and he lowered his sword. "They were dead when Myros came," he repeated. "I am made the instrument of his madness."

In the woman's eyes was something neither pity nor hate. "Go," the woman said.

Many children I have let live, Paulus thought that night. Other men might have killed them all.

And still other men, he answered himself, would have returned the wizards' money before killing the boy with the stick.

Again he grasped after the easy justification: Once Myros collected them, they were going to die. Baby turtles. Paulus had been kinder about it than most would have. Still and yet, there were men who made their way in the world without killing children. Paulus prayed to one day be among them.

One more. He lay looking at the northern stars, knowing that some baby turtles survived, and thinking: one more.

And on into the country of stone and smoke and ice, where men ate seals and great bears ate men. The world is running out of land, Paulus thought. The sixth cannot be far. After the hermit's trap and the ambush laid at the village, he was no longer traveling, but patrolling, eyes and ears sharpened for possible threats, right hand moving restlessly back and forth between Brown's saddle horn and the pommel of his sword. He caught himself praying under his breath, and wondered with wry humor if this was what it took for him to discover piety. Also he had the feeling that the membrane of his forgetting was growing dangerously thin, as if the part of his mind veiled by magic was speaking to him, more loudly and insistently with each hour he traveled north.

I have been here before, he thought—and held his breath until the world grew purplish at the edges and he felt himself swaying in the saddle.

On a morning sharp with ocean breeze and the smells of northern plants awakening to the promise of summer's endless days, Paulus came upon a farmer plowing. Pulling his own blade, the man bent to his work, shirtless and running with sweat even in the chill air. Paulus rode to him, sword drawn and leveled. When the farmer looked up, he asked, "Has a young man with a ring over his glove passed this way?"

The farmer let the handles of his plow drop and squinted up at Paulus. "It's you," he said.

Paulus raised his sword, and would have killed the farmer except the man spoke his name. "How do you know my name?" he asked. "Was it Myros who told you?"

"Do you—it hasn't been that long."

"Since what?"

The farmer cocked his head. "You don't remember me, either, do you? Will?"

"Why would I?"

"Oh," the farmer—Will—said. "You had a magic done, didn't you?"

Paulus' sword point dipped in Will's direction.

"Paulus," Will said. "Your apprentice was here, yesterday, and he did collect a boy. But there's more you need to know."

"No, there isn't," Paulus said. "I don't know how you know me, or if you know me or if Myros left you this part to play. None of that matters. Take me to the boy."

"Well, I was going to do that," Will said. "After all, he's yours."

The membrane stretched thinner, and then Will added, "From Joy. When you came to kill the dragon."

And Paulus remembered.

When he tried to sleep, he heard the dragon.

The whisper of its scales, their soft scrape and rattle. The cold draft of its indrawn breath, so like the breath of a cave. The slow creak of its wings, unfolding in the dark. All memory now, the ghost of his bitter triumph scratching its way through the inside of his mind.

He rolled over, felt the mattress under him: so soft, softer than the wintry mountainside where he'd camped the night before he'd gone into the dragon's lair. In a corner of his chamber, a mouse scampered. There were hours yet before dawn.

He threw back the sheet and stood. In the courtyard below his window, the bucket hung over the well swung in the night wind. A light shone in the stables, and Paulus shrugged into a robe. The groom, Andrew, rarely slept and had grown accustomed to Paulus' intrusions in the middle of the night.

Before going down to the stables, Paulus rummaged in the dark for the bottle on his nightstand. Better to bring a gift when interrupting another man's solitude.

Andrew looked up at the squeak of the stable door's hinges. "Paulus," he said. Paulus set the bottle on the square table Andrew used to cut tack, and the old groom grinned. "The dragon again," he said.

Paulus sat heavily on the cutting bench.

Killing the dragon: the shock of the blade driven at an angle below the scales behind its shoulder, the scalding spray of blood over his hands and face (no blade can cut his face now, nor a long irregular patch of skin on the inside of his right forearm where the seam of his jerkin had split), the long ropes of skin and muscle hanging from Paulus' flanks and legs where its claws had raked him, the sight of his own bones. And then the woman who put him on a sledge and dragged him to her hearth, where the winter passed into spring without him remembering, and in the spring when he was strong again he desired her, and would have taken her back to The Fells; but although she gave freely of her body and her love, she would not leave her birthplace. So he had come back, and slept little and drunk much, and spent the dying hours of the night with Andrew at the tack bench, until with the last of the bounty on the dragon he had purchased his forgetting.

Paulus woke.

In her language, her name meant Joy. She had had one man before him, killed the year before, hunting the horned whales among the ice floes of the Mare Ultima. Perhaps she had had none after.

He could remember the smell of the cutting bench as if it were in the room with him. The morning after sharing that last bottle with Andrew, he had gone to a spell broker and negotiated the terms of his forgetting. Now he remembered it all again: The pain that crept like worms under his skin as the dragon's poison did its slow work, the way the screams had fought their way out of his mouth as she dragged him down the hillside and for miles along the riverside trail. The pungency of her remedies, and the spasms of his body as they drew the poisons out. The long silences in her house, broken only by the whickering of the wind in the thatched roof—and at last the moment when he had caught her hand and said, Come to me.

The boy, Paulus thought. The boy now sleeping on his pallet near the farmer's hearth. He could be mine.

I want him to be mine.

He could never have imagined himself feeling this. He felt newly full, spilling over, as if the unstoppering of his memory had scoured away other walls. Paulus sat up, sealskin covers falling away from him. He had spoken to the boy the day before, Will hanging back with more discretion than Paulus would have expected. A simple conversation, and when the boy had asked in his pidgin four-year-old way to see Paulus' sword, Paulus knew he did not have it in him to kill this boy. Perhaps it was the fact that he might be killing his own offspring—though that had not stopped a number of men Paulus had known, and even admired—and perhaps it was simply the lesson of this journey. The Book of the god to whom Paulus prayed spoke of the Journey, and the Lesson. Part of Paulus' attraction to this faith was his life's own journeying, the travels and travails; now here was a chapter of the Book incarnate in these four limbs, these two eyes, and small voice. The boy did not know that Paulus might be his father. Will had not been so bold. Paulus wanted to tell him, and he burned on the forks of a problem. Duty spoke with the voice he had always heeded; the dawning reality of kinship, and the small hope he held of being able to face his maker, spoke in quietly unanswerable opposition.

Paulus remembered sunrises slanting in through the cobwebby windows of Andrew's tack shed. Had Andrew ever seen Paulus on the streets of The Fells, thought to hail him perhaps? Had he told Andrew of his plan to buy the forgetting?

The sun was not yet up. Will was moving around just outside the door, and Paulus could hear the deep, even breaths of the boy. His boy. The sixth of Myros' collection.

Paulus stretched. He had not slept under a roof in more than a month, and his body was aging past the point when it could easily absorb a month on the campaign. The scars along his ribs hurt, and his shoulders popped, and in an instant of quiet revelation he understood that Myros had collected children, and Paulus had killed them, because Myros wanted the dragon Paulus had killed four years before.

Will had a copy of the Book on a tree-stump table beside his hearth. It was still too dark to read, but Paulus paged through the Book anyway, soothing himself with the beads in his fingers and the familiar weight and texture of the faith he had known all his life. He thought he was looking for something in the Book, but he did not know what, and when enough light had returned to the sky that he could discern the words, he set the Book aside and went to his saddlebag for whetstone and oil.

Sharpening his sword, Paulus imagined the boy grown into a soldier, and was filled with a black fury at what the world had done to him. No, he thought. The boy slept as only a child can, still as death, unstirred by the scrape of the whetstone. Memories rode in on the tide of Paulus' anger. In the Book was a story of a girl named Lily, saved by a story whispered in her ear while she was sleeping. Thinking of it, Paulus found his own tongue loosening. A story came to him, and as he remembered it he told it to the boy.

3

Legend had it that the commoners' gift of magic came from the gods' anger at the separation of people into high and low. Like all legends, this one was as good an explanation as any, and the kingdom largely subscribed to it. One bit of magic, to be deployed once and only once, whether foolish or wise: this was the commoner's reward for a lifetime of subservience. The jester found this delicious, and wasted no opportunity to crow over the kingdom's fatuous belief. But the jester had secrets, and reasons.

Much of his life was apparent in the topology of his face. The king's common subjects bore an expression of calm security, a faith in their sovereign and in their one bit of magic to see them through whatever demands life would place upon them. But as if he had been built by one of the angry gods, the jester's face quirked and twisted with freshly remembered regret, and his cast eye, forever looking vacantly away to his right, took on a horrible aspect when his humor turned scabrous and biting. The younger princes and princesses fled the throne room at his every entrance, pushing each other in most ignoble haste, and the queen reluctantly took action when the youngest prince, awakening in mortal fear from a nightmare of the jester's crooked eye and whiplash tongue, ran blindly from his room and broke both of his legs in a fall down a flight of stairs.

Only a few hours later, in the throne room, the queen looked sadly from her liege lord to his memento mori, telling each that the safety of the royal progeny outweighed decades of service and reward. "His loyalty to you speaks well of him," she said to the king. "Even your dog is not so loyal."

The old dog looked up at her, the tip of his tail twitching. The jester thought that if he had had a tail, it might have twitched as well.

The queen spoke more than she knew, and behind his beard the king mused. The jester farted outrageously and refused to say a word, but within the scrawny rack of his chest, his heart beat with both fear and love for the queen who at that moment was proposing that he be pensioned off to a mountain barony safely away from tender gazes. His love for her exceeded the bounds even of his love for ruler and kingdom, and in that moment the jester bitterly regretted the day when he had loosed his one bit of magic to save the king.

Outside the castle walls, the jester sat cross-legged against a dead tree, looking out over the shore of a lake whose surface was rippled like an old window. He was tired of conjuring witty deflating comments. Tired of handstands, tired of juggling the skulls of the king's would-be assassins. He'd grown old, found aches in his joints and sleepless nights at the end of every day. There were many things he wished had never happened.

The jester had not always been a jester, any more than the king had been a king or the king's dog had been a dog. The day the old king died, the crown prince sat a silent vigil by his father's body until midnight, when he leapt to his feet and went to the chamber door. "Tomorrow a barred door closes on me," he said to his guard. "Tonight I walk through my city."

In the marketplace the uncrowned king walked among his subjects. He flirted with shop girls, bought perhaps one too many flagons of wine, and found himself in the shadow of the city walls watching a pair of ragged street performers. They were tired and performed reluctantly, but he gave them the strength of gold thrown at their feet. When the first birds had begun to chirp in anticipation of the dawn, the pair of acrobats were still turning their tumbles and mining their repertoire for tricks this munificent stranger had not yet seen.

Few things travel faster than news of a king's death, and the two weary acrobats were attuned to town gossip as only itinerant clowns can be. The older brother had absorbed the news and let it find a resting place in his mind; the younger had grown consumed with desire to avenge an injustice perpetrated by the dead king many years before, when an unlucky circus ringmaster had made an inopportune comment about the old king's cleft palate. One thing that travels faster than news of royal death is tidings of royal insult, and before long the ringmaster had vanished into the castle dungeon as his two boys performed with masklike faces before their sovereign, who rose at the end to pronounce the show the most excellent he'd seen in many a year.

The older son had made his peace with this. One lived in one's world, and one did not insult the king. The younger, though, turned the injustice inward and fed on it, not realizing that it was also feeding on him. Over a span of ten years man and hatred grew more to look like one another, and at last on a breezy summer night with dew on the ivy that climbed the city walls, the younger brother, addled with fantasies of regicide, saw his chance for revenge.

It would be their final routine, the brothers told their sole watcher. Dawn was coming, and besides they knew no trick to better it.

The uncrowned king accepted this. "I have been well entertained," he said, "and who better than you to know when you have no more to give?"

Nodding, the brothers unfolded a leather package containing ten knives. "Ready?" the older asked.

"We should rehearse it once."

"Start with three, then."

The king couldn't be certain whether the clowns were really so uncertain of this routine, or whether the uncertainty was part of their patter. Predawn gleam flashed on the knife blades as they flickered between the two brothers in a pattern almost intelligible. "Marvelous," the king said. "I imagine that's dangerous given your eye. Can you see out of it?"

Only for a moment, an eyeblink or even less, a long-dormant sense of hurt bloomed in the older brother. His life had given him a keen sense of irony, and it never escaped his notice when audiences tossed comments toward him of the sort that had gotten his father killed. The pain passed almost immediately, but not before causing a tremor in his throwing hand.

Blades clashed as the younger brother knocked the errant throw from the air. "Careful, brother," he said. The older brother blinked.

"Well enough," he lied. "I see well enough."

Six knives again, this time flawless for thirty seconds. Then the younger brother said, "Now four. Now." Together they stooped, and the gleaming pattern between them recomplicated itself just long enough for the king to think, Masterful. Then the younger brother cried out and dropped his knives in a clatter. One of them bounded toward the king, who reached to pick it up.

"Not to worry, Your Majesty," the younger brother said. He stooped to retrieve the knife, and just as it registered in the king's mind that this slim and smiling trickster knew who he was—had watched him from crowds since he was old enough to assume the paste crown of First Successor—the younger brother leaned in low and thrust the knife into the king's belly.

What should have followed then was a lingering death and a hasty scampering escape over the city walls, but the uncrowned king was not quite the fool the younger acrobat had thought him. His mail shirt, forged within subterranean earshot of the cell where the old ringmaster had died wishing for sunlight, caught the blade and held it with only an inch of its tip parting skin and muscle. The younger brother's weight bore the king over, and he lay on his back, struggling to catch his breath and looking calmly into the eyes of his assassin.

"This blood," the younger brother said, holding his cut hand so the blood dripped onto the king's face. "It is my father's, and I will avenge it." He drew another knife from his belt.

"You are older than I am," the king said. "I do not know your father. Your grievance is with a dead man."

"When you are dead," the younger brother said, "I will have no grievance." He planted one knee in the king's chest. His brother called his name.

"Kill me, then," said the king. "But know that you redress no wrong. You kill as a mad dog kills, because you don't know what else to do."

Perhaps the younger brother hesitated for a moment, or perhaps magic saw its opportunity and spoke through his elder sibling's mouth; but before the knife could fall the older brother said, "You will not be a mad dog, brother. You will not repay shame with shame."

With those words, his life's one bit of magic whirlpooled from his body, and where a moment before the king had lain helpless under an assassin's knife, now the older brother watched as a small brown dog pawed at the king's tunic and strained to lick his chin.

The king pushed the dog aside and with a disgusted noise jerked the knife from the broken links of his mail. "Did you know who I was?" he asked.

The remaining brother, three knives in his two dangling hands, shook his head.

"It is odd," the king said, and had to pause for breath. He struggled to his feet. "To thank a man who would turn his brother into a dog."

"Odder yet to save the son of the man who killed my father," the older brother replied.

The king looked from the older brother to the attentive dog, who limped ever so slightly on one front paw. "So," he said.

"But I have seen men die, and few were able to face it as you did," the older brother went on. He began to gather up his props and gimmicks. "I thought I saw a kingly man in you." He tried to say something more, but he could not speak of what he had done.

The dog sat in front of the king. His tail wagged against one of the fallen knives, and he started up at the clatter and ran a few steps before returning with tail and nose both low to the ground. "Take care of my brother," said the lone acrobat as he shouldered his pack. "I see he wishes to remain with you."

"Why should I not kill him?"

The acrobat looked the king in the eye. "Your grievance is not with a dog."

Dawn broke on the castle's highest towers.

"True," said the king. "Very well, he will remain with me. As will you. I will have you and your brother at my throne, one to remind me of how close to death I came, and the other to remind me of why I was allowed to live. Walk with me, king's jester."

All of this was bad enough; but then the jester fell in love with the queen.

He remembered the moment of falling in love like a story told by someone else. The great stones of the hall outside the throne room, pale gray except streaks on either side, where generations of the royal wolfhounds had rubbed their ears along the grooves and ridges in the ancient stones. This king, whose life the jester had saved, was the first in memory to keep a limping brown dog of anonymous pedigree instead of the great loping hounds named for stars and mythical ancestors.

Passing her in the hall: she taller by a head and younger by two generations, he favoring a heel bruised earlier that day tumbling for an ambassador. She with hair the color of the old streaks in the walls, a brown almost black, and eyes the color of the untouched stones, the gray of a cloud heavy with lightning; he with a balding head and knuckles swollen by winter's chill. The jester became exalted in that moment, realizing that she was the castle, she was the kingdom, it was the twin example of her kindness and her iron rectitude that made it possible for the king to spare the jester's brother. He loved her because she seemed in that moment to him like an ideal given flesh, an ideal for which the sacrifice of a brother was not too great. Foolish, yes, and sentimental: but as good an explanation as any.

It haunted the jester that he had been willing to kill his brother. And he had; only the fickleness of magic had sped his mouth and stayed his hand. He found some small comfort in the royal heir's person, his utter lack of resemblance to his father. The old king had been capricious, vindictive, wanton in both kindness and cruelty. His successor remained scrupulous and fair, even generous. Around him the kingdom prospered without war.

And I didn't kill my brother, the jester thought. I saved him. I protected him, as an older brother must.

The king's dog was old now, gray around the muzzle and lame in his hind legs. A superstition arose that the king would live only as long as his dog (no one said this about the jester), and although the king knew better, still he protected the dog's life as jealously as his own, lest its death provoke unrest in the kingdom. The irony of this kept the jester in fine form for the mordant humor expected of him at court.

What would happen, he wondered, if the king were actually persuaded to foist him off on some rustic baron? Sooner or later, wouldn't the story of the dog his brother leak between the royal lips? And wouldn't the queen . . .? The duty of her heart was to her husband, and of her mind to her king. She would have the dog killed out of a kind of loathing mercy, pitying the beast its lost humanity even as she ordered it drowned to ensure that no entombed memory would resurface and tear out the throat of the sleeping king.

Having once thought this, the jester grew certain events could play out no other way, just as having once seen the queen as his own ideals bodied forth, he could never rid himself of his passion for her. Exaltation fled him. "Why must I love her?" he demanded of the sky, but the clouds of course took on the color of her eyes and kept their peace. Love twisted inside him the way magic had on its way from his body, anguish and ecstasy. Loving the queen who would kill his brother, the jester could only think of her implacable magnificence, her mind like light in cold water.

It was afternoon. The jester left the lake, went back to the city and the castle, and the next day the queen mentioned it again. Wouldn't the old jester be happier away from the trials and pressures of court? she asked, slipping through the fissure in his field of vision, and the jester knew what he had to do.

The spell broker kept himself secret, but the jester knew where to find him in the twilit side of the city. "My magic is gone," the jester said.

"Else why would you be here?" the broker said, and displayed brown teeth in a round white face shaved smooth as an egg. "Let me look at you."

The jester kept himself still as the spell broker plucked a strand of his hair and burned it over a candle, traced the outline of his ribs, smelled his breath, looked into his eyes and ears. "What is it you want?" the broker said upon finishing his inspection.

"The safety of my brother." The jester had heard stories about the deviousness of the spell broker. It was best not to be too specific too soon.

"Safety. Magic cannot guarantee safety. Magic can sometimes kill a threat, perhaps redirect it. Forgetting-magic is the easiest, though, and the surest."

She could forget, the jester thought. It made him inexplicably sad, though, the idea of court whispers: The queen, forget? She of the searchlight mind and unshakable will, the gray eyes like stones that held within them memories of each and every soul who passed by?

I will protect my brother.

"Forgetting magic, yes," the jester said. "If it is the easiest, it must come cheaply."

"The cheapest magic comes dear," said the broker.

"Name your price."

"Your eye."

"Very well," the jester said, and in a sudden panic thought too soon, spoke too soon, because the broker was still speaking, and the words out of his mouth were, "Your left eye."

My good eye, the jester thought. How will I look on the queen?

But his mouth was already open saying yes.

He found he could look upon the queen, after a fashion. If he positioned himself correctly, she would, on her way to kiss the king, walk through the part of his world that had not faded to a lifeless fog. He could not see her clearly, only well enough to remember how she had once appeared to him.

Well enough.

I did this for you, he would whisper sometimes under his breath. So you would not feel betrayed when you discovered what I have done for my brother.

In the jester's thirty-seventh year, when the dog his brother was thirty-three, the king had retired him from acrobatics, and the jester passed his days in excremental assaults on courtiers even as he kept his head turned slightly away to the left of the queen. The court thought him blind in the right eye instead of the left, and grudgingly credited him for his seemly deference to the queen's presence. They imagined that this deference arose out of gratitude at being permitted to remain at court, and the queen's stature increased among the aristocratic gossips, her reputation for kindness burnishing the well-known brilliance of her mind and the much-praised symmetry of her face. She often stooped to pet the old dog, who would thump his tail against the leg of the throne at her approach.

The jester kept his secrets, and he was careful around the children. The broker's spell made no guarantee against the queen's remembering. If he pitied himself from time to time, he ran his fingers where the queen's had been, along the dog his brother's neck, and he said to himself, unable to stop: One lives in one's world, he said to the sleeping dog. One lives in one's world.

4

The boy still slept. But Will had come in from outside. "You're not blind," he said.

"I'm not a dog, either," Paulus said. He set Will's copy of the Book aside.

Will lit his pipe. "Twice someone spent their magic on you?"

"Aye," Paulus said. "Twice."

"And how did the second come about?"

"You wouldn't believe me," Paulus said.

"Already I don't believe you," Will said. "Tell another one."

"My brother confessed to the queen and as a reward for the laughter he had brought to the court, she bought me back my shape as a man, on the condition that I enter the king's service. I fought eleven years in the king's wars, and then he sent me to kill the dragon. When I came back, my brother and the king had both died, and I was released. Since then I have been for hire."

Will blew smoke rings over the sleeping boy. "All of this after you tried to kill the king? Ha," he said. "I wish that was true. No, I don't."

Three times, actually, Paulus thought. The forgetting he'd bought four years ago in The Fells was the third. Paulus made an occasional pastime of imagining who that little bit of magic had come from: a gambler needing to cover a debt, a soldier wanting a woman, a merchant whose cargo had foundered in the straits. Perhaps even the woman who had borne this child who might be his. The brokers of The Fells moved through the hamlets and farms of the mountains, following the lucrative scents of poverty and desperation. Their prices weren't fair, but even a rapacious deal often made the difference between feeding children and selling them.

"Three years ago?" he asked.

"Four, in the fall."

"How?"

Will shrugged. "She was bringing water. Sat down for a rest beside the path, I guess, and I found her when I heard the boy crying. Maybe six months old, he was."

Could be, Paulus thought. The sleeping boy was curled on his side, arms drawn in under his chin, still shadowed from the sunlight falling through the hut's single window. Firelight glowed in the tangles of his hair. Paulus thought he might see something of himself in the shape of the boy's shoulders, the line of his jaw.

Today I must kill Myros, he thought. Because if I do not, I will have to kill this boy, and I cannot.

"Have you named him? Had she?"

"She called him after you," Will said. "So I did, too."

Paulus was brimful and shattering. A boy with my name, he thought. After all this, all the leavings and the years with no place to call my own, in my fiftieth year I ride out on a mission of killing and find a boy with my name.

It was written in the Book: Let the Lesson be.

He stood, and his knees cracked. "Today this ends," Paulus said. "One way or another. If the boy asks for me, tell him I will return by nightfall or not at all."

The boy. Still, Paulus admonished himself, you cannot call him by his name?

He walked the final steps of his Agate Tower errand, his body leading him to the dragon's cave as if his scars were lines on a map. It would have taken Myros some time to prepare the spell to control the dragon, and more time yet for him to gather his courage and enter the cave when the dragon did not come out. Quite a string of surprises Myros was in for, Paulus thought, and bared his teeth as he wound up a switchbacking footpath that ended on the ridge above the cave. He made no effort to disguise his presence. If Myros had already spent his energy on the spell, then he was just another baby turtle; if he had not, Paulus was in for a hard fight, but on this day he would kill no man from behind. He crested the ridge and closed his eyes, riding out a wave of memories. The cave mouth, like a half-lidded eye, was the same, yet it seemed smaller to him; the smell of the snow on the north side of the ridge made him think of ice storms rattling against a window with a sound like the rasp of the dragon's scales.

They were all before him now, the specters of those gone from his life: his brother, Andrew, his mother, the king. Men he had served with. Joy. And the boy she had named for him.

When Paulus opened his eyes, Myros was looking at him from the cave entrance. "For this you made me kill children," Paulus said.

"I made you do nothing," Myros said, and made a gesture with his ringed hand.

Paulus was alight with pain: every blade that had ever cut him cut him anew. He felt the teeth of dogs and the dragon's talons, the piercing of an arrow and the grate of a spearpoint across his skull. Thumbs gouged at his eyes, and bootheels ground his fingers. He dropped his sword and felt his knees buckle. Blood roared in his ears, and somewhere beyond it he heard Myros' footsteps on the stones of the trail. Looking up through tears, he saw the apprentice coming nearer. You misjudge me, Paulus thought, and drank of his pain until it had given him strength to stand, and when he had gotten to his feet he left his sword where it lay and fell upon Myros with bare hands.

When it was done, he lay gasping on the stony ground as the apprentice's spell slowly faded from his body. He felt as if he was being knit together again, and when the pain had faded into the leaden dullness that for Paulus always followed killing, he got to his feet. Leaving his sword where it lay, he walked a short distance into the cave, to the point where the light from without finally failed. Trailing away into the dark, the bones of the dragon had already begun taking on the color of the stones around them.

One more, Paulus remembered thinking. I was right, and I was wrong.

It was afternoon when he returned to Will's farm. The boy was on his hands and knees following an insect through the beaten grass. He looked up at Paulus' approach and stood. "There's a beetle there," he said.

Paulus knew in that moment how little he understood of children, and how enormous his task was. "Your name is Paulus. Is that right?" he asked.

The boy nodded, but his attention was already wandering back to the beetle. He parted the grasses looking for it.

"My name is Paulus too."

The boy looked over his shoulder at Paulus. Where, Paulus wondered? A place without wizards. A place without these bargains driven for your soul. A place where my boy will not follow my path. He realized he had forgotten his sword, and resolved that he would never wear another. Let the Lesson be.

"You're going to come with me," Paulus said.

And the boy said, "Where are we going?"

The Cambist and Lord Iron:
A Fairy Tale of Economics

Daniel Abraham

Daniel Abraham (www.danielabraham.com) sold his first short story in 1996, and followed it with three novels, including the first two volumes in fantasy series "The Long Price Quartet," and more than twenty short stories, including International Horror Guild Award winner "Flat Diane." His most recent books are Hunter's Run (an SF novel written with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois) and A Betrayal in Winter. Upcoming are new novels An Autumn War and The Price of Spring.

A cambist is an expert on exchange rates. In the dark fantasy that follows, written for John Klima's excellent anthology Logorrhea, a mild-mannered cambist is called on to weigh and assess the comparative value of much more than two different currencies.

For as many years as anyone in the city could remember, Olaf Neddelsohn had been the cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority. Every morning, he could be seen making the trek from his rooms in the boarding house on State Street, down past the street vendors with their apples and cheese, and into the bowels of the underground railway only to emerge at the station across the wide boulevard from Magdalen Gate. Some mornings he would pause at the tobacconist's or the newsstand before entering the hallowed hall of the postal authority, but seven o'clock found him without fail at the ticker tape checking for the most recent exchange rates. At half past, he was invariably updating the slate board with a bit of chalk. And with the last chime of eight o'clock, he would nod his respect to his small portrait of His Majesty, King Walther IV, pull open the shutters, and greet whatever traveler had need of him.

From that moment until the lunch hour and again from one o'clock until six, Olaf lived and breathed the exchange of foreign currencies. Under his practiced hands, dollars became pounds sterling; rubles became marks; pesos, kroner; yen, francs. Whatever exotic combination was called for, Olaf arranged with a smile, a kind word, and a question about the countries which minted the currencies he passed under the barred window. Over years, he had built nations in his mind; continents. Every country that existed, he could name, along with its particular flavor of money, its great sights and monuments, its national cuisine.

At the deep brass call of the closing gong, he pulled the shutters closed again. From six until seven o'clock, he reconciled the books, filled out his reports, wiped his slate board clean with a wet rag, made certain he had chalk for the next day, paid his respects to the portrait of the king, and then went back to his boarding room. Some nights he made beans on the hotplate in his room. Others, he would join the other boarders for Mrs. Wells' somewhat dubious roasts. Afterward, he would take a short constitutional walk, read to himself from the men's adventure books that were his great vice, and put out the light. On Saturdays, he would visit the zoo or the fourth-rate gentleman's club that he could afford. On Sundays, he attended church.

He had a reputation as a man of few needs, tepid passions, and great kindness. The romantic fire that the exotic coins and bills awakened in him was something he would have been hard pressed to share, even had he anyone with whom to share it.

Which is to say there could not be a man in the whole of the city less like Lord Iron.

Born Edmund Scarasso, Lord Iron had taken his father's title and lands and ridden them first to war, then to power, and finally to a notorious fame. His family estate outside the city was reputed to rival the king's, but Lord Iron spent little time there. He had a house in the city with two hundred rooms arranged around a central courtyard garden in which trees bore fruits unfamiliar to the city and flowers bloomed with exotic and troubling scents. His servants were numberless as ants; his personal fortune greater than some smaller nations. And never, it was said, had such wealth, power, and influence been squandered on such a debased soul.

No night passed without some new tale of Lord Iron. Ten thousand larks had been killed, their tongues harvested, and their bodies thrown aside in order that Lord Iron might have a novel hors d'oeuvre. Lord Biethan had been forced to repay his family's debt by sending his three daughters to perform as Lord Iron's creatures for a week; they had returned to their father with disturbing, languorous smiles and a rosewood cask filled with silver as "recompense for his Lordship's overuse." A fruit seller had the bad fortune not to recognize Lord Iron one dim, fog-bound morning, and a flippant comment earned him a whipping that left him near dead.

There was no way for anyone besides Lord Iron himself to know which of the thousand stories and accusations that accreted around him were true. There was no doubt that Lord Iron was never seen wearing anything but the richest of velvets and silk. He was habitually in the company of beautiful women of negotiable virtue. He smoked the finest tobacco and other, more exotic weeds. Violence and sensuality and excess were the tissue of which his life was made. If his wealth and web of blackmail and extortion had not protected him, he would no doubt have been invited to the gallows dance years before. If he had been a hero in the war, so much the worse.

And so it was, perhaps, no surprise that when his lackey and drinking companion, Lord Caton, mentioned in passing an inconvenient curiosity of the code of exchange, Lord Iron's mind seized upon it. Among his many vices was a fondness for cruel pranks. And so it came to pass that Lord Iron and the handful of gaudy revelers who followed in his wake descended late one Tuesday morning upon the Magdalen Gate postal authority.

Olaf took the packet of bills, willing his hands not to tremble. Lord Iron's thin smile and river-stone eyes did nothing to calm him. The woman draping herself on Lord Iron's arm made a poor affectation of sincerity.

"Well," Olaf said, unfolding the papers. "Let me see."

These were unlike any currency he had ever seen; the sheets were just larger than a standard sheet of paper, the engraving a riot of colors—crimson, indigo, and a pale, delicate peach. The lordly face that stared out of the bill was Moorish. Ornate letters identified the bills as being valued at a thousand convertible guilders and issued by the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat. Olaf wondered, as his fingers traced the lettering, how a protectorate could be independent.

"I'm very sorry, my lord," he said. "But this isn't a listed currency."

"And how is that my problem?" Lord Iron asked, stroking his beard. He had a rich voice, soft and masculine, that made Olaf blush.

"I only mean, my lord, that I couldn't give an exchange rate on these. I don't have them on my board, you see, and so I can't—"

"These are legal tender, issued by a sovereign state. I would like to change them into pounds sterling."

"I understand that, my lord, it's only that—"

"Are you familiar with the code of exchange?" Lord Iron asked. The dark-haired woman on his arm smiled at Olaf with all the pity a snake shows a rat.

"I  . . . of course, my lord  . . . that is . . ."

"Then you will recall the second provision of the Lord Chancellor's amendment of 1652?"

Olaf licked his lips. Confusion was like cotton ticking filling his head.

"The provision against speculation, my lord?"

"Very good," Lord Iron said. "It states that any cambist in the employ of the crown must complete a requested transfer between legal tenders issued by sovereign states within twenty-four hours or else face review of licensure."

"My . . .my lord, that isn't  . . . I've been working here for years, sir . . ."

"And of course," Lord Iron went on, his gaze implacable and cool, "assigning arbitrary value to a currency also requires a review, doesn't it? And rest assured, my friend, that I am quite capable of determining the outcome of any such review."

Olaf swallowed to loosen the tightness in his throat. His smile felt sickly.

"If I have done something to offend your lordship . . ."

"No," Lord Iron said with something oddly like compassion in his eyes. "You were simply in the wrong place when I grew bored. Destroying you seemed diverting. I will be back at this time tomorrow. Good day, sir."

Lord Iron turned and walked away. His entourage followed. When the last of them had stepped out the street doors, the silence that remained behind was profound as the grave. Olaf saw the eyes of the postal clerks on him and managed a wan smile. The great clock read twenty minutes past eleven. By noontime tomorrow, Olaf realized, it was quite possible he would no longer be a licensed cambist.

He closed his shutters early with a note tacked to the front that clients should knock on them if they were facing an emergency and otherwise return the next day. He pulled out the references of his trade—gazetteer, logs of fiscal reports, conversion tables. By midafternoon, he had discovered the location of the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat, but nothing that would relate their system of convertible guilders to any known currency. Apparently the last known conversion had been into a system of cowry shells, and the numbers involved were absent.

The day waned, the light pouring into the postal authority warming and then fading to shadows. Olaf sent increasingly desperate messages to his fellow cambists at other postal authorities, to the librarians at the city's central reference desk, to the office of the Lord Exchequer. It became clear as the bells tolled their increasing hours that no answer would come before morning. And indeed, no answer would come in time.

If Olaf delayed the exchange, his license could be suspended. If he invented some random value for the guilders, his license could be suspended. And there was no data from which to derive an appropriate equation.

Anger and despair warring in his belly, he closed his station; returned his books to their places, cleaned his slate, logged the few transactions he had made. His hand hovered for a moment over his strongbox.

Here were the funds from which he drew each day to meet the demands of his clientele. Pounds sterling, yen, rubles. He wondered, if he were to fill his pockets with the box's present contents, how far he would get before he was caught. The romance of flight bloomed in his mind and died all in the space of a breath. He withdrew only the bright, venomous bills of the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat, replacing them with a receipt. He locked the box with a steady hand, shrugged on his coat, and left.

Lord Iron, he decided as he walked slowly down the marble steps to the street, was evil. But he was also powerful, rich, and well-connected. There was little that a man like Olaf could do if a man of that stature took it as his whim to destroy him. If it had been the devil, he might at least have fallen back on prayer.

Olaf stopped at the newsstand, bought an evening paper and a tin of lemon mints, and trudged to the station across the street. Waiting on the platform, he listened to the underground trains hiss and squeal. He read his newspaper with the numb disinterest of a man to whom the worst has already happened. A missing child had been found alive in Stonemarket; the diary of a famous courtesan had sold at auction to an anonymous buyer and for a record price; the police had begun a policy of restricting access to the river quays in hopes of reducing accidental deaths by drowning. The cheap ink left more of a mark on his fingers than his mind.

At his boardinghouse, Olaf ate a perfunctory dinner at the common table, retired to his room, and tried in vain to lose himself in the pulp adventure tales. The presence of a killer among the members of the good Count Pendragon's safari proved less than captivating, even if the virtuous Hanna Gable was in danger. Near midnight, Olaf turned out his light, pulled his thin wool blanket up over his head, and wondered what he would do when his position at the postal authority was terminated.

Two hours later, he woke with a shout. Still in his night clothes, he rushed out to the common room, digging through the pile of small kindling and newspaper that Mrs. Wells used to start her fires. When he found the evening newspaper, he read the article detailing the sale of the courtesan's diary again. There was nothing in it that pertained directly to his situation, and yet his startling, triumphant yawp woke the house.

He arrived at work the next day later than usual, with bags dark as bruises under his eyes but a spring in his step. He went through his morning ritual rather hurriedly to make up for the time he had lost, but was well prepared when the street doors opened at eleven o'clock and Lord Iron and his gang of rank nobility slouched in. Olaf held his spine straight and breathed deeply to ease the trip-hammer of his heart.

Lord Iron stepped up to the window like an executioner to the noose. The woman on his arm this morning was fair-haired, but otherwise might have been the previous day's twin. Olaf made a small, nervous bow to them both.

"Lord Iron," he said.

Lord Iron's expression was distant as the moon. Olaf wondered if perhaps his lordship had been drinking already this morning.

"Explain to me why you've failed."

"Well, my lord, I don't think I can do that. I have your money here. It comes to something less than ten pounds, I'm afraid. But that was all the market would bear."

With trembling hand, Olaf slid an envelope across the desk. Lord Iron didn't look down at it. Fury lit his eyes.

"The market? And pray what market is that?"

"The glass blower's shop in Harrington Square, my lord. I have quotes from three other establishments nearby, and theirs was the best. I doubt you would find better anywhere."

"What do they have to do with this?"

"Well, they were the ones who bought the guilders," Olaf said, his voice higher and faster than he liked. He also ran on longer than he had strictly speaking intended. "I believe that they intend to use them as wrapping paper. For the more delicate pieces. As a novelty."

Lord Iron's face darkened.

"You sold my bills?" he growled.

Olaf had anticipated many possible reactions. Violence, anger, amusement. He had imagined a hundred objections that Lord Iron might bring to his actions. Base ignorance had not been one of them. Olaf's surprise leant a steadiness to his voice.

"My lord, you sold them. To me. That's what exchange is, sir. Currency is something bought and sold, just as plums or gas fixtures are. It's what we do here."

"I came to get pounds sterling for guilders, not sell wrapping paper!"

Olaf saw in that moment that Lord Iron genuinely didn't understand. He pulled himself up, straightening his vest.

"Sir," he said. "When a client comes to me with a hundred dollars and I turn him back with seventy pounds, I haven't said some Latin phrase over them. There aren't suddenly seventy more pounds in the world and a hundred fewer dollars. I buy the dollars. You came to sell your guilders to me. Very well. I have bought them."

"As wrapping paper!"

"What does that matter?" Olaf snapped, surprising both Lord Iron and himself. "If I invest them in negotiable bonds in Analdi-Wat or burn them for kindling, it's no business of yours. Someone was willing to buy them. From that, I can now quote you with authority what people are willing to pay. There is your exchange rate. And there is your money. Thank you for your business, and good day."

"You made up the price," Lord Iron said. "To place an arbitrary worth on—"

"Good God, man," Olaf said. "Did you not hear me before? There's nothing arbitrary about it. I went to several prospective buyers and took the best offered price. What can you possibly mean by 'worth' if not what you can purchase with it? Five shillings is worth a loaf of bread, or a cup of wine, or a cheaply bound book of poetry because that is what it will buy. Your tens of thousands of negotiable guilders will buy you nine pounds and seven shillings because that is what someone will pay. And there it is, in that envelope."

Never before in his life had Olaf seen nobility agape at him. The coterie of Lord Iron stared at him as if he had belched fire and farted brimstone. The fair-haired woman stepped back, freeing his lordship's sword arm.

I have gone too far, Olaf thought. He will kill me.

Lord Iron was silent for a long moment while the world seemed to rotate around him. Then he chuckled.

"The measure of a thing's worth is what you can purchase with it," he said as if tasting the words, then turned to the fair-haired woman. "I think he's talking about you, Marjorie."

The woman's cheeks flushed scarlet. Lord Iron leaned against the sill of Olaf's little, barred window and gestured Olaf closer. Against his best judgment, Olaf leaned in.

"You have a strange way of looking at things," Lord Iron said. There were fumes on his breath. Absinthe, Olaf guessed. "To hear you speak, the baker buys my five shillings with his bread."

"And how is that wrong, my lord?" the cambist asked.

"And then the wineseller buys the coins from him with a glass of wine. So why not buy the bread with the wine? If they're worth the same?"

"You could, my lord," Olaf said. "You can express anything in terms of anything else, my lord. How many lemon tarts is a horse worth? How many newspapers equate to a good dinner? It isn't harder to determine than some number of rubles for another number of yen, if you know the trick of it."

Lord Iron smiled again. The almost sleepy expression returned to his eyes. He nodded.

"Wrapping paper," he said. "You have amused me, little man, and I didn't think that could be done any longer. I accept your trade."

And with that, Lord Iron swept the envelope into his pocket, turned, and marched unsteadily out of the postal authority and into the noon light of Magdalen Gate. After the street doors were closed, there was a pause long as three breaths together and then one of the postal clerks began to clap.

A moment later, the staff of the postal authority had filled the vaults of their chambers with applause. Olaf, knees suddenly weak, bowed carefully, closed the shutters of his window, and made his way back to the men's privacy room where he emptied his breakfast into the toilet and then sat on the cool tile floor laughing until tears streamed from his eyes.

He had faced down Lord Iron and escaped with his career intact. It was, no doubt, the greatest adventure of his life. Nothing he had done before could match it, and he could imagine nothing in the future that would surpass it.

And nothing did, as it turned out, for almost six and a half months.

If was a cold, clear February, and the stars had come out long before Olaf had left the Magdalen Gate authority. All during the ride on the underground train, Olaf dreamed of a warm pot of tea, a small fire, and the conclusion of the latest novel. Atherton Crane was on the verge of exposing the plot of the vicious Junwang Ko, but didn't yet know that Kelly O'Callahan was in the villain's clutches. It promised to be a pleasant evening.

He knew as soon as he stepped into the boarding house that something was wrong. The other boarders, sitting around the common table, went silent as he shrugged out of his coat and plucked off his hat. They pointedly did not look at him as Mrs. Wells, her wide, friendly face pale as uncooked dough, crossed the room to meet him.

"There's a message for you, Mr. Neddelsohn," she said. "A man came and left it for you. Very particular."

"Who was he?" Olaf asked, suspicion blooming in his heart more from her affect than from any guilt on his conscience.

"Don't know," Mrs. Wells said, wringing her hands in distress, "but he looked  . . . well, here it is, Mr. Neddelsohn. This is the letter he left for you."

The envelope she thrust into his hand was the color of buttercream, smooth as linen, and thick. The coat of arms embossed upon it was Lord Iron's. Olaf started at the thing as if she'd handed him a viper.

Mrs. Wells simpered her apology as he broke the wax seal and drew out a single sheet of paper. It was written in an erratic but legible hand.

Mr. Neddelsohn –

I find I have need of you to settle a wager. You will bring yourself to the Club Baphomet immediately upon receipt of this note. I will, of course, recompense you for your troubles.

The note was not signed, but Olaf had no doubt of its authorship. Without a word, he pulled his jacket back on, returned his hat to his head, and stepped out to hail a carriage. From the street, he could see the faces of Mrs. Wells and his fellow boarders at the window.

The Club Baphomet squatted in the uncertain territory between the tenements and beer halls of Stonemarket and the mansions and ballrooms of Granite Hill. The glimmers behind its windows did little to illuminate the street, perhaps by design. From the tales Olaf had heard, there might well be members of the club who would prefer not to be seen entering or leaving its grounds. The service entrance was in a mud-paved alley stinking of piss and old food, but it opened quickly to his knock. He was bundled inside and escorted to a private sitting room where, it seemed, he was expected.

Of the five men who occupied the room, Olaf recognized only Lord Iron. The months had not been kind; Lord Iron had grown thinner, his eyes wilder, and a deep crimson cut was only half healed on his cheek. The other four were dressed in fashion similar to Lord Iron—well-razored hair, dark coats of the finest wool, watch chains of gold. The eldest of them seemed vaguely familiar.

Lord Iron rose and held his hand out toward Olaf, not as if to greet him but rather to display him like a carnival barker presenting a three-headed calf.

"Gentlemen," Lord Iron intoned. "This is the cambist I mentioned to you. I propose that he be my champion in this matter."

Olaf felt the rictus grin on his face, the idiot bobbing of his head as he made small bows to the four assembled gentlemen. He was humiliated, but could no more stop himself than a puppy could keep from showing its belly to beg the mercy of wolves.

One of the four—a younger man with gold hair and ice-blue eyes—stepped forward with a smile. Olaf nodded to him for what must have been the fifth time.

"I am Simon Cole," the gold-haired man said. "Lord Eichan, to my enemies."

At this, Lord Iron raised a hand, as if to identify himself as one such enemy. The other three men chuckled, and Lord Eichan smiled as well before continuing.

"Our mutual acquaintance, Lord Iron, has made a suggestion I find somewhat unlikely, and we have made a wager of it. He is of the opinion that the value of anything can be expressed in terms of any other valuable thing. I think his example was the cost of a horse in lemon mints."

"Yes, my lord," Olaf said.

"Ah, you agree then," Lord Eichan said. "That's good. I was afraid our little Edmund had come up with his thesis in a drug-soaked haze."

"We've made the agreement," Lord Iron said pleasantly. "Simon, Satan's catamite that he is, will set the two things to be compared. I, meaning of course you, will have a week to determine their relative worth. These three bastards will judge the answer."

"I see," Olaf said.

"Excellent," Lord Iron said, slapping him on the back and leading him to a chair upholstered in rich leather. It wasn't until Olaf had descended into the chair's depths that he realized he had just agreed to this mad scheme. Lord Eichan had taken a seat opposite him and was thoughtfully lighting a pipe.

"I think I should say," Olaf began, casting his mind about wildly for some way to remove himself from the room without offending either party. "That is, I don't wish that . . .ah . . ."

Lord Eichan nodded as if Olaf had made some cogent point, then shaking his match until the flame died, turned to face Olaf directly.

"I would like to know the value of a day in the life of His Majesty, King Walther," Lord Eichan said. "And I would like that value described in days of life of an inmate in the crown's prison."

"A day in the life of the king expressed in days of a prisoner's life?"

"Certainly you must agree that life is valuable," Lord Eichan said. "You wouldn't lightly part with your own."

"Well, certainly—"

"And you can't suggest that the king is the same as a bread thief."

"No, I wouldn't—"

"Well, then," Lord Eichan said. "It's settled."

"Come along, my boy," Lord Iron said, clapping Olaf on the shoulder. "I'll see you out."

"One week!" Lord Eichan said as Olaf and Lord Iron stepped from the room and into the corridor. Lord Iron was smiling; Olaf was not.

"My lord," Olaf said. "This is . . .I'm not sure I know how to go about something like this."

"That's why I got you a week to do it in," Lord Iron said. "The rat-licker wanted to limit it to three days."

"I don't know for a certainty that I can accommodate you, my lord," Olaf said.

"Do your best," Lord Iron said. "If we lose, Simon, Lord Eichan is going to kill me. Well, and you for that."

Olaf stopped dead. Lord Iron took another few steps before pausing and looking back.

"He's what?"

"Going to kill us," Lord Iron said. "And take five hundred pounds I've set aside in earnest as well. If we win, I'll kill him and bed his sister."

Olaf, unthinking, murmured an obscenity. Lord Iron grinned and pulled him along the dim corridor toward the back of the club.

"Well, you needn't bed his sister if you don't care to. Just do your best, boy. And be back here in a week."

With that, Lord Iron stepped Olaf out the door and into the cold, bleak alley. It wasn't until the door had closed behind him that Olaf realized Lord Iron hadn't recompensed him for the carriage ride.

In the morning, the whole affair had the air of a bad dream. Olaf made his way to Magdalen Gate as he always did, checked the ticker tape, updated his slate. What was the value of life, he wondered. And how was one life best to be measured against another.

And, behind it all, the growing certainty that Lord Eichan would indeed kill him if he couldn't find an acceptable answer.

Twice before noon, Olaf found he had made errors in his accounting. After bolting down the snowy street after a woman who had left with ten pounds fewer than she deserved, Olaf gave up. He wrote a note claiming illness, pinned it to his shuttered window, and left. He paused at the tobacconist to buy a pouch and papers.

In his room at the boarding house, Olaf sketched out every tack he could think of to address the issue. The most obvious was to determine how much money the state spent to keep His Majesty and how much to run the prisons. But objections to that arose almost immediately; was that a measure of the worth of life or of operational expenses appropriate to each career? He considered the relative costs of physician's care for king and prisoner, but this again was not a concern precisely of life, but health. Twenty years coughing and twenty years free from illness were still twenty years.

For three days, he ate little and slept less. He ventured out to the library to search among the stacks of books and periodicals for inspiration. He found nothing on which he would have been willing to stake his life. Lord Iron had done that for him.

On the morning of the fourth day he rolled the last pinch of tobacco into the last paper, wet it, rolled it, and sat on his bed unable to bring himself to the effort of lighting the thing. Despair had descended upon him. He saw the next three days stretching before him in a long, slow sleep.

It was how he imagined the prisoners felt who had so occupied his thoughts. But he, at least, could go out for more tobacco. And beer. And good, bloody beefsteak. If he was to live like a prisoner, he might at least eat like a king. It wasn't as if he'd give himself gout in three days' time, no matter how richly he ate or overmuch he drank.

Something stirred at the back of his mind, and he found himself grinning even before he knew why.

All that day and the two after it he spent in a whirl of activity, his despair forgotten. He visited physicians and the budget office, the office of the prison warden and the newspaperman who most reported on the activities of the king. The last day, he locked himself in his rooms with an abacus, a stub of pencil, and sheaves of paper.

When he came to the final accounting, his heart sank. He went through his figures again, certain that somewhere in the complexity of his argument, he had made an error. But the numbers tallied, and as little as he liked it, there was no more time. Putting on his best coat, he prepared the argument in his mind. Then, papers tucked under his arm, he went out past his silent fellow boarders and the stricken countenance of Mrs. Wells, down to the wintery street, and hailed a carriage to carry him back to Club Baphomet.

The furniture of the sitting room had been rearranged. A single table now dominated the space, with five chairs all along one side like an examiner's panel. The three judges sat in the middle with Simon, Lord Eichan on the left and Lord Iron on the right. Lord Eichan looked somewhat amused, but there was a nervousness in his movement with which Olaf identified. Lord Iron looked as relaxed as a man stepping out of a sauna; the wound on his face was visibly more healed. Glasses of wine sat before each man, and cigars rested in onyx ashtrays when the gentlemen of the club weren't making better use of them.

A straight-backed wooden chair faced them, a small student desk at its side. Olaf sat and arranged his papers. The eldest of the judges leaned forward and with a smile more at home on the lips of a procurer spoke.

"You may proceed, sir."

Olaf nodded his thanks.

"I will need to do just a bit of groundwork before I present my analysis," he said. "I hope you would all agree that a man who decries embezzlement and also diverts money into his private accounts is not actually opposed to the theft?"

The judges looked at one another in amusement.

"Or, similarly," Olaf went on, "a woman who claims to embody chastity and yet beds all comers is not, in point of fact, chaste?"

"I think even Lord Eichan will have to allow those to stand," the eldest judge said. "Your point?"

"My point, sirs, is that we judge people not by what they claim, but what they do. Public declarations of sentiment are not a fit judge of true character."

"You are preaching," the youngest of the judges drawled, "to the choir. There is no group in the nation more adept at saying one thing and doing another."

Olaf smiled awkwardly.

"Just so," he said. "I will move forward. I have come to the determination, after careful consideration, that a day in the life of His Majesty the King equates to nineteen and three-quarter hours of a prisoner of the crown."

There was a moment's silence. Simon, Lord Eichan blinked and an incredulous smile began to work its way onto his countenance. Lord Iron sat forward, his expression unreadable. One of the judges who had not yet spoken took a meditative puff on his cigar.

"I was never particularly good at sums," the man said in an unsettlingly feminine voice, "but it seems to me that you've just said a prisoner's life is more valuable than that of the king?"

"Yes," Olaf said, his belly heavy as if he'd drunk a tankard of lead. The eldest judge glanced at Lord Iron with a pitying expression.

"Let me also make some few observations," Olaf said, fighting to keep the desperation from his voice. "I have met with several physicians in the last few days. I am sorry to report that overindulging in strong liquor is thought by the medical establishment to reduce life expectancy by as much as five years. A habit of eating rich foods may reduce a man's span on the earth by another three to four years. A sedentary lifestyle by as much as eight. Indulging in chocolate and coffee can unbalance the blood, and remove as many as three years of life."

"You have now ceased to preach to the choir," said Lord Eichan. And indeed, the judges had grown more somber. Olaf raised a hand, begging their patience.

"I have used these medical data as well as the reports of the warden of Chappell Hill Prison and the last two years of His Majesty's reported activities in the newspapers. I beg you to consider. A prisoner of the crown is kept on a simple diet and subjected to a mandatory exercise period each day. No spirits of any kind are permitted him. No luxuries such as coffee or chocolate. By comparison  . . ."

Olaf fumbled with the sheaves of papers, searching for the form he had created. The eldest judge cleared his throat.

"By comparison," Olaf continued, "in the last two years, His Majesty has taken vigorous exercise only one day in seven. Has eaten at banquet daily, including the richest of dishes. He regularly drinks both coffee and chocolate, often together in the French style."

"This is ridiculous," Lord Eichan said. "His Majesty has the finest physicians in the world at his command. His life is better safeguarded than any man's in the realm."

"No, sir," Olaf said, his voice taking on a certainty that he was beginning to genuinely feel. "We say that it is, much as the embezzler claims honesty and the wanton claims virtue. I present to you the actions, as we agreed. And I would point out that His Majesty's excesses are subject only to his personal whim. If he wished, he could drink himself insensible each morning, eat nothing but butterfat and lard, and never move from his seat. He could drink half a tun of coffee and play games with raw gunpowder. Unlike a prisoner, there is no enforcement of behavior that could rein him in. I have, if anything, taken a conservative measure in reaching my conclusions."

A glimmer of amusement shone in Lord Iron's eyes, but his face remained otherwise frozen. Simon, Lord Eichan was fidgeting with his cigar. The eldest judge sucked his teeth audibly and shook his head.

"And yet prisoners do not, I think, have a greater lifespan than monarchs," he said.

"It is impossible to say," Olaf said. "For many criminals and poor men, the time spent in the care of the crown can be when they are safest, best overseen, best clothed, best fed. I would, however, point out that His Majesty's father left us at the age of sixty-seven, and the oldest man in the care of the crown is  . . ."

Olaf paused, finding the name.

"The oldest man in the care of the crown is David Bennet, aged eighty. Incarcerated when he was sixteen for killing his brother."

He spread his hands.

"Your argument seems sound," the eldest judge said, "but your conclusion is ridiculous. I cannot believe that the king is of lesser value than a prisoner. I am afraid I remain unconvinced. What say you, gentlemen?"

But before the other two judges could answer Olaf rose to his feet.

"With all respect, sir, the question was not the value of the king or the prisoner, but of the days of their respective lives. I was not asked to judge their pleasures or their health insofar as their discomforts are less than mortal."

The effeminate judge lifted his chin. There was a livid scar across his neck where, Olaf imagined from his knowledge of men's adventure, a garrote might have cut. But it was Simon, Lord Eichan who spoke.

"How is it that a king can be more valuable than a prisoner, but his days be less? It makes no sense at all!"

"There are other things which His Majesty has," Olaf said. He had warmed to his topic now, and the fact that his own life hung in the balance was all but forgotten. "A prisoner must take his exercise; a king has the power to refuse. A prisoner may wish dearly for a rich meal or a great glass of brandy, but since he cannot have them, he cannot exchange pleasure for . . . well, for some duration of life."

"This is a waste of—"

"Be quiet," the eldest judge said. "Let the man have his say."

"But—"

"Don't make me repeat myself, Simon."

Lord Eichan leaned back sneering and gripping his wine glass until his knuckles were white.

"It's a choice every man in this room has made," Olaf went on, raising his arm like a priest delivering a homily. "You might all live as ascetics and survive years longer. But like the king, you choose to make a rational exchange of some span of your life for the pleasure of living as you please. A prisoner is barred from that exchange, and so I submit a greater value is placed on his life precisely to the degree that strictures are placed on his pleasure and his exercise of power.

"Gentlemen, ask yourselves this: If I had two sons and saw that one of them kept from drink and gluttony while letting the other run riot, which of them would you say I valued? The prodigal might have more pleasure. Certainly the king has more pleasure than an inmate. But pleasure and power are not life."

"Amen," said Lord Iron. It was the first time he had spoken since Olaf had entered. The silence that followed this declaration was broken only by the hissing of the fire in the grate and rush of blood in Olaf's ears.

"Your reports were accurate, Lord Iron," the drawling judge said. "Your pet cambist is quite amusing."

"Perhaps it would be best if you gave us a moment to discuss your points," the eldest judge said. "If you would be so kind as to step out to the antechamber? Yes. Thank you."

With the blackwood door closed behind him, Olaf's fear returned. He was in the Club Baphomet with his survival linked to Lord Iron's, and only an argument that seemed less and less tenable with each passing minute to protect him. But he had made his throw. His only other hope now was mad flight, and the door to the corridor was locked. He tried it.

What felt like hours passed, though the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner reported only a quarter-hour. A pistol barked twice, and a moment later Lord Iron strode into the room. The door swung shut behind him before Olaf could make sense of the bloody scene. His gorge rose.

"Well done, boy," Lord Iron said, dropping something heavy into Olaf's lap. "I'll have you taken home in my personal carriage. I have Lord Eichan's sister to console this evening, and I won't be needing horses to do it. And I thought you should know: it wasn't unanimous. If His Majesty hadn't taken your side, I think we might not have won the day."

"His Majesty?"

Olaf's mind reeled. The face of the eldest judge resolved itself suddenly into the portrait he kept at his desk.

"You did well, boy," Lord Iron said. "Your country thanks you."

Without another word, Lord Iron unlocked the door, stepped out to the corridor, and was gone. Olaf looked down. A packet of bills squatted in his lap. Five hundred pounds at a guess, and blood smeared on the topmost bill.

He swore to himself in that moment that he would never answer another summons from Lord Iron, whatever the consequences. And, indeed, when the hour arrived, it was Lord Iron who came to him.

The weeks and months that followed were if anything richer in their tales of Lord Iron. While traveling in the Orient, he had forced a barkeep who had fallen into debt to choose between cutting off one of his infant daughter's toes or three of his own fingers in lieu of payment. He had seduced six nuns in Rome, leaving two of them with child. He had ridden an ostrich down the streets of Cairo naked at midnight. Of the untimely death of Lord Eichan there was no word, but apart from removing the portrait of the king from his desk, Olaf took no action. The less he personally figured into the debaucheries of Lord Iron, the better pleased he was.

Instead, Olaf plunged more deeply than ever into his work, his routine, and the harmless escapism of his men's adventure novels. But for the first time in memory, the perils of the heroines seemed contrived and weak; the masculine bravery of the heroes seemed overstated, like a boy who blusters and puffs out his chest when walking through the graveyard at dusk.

Clifford Knightly wrestled an alligator on the banks of the great Nile. Lord Morrow foiled the evil Chaplain Grut's plan to foul the waters of London. Emily Chastain fell gratefully into the mighty arms of the noble savage Maker-of-Justice. And Olaf found himself wondering what these great men would have done at Club Baphomet. Wrested the gun from Lord Iron? From Simon, Lord Eichan? Sternly spoken of God and truth and righteousness? Olaf doubted it would have had any great effect.

Winter passed into spring. Spring ripened to summer. Slowly, Olaf's discontent, like the nightmares from which he woke himself shouting, lessened. For weeks on end, he could forget what he had been part of. Many men who came to his window at the postal authority had traveled widely. Many had tales to tell of near misses: a runaway carriage that had come within a pace of running them down in the streets of Prague, a fever which had threatened to carry them away in Bombay, the hiss of an Afghan musket ball passing close to their head. Olaf had tales of his own now, if he ever chose to share them. That was all.

And still, when autumn with its golden leaves and fog and chill rain also brought Lord Iron back into his life, Olaf was not surprised.

It was a Tuesday night in September. Olaf had spent his customary hours at the Magdalen Gate postal authority, come back to his boarding house, and eaten alone in his room. The evening air was cool but not biting, and he had propped his window open before sitting down to read. When he woke, he thought for a long, bleary moment that the cold night breeze had woken him. Then the knock at his door repeated itself.

His blanket wrapped around his shoulder, Olaf answered the door. Lord Iron stood in the hall. He looked powerfully out of place. His fine jacket and cravat, the polished boots, the well-groomed beard and moustache all belonged in a palace or club. And yet rather than making the boarding house hall seem shabby and below him, the hallway made Lord Iron, monster of the city, seem false as a boy playing dress-up. Olaf nodded as if he'd been expecting the man.

"I have need of you," Lord Iron said.

"Have I the option of refusal?"

Lord Iron smiled, and Olaf took it as the answer to his question. He stepped back and let the man come through. Lord Iron sat on the edge of the bed while Olaf closed his window, drew up his chair, and sat. In the light from Olaf's reading lamp, Lord Iron's skin seemed waxen and pale. His voice, when he spoke, was distant as a man shouting from across a square.

"There is a question plaguing me," Lord Iron said. "You are the only man I can think of who might answer it."

"Is there a life at stake?" Olaf asked.

"No," Lord Iron said. "Nothing so petty as that."

When Olaf failed to respond, Lord Iron, born Edmund Scarasso, looked up at him. There was a terrible weariness in his eyes.

"I would know the fair price for a man's soul," he said.

"Forgive me?" Olaf said.

"You heard me," Lord Iron said. "What would be a fit trade for a soul? I . . .I can't tell any longer. And it is a question whose answer has . . .some relevance to my situation."

In an instant, Olaf's mind conjured the sitting room at the Club Baphomet. Lord Iron sitting in one deep leather chair, and the Prince of Lies across from him with a snifter of brandy in his black, clawed hands.

"I don't think that would be a wise course to follow," Olaf said, though in truth his mind was spinning out ways to avoid being party to this diabolism. He did not wish to make a case before that infernal judge. Lord Iron smiled and shook his head.

"There is no one in this besides yourself and me," he said. "You are an expert in the exchange of exotic currencies. I can think of none more curious than this. Come to my house on Mammon Street in a month's time. Tell me what conclusion you have reached."

"My Lord—"

"I will make good on the investment of your time," Lord Iron said, then rose and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

Olaf gaped at the empty room. He was a cambist. Of theology, he knew only what he had heard in church. He had read more of satanic contracts in his adventure novels than in the Bible. He was, in fact, not wholly certain that the Bible had an example of a completed exchange. Satan had tempted Jesus. Perhaps there was something to be taken from the Gospel of Matthew . . .

Olaf spent the remainder of the night poring over his Bible and considering what monetary value might be assigned to the ability to change stones to bread. But as the dawn broke and he turned to his morning ablutions, he found himself unsatisfied. The devil might have tempted Christ with all the kingdoms of the world, but it was obvious that such an offer wouldn't be open to everyone. He was approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

As he rode through the deep tunnels to Magdalen Gate, as he stopped at the newsstand for a morning paper, as he checked the ticker tape and updated his slate, his mind occupied itself by sifting through all the stories and folk wisdom he had ever heard. There had been a man who traded his soul to the devil for fame and wealth. Faust had done it for knowledge. Was there a way to represent the learning of Faust in terms of, say, semesters at the best universities of Europe? Then the rates of tuition might serve as a fingerhold.

It was nearly the day's end before the question occurred to him that put Lord Iron's commission in its proper light, and once that had happened, the answer was obvious. Olaf had to sit down, his mind afire with the answer and its implications. He didn't go home, but took himself to a small public house. Over a pint and a stale sandwich, he mentally tested his hypothesis. With the second pint, he celebrated. With the third, he steeled himself, then went out to the street and hailed a carriage to take him to the house of Lord Iron.

Revelers had infected the household like fleas on a dying rat. Masked men and women shrieked with laughter, not all of which bespoke mirth. No servant came to take his coat or ask his invitation, so Olaf made his own way through the great halls. He passed through the whole of the building before emerging from the back and finding Lord Iron himself sitting at a fountain in the gardens. His lordship's eyebrows rose to see Olaf, but he did not seem displeased.

"So soon, boy? It isn't a month," Lord Iron said as Olaf sat on the cool stone rail. The moon high above the city seemed also to dance in the water, lighting Lord Iron's face from below and above at once.

"There was no need," Olaf said. "I have your answer. But I will have to make something clear before I deliver it. If you will permit me?"

Lord Iron opened his hand in motion of deference. Olaf cleared his throat.

"Wealth," he said, "is not a measure of money. It is a measure of well-being. Of happiness, if you will. Wealth is not traded, but rather is generated by trade. If you have a piece of art that I wish to own and I have money that you would prefer to the artwork, we trade. Each of us has something he prefers to the thing he gave away; otherwise, we would not have agreed on the trade. We are both better off. You see? Wealth is generated."

"I believe I can follow you so far," Lord Iron said. "Certainly I can agree that a fat wallet is no guarantor of contentment."

"Very well. I considered your problem for the better part of the day. I confess I came near to despairing; there is no good data from which to work. But then I found my error. I assumed that your soul, my lord, was valuable. Clearly it is not."

Lord Iron coughed out something akin to a laugh, shock in his expression. Olaf raised a hand, palm out, asking that he not interrupt.

"You are renowned for your practice of evil. This very evening, walking through your house, I have seen things for which I can imagine no proper penance. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already."

"He does," Lord Iron said, staring into the middle distance.

"And so I saw," Olaf said. "You aren't seeking to sell a soul. You are hoping to buy one."

Lord Iron sighed and looked at his hands. He seemed smaller now. Not a supernatural being, but a man driven by human fears and passions to acts that could only goad him on to worse and worse actions. A man like any other, but with the wealth to magnify his errors into the scale of legend.

"You are correct, boy," he said. "The angels wouldn't have my soul if I drenched it in honey. I have . . .treated it poorly. It's left me weary and sick. I am a waste of flesh. I know that. If there is no way to become a better man than this, I suspect the best path is to become a corpse."

"I understand, my lord. Here is the answer to your question: the price of a soul is a life of humility and service."

"Ah, is that all," Lord Iron said, as if the cambist had suggested that he pull down the stars with his fingers.

"And as it happens," Olaf went on, "I have one such with which I would be willing to part."

Lord Iron met his gaze, began to laugh, and then went silent.

"Here," Olaf said, "is what I propose . . ."

Edmund, the new cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority was, by all accounts, an adequate replacement for Olaf. Not as good, certainly. But his close-cropped hair and clean-shaven face leant him an eagerness that belonged on a younger man, and if he seemed sometimes more haughty than his position justified, it was a vice that lessened with every passing month. By Easter, he had even been asked to join in the Sunday picnic the girls in the accounting office sponsored. He seemed genuinely moved at the invitation.

The great scandal of the season was the disappearance of Lord Iron. The great beast of the city simply vanished one night. Rumor said that he had left his fortune and lands in trust. The identity of the trustee was a subject of tremendous speculation.

Olaf himself spent several months simply taking stock of his newfound position in the world. Once the financial situation was put in better order, he found himself with a substantial yearly allowance that still responsibly protected the initial capital.

He spent his monies traveling to India, Egypt, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the unworldly underground cities of Persia. He saw the sun set off the Gold Coast and rise from the waters east of Japan. He heard war songs in the jungles of the Congo and sang children's lullabies in a lonely tent made from yak skin in the dark of a Siberian winter.

And, when he paused to recover from the rigors and dangers of travel, he would retire to a cottage north of the city—the least of his holdings—and spend his time writing men's adventure novels set in the places he had been.

He named his protagonist Lord Iron.

By Fools Like Me

Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress (www.sff.net/people/nankress/) published her first story, "The Earth Dwellers," in 1976. Her first novel, fantasy The Prince of Morning Bells, appeared in 1981 and was followed by thirteen novels of science fiction or fantasy, one YA novel, two thrillers, three story collections, and two books on writing. Although Kress began writing fantasy, she currently writes science fiction, most usually about genetic engineering. Her most famous work is Hugo and Nebula-winning novella "Beggars in Spain," which was published in 1990. Her most recent novels are Crossfire and Nothing Human. Upcoming are collection Nano Comes To Clifford Falls and two new novels, Steal Across the Sky and Dogs.

In this post-apocalyptic tale Kress looks clearly and movingly on what kind of future eco-catastrophe might bring.

Hope creeps quietly into my bedroom without knocking, peering around the corner of the rough doorjamb. I'm awake; sleep eludes me so easily now. I know from the awful smell that she has been to the beach.

"Come in, child, I'm not asleep."

"Grandma, where's Mama and Papa?"

"Aren't they in the field?" The rains are late this year and water for the crops must be carried in ancient buckets from the spring in the dell.

"Maybe. I didn't see them. Grandma, I found something."

"What, child?"

She gazes at me and bites her lip. I see that this mysterious find bothers her. Such a sensitive child, though sturdy and healthy enough, God knows how.

"I went to the beach," she confesses in a rush. "Don't tell Mama! I wanted to dig you some trunter roots because you like them so much, but my shovel went clunk on something hard and I . . .I dug it up."

"Hope," I reprimand, because the beach is full of dangerous bits of metal and plastic, washed up through the miles of dead algae on the dead water. And if a soot cloud blows in from the west, it will hit the beach first.

"I'm sorry," she says, clearly lying, "but, Grandma, it was a metal box and the lock was all rusted and there was something inside and I brought it here."

"The box?"

"No, that was too heavy. The . . .just wait!"

No one can recognize most of the bits of rusted metal and twisted plastic from before the Crash. Anything found in a broken metal box should be decayed beyond recognition. I call "Hope! Don't touch anything slimy—" but she is already out of earshot, running from my tiny bedroom with its narrow cot, which is just blankets and pallet on a rope frame to keep me off the hard floor. It doesn't; the old ropes sag too much, just as the thick clay walls don't keep out the heat. But that's my fault. I close the window shutters only when I absolutely have to. Insects and heat are preferable to dark. But I have a door, made of precious and rotting wood, which is more than Hope or her parents have on their sleeping alcoves off the house's only other room. I expect to die in this room.

Hope returns, carrying a bubble of sleek white plastic that fills her bare arms. The bubble has no seams. No mold sticks to it, no sand. Carefully she lays the thing on my cot.

Despite myself, I say, "Bring me the big knife and be very careful, it's sharp."

She gets the knife, carrying it as gingerly as an offering for the altar. The plastic slits more readily than I expected. I peel it back, and we both gasp.

I am the oldest person on Island by two decades, and I have seen much. Not of the world my father told me about, from before the Crash, but in our world now. I have buried two husbands and five children, survived three great sandstorms and two years where the rains didn't come at all, planted and first-nursed a sacred tree, served six times at the altar. I have seen much, but I have never seen so much preserved sin in one place.

"What . . .Grandma . . .what is that?"

"A book, child. They're all books."

"Books?" Her voice holds titillated horror. "You mean . . .like they made before the Crash? Like they cut down trees to make?"

"Yes."

"Trees? Real trees?"

"Yes." I lift the top one from the white plastic bubble. Firm thick red cover, like . . .dear God, it's made from the skin of some animal. My gorge rises. Hope musn't know that. The edges of the sin are gold. My father told me about books, but not that they could look like this. I open it.

"Oh!" Hope cries. "Oh, Grandma!"

The first slate—no, first page, the word floating up from some childhood conversation—is a picture of trees, but nothing like the pictures children draw on their slates. This picture shows dozens of richly colored trees, crowded together, each with hundreds of healthy, beautifully detailed green leaves. The trees shade a path bordered with glorious flowers. Along the path runs a child wearing far too many wraps, following a large white animal dressed in a wrap and hat and carrying a small metal machine. At the top of the picture, words float on golden clouds: Alice in Wonderland.

"Grandma! Look at the—Mama's coming!"

Before I can say anything, Hope grabs the book, shoves it into the white bubble, and thrusts the whole thing under my cot. I feel it slide under my bony ass, past the sag that is my body, and hit the wall. Hope is standing up by the time Gloria crowds into my tiny room.

"Hope, have you fed the chickens yet?"

"No, Mama, I—"

Gloria reaches out and slaps her daughter. "Can't I trust you to do anything?"

"Please, Gloria, it's my fault. I sent her to see if there's any more mint growing in the dell."

Gloria scowls. My daughter-in-law is perpetually angry, perpetually exhausted. Before my legs gave out and I could still do a full day's work, I used to fight back. The Island is no more arid, the see-oh-too no higher, for Gloria than for anyone else. She has borne no more stillborn children than have other women, has endured no fewer soot clouds. But now that she and my son must feed my nearly useless body, I try to not anger her too much, to not be a burden. I weave all day. I twist rope, when there are enough vines to spare for rope. I pretend to be healthier than I am.

Gloria says, "We don't need mint, we need fed chickens. Go, Hope." She turns.

"Gloria—"

"What?" Her tone is unbearable. I wonder, for the thousandth time, why Bill married her, and for the thousandth time I answer my own question.

"Nothing," I say. I don't tell her about the sin under the bed. I could have, and ended it right there. But I do not.

God forgive me.

Gloria stands behind the altar, dressed in the tattered green robe we all wear during our year of service. I sit on a chair in front of the standing villagers; no one may miss services, no matter how old or sick or in need of help to hobble to the Grove. Bill half carried me here, afraid no doubt of being late and further angering his wife. It's hard to have so little respect for my son.

It is the brief time between the dying of the unholy wind that blows all day and the fall of night. Today the clouds are light gray, not too sooty, but not bearing rain, either.

The altar stands at the bottom of the dell, beside the spring that makes our village possible. A large flat slab of slate, it is supported by boulders painstakingly chiseled with the words of God. It took four generations to carve that tiny writing, and three generations of children have learned to read by copying the sacred texts onto their slates. I was among the first. The altar is shaded by the six trees of the Grove and from my uncomfortable seat, I can gaze up at their branches against the pale sky.

How beautiful they are! Ours are the tallest, straightest, healthiest trees of any village on Island. I planted and first-nursed one of them myself, the honor of my life. Even now I feel a thickness in my shriveled chest as I gaze up at the green leaves, each one wiped free of dust every day by those in service. Next year, Hope will be one of them. There is nothing on Earth lovelier than the shifting pattern of trees against the sky. Nothing.

Gloria raises her arms and intones, "'Then God said, "I give you every plant and every tree on the whole Earth. They will be food for you."'"

"Amen," call out two or three people.

"'Wail, oh pine tree,'" Gloria cries, "'for the cedar has fallen, the stately trees are ruined! Wail, oaks—'"

"Wail! Wail!"

I have never understood why people can't just worship in silence. This lot is sometimes as bad as a flock of starlings.

"'—oaks of Bashan, the—'"

Hope whispers, "Who's Bashan?"

Bill whispers back, "A person at the Crash."

"'—dense forest has been cut down! And they were told—told!—not to harm the grass of Earth or any plant or tree.'"

Revelation 9:4, I think automatically, although I never did find out what the words or numbers mean.

"'The vine is dried up!'" Gloria cries, "'the fig tree is withered! The pomegranate and the palm and the apple tree, all the trees of the field, are dried up! Surely the joy of mankind is withered away!'"

"Withered! Oh, amen, withered!"

Joel 1:12.

"'Offer sacrifices and burn incense on the high places, under any spreading tree!'"

Amy Martin, one of the wailers, comes forward with the first sacrifice, an unrecognizable piece of rusted metal dug up from the soil or washed up on the beach. She lays it on the altar. Beside me Hope leans forward, her mouth open and her eyes wide. I can read her young thoughts as easily as if they, too, are chiseled in stone: That metal might have been part of a "car" that threw see-oh-two and soot into the air, might have been part of a "factory" that poisoned the air, might have even been part of a "saw" that cut down the forests! Hope shudders, but I glance away from the intensity on her face. Sometimes she looks too much like Gloria.

Two more sacrifices are offered. Gloria takes an ember from the banked fire under the altar—the only fire allowed in the village—and touches it briefly to the sacrifices. "'Instead of the thornbush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briars the myrtle will grow. This will be for the Lord's glory, for an everlasting sign which—'"

I stop listening. Instead I watch the leaves move against the sky. What is "myrtle"—what did it look like, why was it such a desirable plant? The leaves blur. I have dozed off, but I realize this only when the whole village shouts together, "We will never forget!" and services are over.

Bill carries me back through the quickening darkness without stars or moon. Without the longed-for rain. Without the candles I remember from my childhood on Island, or the dimly remembered (dreamed?) fireless lights from before that. There are no lights after dark on Island, nothing that might release soot into the air.

We will never forget.

It's just too bad that services are so boring.

Alice in Wonderland.

Pride and Prejudice

Birds of India and Asia

Moby Dick

Morning Light

Jane Eyre

The Sun Also Rises

I sit on my cot, slowly sounding out the strange words. Of course the sun rises—what else could it do? It's rising now outside my window, which lets in pale light, insects, and the everlasting hot wind.

"Can I see, Grandma?" Hope, naked in the doorway. I didn't hear the door open. She could have been Gloria. And is it right for a child to see this much sin?

But already she's snuggled beside me, smelling of sweat and grime and young life. Even her slight body makes the room hotter. All at once a memory comes to me, a voice from early childhood: Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that's a—

What bruise? What was I to listen to? The memory is gone.

"M—m—m—oh—bee—Grandma, what's a 'moby'?"

"I don't know, child."

She picks up a different one. "J—j—aye—n . . .Jane! That's Miss Anderson's name! Is this book about her?"

"No. Another Jane, I think." I open Moby Dick. Tiny, dense writing, pages and pages of it, whole burned forests of it.

"Read the sin with the picture of trees!" She roots among the books until she finds Alice in Wonderland and opens it to that impossible vision of tens, maybe hundreds, of glorious trees. Hope studies the child blessed enough to walk that flower-bordered path.

"What's her name, Grandma?"

"Alice." I don't really know.

"Why is she wearing so many wraps? Isn't she hot? And how many days did her poor mother have to work to weave so many?"

I recognize Gloria's scolding tone. The pages of the book are crisp, bright and clear, as if the white plastic bubble had some magic to keep sin fresh. Turning the page, I begin to read aloud. "'Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank—'"

"She has a sister," Hope breathes. Nearly no one does now; so few children are carried to term and born whole.

"'—and tired of having nothing to do: once—'

"How could she have nothing to do? Why doesn't she carry water or weed crops or hunt trunter roots or—"

"Hope, are you going to let me read this to you or not?"

"Yes, Grandma. I'm sorry."

I shouldn't be reading to her at all. Trees were cut down to make this book; my father told me so. As a young man, not long after the Crash, he himself was in service as a book sacrificer, proudly. Unlike many of his generation, my father was a moral man.

"'—or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, "And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" So she was considering—'"

We read while the sun clears the horizon, a burning merciless ball, and our sweat drips onto the gold-edged page. Then Gloria and Bill stir in the next room and Hope is on the floor in a flash, shoving the books under my sagging cot, running out the door to feed the chickens and hunt for their rare, precious eggs.

The rains are very late this year. Every day Gloria, scowling, scans the sky. Every day at sunset she and Bill drag themselves home, bone-weary and smeared with dust, after carrying water from the spring to the crops. The spring is in the dell, and water will not flow uphill. Gloria is also in service this year and must nurse one of the trees, wiping the poisonous dust from her share of the leaves, checking for dangerous insects. More work, more time. Some places on Earth, I was told once, have too much water, too many plants from the see-oh-too. I can't imagine it. Island has heard from no other place since I was a young woman and the last radio failed. Now a radio would be sin.

I sit at the loom, weaving. I'm even clumsier than usual, my fingers stiff and eyes stinging. From too much secret reading, or from a high see-oh-too day? Oh, let it be from the reading!

"Grandma," Hope says, coming in from tending the chickens. "My throat hurts." Her voice is small; she knows.

Dear God, not now, not when the rains are already so late . . .But I look out the window and yes, I can see it on the western horizon, thick and brown.

"Bring in the chickens, Hope. Quick!"

She runs back outside while I hobble to the heavy shutters and wrestle them closed. Hope brings in the first protesting chicken, dumps it in her sleeping alcove, and fastens the rope fence. She races back for the next chicken as Bill and Gloria run over the fields toward the house.

Not now, when everything is so dry . . .

They get the chickens in, the food covered, as much water inside as can be carried. At the last moment Bill swings closed the final shutter, and we're plunged into darkness and even greater heat. We huddle against the west wall. The dust storm hits.

Despite the shutters, the holy protection of wood, dust drifts through cracks, under the door, maybe even through chinks in the walls. The dust clogs our throats, noses, eyes. The wind rages: oooeeeeeeeooooeeeee. Shrinking beside me, Hope gasps, "It's trying to get in!"

Gloria snaps, "Don't talk!" and slaps Hope. Gloria is right, of course; the soot carries poisons that Island can't name and doesn't remember. Only I remember my father saying, "Methane and bio-weapons . . ."

Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that's a—

A what? What was that memory?

Then Gloria, despite her slap, begins to talk. She has no choice; it's her service year and she must pray aloud. "'Wail, oh pine tree, for the cedar has fallen, the stately trees are ruined! Wail, oaks of Bashan, the dense forest has been cut down!'"

I want Gloria to recite a different scripture. I want, God forgive me, Gloria to shut up. Her anger burns worse than the dust, worse than the heat.

"'The vine is dried up and the fig is withered; the pomegranate—'"

I stop listening.

Listen, that's a—

Hope trembles beside me, a sweaty mass of fear.

The dust storm proves mercifully brief, but the see-oh-too cloud pulled behind it lasts for days. Everyone's breathing grows harsh. Gloria and Bill, carrying water, get fierce headaches. Gloria makes Hope stay inside, telling her to sit still. I see in Gloria's eyes the concern for her only living child, a concern that Hope is too young to see. Hope sees only her mother's anger.

Left alone, Hope and I sin.

All the long day, while her parents work frantically to keep us alive, we sit by the light of a cracked shutter and follow Alice down the rabbit hole, through the pool of tears, inside the White Rabbit's house, to the Duchess's peppery kitchen. Hope stops asking questions, since I know none of the answers. What is pepper, a crocodile, a caucus race, marmalade? We just read steadily on, wishing there were more pictures, until the book is done and Alice has woken. We begin Jane Eyre: "'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day . . ..'"

Birds of India and Asia has gorgeous pictures, but the writing is so small and difficult that I can't read most of it. Nonetheless, this is the book I turn to when Hope is asleep. So many birds! And so many colors on wings and backs and breasts and rising from the tops of heads like fantastic feathered trees. I wish I knew if these birds were ever real, or if they are as imaginary as Alice, as the White Rabbit, as marmalade. I wish—

"Grandma!" Hope cries, suddenly awake. "It's raining outside!"

Joy, laughter, dancing. The whole village gathers at the altar under the trees. Bill carries me there, half running, and I smell his strong male sweat mingled with the sweet rain. Hope dances in her drenched wrap like some wild thing and chases after the other children.

Then Gloria strides into the Grove, grabs Hope, and throws her onto the altar. "You've sinned! My own daughter!"

Immediately everyone falls silent. The village, shocked, looks from Gloria to Hope, back to Gloria. Gloria's face is twisted with fury. From a fold of her wrap she pulls out Alice in Wonderland.

"This was in the chicken coop! This! A sin, trees destroyed . . .you had this in our very house!" Gloria's voice rises to a shriek.

Hope shrinks against the wide, flat stone and she puts her hands over her face. Rain streams down on her, flattening her hair against her small skull. The book in Gloria's hand sheds droplets off its skin cover. Gloria tears out pages and throws them to the ground, where they go sodden and pulpy as maggots.

"Because of you, God might not have sent any rains at all this year! We're just lucky that in His infinite mercy—you risked—you—"

Gloria drops the mutilated book, pulls back her arm, and with all her force strikes Hope on the shoulder. Hope screams and draws into a ball, covering her head and neck. Gloria lashes out again, a sickening thud of hand on tender flesh. I cry, "Stop! No, Gloria, stop—Bill—let me go!"

He doesn't. No one else moves to help Hope, either. I can feel Bill's anguish, but he chokes out, "It's right, Mama." And then, invoking the most sacred scripture of all, he whispers, "We will never forget."

I cry out again, but nothing can keep Hope from justice, not even when I scream that it is my fault, my book, my sin. They know I couldn't have found this pre-Crash sin alone. They know that, but no one except me knows when Gloria passes beyond beating Hope for justice, for Godly retribution, into beating her from Gloria's own fury, her withered fig tree, her sin. No one sees but me. And I, an old woman, can do nothing.

Hope lies on her cot, moaning. I crouch beside her in her alcove, its small window unshuttered to the rain. Bill bound her broken arm with the unfinished cloth off my loom, then went into the storm in search of his wife.

"Hope . . .dear heart . . ."

She moans again.

If I could, I would kill Gloria with my own hands.

A sudden lone crack of lightening brightens the alcove. Already the skin on Hope's wet arms and swollen face has started to darken. One eye swells.

Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that's a—

"Grandma . . ."

"Don't talk, Hope."

"Water," Hope gasps, and I hold the glass for her. Another flash of lightning and for a moment Gloria stands framed in the window. We stare at each other. With a kind of horror I feel my lips slide back, baring my teeth. Gloria sees, and cold slides down my spine.

Then the lightening is gone, and I lay my hand on Hope's battered body.

The rain lasts no more than a few hours. It's replaced by day after day of black clouds that thunder and roil but shed no water. Day after day. Gloria and Bill let half the field die in their attempt to save the other half. The rest of the village does much the same.

Hope heals quickly; the young are resilient. I sit beside her, weaving, until she can work again. Her bruises turn all the colors of the angry earth: black and dun and dead-algae green. Gloria never looks at or speaks to her daughter. My son smiles weakly at us all, and brings Hope her meal, and follows Gloria out the door to the fields.

"Grandma, we sinned."

Did we? I don't know anymore. To cut down trees in order to make a book . . .my gorge rises at just the thought. Yes, that's wrong, as wrong as anything could ever be. Trees are the life of the Earth, are God's gift to us. Even my father's generation, still so selfish and sinful, said so. Trees absorb the see-oh-too, clean the air, hold the soil, cool the world. Yes.

But, against that, the look of rapture on Hope's face as Alice chased the White Rabbit, the pictures of Birds of India and Asia, Jane Eyre battling Mrs. Reed . . . Hope and I destroyed nothing ourselves. Is it so wrong, then, to enjoy another's sin?

"We sinned," Hope repeats, mourning, and it is her tone that hardens my heart.

"No, child. We didn't."

"We didn't?" Her eyes, one still swollen, grow wide.

"We didn't make the books. They already were. We just read them. Reading isn't sinful."

"Nooooo," she says reluctantly. "Not reading the altar scriptures. But Alice is—"

Gloria enters the house. She says to me, "Services tonight."

I say, "I'm not going."

Gloria stops dead halfway to the wash bucket, her field hat suspended in her hand. For the briefest moment I see something like panic on her face, before it vanishes into her usual anger. "Not going? To services?"

"No."

Hope, frightened, looks from her mother to me. Bill comes in.

Gloria snaps, with distinct emphasis, "Your mother says she's not going to services tonight."

Bill says, "Mama?"

"No," I say, and watch his face go from puzzlement to the dread of a weak man who will do anything to avoid argument. I hobble to my alcove and close the door. Later, from my window, I watch them leave for the Grove, Hope holding her father's hand.

Gloria must have given him silent permission to do that.

My son.

Painfully I lower myself to the floor, reach under my cot, and pull out the white plastic bubble. For a while I gaze at the pictures of the gorgeous birds of India and Asia. Then I read Jane Eyre. When my family returns at dusk, I keep reading as long as the light holds, not bothering to hide any of the books, knowing that no one will come in.

One heavy afternoon, when the clouds steadily darken and I can no longer see enough to make out words, a huge bolt of lightening shrieks through the sky—crack! For a long moment my head vibrates. Then silence, followed by a shout: "Fire!"

I haul myself to my knees and grasp the bottom of the window. The lightening hit one of the trees in the Grove. As I watch, numb, the fire leaps on the ceaseless wind to a second tree.

People scream and run, throwing buckets of muddy water from the spring. I can see that it will do no good—too much dry timber, too much wind. A third tree catches, a fourth, and then the grass too is on fire. Smoke and ash rise into the sky.

I sink back onto my cot. I planted one of those trees, nursed it as I'd once nursed Bill. But there is nothing I can do. Nothing.

By the light of the terrible flames I pick up Jane Eyre and, desperately, I read.

And then Hope bursts in, smeared with ash, sweat and tears on her face.

"Hope—no! Don't!"

"Give it to me!"

"No!"

We struggle, but she is stronger. Hope yanks Jane Eyre out of my hands and hurls it to the floor. She drops on top of it and crawls under my cot. Frantically I try to press down the sagging ropes so that she can't get past them, but I don't weigh enough. Hope backs out with the other books in their plastic bubble. She scrambles to her feet.

"We did this! You and me! Our sin made God burn the trees!"

"No! Hope –"

"Yes! We did this, just like the people before the Crash!"

We will never forget.

I reach for her, for the books, for everything I've lost or am about to lose. But Hope is already gone. From my window I see her silhouetted against the flames, running toward the grass. The village beats the grass with water-soaked cloths. I let go of the sill and fall back onto the cot before I can see Hope throw the books onto the fire.

Gloria beats Hope again, harder and longer this time. She and Bill might have put me out of the house, except that I have no place to go. So they settle for keeping me away from Hope, so that I cannot lead her further into sin.

Bill speaks to me only once about what happened. Bringing me my meal—meager, so meager—he averts his eyes from my face and says haltingly, "Mama . . .I . . ."

"Don't," I say.

"I have to . . .you . . .Gloria . . ." All at once he finds words. "A little bit of sin is just as bad as a big sin. That's what you taught me. What all those people thought before the Crash—that their cars and machines and books each only destroyed a little air so it didn't matter. And look what happened! The Crash was—"

"Do you really think you're telling me something I don't know? Telling me?"

Bill turns away. But as he closes the door behind him, he mumbles over his shoulder, "A little bit of sin is as bad as a big sin."

I sit in my room, alone.

Bill is not right. Nor is Gloria, who told him what to say. Nor is Hope, who is after all a child, with a child's uncompromising, black-and-white faith. They are all wrong, but I can't find the arguments to tell them so. I'm too ignorant. The arguments must exist, they must—but I can't find them. And my family wouldn't listen anyway.

Listen, Anna, that's a—

A nightingale.

The whole memory flashes like lightening in my head: my father, bending over me in a walled garden, laughing, trying to distract me from some childish fall. Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that's a nightingale! A cube of frozen water pulled with strong fingers from his amber drink. Flowers everywhere, flowers of scarcely believable colors, crimson and gold and blue and emerald. And a burst of glorious unseen music, high and sweet. A bird, maybe one from Birds of India and Asia.

But I don't know, can't remember what a nightingale looks like. And now I never will.

Kiosk

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling (blog.wired.com/sterling/) published his first novel, Involution Ocean, in 1977. The author of ten novels and four short story collections, he is still perhaps best known in science fiction as the Godfather of Cyberpunk. He edited the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades, and his early novels The Artificial Kid and Schismatrix are perhaps the closest things he wrote to cyberpunk. After closing the 'zine Cheap Truth and leaving cyberpunk to others in November 1986, he went on to write major science fiction novels like Holy Fire, Distraction, and The Zenith Angle. He is the author of a large and influential body of short fiction, much of which has been collected in Crystal Express, Globalhead, A Good Old-Fashioned Future and Visionary in Residence. His most recent book is major career retrospective, Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

Reminiscent of his "Leggy Starlitz" stories, which now look to be some of Sterling's most penetrating and perceptive works, "Kiosk" shows a near-future Eastern Europe poised on the brink of collapse.

I

The fabrikator was ugly, noisy, a fire hazard, and it smelled. Borislav got it for the kids in the neighborhood.

One snowy morning, in his work gloves, long coat, and fur hat, he loudly power-sawed through the wall of his kiosk. He duct-taped and stapled the fabrikator into place.

The neighborhood kids caught on instantly. His new venture was a big hit.

The fabrikator made little plastic toys from 3-D computer models. After a week, the fab's dirt-cheap toys literally turned into dirt. The fabbed toys just crumbled away, into a waxy, non-toxic substance that the smaller kids tended to chew.

Borislav had naturally figured that the brief lifetime of these toys might discourage the kids from buying them. This just wasn't so. This wasn't a bug: this was a feature. Every day after school, an eager gang of kids clustered around Borislav's green kiosk. They slapped down their tinny pocket change with mittened hands. Then they exulted, quarreled, and sometimes even punched each other over the shining fab-cards.

The happy kid would stick the fab-card (adorned with some glossily fraudulent pic of the toy) into the fabrikator's slot. After a hot, deeply exciting moment of hissing, spraying, and stinking, the fab would burp up a freshly minted dinosaur, baby doll, or toy fireman.

Foot traffic always brought foot traffic. The grownups slowed as they crunched the snowy street. They cast an eye at the many temptations ranked behind Borislav's windows. Then they would impulse-buy. A football scarf, maybe. A pack of tissues for a sneezy nose.

Once again he was ahead of the game: the only kiosk in town with a fabrikator.

The fabrikator spoke to him as a veteran street merchant. Yes, it definitely meant something that those rowdy kids were so eager to buy toys that fell apart and turned to dirt. Any kiosk was all about high-volume repeat business. The stick of gum. The candy bar. The cheap, last-minute bottle-of-booze. The glittery souvenir keychain that tourists would never use for any purpose whatsoever. These objects were the very stuff of a kiosk's life.

Those colored plastic cards with the 3-D models . . . The cards had potential. The older kids were already collecting the cards: not the toys that the cards made, but the cards themselves.

And now, this very day, from where he sat in his usual street-cockpit behind his walls of angled glass, Borislav had taken the next logical step. He offered the kids ultra-glossy, overpriced, collector cards that could not and would not make toys. And of course—there was definitely logic here—the kids were going nuts for that business model. He had sold a hundred of them.

Kids, by the nature of kids, weren't burdened with a lot of cash. Taking their money was not his real goal. What the kids brought to his kiosk was what kids had to give him—futurity. Their little churn of street energy—that was the symptom of something bigger, just over the horizon. He didn't have a word for that yet, but he could feel it, in the way he felt a coming thunderstorm inside his aching leg.

Futurity might bring a man money. Money never saved a man with no future.

II

Dr. Grootjans had a jaw like a horse, a round blue pillbox of a hat, and a stiff winter coat that could likely stop gunfire. She carried a big European shopping wand.

Ace was acting as her official street-guide, an unusual situation, since Ace was the local gangster. "Madame," Ace told her, "this is the finest kiosk in the city. Boots here is our philosopher of kiosks. Boots has a fabrikator! He even has a water fountain!"

Dr. Grootjans carefully photographed the water fountain's copper pipe, plastic splash basin, and disposable paper pop-out cups. "Did my guide just call you 'Boots'?" she said. "Boots as in footgear?"

"Everybody calls me that."

Dr. Grootjans patted her translation earpiece, looking pleased. "This water-fountain is the exhaust from your fuel cell."

Borislav rubbed his mustache. "When I first built my kiosk here, the people had no running water."

Dr. Grootjans waved her digital wand over his selections of panty-hose. She photographed the rusty bolts that fixed his kiosk to the broken pavement. She took particular interest in his kiosk's peaked roof. People often met their friends and lovers at Borislav's kiosk, because his towering satellite dish was so easy to spot. With its painted plywood base and showy fringes of snipped copper, the dish looked fit for a minaret.

"Please try on this pretty necklace, madame! Made by a fine artist, she lives right up the street. Very famous. Artistic. Valuable. Regional. Handmade!"

"Thank you, I will. Your shop is a fine example of the local small-to-micro regional enterprise. I must make extensive acquisitions for full study by the Parliamentary committee."

Borislav swiftly handed over a sheet of flimsy. Ace peeled off a gaping plastic bag and commenced to fill it with candy bars, placemats, hand-knitted socks, peasant dolls in vests and angular headdresses, and religious-war press-on tattoos. "He has such variety, madame! Such unusual goods!"

Borislav leaned forward through his cash window, so as to keep Dr. Grootjans engaged as Ace crammed her bags. "Madame, I don't care to boast about my modest local wares . . . Because whatever I sell is due to the people! You see, dear doctor-madame, every object desired by these colorful local people has a folk tale to tell us . . .."

Dr. Grootjan's pillbox hat rose as she lifted her brows. "A folk tale, did you say?"

"Yes, it's the people's poetry of commerce! Certain products appear . . .the products flow through my kiosk . . .I present them pleasingly, as best I can . . . Then, the people buy them, or they just don't buy!"

Dr. Grootjans expertly flapped open a third shopping bag. "An itemized catalog of all your goods would be of great interest to my study committee."

Borislav put his hat on.

Dr. Grootjans bored in. "I need the complete, digital inventory of your merchandise. The working file of the full contents of your store. Your commercial records from the past five years will be useful in spotting local consumer trends."

Borislav gazed around his thickly packed shelving. "You mean you want a list of everything I sell in here? Who would ever find the time?"

"It's simple! You must have heard of the European Unified Electronic Product Coding System." Dr. Grootjans tucked the shopping wand into her canvas purse, which bore an imperial logo of thirty-five golden stars in a widening spiral. "I have a smart-ink brochure here which displays in your local language. Yes, here it is: 'A Partial Introduction to EU-EPCS Regulatory Adoption Procedures.'"

Borislav refused her busily flashing inkware. "Oh yes, word gets around about that electric barcoding nonsense! Those fancy radio-ID stickers of yours. Yes, yes, I'm sure those things are just fine for rich foreign people with shopping-wands!"

"Sir, if you sensibly deployed this electronic tracking system, you could keep complete, real-time records of all your merchandise. Then you would know exactly what's selling, and not. You could fully optimize your product flow, reduce waste, maximize your profit, and benefit the environment through reduced consumption."

Borislav stared at her. "You've given this speech before, haven't you?"

"Of course I have! It's a critical policy issue! The modern Internet-of-Things authenticates goods, reduces spoilage, and expedites secure cross-border shipping!"

"Listen, madame doctor: your fancy bookkeeping won't help me if I don't know the soul of the people! I have a little kiosk! I never compete with those big, faceless mall stores! If you want that sort of thing, go shop in your five-star hotel!"

Dr. Grootjans lowered her sturdy purse and her sharp face softened into lines of piety. "I don't mean to violate your quaint local value system . . .. Of course we fully respect your cultural differences . . .. Although there will be many tangible benefits when your regime fully harmonizes with European procedures."

"'My regime,' is it? Ha!" Borislav thumped the hollow floor of his kiosk with his cane. "This stupid regime crashed all their government computers! Along with crashing our currency, I might add! Those crooks couldn't run that fancy system of yours in a thousand years!"

"A comprehensive debate on this issue would be fascinating!" Dr. Grootjans waited expectantly, but, to her disappointment, no such debate followed. "Time presses," she told him at last. "May I raise the subject of a complete acquisition?"

Borislav shrugged. "I never argue with a lady or a paying customer. Just tell what you want."

Dr. Grootjans sketched the air with her starry wand. "This portable shelter would fit onto an embassy truck."

"Are you telling me that you want to buy my entire kiosk?"

"I'm advancing that option now, yes."

"What a scandal! Sell you my kiosk? The people would never forgive me!"

"Kiosks are just temporary structures. I can see your business is improving. Why not open a permanent retail store? Start over in a new, more stable condition. Then you'd see how simple and easy regulatory adoption can be!"

Ace swung a heavily laden shopping bag from hand to hand. "Madame, be reasonable! This street just can't be the same without this kiosk!"

"You do have severe difficulties with inventory management. So, I will put a down-payment on the contents of your store. Then," she turned to Ace, "I will hire you as the inventory consultant. We will need every object named, priced, and cataloged. As soon as possible. Please."

Borislav lived with his mother on the ground floor of a local apartment building. This saved him trouble with his bad leg. When he limped through the door, his mother was doing her nails at the kitchen table, with her hair in curlers and her feet in a sizzling foot-bath.

Borislav sniffed at the stew, then set his cane aside and sat in a plastic chair. "Mama dear, heaven knows we've seen our share of bad times."

"You're late tonight, poor boy! What ails you?"

"Mama, I just sold my entire stock! Everything in the kiosk! All sold, at one great swoop! For hard currency, too!" Borislav reached into the pocket of his long coat. "This is the best business day I've ever had!"

"Really?"

"Yes! It's fantastic! Ace really came through for me—he brought his useful European idiot, and she bought the whole works! Look, I've saved just one special item, just for you."

She raised her glasses on a neck-chain. "Are these new fabbing cards?"

"No, Mama. These fine souvenir playing cards feature all the stars from your favorite Mexican soap operas. These are the originals, still in their wrapper! That's authentic cellophane!"

His mother blew on her wet scarlet nails, not daring to touch her prize. "Cellophane! Your father would be so proud!"

"You're going to use those cards very soon, Mama. Your Saint'sDay is coming up. We're going to have a big bridge party for all your girlfriends. The boys at the Three Cats are going to cater it! You won't have to lift one pretty finger!"

Her mascaraed eyes grew wide. "Can we afford that?"

"I've already arranged it! I talked to Mirko who runs the Three Cats, and I hired Mirko's weird gay brother-in-law to decorate that empty flat upstairs. You know—that flat nobody wants to rent, where that mob guy shot himself. When your old girls see how we've done that place up, word will get around. We'll have new tenants in no time!"

"You're really fixing the haunted flat, son?"

Borislav changed his winter boots for his woolly house slippers. "That's right, Mama. That haunted flat is gonna be a nice little earner."

"It's got a ghost in it."

"Not anymore, it doesn't. From now on, we're gonna call that place . . .what was that French word he used?—we'll call it the 'atelier'!"

"The 'atelier'! Really! My heart's all a-flutter!"

Borislav poured his mother a stiff shot of her favorite digestive.

"Mama, maybe this news seems sudden, but I've been expecting this. Business has been looking up. Real life is changing, for the real people in this world. The people like us!" Borislav poured himself a brimming cup of flavored yogurt. "Those fancy foreigners, they don't even understand what the people are doing here today!"

"I don't understand all this men's political talk."

"Well, I can see it on their faces. I know what the people want. The people . . . They want a new life."

She rose from her chair, shaking a little. "I'll heat up your stew. It's getting so late."

"Listen to me, Mama. Don't be afraid of what I say. I promise you something. You're going to die on silk sheets. That's what this means. That's what I'm telling you. There's gonna be a handsome priest at your bedside, and the oil and the holy water, just like you always wanted. A big granite headstone for you, Mama, with big golden letters."

As he ate his stew, she began to weep with joy.

After supper, Borislav ignored his mother's usual nagging about his lack of a wife. He limped down to the local sports bar for some serious drinking. Borislav didn't drink much anymore, because the kiosk scanned him whenever he sat inside it. It used a cheap superconductive loop, woven through the fiberboard walls. The loop's magnetism flowed through his body, revealing his bones and tissues on his laptop screen. Then the scanner compared the state of his body to its records of past days, and it coughed up a medical report.

This machine was a cheap, pirated copy of some hospital's fancy medical scanner. There had been some trouble in spreading that technology, but with the collapse of public health systems, people had to take some matters into their own hands. Borislav's health report was not cheery. He had plaque in major arteries. He had some seed-pearl kidney-stones. His teeth needed attention. Worst of all, his right leg had been wrecked by a land mine. The shinbone had healed with the passing years, but it had healed badly. The foot below his old wound had bad circulation.

Age was gripping his body, visible right there on the screen. Though he could witness himself growing old, there wasn't much he could do about that.

Except, that is, for his drinking. Borislav had been fueled by booze his entire adult life, but the alcohol's damage was visibly spreading through his organs. Lying to himself about that obvious fact simply made him feel like a fool. So, nowadays, he drank a liter of yogurt a day, chased with eco-correct paper cartons of multivitamin fruit juices, European-approved, licensed, and fully patented. He did that grumpily and he resented it deeply, but could see on the screen that it was improving his health.

So, no more limping, pitching and staggering, poetically numbed, down the midnight streets. Except for special occasions, that is. Occasions like this one.

Borislav had a thoughtful look around the dimly lit haunt of the old Homeland Sports Bar. So many familiar faces lurking in here—his daily customers, most of them. The men were bundled up for winter. Their faces were rugged and lined. Shaving and bathing were not big priorities for them. They were also drunk.

But the men wore new, delicately tinted glasses. They had nice haircuts. Some had capped their teeth. The people were prospering.

Ace sat at his favorite table, wearing a white cashmere scarf, a tailored jacket, and a dandified beret. Five years earlier, Ace would have had his butt royally kicked for showing up at the Homeland Sports Bar dressed like an Italian. But the times were changing at the Homeland.

Bracing himself with his cane, Borislav settled into a torn chair beneath a gaudy flat-screen display, where the Polish football team were making fools of the Dutch.

"So, Ace, you got it delivered?"

Ace nodded. "Over at the embassy, they are weighing, tagging, and analyzing every single thing you sell."

"That old broad's not as stupid as she acts, you know."

"I know that. But when she saw that cheese-grater that can chop glass. The tiling caulk that was also a dessert!" Ace half-choked on the local cognac. "And the skull adjuster! God in heaven!"

Borislav scowled. "That skull adjuster is a great product! It'll chase a hangover away—" Borislav snapped his fingers loudly "—just like that!"

The waitress hurried over. She was a foreign girl who barely spoke the language, but there were a lot of such girls in town lately. Borislav pointed at Ace's drink. "One of those, missie, and keep 'em coming."

"That skull squeezer of yours is a torture device. It's weird, it's nutty. It's not even made by human beings."

"So what? So it needs a better name and a nicer label. 'The Craniette,' some nice brand-name. Manufacture it in pink. Emboss some flowers on it."

"Women will never squeeze their skulls with that crazy thing."

"Oh yes they will. Not old women from old Europe, no. But some will. Because I've seen them do it. I sold ten of those! The people want it!"

"You're always going on about 'what the people want.'"

"Well, that's it! That's our regional competitive advantage! The people who live here, they have a very special relationship to the market economy." Borislav's drink arrived. He downed his shot.

"The people here," he said, "they're used to seeing markets wreck their lives and turn everything upside down. That's why we're finally the ones setting the hot new trends in today's world, while the Europeans are trying to catch up with us! These people here, they love the new commercial products with no human origin!"

"Dr. Grootjans stared at that thing like it had come from Mars."

"Ace, the free market always makes sense—once you get to know how it works. You must have heard of the 'invisible hand of the market.'"

Ace downed his cognac and looked skeptical.

"The invisible hand—that's what gives us products like the skull-squeezer. That's easy to understand."

"No it isn't. Why would the invisible hand squeeze people's heads?"

"Because it's a search engine! It's mining the market data for new opportunities. The bigger the market, the more it tries to break in by automatically generating new products. And that headache-pill market, that's one of the world's biggest markets!"

Ace scratched under his armpit holster. "How big is that market, the world market for headaches?"

"It's huge! Every convenience store sells painkillers. Little packets of two and three pills, with big price markups. What are those pills all about? The needs and wants of the people!"

"Miserable people?"

"Exactly! People who hate their jobs, bitter people who hate their wives and husbands. The market for misery is always huge." Borislav knocked back another drink. "I'm talking too much tonight."

"Boots, I need you to talk to me. I just made more money for less work than I have in a long time. Now I'm even on salary inside a foreign embassy. This situation's getting serious. I need to know the philosophy—how an invisible hand makes real things. I gotta figure that out before the Europeans do."

"It's a market search engine for an Internet-of-Things."

Ace lifted and splayed his fingers. "Look, tell me something I can get my hands on. You know. Something that a man can steal."

"Say you type two words at random: any two words. Type those two words into an Internet search engine. What happens?"

Ace twirled his shot glass. "Well, a search engine always hits on something, that's for sure. Something stupid, maybe, but always something."

"That's right. Now imagine you put two products into a search engine for things. So let's say it tries to sort and mix together . . .a parachute and a pair of shoes. What do you get from that kind of search?"

Ace thought it over. "I get it. You get a shoe that blows up a plane."

Borislav shook his head. "No, no. See, that is your problem right there. You're in the racket, you're a fixer. So you just don't think commercially."

"How can I outthink a machine like that?"

"You're doing it right now, Ace. Search engines have no ideas, no philosophy. They never think at all. Only people think and create ideas. Search engines are just programmed to search through what people want. Then they just mix, and match, and spit up some results. Endless results. Those results don't matter, though, unless the people want them. And here, the people want them!"

The waitress brought a bottle, peppered sauerkraut, and a leathery loaf of bread. Ace watched her hips sway as she left. "Well, as for me, I could go for some of that. Those Iraqi chicks have got it going on."

Borislav leaned on his elbows and ripped up a mouthful of bread. He poured another shot, downed it, then fell silent as the booze stole up on him in a rush. He was suddenly done with talk.

Talk wasn't life. He'd seen real life. He knew it well. He'd first seen real life as a young boy, when he saw a whole population turned inside out. Refugees, the unemployed, the dispossessed, people starting over with pencils in a tin cup, scraping a living out of suitcases. Then people moving into stalls and kiosks. "Transition," that's what they named that kind of life. As if it were all going somewhere in particular.

The world changed a lot in a Transition. Life changed. But the people never transitioned into any rich nation's notion of normal life. In the next big "transition," the twenty-first-century one, the people lost everything they had gained.

When Borislav crutched back, maimed, from the outbreak of shooting-and-looting, he threw a mat on the sidewalk. He sold people boots. The people needed his boots, even indoors, because there was no more fuel in the pipelines and the people were freezing.

Come summer, he got hold of a car. Whenever there was diesel or bio-fuel around, he sold goods straight from its trunk. He made some street connections. He got himself a booth on the sidewalk.

Even in the rich countries, the lights were out and roads were still. The sky was empty of jets. It was a hard Transition. Civilization was wounded.

Then a contagion swept the world. Economic depression was bad, but a plague was a true Horseman of the Apocalypse. Plague thundered through a city. Plague made a city a place of thawing ooze, spontaneous fires, awesome deadly silences.

Borislav moved from his booth into the freezing wreck of a warehouse, where the survivors sorted and sold the effects of the dead. Another awful winter. They burned furniture to stay warm. When they coughed, people stared in terror at their handkerchiefs. Food shortages, too, this time: the dizzy edge of famine. Crazy times.

He had nothing left of that former life but his pictures. During the mayhem, he took thousands of photographs. That was something to mark the day, to point a lens, to squeeze a button, when there was nothing else to do, except to hustle, or sit and grieve, or jump from a bridge. He still had all those pictures, every last one of them. Everyday photographs of extraordinary times. His own extraordinary self: he was young, gaunt, wounded, hungry, burning-eyed.

As long as a man could recognize his own society, then he could shape himself to fit its circumstances. He might be a decent man, dependable, a man of his word. But when the society itself was untenable, when it just could not be sustained—then "normality" cracked like a cheap plaster mask. Beneath the mask of civilization was another face: the face of a cannibal child.

Only hope mattered then: the will to carry on through another day, another night, with the living strength of one's own heartbeat, without any regard for abstract notions of success or failure. In real life, to live was the only "real."

In the absence of routine, in the vivid presence of risk and suffering, the soul grew. Objects changed their primal nature. Their value grew as keen as tears, as keen as kisses. Hot water was a miracle. Electric light meant instant celebration. A pair of boots was the simple, immediate reason that your feet had not frozen and turned black. A man who had toilet paper, insulation, candles: he was the people's hero.

When you handed a woman a tube of lipstick, her pinched and pallid face lit up all over. She could smear that scarlet on her lips, and when she walked down the darkened street it was as if she were shouting aloud, as if she were singing.

When the plague burned out—it was a flu, and it was a killer, but it was not so deadly as the numb despair it inspired—then a profiteer's fortune beckoned to those tough enough to knock heads and give orders. Borislav made no such fortune. He knew very well how such fortunes were made, but he couldn't give the orders. He had taken orders himself, once. Those were orders he should never have obeyed.

Like a stalled train, civilization slowly rattled back into motion, with its usual burden of claptrap. The life he had now, in the civilized moving train, it was a parody of that past life. That burning, immediate life. He had even been in love then.

Today, he lived inside his kiosk. It was a pretty nice kiosk, today. Only a fool could fail to make a living in good times. He took care, he improvised, so he made a profit. He was slowly buying up some flats in an old apartment building, an ugly, unloved place, but sturdy and well-located. When old age stole over him, when he was too weak to hustle in the market anymore, then he would live on the rents.

A football team scored on the big flat screen. The regulars cheered and banged their flimsy tables. Borislav raised his heavy head, and the bar's walls reeled as he came to himself. He was such a cheap drunk now; he would really have to watch that.

Morning was painful. Borislav's mother tiptoed in with muesli, yogurt, and coffee. Borislav put his bad foot into his mother's plastic footbath—that treatment often seemed to help him—and he paged through a crumbling yellow block of antique newspapers. The old arts district had always been a bookish place, and these often showed up in attics. Borislav never read the ancient "news" in the newspapers, which, during any local regime, consisted mostly of official lies. Instead, he searched for the strange things that the people had once desired.

Three huge, universal, dead phenomena haunted these flaking pages: petroleum cars, cinema, and cigarettes. The cars heavily dragged along their hundreds of objects and services: fuels, pistons, mufflers, makers of sparks. The cigarettes had garish paper packages, with lighters, humidors, and special trays just for their ashes. As for the movie stars, they were driving the cars and smoking the cigarettes.

The very oldest newspapers were downright phantasmagoric. All the newspapers, with their inky, frozen graphics, seemed to scream at him across their gulf of decades. The dead things harangued, they flattered, they shamed, they jostled each other on the paper pages. They bled margin-space, they wept ink.

These things were strange, and yet, they had been desired. At first with a sense of daring, and then with a growing boldness, Borislav chose certain dead items to be digitally copied and revived. He re-released them into the contemporary flow of goods. For instance, by changing its materials and proportions, he'd managed to transform a Soviet-era desk telephone into a lightweight plastic rain-hat. No one had ever guessed the origin of his experiments. Unlike the machine-generated new products—always slotted with such unhuman coolness into market niches—these revived goods stank of raw humanity. Raw purpose. Raw desire.

Once, there had been no Internet. And no Internet-of-Things, either, for that could only follow. There had only been the people. People wanting things, trying to make other people want their things. Capitalism, socialism, communism, those mattered little enough. Those were all period arrangements in a time that had no Internet.

The day's quiet study restored Borislav's good spirits. Next morning, his mother recommenced her laments about her lack of a daughter-in-law. Borislav left for work.

He found his kiosk pitifully stripped and empty, with a Closed sign in its damp-spotted window. A raw hole loomed in the wall where the fabrikator had been torn free. This sudden loss of all his trade-goods gave him a lofty thrill of panic.

Borislav savored that for a moment, then put the fear behind him. The neighborhood still surrounded his kiosk. The people would nourish it. He had picked an excellent location, during the darkest days. Once he'd sold them dirty bags of potatoes here, they'd clamored for wilted carrots. This life was easy now. This life was like a good joke.

He limped through the biometric door and turned on the lights.

Now, standing inside, he felt the kiosk's true nature. A kiosk was a conduit. It was a temporary stall in the endless flow of goods.

His kiosk was fiberboard and glue: recycled materials, green and modern. It had air filters, insulated windows, a rugged little fuel cell, efficient lights, a heater grill in the floor. It had password-protected intrusion alarms. It had a medical scanner in the walls. It had smart-ink wallpaper with peppy graphics.

They had taken away his custom-shaped chair, and his music player, loaded with a fantastic mashed-up mulch of the complete pop hits of the twentieth century. He would have to replace those. That wouldn't take him long.

He knelt on the bare floor, and taped a thick sheet of salvaged cardboard over the wintry hole in his wall. A loud rap came at his window. It was Fleka the Gypsy, one of his suppliers.

Borislav rose and stepped outside, reflexively locking his door, since this was Fleka. Fleka was the least dependable of his suppliers, because Fleka had no sense of time. Fleka could make, fetch, or filch most anything, but if you dared to depend on his word, Fleka would suddenly remember the wedding of some gypsy cousin, and vanish.

"I heard about your good luck, Boots," grinned Fleka. "Is the maestro in need of new stock?"

Borislav rapped the empty window with his cane. "It's as you see."

Fleka slid to the trunk of his rusty car and opened it.

"Whatever that is," said Borislav at once, "it's much too big."

"Give me one minute from your precious schedule, maestro," said Fleka. "You, my kind old friend, with your lovely kiosk so empty, I didn't bring you any goods. I brought you a factory! So improved! So new!"

"That thing's not new, whatever it is."

"See, it's a fabrikator! Just like the last fabrikator I got for you, only this one is bigger, fancy and much better! I got it from my cousin."

"I wasn't born yesterday, Fleka."

Fleka hustled under his back seat and brought out a sample. It was a rotund doll of the American actress, Marilyn Monroe. The doll was still unpainted. It was glossily black.

Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate retail movie-star, was always recognizable, due to her waved coif, her lip-mole, and her torpedo-like bust. The passage of a century had scarcely damaged her shelf-appeal. The woman had become an immortal cartoon, like Betty Boop.

Fleka popped a hidden seam under Marilyn's jutting bust. Inside the black Marilyn doll was a smaller Marilyn doll, also jet-black, but wearing less clothing. Then came a smaller, more risqué little Marilyn, and then a smaller one yet, and finally a crudely modeled little Marilyn, shiny black, nude, and the size of Borislav's thumb.

"Nice celebrity branding," Borislav admitted. "So what's this material?" It seemed to be black china.

"It's not wax, like that other fabrikator. This is carbon. Little straws of carbon. It came with the machine."

Borislav ran his thumbnail across the grain of the material. The black Marilyn doll was fabricated in ridges, like the grooves in an ancient gramophone record. Fabs were always like that: they jet-sprayed their things by piling up thin layers, they stacked them up like pancakes. "'Little straws of carbon.' I never heard of that."

"I'm telling you what my cousin told me. 'Little nano tubes, little nano carbon.' That's what he said." Fleka grabbed the round Marilyn doll like a football goalie, and raised both his hands overhead. Then, with all his wiry strength, he smacked the black doll against the rust-eaten roof of his car. Chips flew.

"You've ruined her!"

"That was my car breaking," Fleka pointed out. "I made this doll this morning, out of old plans and scans from the Net. Then I gave it to my nephew, a nice big boy. I told him to break the doll. He broke a crowbar on this doll."

Borislav took the black doll again, checked the seams and detailing, and rapped it with his cane. "You sell these dolls to anyone else, Fleka?"

"Not yet."

"I could move a few of these. How much you asking?"

Fleka spread his hands. "I can make more. But I don't know how to make the little straws of carbon. There's a tutorial inside the machine. But it's in Polish. I hate tutorials."

Borislav examined the fabrikator. The machine looked simple enough: it was a basic black shell, a big black hopper, a black rotating plate, a black spraying nozzle, and the black gearing of a 3-D axis. "Why is this thing so black?"

"It's nice and shiny, isn't it? The machine itself is made of little straws of carbon."

"Your cousin got you this thing? Where's the brand name? Where's the serial number?"

"I swear he didn't steal it! This fabrikator is a copy, see. It's a pirate copy of another fabrikator in Warsaw. But nobody knows it's a copy. Or if they do know, the cops won't be looking for any copies around this town, that's for sure."

Borislav's doubts overflowed into sarcasm. "You're saying it's a fabrikator that copies fabrikators? It's a fabbing fab fabber, that's what you're telling me, Fleka?"

A shrill wail of shock and alarm came from the front of the kiosk. Borislav hurried to see.

A teenage girl, in a cheap red coat and yellow winter boots, was sobbing into her cellphone. She was Jovanica, one of his best customers.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"Oh! It's you!" Jovanica snapped her phone shut and raised a skinny hand to her lips. "Are you still alive, Mr. Boots?"

"Why wouldn't I be alive?"

"Well, what happened to you? Who robbed your store?"

"I'm not robbed. Everything has been sold, that's all."

Jovanica's young face screwed up in doubt, rage, frustration, and grief. "Then where are my hair toys?"

"What?"

"Where are my favorite barrettes? My hair clips! My scrunchies and headbands and beautiful pins! There was a whole tree of them, right here! I picked new toys from that tree every day! I finally had it giving me just what I wanted!"

"Oh. That." Borislav had sold the whirling rack of hair toys, along with its entire freight of goods.

"Your rack sold the best hair toys in town! So super and cool! What happened to it? And what happened to your store? It's broken! There's nothing left!"

"That's true, 'Neetsa. You had a very special relationship with that interactive rack, but . . .well . . .." Borislav groped for excuses, and, with a leap of genius, he found one. "I'll tell you a secret. You're growing up now, that's what."

"I want my hair toys! Go get my rack right now!"

"Hair toys are for the nine-to-fifteen age bracket. You're growing out of that market niche. You should be thinking seriously about earrings."

Jovanica's hands flew to her earlobes. "You mean pierce my ears?"

Borislav nodded. "High time."

"Mama won't let me do that."

"I can speak to your mama. You're getting to be a big girl now. Soon you'll have to beat the boys away with a stick."

Jovanica stared at the cracks in the pavement. "No I won't."

"Yes you will," said Borislav, hefting his cane reflexively.

Fleka the Gypsy had been an interested observer. Now he spoke up. "Don't cry about your pretty things: because Boots here is the King of Kiosks. He can get you all the pretty things in the world!"

"Don't you listen to the gypsy," said Borislav. "Listen, Jovanica: your old hair-toy tree, I'm sorry, it's gone for good. You'll have to start over with a brand new one. It won't know anything about what you want."

"After all my shopping? That's terrible!"

"Never you mind. I'll make you a different deal. Since you're getting to be such a big girl, you're adding a lot of value by making so many highly informed consumer choices. So, next time, there will be a new economy for you. I'll pay you to teach that toy tree just what you want to buy."

Fleka stared at him. "What did you just say? You want to pay this kid for shopping?"

"That's right."

"She's a little kid!"

"I'm not a little kid!" Jovanica took swift offense. "You're a dirty old gypsy!"

"Jovanica is the early hair-toy adopter, Fleka. She's the market leader here. Whatever hair toys Jovanica buys, all the other girls come and buy. So, yeah. I'm gonna cut her in on that action. I should have done that long ago."

Jovanica clapped her hands. "Can I have lots of extra hair toys, instead of just stupid money?"

"Absolutely. Of course. Those loyal-customer rewards will keep you coming back here, when you ought to be doing your homework."

Fleka marveled. "It's completely gone to your head, cashing out your whole stock at once. A man of your age, too."

The arts district never lacked for busybodies. Attracted by the little drama, four of them gathered round Borislav's kiosk. When they caught him glowering at them, they all pretended to need water from his fountain. At least his fountain was still working.

"Here comes my mama," said Jovanica. Her mother, Ivana, burst headlong from the battered doors of a nearby block of flats. Ivana wore a belted house robe, a flung-on muffler, a heavy scarf, and brightly knitted woolen house slippers. She brandished a laden pillowcase.

"Thank God they haven't hurt you!" said Ivana, her breath puffing in the chilly air. She opened her pillowcase. It held a steam iron, a hair dryer, an old gilt mirror, a nickeled hip-flask, a ragged fur stole, and a lidded, copper-bottomed saucepan.

"Mr. Boots is all right, Mama," said Jovanica. "They didn't steal anything. He sold everything!"

"You sold your kiosk?" said Ivana, and the hurt and shock deepened in her eyes. "You're leaving us?"

"It was business," Borislav muttered. "Sorry for the inconvenience. It'll be a while before things settle down."

"Honestly, I don't need these things. If these things will help you in any way, you're very welcome to them."

"Mama wants you to sell these things," Jovanica offered, with a teen's oppressive helpfulness. "Then you can have the money to fix your store."

Borislav awkwardly patted the kiosk's fiberboard wall. "Ivana, this old place doesn't look like much, so empty and with this big hole . . .but, well, I had some luck."

"Ma'am, you must be cold in those house slippers," said Fleka the Gypsy. With an elegant swoop of his arm, he gestured at the gilt-and-glassed front counter of the Three Cats Café. "May I get you a hot cappuccino?"

"You're right, sir, it's cold here." Ivana tucked the neck of her pillowcase, awkwardly, over her arm. "I'm glad things worked out for you, Borislav."

"Yes, things are all right. Really."

Ivana aimed a scowl at the passersby, who watched her with a lasting interest. "We'll be going now, 'Neetsa."

"Mama, I'm not cold. The weather's clearing up!"

"We're going." They left.

Fleka picked at his discolored canine with his forefinger. "So, maestro. What just happened there?"

"She's a nice kid. She's hasty sometimes. The young are like that. That can't be helped." Borislav shrugged. "Let's talk our business inside."

He limped into his empty kiosk. Fleka wedged in behind him and managed to slam the door. Borislav could smell the man's rich, goulash-tinged breath.

"I was never inside one of these before," Fleka remarked, studying every naked seam for the possible point of a burglar's prybar. "I thought about getting a kiosk of my own, but, well, a man gets so restless."

"It's all about the product flow divided by the floor space. By that measure, a kiosk is super-efficient retailing. It's about as efficient as any sole proprietor can do. But it's a one-man enterprise. So, well, a man's just got to go it alone."

Fleka looked at him with wise, round eyes. "That girl who cried so much about her hair. That's not your girl, is she?"

"What? No."

"What happened to the father, then? The flu got him?"

"She was born long after the flu, but, yeah, you're right, her father passed away." Borislav coughed. "He was a good friend of mine. A soldier. Really good-looking guy. His kid is gorgeous."

"So you didn't do anything about that. Because you're not a soldier, and you're not rich, and you're not gorgeous."

"Do anything about what?"

"A woman like that Ivana, she isn't asking for some handsome soldier or some rich-guy boss. A woman like her, she wants maybe a pretty dress. Maybe a dab of perfume. And something in her bed that's better than a hot-water bottle."

"Well, I've got a kiosk and a broken leg."

"All us men have a broken leg. She thought you had nothing. She ran right down here, with anything she could grab for you, stuffed into her pillowcase. So you're not an ugly man. You're a stupid man." Fleka thumped his chest. "I'm the ugly man. Me. I've got three wives: the one in Bucharest, the one in Lublin, and the wife in Linz isn't even a gypsy. They're gonna bury me standing, maestro. That can't be helped, because I'm a man. But that's not what you are. You're a fool."

"Thanks for the free fortune-telling. You know all about this, do you? She and I were here during the hard times. That's what. She and I have a history."

"You're a fanatic. You're a geek. I can see through you like the windows of this kiosk. You should get a life." Fleka thumped the kiosk's wallpaper, and sighed aloud. "Look, life is sad, all right? Life is sad even when you do get a life. So. Boots. Now I'm gonna tell you about this fabrikator of mine, because you got some spare money, and you're gonna buy it from me. It's a nice machine. Very sweet. It comes from a hospital. It's supposed to make bones. So the tutorial is all about making bones, and that's bad, because nobody buys bones. If you are deaf and you want some new little black bones in your ears, that's what this machine is for. Also, these black toys I made with it, I can't paint them. The toys are much too hard, so the paint breaks right off. Whatever you make with this fabrikator, it's hard and black, and you can't paint it, and it belongs by rights inside some sick person. Also, I can't read the stupid tutorials. I hate tutorials. I hate reading."

"Does it run on standard voltage?"

"I got it running on DC off the fuel cell in my car."

"Where's the feedstock?"

"It comes in big bags. It's a powder, it's a yellow dust. The fab sticks it together somehow, with sparks or something, it turns the powder shiny black and it knits it up real fast. That part, I don't get."

"I'll be offering one price for your machine and all your feedstock."

"There's another thing. That time when I went to Vienna. I gave you my word on that deal. We shook hands on it. That deal was really important, they really needed it, they weren't kidding about it, and, well, I screwed up. Because of Vienna."

"That's right, Fleka. You screwed up bad."

"Well, that's my price. That's part of my price. I'm gonna sell you this toy-maker. We're gonna haul it right out of the car, put it in the kiosk here nice and safe. When I get the chance, I'm gonna bring your bag of coal-straw, too. But we forget about Vienna. We just forget about it."

Borislav said nothing.

"You're gonna forgive me my bad, screwed-up past. That's what I want from you."

"I'm thinking about it."

"That's part of the deal."

"We're going to forget the past, and you're going to give me the machine, the stock, and also fifty bucks."

"Okay, sold."

With the fabrikator inside his kiosk, Borislav had no room inside the kiosk for himself. He managed to transfer the tutorials out of the black, silent fab and into his laptop. The sun had come out. Though it was still damp and chilly, the boys from the Three Cats had unstacked their white café chairs. Borislav took a seat there. He ordered black coffee and began perusing awkward machine translations from the Polish manual.

Selma arrived to bother him. Selma was married to a schoolteacher, a nice guy with a steady job. Selma called herself an artist, made jewelry, and dressed like a lunatic. The schoolteacher thought the world of Selma, although she slept around on him and never cooked him a decent meal.

"Why is your kiosk so empty? What are you doing, just sitting out here?"

Borislav adjusted the angle of his screen. "I'm seizing the means of production."

"What did you do with all my bracelets and necklaces?"

"I sold them."

"All of them?"

"Every last scrap."

Selma sat down as it hit with a mallet. "Then you should buy me a glass of champagne!"

Borislav reluctantly pulled his phone and text-messaged the waiter.

It was getting blustery, but Selma preened over her glass of cheap Italian red. "Don't expect me to replace your stock soon! My artwork's in great demand."

"There's no hurry."

"I broke the luxury market, across the river at the Intercontinental! The hotel store will take all the bone-ivory chokers I can make."

"Mmm-hmm."

"Bone-ivory chokers, they're the perennial favorite of ugly, aging tourist women with wattled necks."

Borislav glanced up from his screen. "Shouldn't you be running along to your workbench?"

"Oh, sure, sure, 'give the people what they want,' that's your sick, petit-bourgeois philosophy! Those foreign tourist women in their big hotels, they want me to make legacy kitsch!"

Borislav waved one hand at the street. "Well, we do live in the old arts district."

"Listen, stupid, when this place was the young arts district, it was full of avant-gardists plotting revolution. Look at me for once. Am I from the museum?" Selma yanked her skirt to mid-thigh. "Do I wear little old peasant shoes that turn up at the toes?"

"What the hell has gotten into you? Did you sit on your tack-hammer?"

Selma narrowed her kohl-lined eyes. "What do you expect me to do, with my hands and my artisan skills, when you're making all kinds of adornments with fabrikators? I just saw that stupid thing inside your kiosk there."

Borislav sighed. "Look, I don't know. You tell me what it means, Selma."

"It means revolution. That's what. It means another revolution."

Borislav laughed at her.

Selma scowled and lifted her kid-gloved fingers. "Listen to me. Transition number one. When communism collapsed. The people took to the streets. Everything privatized. There were big market shocks."

"I remember those days. I was a kid, and you weren't even born then."

"Transition Two. When globalism collapsed. There was no oil. There was war and bankruptcy. There was sickness. That was when I was a kid."

Borislav said nothing about that. All things considered, his own first Transition had been a kinder time to grow up in.

"Then comes Transition Three." Selma drew a breath. "When this steadily increasing cybernetic intervention in manufacturing liberates a distinctly human creativity."

"Okay, what is that about?"

"I'm telling you what it's about. You're not listening. We're in the third great Transition. It's a revolution. Right now. Here. This isn't Communism, this isn't Globalism. This is the next thing after that. It's happening. No longer merely reacting to this influx of mindless goods, the modern artist uses human creative strength in the name of a revolutionary heterogeneity!"

Selma always talked pretentious, self-important drivel. Not quite like this, though. She'd found herself some new drivel.

"Where did you hear all that?"

"I heard it here in this café! You're just not listening, that's your problem. You never listen to anybody. Word gets around fast in the arts community."

"I live here too, you know. I'd listen to your nutty blither all day, if you ever meant business."

Selma emptied her wineglass. Then she reached inside her hand-loomed, artsy sweater. "If you laugh at this, I'm going to kill you."

Borislav took the necklace she offered him. "Where's this from? Who sent you this?"

"That's mine! I made it. With my hands."

Borislav tugged the tangled chain through his fingers. He was no jeweler, but knew what decent jewelry looked like. This was indecent jewelry. If the weirdest efforts of search engines looked like products from Mars, then this necklace was straight from Venus. It was slivers of potmetal, blobs of silver, and chips of topaz. It was like jewelry straight out of a nightmare.

"Selma, this isn't your customary work."

"Machines can't dream. I saw this in my dreams."

"Oh. Right, of course."

"Well, it was my nightmare, really. But I woke up! Then I created my vision! I don't have to make that cheap, conventional crap, you know! I only make cheap junk because that's all you are willing to sell!"

"Well . . .." He had never spoken with frankness to Selma before, but the glittering light in her damp eyes made yesterday's habits seem a little slow-witted. "Well, I wouldn't know what to charge for a work of art like this."

"Somebody would want this, though? Right? Wouldn't they?" She was pleading with him. "Somebody? They would buy my new necklace, right? Even though it's . . .different."

"No. This isn't the sort of jewelry that the people buy. This is the sort of jewelry that the people stare at, and probably laugh at, too. But then, there would come one special person. She would really want this necklace. She would want this more than anything. She would have to have this thing at absolutely any price."

"I could make more like that," Selma told him, and she touched her heart. "Because now I know where it comes from."

III

Borislav installed the fab inside the empty kiosk, perched on a stout wooden pedestal, where its workings could be seen by the people.

His first choices for production were, naturally, hair toys. Borislav borrowed some fancy clips from Jovanica, and copied their shapes inside his kiosk with his medical scanner.

Sure enough, the fabricator sprayed out shiny black replicas.

Jovanica amused a small crowd by jumping up and down on them. The black clips themselves were well-nigh indestructible, but their cheap metal springs soon snapped.

Whenever a toy broke, however, it was a simple matter to cast it right back into the fabrikator's hopper. The fab chewed away at the black object, with an ozone-like reek, until the fabbed object became the yellow dust again.

Straw, right into gold.

Borislav sketched out a quick business plan on the back of a Three Cats beer coaster. With hours of his labor, multiplied by price-per-gram, he soon established his point of profit. He was in a new line of work.

With the new fabrikator, he could copy the shapes of any small object he could scan. Of course, he couldn't literally "copy" everything: a puppy dog, a nice silk dress, a cold bottle of beer, those were all totally out of the question. But he could copy most anything that was made from some single, rigid material: an empty bottle, a fork, a trash can, a kitchen knife.

The kitchen knives were an immediate hit. The knives were shiny and black, very threatening and scary, and it was clear they would never need sharpening. It was also delightful to see the fabrikator mindlessly spitting up razor-sharp knives. The kids were back in force to watch the action, and this time, even the grownups gathered and chattered.

To accommodate the eager crowd of gawkers, the Three Cats boys set out their chairs and tables, and even their striped, overhead canopy, as cheery as if it were summer.

The weather favored them. An impromptu block party broke out.

Mirko from the Three Cats gave him a free meal. "I'm doing very well by this," Mirko said. "You've got yourself a nine-days' wonder here. This sure reminds me of when Transition Two was ending. Remember when those city lights came back on? Brother, those were great days."

"Nine days won't last long. I need to get back inside that kiosk, like normal again."

"It's great to see you out and about, mixing it up with us, Boots. We never talk anymore." Mirko spread his hands in apology, then scrubbed the table. "I run this place now . . .it's the pressure of business . . .that's all my fault."

Borislav accepted a payment from a kid who'd made himself a rock-solid black model dinosaur. "Mirko, do you have room for a big vending machine, here by your café? I need to get that black beast out of my kiosk. The people need their sticks of gum."

"You really want to build some vendorizing thing out here? Like a bank machine?"

"I guess I do, yeah. It pays."

"Boots, I love this crowd you're bringing me, but why don't you just put your machine wherever they put bank machines? There are hundreds of bank machines." Mirko took his empty plate. "There are millions of bank machines. Those machines took over the world."

IV

Days passed. The people wouldn't let him get back to normal. It became a public sport to see what people would bring in for the fabrikator to copy. It was common to make weird things as gag gifts: a black, rock-solid spray of roses, for instance. You could hand that black bouquet to your girlfriend for a giggle, and if she got huffy, then you could just bring it back, have it weighed, and get a return-deposit for the yellow dust.

The ongoing street drama was a tonic for the neighborhood. In no time flat, every café lounger and class-skipping college student was a self-appointed expert about fabs, fabbing, and revolutionary super-fabs that could fab their own fabbing. People brought their relatives to see. Tourists wandered in and took pictures. Naturally they all seemed to want a word with the owner and proprietor.

The people being the people, the holiday air was mixed with unease. Things took a strange turn when a young bride arrived with her wedding china. She paid to copy each piece, then loudly and publicly smashed the originals in the street. A cop showed up to dissuade her. Then the cop wanted a word, too.

Borislav was sitting with Professor Damov, an academician and pious blowhard who ran the local ethnographic museum. The professor's city-sponsored hall specialized in what Damov called "material culture," meaning dusty vitrines full of battle flags, holy medallions, distaffs, fishing nets, spinning wheels, gramophones, and such. Given these new circumstances, the professor had a lot on his mind.

"Officer," said Damov, briskly waving his wineglass, "it may well surprise you to learn this, but the word 'kiosk' is an ancient Ottoman term. In the original Ottoman kiosk, nothing was bought or sold. The kiosk was a regal gift from a prince to the people. A kiosk was a place to breathe the evening air, to meditate, to savor life and living; it was an elegant garden pergola."

"They didn't break their wedding china in the gutter, though," said the cop.

"Oh, no, on the contrary, if a bride misbehaved in those days, she'd be sewn into a leather sack and thrown into the Bosphorus!"

The cop was mollified, and he moved right along, but soon a plainclothes cop showed up and took a prominent seat inside the Three Cats Café. This changed the tone of things. The police surveillance proved that something real was happening. It was a kind of salute.

Dusk fell. A group of garage mechanics came by, still in their grimy overalls, and commenced a deadly serious professional discussion about fabbing trolley parts. A famous stage actor showed up with his entourage, to sign autographs and order drinks for all his "friends."

Some alarmingly clean-cut university students appeared. They weren't there to binge on beer. They took a table, ordered Mirko's cheapest pizza, and started talking in points-of-order.

Next day, the actor brought the whole cast of his play, and the student radicals were back in force. They took more tables, with much more pizza. Now they had a secretary, and a treasurer. Their ringleaders had shiny black political buttons on their coats.

A country bus arrived and disgorged a group of farmers. These peasants made identical copies of something they were desperate to have, yet anxious to hide from all observers.

Ace came by the bustling café. Ace was annoyed to find that he had to wait his turn for any private word with Borislav.

"Calm down, Ace. Have a slice of this pork pizza. The boss here's an old friend of mine, and he's in a generous mood."

"Well, my boss is unhappy," Ace retorted. "There's money being made here, and he wasn't told about it."

"Tell your big guy to relax. I'm not making any more money than I usually do at the kiosk. That should be obvious: consider my rate of production. That machine can only make a few copies an hour."

"Have you finally gone stupid? Look at this crowd!" Ace pulled his shades off and studied the densely clustered café. Despite the lingering chill, a gypsy band was setting up, with accordions and trombones. "Okay, this proves it: see that wiseguy sitting there with that undercover lieutenant? He's one of them!"

Borislav cast a sidelong glance at the rival gangster. The North River Boy looked basically identical to Ace: the same woolly hat, cheap black sunglasses, jacket, and bad attitude, except for his sneakers, which were red instead of blue. "The River Boys are moving in over here?"

"They always wanted this turf. This is the lively part of town."

That River Boy had some nerve. Gangsters had been shot in the Three Cats Café. And not just a few times, either. It was a major local tradition.

"I'm itching to whack that guy," Ace lied, sweating, "but, well, he's sitting over there with that cop! And a pet politician, too!"

Borislav wondered if his eyes were failing. In older days, he would never have missed those details.

There was a whole little tribe of politicians filtering into the café, and sitting near the mobster's table. The local politicians always traveled in parties. Small, fractious parties.

One of these local politicals was the arts district's own national representative. Mr. Savic was a member of the Radical Liberal Democratic Party, a splinter clique of well-meaning, overeducated cranks.

"I'm gonna tell you a good joke, Ace. 'You can get three basic qualities with any politician: Smart, Honest, and Effective. But you only get to pick two.'"

Ace blinked. He didn't get it.

Borislav levered himself from his café chair and limped over to provoke a gladhanding from Mr. Savic. The young lawyer was smart and honest, and therefore ineffective. However, Savic, being so smart, was quick to recognize political developments within his own district. He had already appropriated the shiny black button of the young student radicals.

With an ostentatious swoop of his camel's-hair coattails, Mr. Savic deigned to sit at Borislav's table. He gave Ace a chilly glare. "Is it necessary that we consort with this organized-crime figure?"

"You tried to get me fired from my job in the embassy," Ace accused him.

"Yes, I did. It's bad enough that the criminal underworld infests our ruling party. We can't have the Europeans paying you off, too."

"That's you all over, Savic: always sucking up to rich foreigners and selling out the guy on the street!"

"Don't flatter yourself, you jumped-up little crook! You're not 'the street.' The people are the street!"

"Okay, so you got the people to elect you. You took office and you got a pretty haircut. Now you're gonna wrap yourself up in our flag, too? You're gonna steal the last thing the people have left!"

Borislav cleared his throat. "I'm glad we have this chance for a frank talk here. The way I figure it, managing this fabbing business is going to take some smarts and finesse."

The two of them stared at him. "You brought us here?" Ace said. "For our 'smarts and finesse'?"

"Of course I did. You two aren't here by accident, and neither am I. If we're not pulling the strings around here, then who is?"

The politician looked at the gangster. "There's something to what he says, you know. After all, this is Transition Three."

"So," said Borislav, "knock it off with that tough talk and do some fresh thinking for once! You sound like your own grandfathers!"

Borislav had surprised himself with this outburst. Savic, to his credit, looked embarrassed, while Ace scratched uneasily under his woolly hat. "Well, listen, Boots," said Ace at last, "even if you, and me, and your posh lawyer pal have us three nice Transition beers together, that's a River Boy sitting over there. What are we supposed to do about that?"

"I am entirely aware of the criminal North River Syndicate," Mr. Savic told him airily. "My investigative committee has been analyzing their gang."

"Oh, so you're analyzing, are you? They must be scared to death."

"There are racketeering laws on the books in this country," said Savic, glowering at Ace. "When we take power and finally have our purge of the criminal elements in this society, we won't stop at arresting that one little punk in his cheap red shoes. We will liquidate his entire parasite class: I mean him, his nightclub-singer girlfriend, his father, his boss, his brothers, his cousins, his entire football club. . . . As long as there is one honest judge in this country, and there are some honest judges, there are always some. . . . We will never rest! Never!"

"I've heard about your honest judges," Ace sneered. "You can spot 'em by the smoke columns when their cars blow up."

"Ace, stop talking through your hat. Let me make it crystal clear what's at stake here." Borislav reached under the table and brought up a clear plastic shopping bag. He dropped it on the table with a thud.

Ace took immediate interest. "You output a skull?"

"Ace, this is my own skull." The kiosk scanned him every day. So Borislav had his skull on file.

Ace juggled Borislav's skull free of the clear plastic bag, then passed it right over to the politician. "That fab is just superb! Look at the crisp detailing on those sutures!"

"I concur. A remarkable technical achievement." Mr. Savic turned the skull upside down, and frowned. "What happened to your teeth?"

"Those are normal."

"You call these wisdom teeth normal?"

"Hey, let me see those," Ace pleaded. Mr. Savic rolled Borislav's jet-black skull across the tabletop. Then he cast an over-shoulder look at his fellow politicians, annoyed that they enjoyed themselves so much without him.

"Listen to me, Mr. Savic. When you campaigned, I put your poster up in my kiosk. I even voted for you, and—"

Ace glanced up from the skull's hollow eye-sockets. "You vote, Boots?"

"Yes. I'm an old guy. Us old guys vote."

Savic faked some polite attention.

"Mr. Savic, you're our political leader. You're a Radical Liberal Democrat. Well, we've got ourselves a pretty radical, liberal situation here. What are we supposed to do now?"

"It's very good that you asked me that," nodded Savic. "You must be aware that there are considerable intellectual-property difficulties with your machine."

"What are those?"

"I mean patents and copyrights. Reverse-engineering laws. Trademarks. We don't observe all of those laws in this country of ours . . .in point of fact, practically speaking, we scarcely observe any. . . . But the rest of the world fully depends on those regulatory structures. So if you go around publicly pirating wedding china—let's just say—well, the makers of wedding china will surely get wind of that someday. I'd be guessing that you will see a civil lawsuit. Cease-and-desist, all of that."

"I see."

"That's just how the world works. If you damage their income, they'll simply have to sue you. Follow the money, follow the lawsuits. A simple principle, really. Although you've got a very nice little sideshow here . . . It's really brightened up the neighborhood . . .."

Professor Damov arrived at the café. He had brought his wife, Mrs. Professor-Doctor Damov, an icy sociologist with annoying Marxist and feminist tendencies. The lady professor wore a fur coat as solid as a bank vault, and a bristling fur hat.

Damov pointed out a black plaque on Borislav's tabletop. "I'm sorry, gentleman, but this table is reserved for us."

"Oh," Borislav blurted. He hadn't noticed the fabbed reservation, since it was so black.

"We're having a little party tonight," said Damov, "it's our anniversary."

"Congratulations, sir and madame!" said Mr. Savic. "Why not sit here with us just a moment until your guests arrive?"

A bottle of Mirko's prosecco restored general good feeling. "I'm an arts-district lawyer, after all," said Savic, suavely topping up everyone's glasses. "So, Borislav, if I were you, I would call this fabrikator an arts installation!"

"Really? Why?"

"Because when those humorless foreigners with their lawsuits try to make a scandal of the arts scene, that never works!" Savic winked at the professor and his wife. "We really enjoyed it, eh? We enjoyed a good show while we had it!"

Ace whipped off his sunglasses. "It's an 'arts installation'! Wow! That is some smart lawyer thinking there!"

Borislav frowned. "Why do you say that?"

Ace leaned in to whisper behind his hand. "Well, because that's what we tell the River Boys! We tell them it's just an art show, then we shut it down. They stay in their old industrial district, and we keep our turf in the old arts district. Everything is cool!"

"That's your big solution?"

"Well, yeah," said Ace, leaning back with a grin. "Hooray for art!"

Borislav's temper rose from a deep well to burn the back of his neck. "That's it, huh? That's what you two sorry sons of bitches have to offer the people? You just want to get rid of the thing! You want to put it out, like spitting on a candle! Nothing happens with your stupid approach! You call that a Transition? Everything's just the same as it was before! Nothing changes at all!"

Damov shook his head. "History is always passing. We changed. We're all a year older."

Mrs. Damov spoke up. "I can't believe your fascist, technocratic nonsense! Do you really imagine that you will improve the lives of the people by dropping some weird machine onto their street at random? With no mature consideration of any deeper social issues? I wanted to pick up some milk tonight! Who's manning your kiosk, you goldbricker? Your store is completely empty! Are we supposed to queue?"

Mr. Savic emptied his glass. "Your fabrikator is great fun, but piracy is illegal and immoral. Fair is fair, let's face it."

"Fine," said Borislav, waving his arms, "if that's what you believe, then go tell the people. Tell the people in this café, right now, that you want to throw the future away! Go on, do it! Say you're scared of crime! Say they're not mature enough and they have to think it through. Tell the people that they have to vote for that!"

"Let's not be hasty," said Savic.

"Your sordid mechanical invention is useless without a social invention," said Mrs. Damov primly.

"My wife is exactly correct!" Damov beamed. "Because a social invention is much more than gears and circuits, it's . . .well, it's something like that kiosk. A kiosk was once a way to drink tea in a royal garden. Now it's a way to buy milk! That is social invention!" He clicked her bubbling glass with his own.

Ace mulled this over. "I never thought of it that way. Where can we steal a social invention? How do you copy one of those?"

These were exciting questions. Borislav felt a piercing ray of mental daylight. "That European woman, what's-her-face. She bought out my kiosk. Who is she? Who does she work for?"

"You mean Dr. Grootjans? She is, uh . . .she's the economic affairs liaison for a European Parliamentary investigative committee."

"Right," said Borislav at once, "that's it. Me, too! I want that. Copy me that! I'm the liaison for the investigation Parliament something stupid-or-other."

Savic laughed in delight. "This is getting good."

"You. Mr. Savic. You have a Parliament investigation committee."

"Well, yes, I certainly do."

"Then you should investigate this fabrikator. You place it under formal government investigation. You investigate it, all day and all night. Right here on the street, in public. You issue public reports. And of course you make stuff. You make all kinds of stuff. Stuff to investigate."

"Do I have your proposal clear? You are offering your fabrikator to the government?"

"Sure. Why not? That's better than losing it. I can't sell it to you. I've got no papers for it. So sure, you can look after it. That's my gift to the people."

Savic stroked his chin. "This could become quite an international issue." Suddenly, Savic had the look of a hungry man about to sit at a bonfire and cook up a whole lot of sausages.

"Man, that's even better than making it a stupid art project," Ace enthused. "A stupid government project! Hey, those last forever!"

V

Savic's new investigation committee was an immediate success. With the political judo typical of the region, the honest politician wangled a large and generous support grant from the Europeans—basically, in order to investigate himself.

The fab now reformed its efforts: from consumer knickknacks to the pressing needs of the state's public sector. Jet-black fire plugs appeared in the arts district. Jet-black hoods for the broken streetlights, and jet-black manhole covers for the streets. Governments bought in bulk, so a primary source for the yellow dust was located. The fab churned busily away right in the public square, next to a railroad tanker full of feed-stock.

Borislav returned to his kiosk. He made a play at resuming his normal business. He was frequently called to testify in front of Savic's busy committee. This resulted in Fleka the Gypsy being briefly arrested, but the man skipped bail. No one made any particular effort to find Fleka. They certainly had never made much effort before.

Investigation soon showed that the fabrikator was stolen property from a hospital in Gdansk. Europeans had long known how to make such fabrikators: fabrikators that used carbon nanotubes. They had simply refrained from doing so.

As a matter of wise precaution, the Europeans had decided not to create devices that could so radically disrupt a well-established political and economic order. The pain of such an act was certain to be great. The benefits were doubtful.

On some grand, abstract level of poetic engineering, it obviously made sense to create super-efficient, widely distributed, cottage-scale factories that could create as much as possible with as little as possible. If one were inventing industrial civilization from the ground up, then fabbing was a grand idea. But an argument of that kind made no sense to the installed base and the established interests. You couldn't argue a voter out of his job. So fabs had been subtly restricted to waxes, plastics, plaster, papier-mâché, and certain metals.

Except, that is, for fabs with medical applications. Medicine, which dealt in agonies of life and death, was never merely a marketplace. There was always somebody whose child had smashed and shattered bones. Sooner or later this violently interested party, researching a cure for his beloved, would find the logjam and scream: Won't one of you heartless, inhuman bastards think of the children?

Of course, those who had relinquished this technology had the children's best interests at heart. They wanted their children to grow up safe within stable, regulated societies. But one could never explain good things for vaporous, potential future children to someone whose heart and soul was twisted by the suffering of an actual, real-life child.

So a better and different kind of fab had come into being. It was watched over with care . . .but, as time and circumstance passed, it slipped loose.

Eager to spread the fabbing pork through his constituency, Savic commissioned renowned local artists to design a new breed of kiosk. This futuristic Transition Three ultra-kiosk would house the very fab that could make it. Working with surprising eagerness and speed (given that they were on government salary), these artisan-designers created a new, official, state-supported fabbing kiosk, an alarmingly splendid, well-nigh monumental kiosk, half Ottoman pavilion, half Stalinist gingerbread, and almost one hundred percent black carbon nanotubes, except for a few necessary steel bolts, copper wires, and brass staples.

Borislav knew better than to complain about this. He had to abandon his perfectly decent, old-fashioned, customary kiosk, which was swiftly junked and ripped into tiny recyclable shreds. Then he climbed, with pain and resignation, up the shiny black stairsteps into this eerie, oversized, grandiose rock-solid black fort, this black-paneled royal closet whose ornate, computer-calligraphic roof would make meteors bounce off it like graupel hail.

The cheap glass windows fit badly. The new black shelves confused his fingers. The slick black floor sent his chair skidding wildly. The black carbon walls would not take paint, glue, or paper. He felt like an utter fool—but this kiosk hadn't been built for his convenience. This was a kiosk for the new Transition Three generation, crazily radical, liberal guys for whom a "kiosk" was no mere humble conduit, but the fortress of a new culture war.

A kiosk like this new one could be flung from a passing jet. It could hammer the ground like a plummeting thunderbolt and bounce up completely unharmed. With its ever-brimming bags of gold dust, a cybernetic tumbling of possessions would boil right out of it: bottles bags knobs latches wheels pumps, molds for making other things, tools for making other things; saws, hammers wrenches levers, drillbits, screws, screwdrivers, awls pliers scissors punches, planes, files, rasps, jacks, carts and shears; pulleys, chains and chain hoists, trolleys, cranes, buckets, bottles, barrels . . .. All of these items sitting within their digital files as neat as chess pieces, sitting there like the very idea of chess pieces, like a mental chess set awaiting human desire to leap into being and action.

As Borislav limped, each night, from his black battleship super-kiosk back to his mother's apartment, he could see Transition Three insinuating itself into the fabric of his city.

Transition One had once a look all its own: old socialist buildings of bad brick and substandard plaster, peeling like a secret leprosy, then exploding with the plastic branding symbols of the triumphant West: candy bars, franchised fried food, provocative lingerie.

Transition Two was a tougher business: he remembered it mostly for its lacks and privations. Empty stores, empty roads, crowds of bicycles, the angry hum of newfangled fuel cells, the cheap glitter of solar roofing, insulation stuffed everywhere like the paper in a pauper's shoes. Crunchy, mulchy-looking new construction. Grass on the rooftops, grass in the trolley-ways. Networking masts and dishes. Those clean, cold, flat-panel lights.

This third Transition had its own native look, too. It was the same song and another verse. It was black. It was jet-black, smooth, anonymous, shiny, stainless, with an occasional rainbow shimmer off the layers and grooves whenever the light was just right, like the ghosts of long-vanished oil slicks.

Revolution was coming. The people wanted more of this game than the regime was allowing them to have. There were five of the fabs running in the city now. Because of growing foreign pressure against "the dangerous proliferation," the local government wouldn't make any more fabrikators. So the people were being denied the full scope of their desire to live differently. The people were already feeling different inside, so they were going to take it to the streets. The politicians were feebly trying to split differences between ways of life that just could not be split.

Did the laws of commerce exist for the people's sake? Or did the people exist as slaves of the so-called laws of commerce? That was populist demagoguery, but that kind of talk was popular for a reason.

Borislav knew that civilization existed through its laws. Humanity suffered and starved whenever outside the law. But those stark facts didn't weigh on the souls of the locals for ten seconds. The local people here were not that kind of people. They had never been that kind of people. Turmoil: that was what the people here had to offer the rest of the world.

The people had flown off the handle for far less than this; for a shot fired at some passing prince, for instance. Little street demonstrations were boiling up from left and right. Those demonstrations waxed and waned, but soon the applecart would tip hard. The people would take to the city squares, banging their jet-black kitchen pans, shaking their jet-black house keys. Borislav knew from experience that this voice from the people was a nation-shaking racket. The voice of reason from the fragile government sounded like a cartoon mouse.

Borislav looked after certain matters, for there would be no time to look after them later. He talked to a lawyer and made a new will. He made backups of his data and copies of important documents, and stashed things away in numerous caches. He hoarded canned goods, candles, medicines, tools, even boots. He kept his travel bag packed.

He bought his mother her long-promised cemetery plot. He acquired a handsome headstone for her, too. He even found silk sheets.

VI

It didn't break in the way he had expected, but then local history could be defined as events that no rational man would expect. It came as a kiosk. It was a brand new European kiosk. A civilized, ultimate, decent, well-considered, preemptive intervention kiosk. The alien pink-and-white kiosk was beautiful and perfect and clean, and there was no one remotely human inside it.

The automatic kiosk had a kind of silver claw that unerringly picked its goods from its antiseptic shelves, and delivered them to the amazed and trembling customer. These were brilliant goods, they were shiny and gorgeous and tagged with serial numbers and radio-tracking stickers. They glowed all over with reassuring legality: health regulations, total lists of contents, cross-border shipping, tax stamps, associated websites, places to register a complaint.

The superpower kiosk was a thing of interlocking directorates, of 100,000-page regulatory codes, and vast, clotted databases, a thing of true brilliance, neurosis and fine etiquette, like a glittering Hapsburg court. And it had been dropped with deliberate accuracy on his own part of Europe—that frail and volatile part—the part about to blow up.

The European kiosk was an almighty vending machine. It replaced its rapidly dwindling stocks in the Black Maria middle of the night, with unmanned cargo vehicles, flat blind anonymous cockroach-like robot things of pink plastic and pink rubber wheels, that snuffled and radared their way across the midnight city and obeyed every traffic law with a crazy punctiliousness.

There was no one to talk to inside the pink European kiosk, although, when addressed through its dozens of microphones, the kiosk could talk the local language, rather beautifully. There were no human relations to be found there. There was no such thing as society: only a crisp interaction.

Gangs of kids graffiti-tagged the pink invader right away. Someone—Ace most likely—made a serious effort to burn it down.

They found Ace dead two days later, in his fancy electric sports car, with three fabbed black bullets through him, and a fabbed black pistol abandoned on the car's hood.

VII

Ivana caught him before he could leave for the hills.

"You would go without a word, wouldn't you? Not one word to me, and again you just go!"

"It's the time to go."

"You'd take crazy students with you. You'd take football bullies. You'd take tough-guy gangsters. You'd take gypsies and crooks. You'd go there with anybody. And not take me?"

"We're not on a picnic. And you're not the kind of scum who goes to the hills when there's trouble."

"You're taking guns?"

"You women never understand! You don't take carbines with you when you've got a black factory that can make carbines!" Borislav rubbed his unshaven jaw. Ammo, yes, some ammo might well be needed. Grenades, mortar rounds. He knew all too well how much of that stuff had been buried out in the hills, since the last time. It was like hunting for truffles.

And the land mines. Those were what really terrified him, in an unappeasable fear he would take to his grave. Coming back toward the border, once, he and his fellow vigilantes, laden with their loot, marching in step in the deep snow, each man tramping in another's sunken boot-prints . . .. Then a flat, lethal thing, with a chip, a wad of explosive and a bellyful of steel bolts, counted their passing footsteps. The virgin snow went blood-red.

Borislav might have easily built such a thing himself. The shade-tree plans for such guerrilla devices were everywhere on the Net. He had never built such a bomb, though the prospect gnawed at him in nightmares.

Crippled for life, back then, he had raved with high fever, freezing, starving, in a hidden village in the hills. His last confidante was his nurse. Not a wife, not a lover, not anyone from any army, or any gang, or any government. His mother. His mother had the only tie to him so profound that she would leave her city, leave everything, and risk starvation to look after a wounded guerrilla. She brought him soup. He watched her cheeks sink in day by day as she starved herself to feed him.

"You don't have anyone to cook for you out there," Ivana begged.

"You'd be leaving your daughter."

"You're leaving your mother."

She had always been able to sting him that way. Once again, despite everything he knew, he surrendered. "All right, then," he told her. "Fine. Be that way, since you want it so much. If you want to risk everything, then you can be our courier. You go to the camp, and you go to the city. You carry some things for us. You never ask any questions about the things."

"I never ask questions," she lied. They went to the camp and she just stayed with him. She never left his side, not for a day or a night. Real life started all over for them, once again. Real life was a terrible business.

VIII

It no longer snowed much in the old ski villages; the weather was a real mess nowadays, and it was the summers you had to look out for. They set up their outlaw fab plant inside an abandoned set of horse stables.

The zealots talked wildly about copying an "infinite number of fabs," but that was all talk. That wasn't needed. It was only necessary to make and distribute enough fabs to shatter the nerves of the authorities. That was propaganda of the deed.

Certain members of the government were already nodding and winking at their efforts. That was the only reason that they might win. Those hustlers knew that if the weathervanes spun fast enough, the Byzantine cliques that ruled the statehouse would have to break up. There would be chaos. Serious chaos. But then, after some interval, the dust would have to settle on a new arrangement of power-players. Yesterday's staunch conservative, if he survived, would become the solid backer of the new regime. That was how it worked in these parts.

In the meantime, however, some dedicated group of damned fools would have to actually carry out the campaign on the ground. Out of any ten people willing to do this, seven were idiots. These seven were dreamers, rebels by nature, unfit to run so much as a lemonade stand.

One out of the ten would be capable and serious. Another would be genuinely dangerous: a true, amoral fanatic. The last would be the traitor to the group: the police agent, the coward, the informant.

There were thirty people actively involved in the conspiracy, which naturally meant twenty-one idiots. Knowing what he did, Borislav had gone there to prevent the idiots from quarreling over nothing and blowing the effort apart before it could even start. The three capable men had to be kept focussed on building the fabs. The fanatics were best used to sway and intimidate the potential informants.

If they held the rebellion together long enough, they would wear down all the sane people. That was the victory.

The rest was all details, where the devil lived. The idea of self-copying fabs looked great on a sheet of graph paper, but it made little practical sense to make fabs entirely with fabs. Worse yet, there were two vital parts of the fab that simply couldn't be fabbed at all. One was the nozzle that integrated the yellow dust into the black stuff. The other was the big recycler comb that chewed up the black stuff back into the yellow dust. These two crucial components obviously couldn't be made of the yellow dust or the black stuff.

Instead, they were made of precisely machined high-voltage European metals that were now being guarded like jewels. These components were way beyond the conspiracy's ability to create.

Two dozen of the fabbing nozzles showed up anyway. They came through the courtesy of some foreign intelligence service. Rumor said the Japanese, for whatever inscrutable reason.

They still had no recycling combs. That was bad. It confounded and betrayed the whole dream of fabs to make them with the nozzles but not the recycling combs. This meant that their outlaw fabs could make things, but never recycle them. A world with fabs like that would be a nightmare: it would slowly but surely fill up with horrible, polluting fabjunk: unusable, indestructible, rock-solid lumps of black slag. Clearly this dark prospect had much affected the counsels of the original inventors.

There were also many dark claims that carbon nanotubes had dire health effects: because they were indestructible fibers, something like asbestos. And that was true: carbon nanotubes did cause cancer. However, they caused rather less cancer than several thousand other substances already in daily use.

It took all summer for the competent men to bang together the first outlaw fabs. Then it became necessary to sacrifice the idiots, in order to distribute the hardware. The idiots, shrill and eager as ever, were told to drive the fabs as far as possible from the original factory, then hand them over to sympathizers and scram.

Four of the five idiots were arrested almost at once. Then the camp was raided by helicopters.

However, Borislav had fully expected this response. He had moved the camp. In the city, riots were under way. It didn't matter who "won" these riots, because rioting melted the status quo. The police were hitting the students with indestructible black batons. The kids were slashing their paddywagon tires with indestructible black kitchen knives.

At this point, one of the fanatics had a major brainwave. He demanded that they send out dozens of fake black boxes that merely looked like fabs. There was no political need for their futuristic promises of plenty to actually work.

This cynical scheme was much less work than creating real fabs, so it was swiftly adopted. More than that: it was picked up, everywhere, by copycats. People were watching the struggle: in Bucharest, Lublin, Tbilisi; in Bratislava, Warsaw, and Prague. People were dipping ordinary objects in black lacquer to make them look fabbed. People were distributing handbooks for fabs, and files for making fabs. For every active crank who really wanted to make a fab, there were a hundred people who wanted to know how to do it. Just in case.

Some active cranks were succeeding. Those who failed became martyrs. As resistance spread like spilled ink, there were simply too many people implicated to classify it as criminal activity.

Once the military contractors realized there were very good reasons to make giant fabs the size of shipyards, the game was basically over. Transition Three was the new realpolitik. The new economy was the stuff of the everyday. The older order was over. It was something no one managed to remember, or even wanted to manage to remember.

The rest of it was quiet moves toward checkmate. And then the game just stopped. Someone tipped over the White King, in such a sweet, subtle, velvety way that one would have scarcely guessed that there had ever been a White King to fight against at all.

IX

Borislav went to prison. It was necessary that somebody should go. The idiots were only the idiots. The competent guys had quickly found good positions in the new regime. The fanatics had despaired of the new dispensation, and run off to nurse their bitter disillusionment.

As a working rebel whose primary job had been public figurehead, Borislav was the reasonable party for public punishment.

Borislav turned himself in to a sympathetic set of cops who would look much better for catching him. They arrested him in a blaze of publicity. He was charged with "conspiracy": a rather merciful charge, given the host of genuine crimes committed by his group. Those were the necessary, everyday crimes of any revolution movement, crimes such as racketeering, theft of services, cross-border smuggling, subversion and sedition, product piracy, copyright infringement, money laundering, fake identities, squatting inside stolen property, illegal possession of firearms, and so forth.

Borislav and his various allies weren't charged with those many crimes. On the contrary; since he himself had been so loudly and publicly apprehended, those crimes of the others were quietly overlooked.

While sitting inside his prison cell, which was not entirely unlike a kiosk, Borislav discovered the true meaning of the old term "penitentiary." The original intention of prisons was that people inside them should be penitent people. Penitent people were supposed to meditate and contemplate their way out of their own moral failings. That was the original idea.

Of course, any real, modern "penitentiary" consisted mostly of frantic business dealings. Nobody "owned" much of anything inside the prison, other than a steel bunk and a chance at a shower, so simple goods such as talcum powder loomed very large in the local imagination. Borislav, who fully understood street-trading, naturally did very well at this. At least, he did much better than the vengeful, mentally limited people who were doomed to inhabit most jails.

Borislav thought a lot about the people in the jails. They, too, were the people, and many of those people were getting into jail because of him. In any Transition, people lost their jobs. They were broke, they lacked prospects. So they did something desperate.

Borislav did not much regret the turmoil he had caused the world, but he often thought about what it meant and how it must feel. Somewhere, inside some prison, was some rather nice young guy, with a wife and kids, whose job was gone because the fabs took it away. This guy had a shaven head, an ugly orange jumpsuit, and appalling food, just like Borislav himself. But that young guy was in the jail with less good reason. And with much less hope. And with much more regret.

That guy was suffering. Nobody gave a damn about him. If there was any justice, someone should mindfully suffer, and be penitent, because of the harsh wrong done that guy.

Borislav's mother came to visit him in the jail. She brought printouts from many self-appointed sympathizers. The world seemed to be full of strange foreign people who had nothing better to do with their time than to e-mail tender, supportive screeds to political prisoners. Ivana, something of a mixed comfort to him in their days of real life, did not visit the jail or see him. Ivana knew how to cut her losses when her men deliberately left her to do something stupid, such as volunteering for a prison.

These strangers and foreigners expressed odd, truncated, malformed ideas of what he had been doing. Because they were the Voice of History.

He himself had no such voice to give to history. He came from a small place under unique circumstances. People who hadn't lived there would never understand it. Those who had lived there were too close to understand it. There was just no understanding for it. There were just . . .the events. Events, transitions, new things. Things like the black kiosks.

These new kiosks. . . . No matter where they were scattered in the world, they all had the sinister, strange, overly dignified look of his own original black kiosk. Because the people had seen those kiosks. The people knew well what a black fabbing kiosk was supposed to look like. Those frills, those fringes, that peak on top, that was just how you knew one. That was their proper look. You went there to make your kid's baby shoes indestructible. The kiosks did what they did, and they were what they were. They were everywhere, and that was that.

After twenty-two months, a decent interval, the new regime pardoned him as part of a general amnesty. He was told to keep his nose clean and his mouth shut. Borislav did this. He didn't have much to say, anyway.

X

Time passed. Borislav went back to the older kind of kiosk. Unlike the fancy new black fabbing kiosk, these older ones sold things that couldn't be fabbed: foodstuffs, mostly.

Now that fabs were everywhere and in public, fabbing technology was advancing by leaps and bounds. Surfaces were roughened so they shone with pastel colors. Technicians learned how to make the fibers fluffier, for bendable, flexible parts. The world was in a Transition, but no transition ended the world. A revolution just turned a layer in the compost heap of history, compressing that which now lay buried, bringing air and light to something hidden.

On a whim, Borislav went into surgery and had his shinbone fabbed. His new right shinbone was the identical, mirror-reversed copy of his left shinbone. After a boring recuperation, for he was an older man now and the flesh didn't heal as it once had, he found himself able to walk on an even keel for the first time in twenty-five years.

Now he could walk. So he walked a great deal. He didn't skip and jump for joy, but he rather enjoyed walking properly. He strolled the boulevards, he saw some sights, he wore much nicer shoes.

Then his right knee gave out, mostly from all that walking on an indestructible artificial bone. So he had to go back to the cane once again. No cure was a miracle panacea: but thanks to technology, the trouble had crept closer to his heart.

That made a difference. The shattered leg had oppressed him during most of his lifetime. That wound had squeezed his soul into its own shape. The bad knee would never have a chance to do that, because he simply wouldn't live that long. So the leg was a tragedy. The knee was an episode.

It was no great effort to walk the modest distance from his apartment block to his mother's grave. The city kept threatening to demolish his old apartments. They were ugly and increasingly old-fashioned, and they frankly needed to go. But the government's threats of improvement were generally empty, and the rents would see him through. He was a landlord. That was never a popular job, but someone was always going to take it. It might as well be someone who understood the plumbing.

It gave him great satisfaction that his mother had the last true granite headstone in the local graveyard. All the rest of them were fabbed.

Dr. Grootjans was no longer working in a government. Dr. Grootjans was remarkably well-preserved. If anything, this female functionary from an alien system looked younger than she had looked, years before. She had two prim Nordic braids. She wore a dainty little off-pink sweater. She had high heels.

Dr. Grootjans was writing about her experiences in the transition. This was her personal, confessional text, on the Net of course, accompanied by photographs, sound recordings, links to other sites, and much supportive reader commentary.

"Her gravestone has a handsome Cyrillic font," said Dr. Grootjans.

Borislav touched a handkerchief to his lips. "Tradition does not mean that the living are dead. Tradition means that the dead are living."

Dr. Grootjans happily wrote this down. This customary action of hers had irritated him at first. However, her strange habits were growing on him. Would it kill him that this overeducated foreign woman subjected him to her academic study? Nobody else was bothering. To the neighborhood, to the people, he was a crippled, short-tempered old landlord. To her, the scholar-bureaucrat, he was a mysterious figure of international significance. Her version of events was hopelessly distorted and self-serving. But it was a version of events.

"Tell me about this grave," she said. "What are we doing here?"

"You wanted to see what I do these days. Well, this is what I do." Borislav set a pretty funeral bouquet against the headstone. Then he lit candles.

"Why do you do this?"

"Why do you ask?"

"You're a rational man. You can't believe in religious rituals."

"No," he told her, "I don't believe. I know they are just rituals."

"Why do it, then?"

He knew why, but he did not know how to give her that sermon. He did it because it was a gift. It was a liberating gift for him, because it was given with no thought of any profit or return. A deliberate gift with no possibility of return.

Those gifts were the stuff of history and futurity. Because gifts of that kind were also the gifts that the living received from the dead.

The gifts we received from the dead: those were the world's only genuine gifts. All the other things in the world were commodities. The dead were, by definition, those who gave to us without reward. And, especially: our dead gave to us, the living, within a dead context. Their gifts to us were not just abjectly generous, but archaic and profoundly confusing.

Whenever we disciplined ourselves, and sacrificed ourselves, in some vague hope of benefiting posterity, in some ambition to create a better future beyond our own moment in time, then we were doing something beyond a rational analysis. Those in that future could never see us with our own eyes: they would only see us with the eyes that we ourselves gave to them. Never with our own eyes: always with their own. And the future's eyes always saw the truths of the past as blinkered, backward, halting. Superstition.

"Why?" she said.

Borislav knocked the snow from his elegant shoes. "I have a big heart."

Singing of Mount Abora

Theodora Goss

Theodora Goss (www.theodoragoss.com) was born in Hungary and now lives in Boston with her husband, daughter, and three cats in an apartment that contains the history of English literature, from Beowulf to Octavia Butler. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in English literature, learning Hungarian, and looking for dragons. Her fiction, which has been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, has been collected in In the Forest of Forgetting. Her most recent book is Interfictions, an anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman.

The charming fantasy that follows takes a classic fairy tale trope, the hero faced with impossible tasks, and combines it with Coleridge's poem "Kublai Khan," which spoke of a damsel with a dulcimer, an Abyssinian maid who sang of Mount Abora with wonderful results.

A hundred years ago, the blind instrument-maker known as Alem Das, or Alem the Master, made a dulcimer whose sound was sweeter, more passionate, and more filled with longing than any instrument that had ever been made. It was carved entirely from the wood of an almond tree that had grown in the garden of Al Meseret, that palace with a thousand rooms where the Empress Nasren had chosen to spend her widowhood. The doors of the palace were shaped like moons, its windows like stars. It was a palace of night, and every night the Empress walked through its thousand rooms, wearing the veil she had worn for her wedding to the Great Khan. If the cooks, who sometimes saw her wandering through the kitchen, had not known who she was, they would have mistaken her for a ghost. The dulcimer was strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon, who wreaths his body around the slopes of Mount Abora. He can always be found there in the early morning, and that is when Alem Das approached him, walking up the path on the arm of his niece Kamora.

"What do you want?" asked the dragon.

"Your whiskers, luminous one," said Alem Das.

"My whiskers! You must be that instrument maker. I've heard of you. You're the reason my cousin, the River Dragon, no longer has spines along his back, and why my other cousin, the Phoenix, no longer has tail-feathers. Why should I give you my whiskers?"

"Because when I have made my dulcimer, my niece Kamora will come and play for you, and sing to you the secrets of your soul," said Alem Das.

"We dragons have no souls," said the Cloud Dragon, wreathing himself around and around, like a cat.

"You dragons are souls," said Alem Das, and he asked his niece to sing one of the songs that she sang at night, to sooth the Empress Nasren. Kamora sang, and the Cloud Dragon stopped wreathing himself around and around. Instead, he lay at her feet, which disappeared into mist. When she was done, he said, "All right, instrument maker. You may have my whiskers, but on one condition. First, your niece Kamora must marry me. And when you have made your dulcimer, she must sing to me every night the secrets of my soul."

Kamora knew how the Cloud Dragon looked at night, when he took the form of a man, so she said, "I will marry you, if my Empress allows it." And that is my first song.

You can't imagine how cold Boston is in winter, not for someone from a considerably warmer climate. In my apartment, I sat as close as I could to the radiator, sometimes with my back against it. The library at the university was warmer, but the chairs were wooden and hard, so it was a compromise: the comforts of my apartment, where I had to wrap my fingers around incessant cups of chamomile tea to warm them, or the warmth and discomfort of the library. I had been born in Abyssinia, which is now Ethiopia, and had been brought up in so many places that they seemed no place at all, Italy and France and Spain. Finally, I had come to cold, shining North America, where the universities, I told my mother, were the best in the world. And the best of the best universities were in Boston.

My mother was beautiful. I should say rather that she was a beauty, for to her, beauty was not a quality but a state of being. Beauty was her art, her profession. I don't mean that she was anything as vulgar as a model, or even an actress. No, she was simply beautiful, and so life gave her what it gives the beautiful: apartments in Italy, France, and Spain, and an airplane to travel between them, and a diamond called the Robin's Egg, because it was as big as a robin's egg, and as blue.

"Oh, Sabra," she would say to me, "what will we do about you? You look exactly like your father." And it was true. In old photographs, I saw my nose, the bones of my cheeks and jaws on a man who had not needed to be handsome, because he was rich. But his riches had not saved his life. Although he could have bought his way out of the revolution, he had remained loyal to the Emperor. He had died when his airplane was shot down, with the Emperor in it, just before crossing the border. This was after the Generals had taken power and the border had been closed. My mother and I were already on our way to Italy, with the Robin's Egg in her brassier. "Loyalty is nothing," my mother would say. "If your father had been more sensible, he would still be with us. Loyalty is a breath. It is not worth the ring on my finger."

"But he had courage," I said. "Did he not have courage?"

"Courage, of course. He was, after all, my husband. But it is better to have diamonds."

Her beauty gave her ruthless practicality an indescribable charm.

"You are like him, Sabra. Always with your head in the clouds. When are you going to get married? When are you going to live properly?" She thought it was foolish that I insisted on living on my stipend, but she approved of my studying literature, which was a decorative discipline. "That Samuel Coleridge whose poem you to read me," she would say, "I am convinced he must have been a handsome man."

I insisted on providing for myself, and living in a city that was too cold for her, because it kept me from feeling the enchantment that she threw over everything around her. She was an enchantress without intention, as a spider gathers flies by instinct. One longed to be in her web. In her presence, one could not help loving her, without judgment. And I was proud of my independence, if of nothing else.

Let me sing about the marriage of Kamora and the Cloud Dragon. Among all the maidens of the Empress Nasren, there was none so clever as Kamora. She knew every song that had ever been sung, since the world was made. When she sang, she could draw the nightingales into the Empress' garden, where they would sit on the branches of the almond trees and sing accompaniment. Each night she followed the Empress through the thousand rooms of the palace, singing her songs. Only Kamora could soothe the Empress when Nasren sank down on the courtyard stones and wept into her hands with the wild abandon of a storm.

On the night after Alem Das had visited the Cloud Dragon, Kamora said to the Empress, "Lady, whose face is as bright as the moon, there is nothing more wonderful in the world than serving you, except for marrying the one I love. And you know this is true, because you have known the delights of such a marriage."

The Empress, who sat in a chair that Alem Das had carved for her from the horns of Leviathan, stood suddenly, so that the chair fell back, and a figure of Noah broke off from one corner. "Kamora, would you too leave me, as the Great Khan left me to wander among the stars? Some night, it may be this night, he will come back to me. But until that night, you must not leave me!" And she stared at Kamora with eyes that were apprehensive, and a little mad.

"Lady, whose eyes are as dark as the night," said Kamora, in her most soothing voice, "you know that the Great Khan lies in his tomb on Mount Abora. You built it yourself of white marble, stone on stone, and before you placed the last stone, you kissed his lips. Do you think that your husband would leave the bed you made for him? You would not keep me from marrying the one I love."

The Empress turned and walked, out of that room and into another, and another, and through all the thousand rooms of the palace. Kamora followed her, not singing tonight, but silent. When the Empress had reached the last room of the palace, a pantry in which the head cook kept her rose-petal jam, she said, "Very well. You may marry your Cloud Dragon. Do not look surprised that I know whom you love. I am not so insensible as all that. But first, you must complete one task for me. When you have completed it, then you may marry whom you please."

"What is that task?" asked Kamora.

"You must find me someone who amuses me more than you do."

It was Michael who introduced me to Coleridge. "Listen to this," he said.

"'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.'

"I can't believe you've never read it before. I mean, I learned that in high school."

"Who is this Michael Cavuto you keep talking about?" asked my mother over the telephone. "Where does he come from?"

"Ohio," I said.

She was as silent as though I had said, "The surface of the moon."

We were teaching assistants together, for a class on the Romantics. We read sentences to each other from our students' papers. "A nightingale is a bird that comes out at night to which Keats has written an ode." "William and his wife Dorothy lived together for many years until she died and left him lamenting." "Coleridge smoked a lot of opium, which explains a lot." We laughed, and marked our papers together, and one day, when we were both sitting in the library, making up essay questions for the final exam, we started talking about our families.

"Yours is much more interesting than mine," he told me. "I'd like to meet your mother."

You never will, I told myself. I liked him, with his spiky hair that stood up although he was always trying to gel it down, the angular bones that made him look graceless, as though his joints were not quite knit together, and his humor. I did not want him, too, to fall hopelessly in love. For goodness' sake, the woman was fifty-four. She was in Italy again, with a British rock star. He was twenty-seven. They had been together for two years. I could tell that she was already beginning to get bored.

"There's no one like Coleridge," Michael had said. "You'll see."

I have told you that Kamora was clever. Listen to how clever she was. She said to the Empress, "I will bring you what you ask for, but you must give me a month to find it, and a knapsack filled with bread and cheese and dried apricots, and a jar of honey."

"Very well," said the Empress. "You shall have all these things, although I will miss you, Kamora. But at the end of that month you will return to me, won't you?"

"If at the end of that month I have not found someone who amuses you more than I do, then I will return to you, and remain with you as long as you wish," said Kamora.

The Empress said, "Now I can sleep, because I know you will remain with me forever."

The next day, Kamora put her knapsack on her back. "I wish you luck, I do," said the head cook. "It can't be easy, spending every night with Her Craziness upstairs. Though why you would want to marry a dragon is beyond me."

Kamora smiled but did not answer. Then she turned and walked through the palace gates, chewing a dried apricot.

First, Kamora went to the house of her uncle Alem Das, which was built against the wall that surrounded the palace. She found him sitting on the stone floor, carving a bird for the youngest daughter of the River Dragon. When you wound it with a key, it could sing by itself. "Uncle," she said, "they call me clever, but I know that you are more clever than I am. You talked the horns off Leviathan, and once Bilkis, the sun herself, gave you three of her shining hairs. Who can amuse the Empress more than I can?"

Alem Das sat and thought. Kamora was his favorite niece, and he did not want to disappoint her. "You might bring her the Laughing Hound, who dances on his hind legs, and rides a donkey, and tells jokes all day long, or the Tree of Tales, whose leaves whisper all the secrets that men do not wish to reveal. But she would eventually tire of these. You, my dear, can sing all the songs that were ever sung. If she tires of a song, you can sing her another. If she is sad, you can comb her hair with the comb I gave you for your fourteenth birthday, and cover her with a blanket, and sit by her until she has fallen asleep. It will be difficult to find anyone as amusing as you are."

Kamora sighed. "I hoped that you could help me. Oh, uncle," and for the first time she did not sound perfectly confident, "I do love him, you know."

"I'm not clever enough to help you," said Alem Das, "but I know who is. Kamora, I will tell you a secret. If you climb to the top of Mount Abora, even higher than the Cloud Dragon, you will find the Stone Woman. She is the oldest of all things, and I think she will be able to help you. But you must tell no one where she lives, and allow no one to follow you, because she values her privacy. If it grows dark, take out the tail-feather of the Phoenix, which I gave you for your twelfth birthday. It will light your way up the mountain."

Kamora said, "But Uncle, why should the Stone Woman help me?"

"Take this drum," said Alem Das. "I made it from the skin that the Sea Serpent sheds once a year. The Stone Woman is old, and the old always like a present."

"Thank you, Uncle," said Kamora, kissing him on both cheeks. "There truly is no one in the world as clever as you."

Kamora walked through the village, chewing a dried apricot. She walked over the hills, to the foot of Mount Abora. At the foot of the mountain, where the climb begins in earnest, she picked a handful of lilies, which grow by the streams that flow down the mountain to become the Alph. She left them at the tomb of the Great Khan, who had given her sugared almonds when she was a girl. Then she began to climb the path up the mountain. Halfway up, Kamora ate her lunch, bread and cheese and dried apricots. She washed her hands in one of the streams, put her knapsack on her back, and continued to climb. Near the top, she stopped to see the Cloud Dragon and tell him the Empress' condition.

"Well, good luck to you," he said. "If you were anyone else, I would be certain that you would fail, but I've been told that you're almost as clever as your uncle."

"I will not fail," said Kamora, and she gave him a look that made him break into puffs that flew every which way over the mountain. And this is the woman I'm going to marry, he thought. What have I gotten myself into?

In his house by the palace wall, Alem Das thought about his niece and smiled. He said to himself, "Sometimes she is too clever, that girl. First she asked for one of the Phoenix's tail-feathers, then for a comb carved from the shell of the Great Turtle. And now I've given her my drum. Does she really think she's tricked me? Oh, Kamora! It's certainly time you got married."

I'm not sure when we started dating. There was a gradual progression between friend and boyfriend. We were comfortable together, we seemed to fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. But a puzzle that showed what picture? I did not know.

It was a Friday. I remember because we had just turned back a set of graded papers. I was still taking classes, and for my own class on the Romantics, taught by the same professor for whom I was TAing, I had decided to write a final paper on Coleridge. This will be easy, I thought. Michael and I have talked about him so often.

I was in my apartment. It was cold. It felt like a cave of ice.

And suddenly, I was there.

The Kubla Khan of Coleridge's poem is not the historical Kubla Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty, and Xanadu is not Shangdu. Both are dreams or hallucinations. Indeed, if we examine Coleridge's description of the palace itself, we notice that it does not make sense. Here, the river Alph, fed by the streams that flow down Mount Abora, does something strange: it disappears into a series of fissures in the ground, flowing through them until it comes to an underground lake. Coleridge's identification of this lake as a "sunless sea" or "lifeless ocean" is certainly poetic exaggeration, as my experience will show. The palace itself is situated where the river disappears, so that seen from one side, it seems to sit on the river itself. Seen from the other, it is surrounded by an extensive garden, where the Khan has collected specimens from all the fantastical countries, plants from lost Atlantis and Hyperborea and Thule. The palace is built of stone, and rises out of the stone beneath it, so that an outcropping will suddenly turn into a wall. Although Coleridge describes "caves of ice," this is again a poetic exaggeration. He means that since the palace is built of stone, even in summer the rooms are cold, so cold. I was always cold in that palace, as long as I was there.

It was empty. There were silk cushions on the floor, embroidered with dragons and orange trees, but no one to sit on them. There were tables inlaid with tulips and gazelles and chessboards, but no one to play. The curtains that hung in the doorways, filtering the sunlight, rose and fell with the breath of the river. But there was no other breath, and no noise other than a ceaseless rushing as the river swept through the caves below. As I walked, my steps sounded hollow, and I knew that the floors hung over rushing water and empty space. As an architectural feat, the Khan's palace is impossible.

There was water everywhere, in pools where ornamental fish swam, dappled white and orange and black, and basins in which the inhabitants, if there were any, would have washed their hands. The air had the clean, curiously empty smell of sunlight and water.

"I have looked. There is no one but ourselves."

He was dressed as you might expect, in breeches and a waistcoat over a linen shirt that seemed too large for him. He had thick brown hair and a thin, inquisitive face, and his hands moved nervously. The young poet, already an addict.

I was not sure how to respond. "Have you been here long?"

"Several hours, and I confess that I'm beginning to feel hungry. Surely there is a kitchen? Shall we attempt to find it?"

The kitchen was empty as well, but the pantry was full. We ate sugared almonds, and a sweet cheese studded with raisins, and dried fish that was better than it looked. We drank a wine that tasted like honey.

"Sabra is a pretty name," he said. "Mine is Samuel, not so pretty, you see, but then I'm not as pretty as you." He wiped the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. "Here we are, Samuel and Sabra, in the palace of the Khan. Where is the Khan, I wonder? Is he out hunting, or in another of his palaces? Perhaps when he returns he will execute us for being here. Have you thought of that, Sabra? We are, after all, trespassers."

"I don't know," I said. "I don't feel like a trespasser. And anyway, he isn't here now."

"That is true," he said. "Would you like the last of the almonds? I've never much cared for almonds." He leaned back against a cushion, his hair spread out over an apricot tree in bloom, with a phoenix in its boughs. "Will you sing to me, Sabra? I am tired, and I feel that I have been speaking inanities. There is an instrument, on that table. Can you play it, do you think?"

"Yes," I said, and picked up the instrument: a dulcimer. While my friends in school were at soccer practice, I was learning to play the dulcimer. It was another of my mother's charming impracticalities.

"Then sing me something, won't you, pretty Sabra? I'm so tired, and my head aches, I don't know why."

So I put away the last of the sugared almonds, picked up the dulcimer, and began to sing.

Kamora could feel blisters forming where her sandals rubbed against her feet, but she climbed steadily. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already sinking into the west, when she reached the summit. The Stone Woman was waiting for her. She was wrapped in a gray shawl and hunched over with age, so that she looked like a part of the mountain itself.

"Back again, are you? And did you ever find your own true love, the one whose face you saw in my mirror?"

"I found him, lady who is wiser than the stars," said Kamora. "But now I have to win him."

"None of your flattery for me, girl," said the Stone Woman. "I know exactly how wise I am. What are you going to give me for my help?"

Kamora took the drum out of her knapsack.

The Stone Woman looked at it appreciatively. "Ah, this is better than that other stuff you gave me. Although the tail-feather of the Phoenix, which you gave me for teaching you all the songs that have ever been sung, burns all night long, so I can weave my tapestries. And every morning I use the comb made from the shell of the Great Turtle, which you gave me for showing you the Cloud Dragon in my mirror, and my hair never tangles." She ran one hand over her braid of gray hair, which was so long that it touched the ground. "But this!" She tapped the drum once with her finger, and Kamora heard a reverberation, not only from the drum itself, but from the stones around her, the scrubby cedars, bent by the wind, and even the air. It seemed to echo over the forested slopes of the mountain, and the hills below, on which she could see the tomb of the Great Khan, as white as the rising moon, and the plains stretching away into the distance.

"What is it?" asked Kamora.

"Your uncle didn't tell you? That sound is the beat of the world, which governs everything, even the beating of your heart, and on this drum I can play it slower or faster, more sadly or more joyfully. No one can make an instrument like your uncle Alem, but I think this is his masterpiece. No wonder he wanted you to bring it to me. I'm the only one in whose hands it is perfectly safe. Think, girl, what would a man do who could alter the beat of the world? And by getting you to carry it, he saved himself a trip up the mountain! He is a clever man, your uncle. Now, it's dinnertime, and I'm hungry. Have you brought me any food?"

Kamora took out the honey, of which she knew the Stone Woman was inordinately fond.

"Good girl. Well, come inside, then, and tell me what you want this time."

The walls of the Stone Woman's cave were covered with tapestries. On one you could see the creation of the world by Lilit, and her marriage to the Sea Serpent, in which she wore a veil of stars. On another you could see the flood that resulted from their thrashing when they lay together, so that many of the first creatures she had created, the great dragons with horns like Leviathan's and eyes like rubies and emeralds, and the great turtles that carried mountains and even small lakes on their backs, were drowned. The whole history of the world was there, and on a panel that Kamora had not seen before, she saw Mount Abora, and the marriage of the Empress Nasren, the oldest daughter of the River Dragon, to the Great Khan, with the apricot trees on the mountain blooming around them.

The Stone Woman sat on a cushion and opened the honey-pot. She dipped a wooden spoon into it, tasted the honey, and licked her lips. "Very good, very good. Well, what do you want this time?"

Kamora knew that it was time to be, not clever, but direct. "The Empress, whose hands move like doves, will not let me marry until I have brought her someone who amuses her more than I do."

"So that's how it is," said the Stone Woman. "You can't marry your Cloud Dragon until she lets you, and she won't let you until she has found a substitute. You have been too clever, Kamora. When you asked me to teach you all the songs that have ever been sung, so the Empress would choose you as one of her maidens, to serve her and live in the palace, did you consider that she might want to keep you forever? Getting what you wish for isn't always a good thing, you know."

"If I had not learned all the songs that have ever been sung," said Kamora, "the Cloud Dragon would not have wanted to marry me. And I love him, I can't help loving him, since I saw how he looks at night, when he is a man. Perhaps I should not have looked in your mirror and asked to see my own true love, but when I saw how happy the Empress was with the Great Khan  . . ." A tear slid down her cheek, and she wiped it away with her hand.

"Ah, clever Kamora! So you wanted to love and be loved. You have a heart after all," said the Stone Woman. "Just remember that cleverness is not enough to keep a husband, not even the Cloud Dragon, who is less clever than you are. You must show him your heart as well. I warned him about choosing such a clever wife! But how do you expect me to help you?"

Kamora said, "I thought about that, when I walked through the thousand rooms of the palace at night with the Empress. What is more amusing than a person who knows all the songs that have ever been sung? Only a person who can create new songs. Only a poet."

"If you know the answer yourself," said the Stone Woman, "why do you need me?"

"Because I need you to make me a poet. Not one of those poets who sit in the marketplace, selling rhymes so that soldiers, and anyone with a silver coin, can sing them to the Empress' maidens—out of tune! I need a true poet, who can write what has never been sung before."

"A poet?" asked the Stone Woman. "And how to you expect me to make you a poet?"

"In the same way you made the world, Lilit."

Kamora and the Stone Woman stared at each other. Finally the Stone Woman said, "You are as clever as your uncle. How did you know who I am?"

Kamora smiled. "Who else would know all the songs that have ever been sung? Who else would keep the Mirror of Truth in a cave on Mount Abora? And when the Great Khan was laid in his tomb, the Empress put honey on his lips so you would kiss them when he entered the land of the dead. Even songs from the making of the world mention how fond you are of honey. You have created the Sea Serpent, the Lion of the Sun who carries Bilkis on his back, and whose walk across the sky warms the earth, the Silver Stag who summons men to the land of the dead  . . . Only you can make a poet."

"Very well," said the Stone Woman. "I will make you a poet, Kamora. But only because I like you. And this is my wedding gift, and the last thing I will do for you. You have had two gifts from me already, and three is enough for anyone." She stood and considered. "But I haven't made a poet for a long time. I wonder if I remember how?"

Have you seen the stone caves beneath the palace of Kubla Khan, called the Lesser Khan because for all his palaces, he could not match the conquests of his grandfather, the Great Khan? Where the stone is thin, it is translucent, so that the caves are filled with a strange, ghostly light. In the dark water, which is still and no longer rushing, since the river has mingled into the underground lake, there are luminescent fish. When they swim to the surface, they shine like moving stars.

Samuel took off his breeches and swam in the dark water, in just his shirt. I sat on the bank, striking the dulcimer, thinking of songs that he might like. He floated on his back, his hair spreading around his face like seaweed.

"There seems to be no time here," he said. "At home, I was expecting a person from Porlock. But here, I feel that no person from Porlock will ever come. Time has stopped, and nothing will ever happen. Except that you will keep singing, Sabra. You will keep singing, won't you? Sing to me about how the Stone Woman made a poet." But I did not finish my song, then.

Later, we walked in the garden that surrounded the palace.

"They go on for ten miles," I said.

"How do you know that?" he asked, but I did not answer. It was hot, even in the shade of the almond trees, and the roses, which had been transported at great expense from Nineveh, were releasing their fragrance into the evening. "I think I could stay here forever," he said. "Forget my damned debts. Forget my . . . marriage. Never write again, never write anything else. I'm no good at it anyway. I never finish anything."

"That's not what Lilit said, when she made you."

"What do you mean?"

"Lilit created the poet out of clay. Kamora watched her mold the figure, the height and shape of a man. It was late now. Outside, the moon had risen, and it shone in through the opening of the cave, its pale light meeting the light of the Phoenix's tail-feather. Kamora sat on the floor and watched, but she was so tired that her eyes kept closing, and somehow, between one blink of her eyes and another, the man was complete. He was tall, well-formed, and gray, the color of the clay at the bottom of the river Alph. His mouth was open, as though already speaking a poem.

"'Now we must awaken him,' said Lilit. 'I will walk around him three times one way, and you must walk around him three times the other. Then I will spread honey on his lips, and you must put honey into his mouth, so that his words will be both nourishing and sweet.'

"Kamora rose. She was so tired that she stumbled as she walked, but three times she stumbled around the poet, and when she had done so, she took the jar from Lilit and put honey into the poet's open mouth.

"'There,' said Lilit. 'And I really think that this time I have outdone myself. He will be the greatest poet that ever lived, and every night he will write a poem that has never been heard before for the Empress Nasren. He will be like the river Alph, endlessly replenished by the streams that flow down Mount Abora.' The poet was no longer the color of clay. Now he had brown hair hanging down to his shoulders, and his skin was as white as milk and covered, irregularly, with brown hair. Lilit took off her gray shawl and wrapped it around his hipbones. 'Speak, poet. Give us the gift of your first poem.'

"The poet turned to her and said,

'A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.'

"'That's enough for now,' said Lilit. 'You see, Kamora, your poet works. Now take him to your Empress, and marry your Cloud Dragon. But don't visit me again, because the next time you come I won't be here.'"

"And was he the greatest poet that ever lived?" asked Samuel. We were sitting on the riverbank, where the Alph begins to disappear into the fissures below, surrounded by the scent of roses. The sun was setting, and the walls of the palace had changed from white to gold, and then to indigo. I could not see his face, but his voice sounded sad.

"He was, in the palace of the Empress Nasren," I said. "He wrote a different poem for her every night, and she gathered scribes around her to make copies so they could be taken to every village. They were set to music, as poems were in those days, and sung at every village fair. And when her ambassadors traveled to other countries, they carried the volumes of his poems, fourteen of them, the number of the constellations, on the back of a white elephant, so they could be presented to foreign sultans and caliphs and tzars."

"But elsewhere, in the country of daffodils and mutton and rain? Because I think, Sabra, that you come from outside this dream, as I do."

"In that country, he was a poet who could not finish his poems, and who, for many years, did not write poems at all. How could he, when every night in the palace of the Empress, he wrote a new poem entirely for her? What was left over, after that?"

"Perhaps. Yes, perhaps that is true."

We heard it then: lightening, crashing over the palace, turning the walls again from indigo to white. Once, twice, three times.

"He has come," said Samuel. "He has come, the person from Porlock." And then suddenly, he was gone.

I was staring at my computer screen, on which I had written: "The Kubla Khan of Coleridge's poem is not the historical Kubla Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty, and Xanadu is not Shangdu."

Again, I heard three knocks on the apartment door. "Sabra, are you there? It's Michael."

I rose, and went to open the door. "You people!" I said, as Michael walked in, carrying two bags of groceries.

"What do you mean?" he asked, startled.

"You people from Porlock, always interrupting."

He kissed me and put the bags he had been carrying on the table. "I was thinking of making a curry, but—you've had better curry than I can make. Are you going to laugh at my curry?"

"I would never laugh at your curry."

He began unpacking the grocery bags. "So, what were you thinking about so hard that you didn't hear me knock?"

"Coleridge. About how he never finished anything. And about how I'm not sure I want to finish this PhD. Michael, what would you think if I became a writer?"

"Fine by me, as long as you become famous—and rich, so you can keep me in a style to which I am not accustomed."

Later, after dinner, which was not as disastrous as I had expected, I called my mother. "Nasren Makeda, please."

"Just a moment. Madame Makeda, it's your daughter."

"Sabra! How good it is to hear your voice. I'm in Vienna with Ronnie. Darling, I'm so bored. Won't you come visit your poor mother? You can't imagine these rock and roll people. They have no culture whatsoever. One can't talk to them about anything."

"Mom, I'd like you to come to Boston and meet Michael."

"The one from Ohio? Oh, Sabra. Well, I suppose we can't control whom we fall in love with. It was like that with your father. He was the only man I ever loved, and yet he was shorter than I am by three inches, and that nose—such a pity you inherited it, although you have my ears, thank goodness. But I tell you the truth, I would have married him even if he had not been rich. He was that sort of man. So, I will come and meet your Michael. I can fly over in Ronnie's plane. Is there a month when Boston is warm? I can come then."

Perhaps he would fall in love with her. But sometimes one has to take chances.

For Kamora's marriage to the Cloud Dragon, the Empress' poet Samuel wrote a new poem, one that no one had heard before. It began:

Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,

The linnet and thrush say, "I love and I love."

Alem Das himself sang it, playing a dulcimer strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon, whose sound was sweeter, more passionate, and more filled with longing than any instrument that had ever been made. When he was finished, the Empress Nasren clapped, and Kamora, in the Empress' wedding veil, turned to her husband and blushed.

Later that night, in the cave of the Cloud Dragon, he said to her, "It may be that you are too clever to be my wife."

She stroked his silver hair and looked with wonder at his pale shoulders, shy for once before his human form. "And perhaps you are too beautiful to be my husband."

"Then we are well-matched," he said, "for together there is none in the world more clever or more beautiful than we. And now, my clever wife, are you going to kiss your husband?"

That night, the top of Mount Abora was wreathed in clouds. The Empress Nasren saw it as she walked in the garden of her palace, and she told blind Alem Das, who was walking with her. "Did you know, my friend, that it would end like this?" she asked.

Alem Das laughed in the darkness. "I suspected, from the moment Kamora insisted that my dulcimer should be strung with the whiskers of the Cloud Dragon. She always was a clever girl, although not as clever, I like to think, as her uncle."

"So, your niece is happy," said the Empress. "It is good that she is happy, although we who are old, Alem, know that happiness is fleeting." And she sighed her soft, mad sigh.

"Yes, lady," said Alem Das. "But tonight your roses are blooming, and I can hear the splashing of fountains. Somewhere inside the palace, your poet is reciting to the wedding guests, who are drunk on honey wine. And we who are old can remember what it was like to be young and foolish and happy, and be content." And they walked on in the moonlight, the instrument-maker and the Empress.

The Witch's Headstone

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman (www.neilgaiman.com) is the acclaimed writer/creator of The Sandman series of graphic novels, and is the author of the novels Coraline, American Gods, and Anansi Boys. Having started his career as a journalist in the 1980s, Gaiman has garnered acclaim and wide popularity for writing everything from comics to novels to screenplays. His most recent book is collection M is for Magic. Upcoming is a new novel, The Graveyard Book.

One of Gaiman's greatest assets as a writer is his "voice." He manages to write in a welcoming, inviting manner that brings the reader quickly into the story, and makes him or her complicit in the action. In the story that follows, a charming Charles Addams-influenced tale that is also a central chapter from The Graveyard Book, Gaiman introduces us to a boy who grew up in a graveyard and the people he met there . . .

There was a witch buried at the edge of the graveyard, it was common knowledge. Bod had been told to keep away from that corner of the world by Mrs Owens as far back as he could remember.

"Why?" he asked.

"T'aint healthy for a living body," said Mrs Owens. "There's damp down that end of things. It's practically a marsh. You'll catch your death."

Mr Owens himself was more evasive and less imaginative. "It's not a good place," was all he said.

The graveyard proper ended at the edge of the hill, beneath the old apple tree, with a fence of rust-brown iron railings, each topped with a small, rusting spear-head, but there was a wasteland beyond that, a mass of nettles and weeds, of brambles and autumnal rubbish, and Bod, who was a good boy, on the whole, and obedient, did not push between the railings, but he went down there and looked through. He knew he wasn't being told the whole story, and it irritated him.

Bod went back up the hill, to the abandoned church in the middle of the graveyard, and he waited until it got dark. As twilight edged from grey to purple there was a noise in the spire, like a fluttering of heavy velvet, and Silas left his resting place in the belfry and clambered headfirst down the spire.

"What's in the far corner of the graveyard," asked Bod. "Past Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives Marion and Joan?"

"Why do you ask?" said his guardian, brushing the dust from his black suit with ivory fingers.

Bod shrugged. "Just wondered."

"It's unconsecrated ground," said Silas. "Do you know what that means?"

"Not really," said Bod.

Silas walked across the path without disturbing a fallen leaf, and sat down on the stone bench, beside Bod. "There are those," he said, in his silken voice, "who believe that all land is sacred. That it is sacred before we come to it, and sacred after. But here, in your land, they bless the churches and the ground they set aside to bury people in, to make it holy. But they leave land unconsecrated beside the sacred ground, Potter's Fields to bury the criminals and the suicides or those who were not of the faith."

"So the people buried in the ground on the other side of the fence are bad people?"

Silas raised one perfect eyebrow. "Mm? Oh, not at all. Let's see, it's been a while since I've been down that way. But I don't remember anyone particularly evil. Remember, in days gone by you could be hanged for stealing a shilling. And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence."

"They kill themselves, you mean?" said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid.

"Indeed."

"Does it work? Are they happier dead?"

Silas grinned so wide and sudden that he showed his fangs. "Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean."

"Sort of," said Bod.

Silas reached down and ruffled the boy's hair.

Bod said, "What about the witch?"

"Yes. Exactly," said Silas. "Suicides, criminals, and witches. Those who died unshriven." He stood up, a midnight shadow in the twilight. "All this talking," he said, "and I have not even had my breakfast. While you will be late for lessons." In the twilight of the graveyard there was a silent implosion, a flutter of velvet darkness, and Silas was gone.

The moon had begun to rise by the time Bod reached Mr Pennyworth's mausoleum, and Thomes Pennyworth (here he lyes in the certainty of the moft glorious refurrection) was already waiting, and was not in the best of moods.

"You are late," he said.

"Sorry, Mr Pennyworth."

Pennyworth tutted. The previous week Mr Pennyworth had been teaching Bod about Elements and Humours, and Bod had kept forgetting which was which. He was expecting a test but instead Mr Pennyworth said, "I think it is time to spend a few days on practical matters. Time is passing, after all."

"Is it?" asked Bod.

"I am afraid so, young Master Owens. Now, how is your Fading?"

Bod had hoped he would not be asked that question.

"It's all right," he said. "I mean. You know."

"No, Master Owens. I do not know. Why do you not demonstrate for me?"

Bod's heart sank. He took a deep breath, and did his best, squinching up his eyes and trying to Fade away.

Mr Pennyworth was not impressed.

"Pah. That' s not the kind of thing. Not the kind of thing at all. Slipping and fading, boy, the way of the dead. Slip through shadows. Fade from awareness. Try again."

Bod tried harder.

"You're as plain as the nose on your face," said Mr Pennyworth. "And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody."

Bod tried again. He closed his eyes and imagined himself fading into the stained stonework of the mausoleum wall, becoming a shadow on the night and nothing more. He sneezed.

"Dreadful," said Mr Pennyworth, with a sigh. "Quite dreadful. I believe I shall have a word with your guardian about this." He shook his head. "So. The humours. List them."

"Um. Sanguine. Choleric. Phlegmatic. And the other one. Um, Melancholic, I think."

And so it went, until it was time for Grammar and Composition with Miss Letitia Borrows, Spinster of this Parish (Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykewise?). Bod liked Miss Borrows, and the cosiness of her little crypt, and could all-too-easily be led off the subject.

"They say there's a witch in uncons—unconsecrated ground," he said.

"Yes, dear. But you don't want to go over there."

"Why not?"

Miss Borrows smiled the guileless smile of the dead. "They aren't our sort of people," she said.

"But it is the graveyard, isn't it? I mean, I'm allowed to go there if I want to?"

"That," said Miss Borrows, "would not be advisable."

Bod was obedient, but curious, and so, when lessons were done for the night, he walked past Harrison Westwood, Baker, and family's memorial, a broken-headed angel, but did not climb down the hill to the Potter's Field. Instead he walked up the side of the hill to where a picnic some thirty years before had left its mark in the shape of a large apple tree.

There were some lessons that Bod had mastered. He had eaten a bellyful of unripe apples, sour and white-pipped, from the tree some years before, and had regretted it for days, his guts cramping and painful while Mistress Owens lectured him on what not to eat. Now he waited until the apples were ripe before eating them, and never ate more than two or three a night. He had finished the last of the apples the week before, but he liked the apple tree as a place to think.

He edged up the trunk, to his favourite place in the crook of two branches, and looked down at the Potter's Field below him, a brambly patch of weeds and unmown grass in the moonlight. He wondered whether the witch would be old and iron-toothed and travel in a house on chicken legs, or whether she would be thin and carry a broomstick.

And then he was hungry. He wished he had not devoured all the apples on the tree. That he had left just one . . .

He glanced up, and thought he saw something. He looked once, looked twice to be certain. An apple, red and ripe

Bod prided himself on his tree-climbing skills. He swung himself up, branch by branch, and imagined he was Silas, swarming smoothly up a sheer brick wall. The apple, the red of it almost black in the moonlight, hung just out of reach. Bod moved slowly forward along the branch, until he was just below the apple. Then he stretched up, and the tips of his fingers touched the perfect apple.

He was never to taste it.

A snap, loud as a hunter's gun, as the branch gave way beneath him.

A flash of pain woke him, sharp as ice, the colour of slow thunder, down in the weeds that summer's night.

The ground beneath him seemed relatively soft, and oddly warm. He pushed a hand down and felt something like warm fur. He had landed on the grass-pile, where the graveyard's gardener threw the cuttings from the mower, and it had broken his fall. Still, there was a pain in his chest, and his leg hurt as if he had landed on it first, and twisted it.

Bod moaned.

"Hush-a-you-hush-a-boy," said a voice from behind him. "Where did you come from? Dropping like a thunderstone. What way is that to carry on?"

"I was in the apple tree," said Bod.

"Ah. Let me see your leg. Broken like the tree's limb, I'll be bound." Cool fingers prodded his left leg. "Not broken. Twisted, yes, sprained perhaps. You have the Devil's own luck, boy, falling into the compost. 'Tain't the end of the world."

"Oh, good," said Bod. "Hurts, though."

He turned his head, looked up and behind him. She was older than him, but not a grown-up, and she looked neither friendly nor unfriendly. Wary, mostly. She had a face that was intelligent and not even a little bit beautiful.

"I'm Bod," he said.

"The live boy?" she asked.

Bod nodded.

"I thought you must be," she said. "We've heard of you, even over here, in the Potter's Field. What do they call you?"

"Owens," he said. "Nobody Owens. Bod, for short."

"How-de-do, young Master Bod."

Bod looked her up and down. She wore a plain white shift. Her hair was mousy and long, and there was something of the goblin in her face—a sideways hint of a smile that seemed to linger, no matter what the rest of her face was doing.

"Were you a suicide?" he asked. "Did you steal a shilling?"

"Never stole nuffink," she said. "Not even a handkerchief. Anyway," she said, pertly, "the suicides is all over there, on the other side of that hawthorn, and the gallows-birds are in the blackberry-patch, both of them. One was a coiner, t'other a highwayman, or so he says, although if you ask me I doubt he was more than a common footpad and nightwalker."

"Ah," said Bod. Then, suspicion forming, tentatively, he said, "They say a witch is buried here."

She nodded. "Drownded and burnded and buried here without as much as a stone to mark the spot."

"You were drowned and burned?"

She settled down on the hill of grass-cuttings beside him, and held his throbbing leg with her chilly hands. "They come to my little cottage at dawn, before I'm proper awake, and drags me out onto the green. 'You're a witch!' they shouts, fat and fresh-scrubbed all pink in the morning, like so many pigwiggins fresh-scrubbed for market day. One by one they gets up beneath the sky and tells of milk gone sour and horses gone lame, and finally Mistress Jemima gets up, the fattest, pinkest, best-scrubbed of them all, and tells how as Solomon Porritt now cuts her dead and instead hangs around the washhouse like a wasp about a honeypot , and it's all my magic, says she, that made him so and the poor young man must be bespelled. So they strap me to the cucking stool and forces it under the water of the duckpond, saying if I'm a witch I'll neither drown nor care, but if I am not a witch I'll feel it. And Mistress Jemima's father gives them each a silver groat to hold the stool down under the foul green water for a long time, to see if I'd choke on it."

"And did you?"

"Oh yes. Got a lungful of water. It done for me."

"Oh," said Bod. "Then you weren't a witch after all."

The girl fixed him with her beady ghost-eyes and smiled a lopsided smile. She still looked like a goblin, but now she looked like a pretty goblin, and Bod didn't think she would have needed magic to attract Solomon Porritt, not with a smile like that. "What nonsense. Of course I was a witch. They learned that when they untied me from the cucking-stool and stretched me on the green, nine-parts dead and all covered with duckweed and stinking pond-muck. I rolled my eyes back in my head, and I cursed each and every one of them there on the village green that morning, that none of them would ever rest easily in a grave. I was surprised at how easily it came, the cursing. Like dancing it was, when your feet pick up the steps of a new measure your ears have never heard and your head don't know, and they dance it till dawn." She stood, and twirled, and kicked, and her bare feet flashed in the moonlight. "That was how I cursed them, with my last gurgling pond-watery breath. And then I expired. They burned my body on the green until I was nothing but blackened charcoal, and they popped me in a hole in the Potter's Field without so much as a headstone to mark my name," and it was only then that she paused, and seemed, for a moment, wistful.

"Are any of them buried in the graveyard, then?" asked Bod.

"Not a one," said the girl, with a twinkle. "The Saturday after they drownded and toasted me, a carpet was delivered to Master Porringer, all the way from London Town, and it was a fine carpet. But it turned out there was more in that carpet than strong wool and good weaving, for it carried the plague in its pattern, and by Monday five of them were coughing blood, and their skins were gone as black as mine when they hauled me from the fire. A week later and it had taken most of the village, and they threw the bodies all promiscuous in a plague pit they dug outside of the town, that they filled in after."

"Was everyone in the village killed?"

She shrugged. "Everyone who watched me get drownded and burned. How's your leg now?"

"Better," he said. "Thanks."

Bod stood up, slowly, and limped down from the grass-pile. He leaned against the iron railings. "So were you always a witch?" he asked. "I mean, before you cursed them all?"

"As if it would take witchcraft," she said with a sniff, "to get Solomon Porritt mooning round my cottage."

Which, Bod thought, but did not say, was not actually an answer to the question, not at all.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Got no headstone," she said, turning down the corners of her mouth. "Might be anybody. Mightn't I?"

"But you must have a name."

"Liza Hempstock, if you please," she said tartly. Then she said, "It's not that much to ask, is it? Something to mark my grave. I'm just down there, see? With nothing but nettles to mark where I rest." And she looked so sad, just for a moment, that Bod wanted to hug her. And then it came to him, and as he squeezed between the railings of the fence. He would find Liza Hempstock a headstone, with her name upon it. He would make her smile.

He turned to wave goodbye as he began to clamber up the hill, but she was already gone.

There were broken lumps of other people's stones and statues in the graveyard, but, Bod knew, that would have been entirely the wrong sort of thing to bring to the grey-eyed witch in the Potter's Field. It was going to take more than that. He decided not to tell anyone what he was planning, on the not entirely unreasonable basis that they would have told him not to do it.

Over the next few days his mind filled with plans, each more complicated and extravagant than the last. Mr Pennyworth despaired.

"I do believe," he announced, scratching his dusty moustache, "that you are getting, if anything, worse. You are not Fading. You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn, astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies."

Bod simply stared at him, and said nothing. He was wondering whether there were special shops in the places where the living people gathered that sold only headstones, and if so how he could go about finding one, and Fading was the least of his problems.

He took advantage of Miss Borrows' willingness to be diverted from the subjects of Grammar and Composition to the subject of anything else at all to ask her about money—how exactly it worked, how one used it to get things one wanted. Bod had a number of coins he had found over the years (he had learned that the best place to find money was to go, afterwards, to wherever courting couples had used the grass of the graveyard as a place to cuddle and snuggle and kiss and roll about. He would often find metal coins on the ground, in the place where they had been) and he thought perhaps he could finally get some use from them.

"How much would a headstone be?" he asked Miss Borrows.

"In my time," she told him, "they were fifteen guineas. I do not know what they would be today. More, I imagine. Much, much more."

Bod had fifty-three pence. It would not be enough.

It had been four years, almost half a lifetime, since Bod had visited the Indigo Man's tomb. But he still remembered the way. He climbed to the top of the hill, until he was above the whole town, above even the top of the apple tree, above even the steeple of the ruined church, up where the Frobisher vault stood like a rotten tooth. He slipped down into it, and down and down and still further down, down to the tiny stone steps cut into the center of the hill, and those he descended until he reached the stone chamber at the base of the hill. It was dark in that tomb, dark as a deep mine, but Bod saw as the dead see and the room gave up its secrets to him.

The Sleer was coiled around the wall of the barrow. It was as he remembered it, all smoky tendrils and hate and greed. This time, however, he was not afraid of it.

Fear me, whispered the Sleer. For I guard things precious and never-lost.

"I don't fear you," said Bod. "Remember? And I need to take something away from here."

Nothing ever leaves, came the reply from the coiled thing in the darkness. The Knife, the Brooch, the Goblet. I guard them in the darkness. I wait.

In the centre of the room was a slab of rock, and on it they lay: a stone knife, a brooch, and a goblet.

"Pardon me for asking," said Bod, "but was this your grave?"

Master sets us here on the plain to guard, buries our skulls beneath this stone, leaves us here knowing what we have to do. We guards the treasures until Master comes back.

"I expect that he's forgotten all about you," pointed out Bod. "I'm sure he's been dead himself for ages."

We are the Sleer. We guard.

Bod wondered just how long ago you had to go back before the deepest tomb inside the hill was on a plain, and he knew it must have been an extremely long time ago. He could feel the Sleer winding its waves of fear around him, like the tendrils of some carnivorous plant. He was beginning to feel cold, and slow, as if he had been bitten in the heart by some arctic viper and it was starting to pump its icy venom through his body.

He took a step forward, so he was standing against the stone slab, and he reached down and closed his fingers around the coldness of the brooch.

Hish! whispered the Sleer. We guards that for the Master.

"He won't mind," said Bod. He took a step backward, walking toward the stone steps, avoiding the desiccated remains of people and animals on the floor.

The Sleer writhed angrily, twining around the tiny chamber like ghost-smoke. Then it slowed. It comes back, said the Sleer, in its tangled triple voice. Always comes back.

Bod went up the stone steps inside the hill as fast as he could. At one point he imagined that there was something coming after him, but when he broke out of the top, into the Frobisher vault, and he could breathe the cool dawn air, nothing moved or followed.

Bod sat in the open air on the top of the hill and held the brooch. He thought it was all black, at first, but then the sun rose, and he could see that the stone in the centre of the black metal was a swirling red. It was the size of a robin's egg, and Bod stared into the stone wondering if there were things moving in its heart, his eyes and soul deep in the crimson world. If Bod had been smaller he would have wanted to put it into his mouth.

The stone was held in place by a black metal clasp, by something that looked like claws, with something else crawling around it. The something else looked almost snakelike, but it had too many heads. Bod wondered if that was what the Sleer looked like, in the daylight.

He wandered down the hill, taking all the short-cuts he knew, through the ivy tangle that covered the Bartleby's family vault (and inside, the sound of the Bartlebies grumbling and readying for sleep) and on and over and through the railings and into the Potter's Field.

He called, "Liza! Liza!" and looked around.

"Good morrow, young lummox," said Liza's voice. Bod could not see her, but there was an extra shadow beneath the hawthorn tree, and, as he approached it, the shadow resolved itself into something pearlescent and translucent in the early-morning light. Something girl-like. Something grey-eyed. "I should be decently sleeping," she said. "What kind of carrying on is this?"

"Your headstone," he said. "I wanted to know what you want on it."

"My name," she said. "It must have my name on it, with a big E, for Elizabeth, like the old queen that died when I was born, and a big Haitch for Hempstock. More than that I care not, for I did never master my letters."

"What about dates?" asked Bod.

"Willyum the Conker ten sixty-six," she sang, in the whisper of the dawn-wind in the hawthorn tree. "A big E if you please. And a big Haitch."

"Did you have a job?" asked Bod. "I mean, when you weren't being a witch?"

"I done laundry," said the dead girl, and then the morning sunlight flooded the wasteland, and Bod was alone.

It was nine in the morning, when all the world is sleeping. Bod was determined to stay awake. He was, after all, on a mission. He was eight years old, and the world beyond the graveyard held no terrors for him.

Clothes. He would need clothes. His usual dress, of a grey winding sheet, was, he knew, quite wrong. It was good in the graveyard, the same colour as stone and as shadows. But if he was going to dare the world beyond the graveyard walls, he would need to blend in there.

There were some clothes in the crypt beneath the ruined church, but Bod did not want to go there, even in daylight. While Bod was prepared to justify himself to Master and Mistress Owens, he was not about to explain himself to Silas; the very thought of those dark eyes angry, or worse still, disappointed, filled him with shame.

There was a gardener's hut at the far end of the graveyard, a small green building that smelled like motor oil, and in which the old mower sat and rusted, unused, along with an assortment of ancient garden tools. The hut had been abandoned when the last gardener had retired, before Bod was born, and the task of keeping the graveyard had been shared between the council (who sent in a man to cut the grass, once a month from April to September) and local volunteers.

A huge padlock on the door protected the contents of the hut, but Bod had long ago discovered the loose wooden board in the back. Sometimes he would go to the gardener's hut, and sit, and think, when he wanted to be by himself.

As long as he had been going to the hut there had been a brown working man's jacket hanging on the back of the door, forgotten or abandoned years before, along with a green-stained pair of gardening jeans. The jeans were much too big for him, but he rolled up the cuffs until his feet showed, then he made a belt out of brown garden-twine, and tied them around his waist. There were boots in one corner, and he tried putting them on, but they were so big and encrusted with mud and concrete that he could barely shuffle them, and if he took a step, the boots remained on the floor of the shed. He pushed the jacket out through the space in the loose board, squeezed himself out, then put it on. If he rolled up the sleeves, he decided, it worked quite well. It had big pockets, and he thrust his hands into them, and felt quite the dandy.

Bod walked down to the main gate of the graveyard, and looked out through the bars. A bus rattled past, in the street; there were cars there and noise and shops. Behind him, a cool green shade, overgrown with trees and ivy: home.

His heart pounding, Bod walked out into the world.

Abanazer Bolger had seen some odd types in his time; if you owned a shop like Abanazer's, you'd see them too. The shop, in the warren of streets in the Old Town—a little bit antique shop, a little bit junk shop, a little bit pawnbroker's (and not even Abanazer himself was entirely certain which bit was which) brought odd types and strange people, some of them wanting to buy, some of them needing to sell. Abanazer Bolger traded over the counter, buying and selling, and he did a better trade behind the counter and in the back room, accepting objects that may not have been acquired entirely honestly, and then quietly shifting them on. His business was an iceberg. Only the dusty little shop was visible on the surface. The rest of it was underneath, and that was just how Abanazer Bolger wanted it.

Abanazer Bolger had thick spectacles and a permanent expression of mild distaste, as if he had just realised that the milk in his tea had been on the turn, and he could not get the sour taste of it out of his mouth. The expression served him well when people tried to sell him things. "Honestly," he would tell them, sour-faced, "it's not really worth anything at all. I'll give you what I can, though, as it has sentimental value." You were lucky to get anything like what you thought you wanted from Abanazer Bolger.

A business like Abanazer Bolger's brought in strange people, but the boy who came in that morning was one of the strangest Abanazer could remember in a lifetime of cheating strange people out of their valuables. He looked to be about seven years old, and dressed in his grandfather's clothes. He smelled like a shed. His hair was long and shaggy, and he looked extremely grave. His hands were deep in the pockets of a dusty brown jacket, but even with the hands out of sight, Abanazer could see that something was clutched extremely tightly—protectively—in the boy's right hand.

"Excuse me," said the boy.

"Aye-aye Sonny-Jim," said Abanazer Bolger warily. Kids, he thought. Either they've nicked something, or they're trying to sell their toys. Either way, he usually said no. Buy stolen property from a kid, and next thing you knew you'd an enraged adult accusing you of having given little Johnnie or Matilda a tenner for their wedding ring. More trouble than they was worth, kids.

"I need something for a friend of mine," said the boy. "And I thought maybe you could buy something I've got."

"I don't buy stuff from kids," said Abanazer Bolger flatly.

Bod took his hand out of his pocket and put the brooch down on the grimy counter-top. Bolger glanced down at it, then he looked at it. He took an eye-piece from the counter-top and he screwed it into his eye. He removed his spectacles. He turned on a little light on the counter and examined the brooch through the eyeglass. "Snakestone?" he said, to himself, not to the boy. Then he took the eyepiece out, replaced his glasses, and fixed the boy with a sour and suspicious look.

"Where did you get this?" Abanazer Bolger asked.

Bod said, "Do you want to buy it?"

"You stole it. You've nicked this from a museum or somewhere, didn't you?"

"No," said Bod flatly. "Are you going to buy it, or shall I go and find somebody who will?"

Abanazer Bolger's sour mood changed then. Suddenly he was all affability. He smiled broadly. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just you don't see many pieces like this. Not in a shop like this. Not outside of a museum. But I would certainly like it. Tell you what. Why don't we sit down over tea and biscuits—I've got a packet of chocolate chip cookies in the back room—and decide how much something like this is worth? Eh?"

Bod was relieved that the man was finally being friendly. "I need enough to buy a stone," he said. "A headstone for a friend of mine. Well, she's not really my friend. Just someone I know. I think she helped make my leg better, you see."

Abanazer Bolger, paying little attention to the boy's prattle, led him behind the counter, and opened the door to the storeroom, a windowless little space, every inch of which was crammed high with teetering cardboard boxes, each filled with junk. There was a safe in there, in the corner, a big old one. There was a box filled with violins, an accumulation of stuffed dead animals, chairs without seats, books and prints.

There was a small desk beside the door, and Abanazer Bolger pulled up the only chair, and sat down, letting Bod stand. Abanazer rummaged in a drawer, in which Bod could see a half-empty bottle of whisky, and pulled out an almost-finished packet of chocolate chip cookies, and he offered one to the boy; he turned on the desk light, looked at the brooch again, the swirls of red and orange in the stone, and he examined the black metal band that encircled it, suppressing a little shiver at the expression on the heads of the snake-things. "This is old," he said. "It's—" priceless, he thought, "—probably not really worth much, but you never know." Bod's face fell. Abanazer Bolger tried to look reassuring. "I just need to know that it's not stolen, though, before I can give you a penny. Did you take it from your mum's dresser? Nick it from a museum? You can tell me. I'll not get you into trouble. I just need to know."

Bod shook his head. He munched on his cookie.

"Then where did you get it?"

Bod said nothing.

Abanazer Bolger did not want to put down the brooch, but he pushed it across the desk to the boy. "If you can't tell me," he said, "you'd better take it back. There has to be trust on both sides, after all. Nice doing business with you. Sorry it couldn't go any further."

Bod looked worried. Then he said, "I found it in an old grave. But I can't say where." And then he stopped, because naked greed and excitement had replaced the friendliness on Abanazer Bolger's face.

"And there's more like this there?"

Bod said, "If you don't want to buy it, I'll find someone else. Thank you for the biscuit."

Bolger said, "You're in a hurry, eh? Mum and dad waiting for you, I expect?"

The boy shook his head, then wished he had nodded.

"Nobody waiting. Good." Abanazer Bolger closed his hands around the brooch. "Now, you tell me exactly where you found this. Eh?"

"I don't remember," said Bod.

"Too late for that," said Abanazer Bolger. "Suppose you have a little think for a bit about where it came from. Then, when you've thought, we'll have a little chat, and you'll tell me."

He got up, and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. He locked it, with a large metal key.

He opened his hand, and looked at the brooch and smiled, hungrily.

There was a ding from the bell above the shop door, to let him know someone had entered, and he looked up, guiltily, but there was nobody there. The door was slightly ajar though, and Bolger pushed it shut, and then for good measure, he turned around the sign in the window, so it said Closed. He pushed the bolt closed. Didn't want any busybodies turning up today.

The autumn day had turned from sunny to grey, and a light patter of rain ran down the grubby shop window.

Abanazer Bolger picked up the telephone from the counter and pushed at the buttons with fingers that barely shook.

"Paydirt, Tom," he said. "Get over here, soon as you can."

Bod realised that he was trapped when he heard the lock turn in the door. He pulled on the door, but it held fast. He felt stupid for having been lured inside, foolish for not trusting his first impulses, to get as far away from the sour-faced man as possible. He had broken all the rules of the graveyard, and everything had gone wrong. What would Silas say? Or the Owenses? He could feel himself beginning to panic, and he suppressed it, pushing the worry back down inside him. It would all be good. He knew that. Of course, he needed to get out . . .

He examined the room he was trapped in. It was little more than a storeroom with a desk in it. The only entrance was the door.

He opened the desk drawer, finding nothing but small pots of paint (used for brightening up antiques) and a paintbrush. He wondered if he would be able to throw paint in the man's face, and blind him for long enough to escape. He opened the top of a pot of paint and dipped in his finger.

"What're you doin'?" asked a voice close to his ear.

"Nothing," said Bod, screwing the top on the paintpot, and dropping it into one of the jacket's enormous pockets.

Liza Hempstock looked at him, unimpressed. "Why are you in here?" she asked. "And who's old bag-of-lard out there?"

"It's his shop. I was trying to sell him something."

"Why?"

"None of your beeswax."

She sniffed. "Well," she said, "you should get on back to the graveyard."

"I can't. He's locked me in."

"'Course you can. Just slip through the wall—"

He shook his head. "I can't. I can only do it at home because they gave me the freedom of the graveyard when I was a baby." He looked up at her, under the electric light. It was hard to see her properly, but Bod had spent his life talking to dead people. "Anyway, what are you doing here? What are you doing out from the graveyard? It's daytime. And you're not like Silas. You're meant to stay in the graveyard."

She said, "There's rules for those in graveyards, but not for those as was buried in unhallowed ground. Nobody tells me what to do, or where to go." She glared at the door. "I don't like that man," she said. "I'm going to see what he's doing."

A flicker, and Bod was alone in the room once more. He heard a rumble of distant thunder.

In the cluttered darkness of Bolger's Antiquities, Abanazer Bolger looked up suspiciously, certain that someone was watching him, then realised he was being foolish. "The boy's locked in the room," he told himself. "The front door's locked." He was polishing the metal clasp surrounding the snakestone, as gently and as carefully as an archaeologist on a dig, taking off the black and revealing the glittering silver beneath it.

He was beginning to regret calling Tom Hustings over, although Hustings was big and good for scaring people. He was also beginning to regret that he was going to have to sell the brooch, when he was done. It was special. The more it glittered, under the tiny light on his counter, the more he wanted it to be his, and only his.

There was more where this came from, though. The boy would tell him. The boy would lead him to it . . .

A knocking on the outer door of the shop.

Bolger walked over to the door, peering out into the wet afternoon.

"Hurry up," called Tom Hustings. "It's miserable out here. Dismal. I'm getting soaked."

Bolger unlocked the door and Tom Hustings pushed his way in, his raincoat and hair dripping. "What's so important that you can't talk about it over the phone, then?"

"Our fortune," said Abanazer Bolger, with his sour face. "That's what."

Hustings took off his raincoat and hung it on the back of the shopdoor. "What is it? Something good fell off the back of a lorry?"

"Treasure," said Abanazer Bolger. He took his friend over to the counter, showed him the brooch, under the little light.

"It's old, isn't it?"

"From pagan times," said Abanazer. "Before. From Druid times. Before the Romans came. It's called a snakestone. Seen 'em in museums. I've never seen metalwork like that, or one so fine. Must have belonged to a king. The lad who found it says it come from a grave—think of a barrow filled with stuff like this."

"Might be worth doing it legit," said Hustings, thoughtfully. "Declare it as treasure trove. They have to pay us market value for it, and we could make them name it for us. The Hustings-Bolger Bequest."

"Bolger-Hustings," said Abanazer, automatically. Then he said, "There's a few people I know of, people with real money, would pay more than market value, if they could hold it as you are—" for Tom Hustings was fingering the brooch, gently, like a man stroking a kitten—"and there'd be no questions asked." He reached out his hand and, reluctantly, Tom Hustings passed him the brooch.

And the two men went back and forth on it, weighing the merits and disadvantages of declaring the brooch as a treasure trove or of forcing the boy to show them the treasure, which had grown in their minds to a huge underground cavern filled with precious things, and as they debated Abanazer pulled a bottle of sloe gin from beneath the counter and poured them both a generous tot, "to assist the cerebrations."

Liza was soon bored with their discussions, which went back and forth and around like a whirligig, getting nowhere, and so she went back into the storeroom, to find Bod standing in the middle of the room with his eyes tightly closed and his fists clenched and his face all screwed up as if he had a toothache, almost purple from holding his breath.

"What you a-doin' of now?" she asked, unimpressed.

He opened his eyes and relaxed. "Trying to Fade," he said.

Liza sniffed. "Try again," she said.

He did, holding his breath even longer this time.

"Stop that," she told him. "Or you'll pop."

Bod took a deep breath and then sighed. "It doesn't work," he said. "Maybe I could hit him with a rock, and just run for it." There wasn't a rock, so he picked up a coloured glass paperweight, hefted it in his hand, wondering if he could throw it hard enough to stop Abanazer Bolger in his tracks.

"There's two of them out there now," said Liza. "And if the one don't get you, t'other one will. They say they want to get you to show where you got the brooch, and then dig up the grave and take the treasure." She shook her head. "Why did you do something as stupid as this anyway? You know the rules about leaving the graveyard. Just asking for trouble, it was."

Bod felt very insignificant, and very foolish. "I wanted to get you a headstone," he admitted, in a small voice. "And I thought it would cost more money. So I was going to sell him the brooch, to buy you one."

She didn't say anything.

"Are you angry?"

She shook her head. "It's the first nice thing anyone's done for me in five hundred years," she said, with a hint of a goblin smile. "Why would I be angry?" Then she said, "What do you do, when you try to Fade?"

"What Mr Pennyworth told me. I am an empty doorway, I am a vacant alley, I am nothing. Eyes will not see me, glances slip over me. But it never works."

"It's because you're alive," said Liza, with a sniff. "There's stuff as works for us, the dead, who have to fight to be noticed at the best of times, that won't never work for you people."

She hugged herself tightly, moving her body back and forth, as if she was debating something. Then she said, "It's because of me you got into this . . .. Come here, Nobody Owens."

He took a step towards her, in that tiny room, and she put her cold hand on his forehead. It felt like a wet silk scarf against his skin.

"Now," she said. "Perhaps I can do a good turn for you."

And with that, she began to mutter to herself, mumbling words that Bod could not make out. Then she said, clear and loud:

"Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind

Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,

Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,

Above, beneath, betwixt, between."

Something huge touched him, brushed him from head to feet, and he shivered. His hair prickled, and his skin was all goose-flesh. Something had changed. "What did you do?" he asked.

"Just gived you a helping hand," she said. "I may be dead, but I'm a dead witch, remember. And we don't forget."

"But–"

"Hush up," she said. "They're coming back."

The key rattled in the storeroom lock. "Now then, chummy," said a voice Bod had not heard clearly before, "I'm sure we're all going to be great friends," and with that Tom Hustings pushed open the door. Then he stood in the doorway looking around, looking puzzled. He was a big, big man, with foxy-red hair and a bottle-red nose. "Here. Abanazer? I thought you said he was in here?"

"I did," said Bolger, from behind him.

"Well, I can't see hide nor hair of him."

Bolger's face appeared behind the ruddy man's and he peered into the room. "Hiding," he said, staring straight at where Bod was standing. "No use hiding," he announced, loudly. "I can see you there. Come on out."

The two men walked into the little room, and Bod stood stock still between them and thought of Mr Pennyworth's lessons. He did not react, he did not move. He let the men's glances slide from him without seeing him.

"You're going to wish you'd come out when I called," said Bolger, and he shut the door. "Right," he said to Tom Hustings. "You block the door, so he can't get past." And with that he walked around the room, peering behind things, and bending, awkwardly, to look beneath the desk. He walked straight past Bod and opened the cupboard. "Now I see you!" he shouted. "Come out!"

Liza giggled.

"What was that?" asked Tom Hustings, spinning round.

"I didn't hear nothing," said Abanazer Bolger.

Liza giggled again. Then she put her lips together and blew, making a noise that began as a whistling, and then sounded like a distant wind. The electric lights in the little room flickered and buzzed. Then they went out.

"Bloody fuses," said Abanazer Bolger. "Come on. This is a waste of time."

The key clicked in the lock, and Liza and Bod were left alone in the room.

"He's got away," said Abanazer Bolger. Bod could hear him now, through the door. "Room like that. There wasn't anywhere he could have been hiding. We'd've seen him if he was."

A pause.

"Here. Tom Hustings. Where's the brooch gone?"

"Mm? That? Here. I was keeping it safe."

"Keeping it safe? In your pocket? Funny place to be keeping it safe, if you ask me. More like you were planning to make off with it—like you was planning to keep my brooch for your own."

"Your brooch, Abanazer? Your brooch? Our brooch, you mean."

"Ours, indeed. I don't remember you being here, when I got it from that boy."

There was another long silence, then Abanazer Bolger said, "Well, look at that, we're almost out of sloe gin—how would you fancy a good Scotch? I've whisky in the back room. You just wait here a moment."

The storeroom door was unlocked, and Abanazer entered, holding a walking stick and an electric torch, looking even more sour of face than before.

"If you're still in here," he said, in a sour mutter, "don't even think of making a run for it. I've called the police on you, that's what I've done." A rummage in a drawer produced the half-filled bottle of whisky, and then a tiny black bottle. Abanazer poured several drops from the little bottle into the larger, then he pocketed the tiny bottle. "My brooch, and mine alone," he muttered, and followed it with a barked, "Just coming, Tom!"

He glared around the dark room, staring past Bod, then he left the storeroom, carrying the whisky in front of him. He locked the door behind him.

"Here you go," came Abanazer Bolger's voice through the door. "Give us your glass then Tom. Nice drop of Scotch, put hairs on your chest. Say when."

Silence. "Cheap muck. Aren't you drinking?"

"That sloe gin's gone to my innards. Give it a minute for my stomach to settle . . ." Then, "Here—Tom! What have you done with my brooch?"

"Your brooch is it now? Whoa—what did you . . . you put something in my drink, you little grub!"

"What if I did? I could read on your face what you was planning, Tom Hustings. Thief."

And then there was shouting, and several crashes, and loud bangs, as if heavy items of furniture were being overturned . . .

. . .then silence.

Liza said, "Quickly now. Let's get you out of here."

"But the door's locked." He looked at her. "Is there something you can do?"

"Me? I don't have any magics will get you out of a locked room, boy."

Bod crouched, and peered out through the keyhole. It was blocked; the key sat in the keyhole. Bod thought, then he smiled, momentarily, and it lit his face like the flash of a lightbulb. He pulled a crumpled sheet of newspaper from a packing case, flattened it out as best he could, then pushed it underneath the door, leaving only a corner on his side of the doorway.

"What are you playing at?" asked Liza, impatiently.

"I need something like a pencil. Only thinner . . ." he said. "Here we go." And he took a thin paintbrush from the top of the desk, and pushed the brushless end into the lock, jiggled it and pushed some more.

There was a muffled clunk as the key was pushed out, as it dropped from the lock onto the newspaper. Bod pulled the paper back under the door, now with the key sitting on it.

Liza laughed, delighted. "That's wit, young man," she said. "That's wisdom."

Bod put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the storeroom door.

There were two men on the floor, in the middle of the crowded antique shop. Furniture had indeed fallen; the place was a chaos of wrecked clocks and chairs, and in the midst of it the bulk of Tom Hustings lay, fallen on the smaller figure of Abanazer Bolger. Neither of them was moving.

"Are they dead?" asked Bod.

"No such luck," said Liza.

On the floor beside the men was a brooch of glittering silver; a crimson-orange-banded stone, held in place with claws and with snake-heads, and the expression on the snake-heads was one of triumph and avarice and satisfaction.

Bod dropped the brooch into his pocket, where it sat beside the heavy glass paperweight, the paintbrush, and the little pot of paint.

Lightning illuminated the cobbled street.

Bod hurried through the rain through the old town, always heading up the hill toward the graveyard. The grey day had become an early night while he was inside the storeroom, and it came as no surprise to him when a familiar shadow swirled beneath the street lamps. Bod hesitated, and a flutter of night-black velvet resolved itself into a man-shape.

Silas stood in front of him, arms folded. He strode forward, impatiently.

"Well?" he said.

Bod said, "I'm sorry, Silas."

"I'm disappointed in you, Bod." Silas said, and he shook his head. "I've been looking for you since I woke. You have the smell of trouble all around you. And you know you're not allowed to go out here, into the living world."

"I know. I'm sorry." There was rain on the boy's face, running down like tears.

"First of all, we need to get you back to safety." Silas reached down, and enfolded the living child inside his cloak, and Bod felt the ground fall away beneath him.

"Silas," he said.

Silas did not answer.

"I was a bit scared," he said. "But I knew you'd come and get me if it got too bad. And Liza was there. She helped a lot."

"Liza?" Silas's voice was sharp.

"The witch. From the Potter's Field."

"And you say she helped you?"

"Yes. She especially helped me with my Fading. I think I can do it now."

Silas grunted. "You can tell me all about it when we're home." And Bod was quiet until they landed beside the church. They went inside, into the empty hall, as the rain redoubled, splashing up from the puddles that covered the ground.

"Tell me everything," he said.

Bod told him everything he could remember about the day. And at the end, Silas shook his head, slowly, thoughtfully.

"Am I in trouble?" asked Bod.

"Nobody Owens," said Silas. " You are indeed in trouble. However, I believe I shall leave it to your foster-parents to administer whatever discipline and reproach they believe to be needed."

And then, in the manner of his kind, Silas was gone.

Bod pulled the jacket up over his head, and clambered up the slippery paths to the top of the hill, to the Frobisher vault, and then he went down, and down, and still further down.

He dropped the brooch beside the goblet and the knife.

"Here you go," he said. "All polished up. Looking pretty."

It comes back, said the Sleer, with satisfaction in its smoke-tendril voice. It always comes back.

The night had been long, but it was almost dawn.

Bod was walking, sleepily and a little gingerly, past the final resting place of Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives Marion and Joan, to the Potter's Field. Mr and Mrs Owens had died several hundred years before it had been decided that beating children was wrong, and Mr Owens had, regretfully, that night, done what he saw as his duty, and Bod's bottom stung like anything. Still, the look of worry on Mrs Owens' face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.

He reached the iron railings that bounded the Potter's Field, and slipped between them.

"Hullo?" he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn tree. "I hope I didn't get you into trouble, too," he said.

Nothing.

He had replaced the jeans in the gardener's hut—he was more comfortable in just his grey winding sheet—but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.

When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the Potter's Field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colours, along with the paintpot, and the paintbrush.

He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters

E H

and beneath them he wrote

we don't forget

It was almost daylight. Bedtime, soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and, pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, he went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

"Not bad," said a pert voice from the Potter's Field, behind him. "Not bad at all."

But when he turned to look, there was nobody there.

Last Contact

Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter (www.stephen-baxter.com) is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from Britain in the past thirty years. His "Xeelee" sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of future history in modern science fiction. Baxter is the author of more than forty books and over 100 short stories. His most recent book is YA alternate history, The H-bomb Girl.

Baxter has written a number of novels with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and the quiet and moving first contact story that follows recalls nothing as much as Clarke's own "The Nine Billion Names of God."

March 15th

Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.

Just at that moment Maureen's mobile phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat and looked at the screen. "Another contact," she called to her daughter.

Caitlin looked cold in her thin jacket; she wrapped her arms around her body. "Another super-civilisation discovered, off in space. We live in strange times,
Mum."

"That's the fifteenth this year. And I did my bit to help discover it. Good for me," Maureen said, smiling. "Hello, love." She leaned forward for a kiss on the cheek.

She knew why Caitlin was here, of course. Caitlin had always hinted she would come and deliver the news about the Big Rip in person, one way or the other. Maureen guessed what that news was from her daughter's hollow, stressed eyes. But Caitlin was looking around the garden, and Maureen decided to let her tell it all in her own time.

She asked, "How's the kids?"

"Fine. At school. Bill's at home, baking bread." Caitlin smiled. "Why do stay-at-home fathers always bake bread? But he's starting at Webster's next month."

"That's the engineers in Oxford."

"That's right. Not that it makes much difference now. We won't run out of money before, well, before it doesn't matter." Caitlin considered the garden. It was just a scrap of lawn, really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. "It's the first time I've seen this properly."

"Well, it's the first bright day we've had. My first spring here." They walked around the lawn. "It's not bad. It's been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow," Maureen said.

"You mustn't think like that."

"Well, it's true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I'd pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I'm done."

Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

Maureen showed her patches where the lawn had dried out last summer and would need reseeding. And there was a little brass plaque fixed to the wall of the house to show the level reached by the Thames floods of two years ago. "The lawn is all right. I do like this time of year when you sort of wake it up from the winter. The grass needs raking and scarifying, of course. I'll reseed bits of it, and see how it grows during the summer. I might think about getting some of it re-laid. Now the weather's so different the drainage might not be right anymore."

"You're enjoying getting back in the saddle, aren't you, Mum?"

Maureen shrugged. "Well, the last couple of years weren't much fun. Nursing your dad, and then getting rid of the house. It's nice to get this old thing back on again." She raised her arms and looked down at her quilted gardening coat.

Caitlin wrinkled her nose. "I always hated that stupid old coat. You really should get yourself something better, Mum. These modern fabrics are very good."

"This will see me out," Maureen said firmly.

They walked around the verge, looking at the plants, the weeds, the autumn leaves that hadn't been swept up and were now rotting in place.

Caitlin said, "I'm going to be on the radio later. BBC Radio 4. There's to be a government statement on the Rip, and I'll be in the follow-up discussion. It starts at nine, and I should be on about nine thirty."

"I'll listen to it. Do you want me to tape it for you?"

"No. Bill will get it. Besides, you can listen to all these things on the websites these days."

Maureen said carefully, "I take it the news is what you expected, then."

"Pretty much. The Hawaii observatories confirmed it. I've seen the new Hubble images, deep sky fields. Empty, save for the foreground objects. All the galaxies beyond the local group have gone. Eerie, really, seeing your predictions come true like that. That's couch grass, isn't it?"

"Yes. I stuck a fork in it. Nothing but root mass underneath. It will be a devil to get up. I'll have a go, and then put down some bin liners for a few weeks, and see if that kills it off. Then there are these roses that should have been pruned by now. I think I'll plant some gladioli in this corner—"

"Mum, it's October." Caitlin blurted that out. She looked thin, pale and tense, a real office worker, but then Maureen had always thought that about her daughter, that she worked too hard. Now she was thirty-five, and her moderately pretty face was lined at the eyes and around her mouth, the first wistful signs of age. "October 14, at about four in the afternoon. I say 'about.' I could give you the time down to the attosecond if you wanted."

Maureen took her hands. "It's all right, love. It's about when you thought it would be, isn't it?"

"Not that it does us any good, knowing. There's nothing we can do about it."

They walked on. They came to a corner on the south side of the little garden. "This ought to catch the sun," Maureen said. "I'm thinking of putting in a seat here. A pergola maybe. Somewhere to sit. I'll see how the sun goes around later in the year."

"Dad would have liked a pergola," Caitlin said. "He always did say a garden was a place to sit in, not to work."

"Yes. It does feel odd that your father died, so soon before all this. I'd have liked him to see it out. It seems a waste somehow."

Caitlin looked up at the sky. "Funny thing, Mum. It's all quite invisible to the naked eye, still. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, just, but that's bound to the Milky Way by gravity. So the expansion hasn't reached down to the scale of the visible, not yet. It's still all instruments, telescopes. But it's real all right."

"I suppose you'll have to explain it all on Radio 4."

"That's why I'm there. We'll probably have to keep saying it over and over, trying to find ways of saying it that people can understand. You know, don't you, Mum? It's all to do with dark energy. It's like an antigravity field that permeates the universe. Just as gravity pulls everything together, the dark energy is pulling the universe apart, taking more and more of it so far away that its light can't reach us anymore. It started at the level of the largest structures in the universe, superclusters of galaxies. But in the end it will fold down to the smallest scales. Every bound structure will be pulled apart. Even atoms, even subatomic particles. The Big Rip.

"We've known about this stuff for years. What we didn't expect was that the expansion would accelerate as it has. We thought we had trillions of years. Then the forecast was billions. And now—"

"Yes."

"It's funny for me being involved in this stuff, Mum. Being on the radio. I've never been a people person. I became an astrophysicist, for God's sake. I always thought that what I studied would have absolutely no effect on anybody's life. How wrong I was. Actually there's been a lot of debate about whether to announce it or not."

"I think people will behave pretty well," Maureen said. "They usually do. It might get trickier towards the end, I suppose. But people have a right to know, don't you think?"

"They're putting it on after nine so people can decide what to tell their kids."

"After the watershed! Well, that's considerate. Will you tell your two?"

"I think we'll have to. Everybody at school will know. They'll probably get bullied about it if they don't know. Imagine that. Besides, the little beggars will probably have googled it on their mobiles by one minute past nine."

Maureen laughed. "There is that."

"It will be like when I told them Dad had died," Caitlin said. "Or like when Billy started asking hard questions about Santa Claus."

"No more Christmases," Maureen said suddenly. "If it's all over in October."

"No more birthdays for my two either," Caitlin said.

"November and January."

"Yes. It's funny, in the lab, when the date came up, that was the first thing I thought of."

Maureen's phone pinged again. "Another signal. Quite different in nature from the last, according to this."

"I wonder if we'll get any of those signals decoded in time."

Maureen waggled her phone. "It won't be for want of trying, me and a billion other search-for-ET-at-home enthusiasts. Would you like some tea, love?"

"It's all right. I'll let you get on. I told Bill I'd get the shopping in, before I have to go back to the studios in Oxford this evening."

They walked towards the back door into the house, strolling, inspecting the plants and the scrappy lawn.

June 5th

It was about lunchtime when Caitlin arrived from the garden centre with the pieces of the pergola. Maureen helped her unload them from the back of a white van, and carry them through the gate from the drive. They were mostly just prefabricated wooden panels and beams that they could manage between the two of them, though the big iron spikes that would be driven into the ground to support the uprights were heavier. They got the pieces stacked up on the lawn.

"I should be able to set it up myself," Maureen said. "Joe next door said he'd lay the concrete base for me, and help me lift on the roof section. There's some nailing to be done, and creosoting, but I can do all that."

"Joe, eh." Caitlin grinned.

"Oh, shut up, he's just a neighbour. Where did you get the van? Did you have to hire it?"

"No, the garden centre loaned it to me. They can't deliver. They are still getting stock in, but they can't rely on the staff. They just quit, without any notice. In the end it sort of gets to you, I suppose."

"Well, you can't blame people for wanting to be at home."

"No. Actually Bill's packed it in. I meant to tell you. He didn't even finish his induction at Webster's. But the project he was working on would never have got finished anyway."

"I'm sure the kids are glad to have him home."

"Well, they're finishing the school year. At least I think they will, the teachers still seem keen to carry on."

"It's probably best for them."

"Yes. We can always decide what to do after the summer, if the schools open again."

Maureen had prepared some sandwiches, and some iced elderflower cordial. They sat in the shade of the house and ate their lunch and looked out over the garden.

Caitlin said, "Your lawn's looking good."

"It's come up quite well. I'm still thinking of re-laying that patch over there."

"And you put in a lot of vegetables in the end," Caitlin said.

"I thought I should. I've planted courgettes and French beans and carrots, and a few outdoor tomatoes. I could do with a greenhouse, but I haven't really room for one. It seemed a good idea, rather than flowers, this year."

"Yes. You can't rely on the shops."

Things had kept working, mostly, as people stuck to their jobs. But there were always gaps on the supermarket shelves, as supply chains broke down. There was talk of rationing some essentials, and there were already coupons for petrol.

"I don't approve of how tatty the streets are getting in town," Maureen said sternly.

Caitlin sighed. "I suppose you can't blame people for packing in a job like street-sweeping. It is a bit tricky getting around town though. We need some work done on the roof, we're missing a couple of tiles. It's just as well we won't have to get through another winter," she said, a bit darkly. "But you can't get a builder for love or money."

"Well, you never could."

They both laughed.

Maureen said, "I told you people would cope. People do just get on with things."

"We haven't got to the end game yet," Caitlin said. "I went into London the other day. That isn't too friendly, Mum. It's not all like this, you know."

Maureen's phone pinged, and she checked the screen. "Four or five a day now," she said. "New contacts, lighting up all over the sky."

"But that's down from the peak, isn't it?"

"Oh, we had a dozen a day at one time. But now we've lost half the stars, haven't we?"

"Well, that's true, now the Rip has folded down into the Galaxy. I haven't really been following it, Mum. Nobody's been able to decode any of the signals, have they?"

"But some of them aren't the sort of signal you can decode anyhow. In one case somebody picked up an artificial element in the spectrum of a star. Something that was manufactured, and then just chucked in to burn up, like a flare."

Caitlin considered. "That can't say anything but 'here we are,' I suppose."

"Maybe that's enough."

"Yes."

It had really been Harry who had been interested in wild speculations about alien life and so forth. Joining the cell-phone network of home observers of ET, helping to analyse possible signals from the stars in a network of millions of others, had been Harry's hobby, not Maureen's. It was one of Harry's things she had kept up after he had died, like his weather monitoring and his football pools. It would have felt odd just to have stopped it all.

But she did understand how remarkable it was that the sky had suddenly lit up with messages like a Christmas tree, after more than half a century of dogged, fruitless, frustrating listening. Harry would have loved to see it.

"Caitlin, I don't really understand how all these signals can be arriving just now. I mean, it takes years for light to travel between the stars, doesn't it? We only knew about the phantom energy a few months ago."

"But others might have detected it long before, with better technology than we've got. That would give you time to send something. Maybe the signals have been timed to get here, just before the end, aimed just at us."

"That's a nice thought."

"Some of us hoped that there would be an answer to the dark energy in all those messages."

"What answer could there be?"

Caitlin shrugged. "If we can't decode the messages we'll never know. And I suppose if there was anything to be done, it would have been done by now."

"I don't think the messages need decoding," Maureen said.

Caitlin looked at her curiously, but didn't pursue it. "Listen, Mum. Some of us are going to try to do something. You understand that the Rip works down the scales, that larger structures break up first. The Galaxy, then the solar system, then planets like Earth. And then the human body."

Maureen considered. "So people will outlive the Earth."

"Well, they could. For maybe about thirty minutes, until atomic structures get pulled apart. There's talk of establishing a sort of shelter in Oxford that could survive the end of the Earth. Like a submarine, I suppose. And if you wore a pressure suit you might last a bit longer even than that. The design goal is to make it through to the last microsecond. You could gather another thirty minutes of data that way. They've asked me to go in there."

"Will you?"

"I haven't decided. It will depend on how we feel about the kids, and—you know."

Maureen considered. "You must do what makes you happy, I suppose."

"Yes. But it's hard to know what that is, isn't it?" Caitlin looked up at the sky. "It's going to be a hot day."

"Yes. And a long one. I think I'm glad about that. The night sky looks odd now the Milky Way has gone."

"And the stars are flying off one by one," Caitlin mused. "I suppose the constellations will look funny by the autumn."

"Do you want some more sandwiches?"

"I'll have a bit more of that cordial. It's very good, Mum."

"It's elderflower. I collect the blossoms from that bush down the road. I'll give you the recipe if you like."

"Shall we see if your Joe fancies laying a bit of concrete this afternoon? I could do with meeting your new beau."

"Oh, shut up," Maureen said, and she went inside to make a fresh jug of cordial.

October 14th

That morning Maureen got up early. She was pleased that it was a bright morning, after the rain of the last few days. It was a lovely autumn day. She had breakfast listening to the last-ever episode of The Archers, but her radio battery failed before the end.

She went to work in the garden, hoping to get everything done before the light went. There was plenty of work, leaves to rake up, the roses and the clematis to prune. She had decided to plant a row of daffodil bulbs around the base of the new pergola.

She noticed a little band of goldfinches, plundering a clump of Michaelmas daisies for seed. She sat back on her heels to watch. The colourful little birds had always been her favourites.

Then the light went, just like that, darkening as if somebody was throwing a dimmer switch. Maureen looked up. The sun was rushing away, and sucking all the light out of the sky with it. It was a remarkable sight, and she wished she had a camera. As the light turned grey, and then charcoal, and then utterly black, she heard the goldfinches fly off in a clatter, confused. It had only taken a few minutes.

Maureen was prepared. She dug a little torch out of the pocket of her old quilted coat. She had been hoarding the batteries; you hadn't been able to buy them for weeks. The torch got her as far as the pergola, where she lit some rush torches that she'd fixed to canes.

Then she sat in the pergola, in the dark, with her garden lit up by her rush torches, and waited. She wished she had thought to bring out her book. She didn't suppose there would be time to finish it now. Anyhow the flickering firelight would be bad for her eyes.

"Mum?"

The soft voice made her jump. It was Caitlin, threading her way across the garden with a torch of her own.

"I'm in here, love."

Caitlin joined her mother in the pergola, and they sat on the wooden benches, on the thin cushions Maureen had been able to buy. Caitlin shut down her torch to conserve the battery.

Maureen said, "The sun went, right on cue."

"Oh, it's all working out, bang on time."

Somewhere there was shouting, whooping, a tinkle of broken glass.

"Someone's having fun," Maureen said.

"It's a bit like an eclipse," Caitlin said. "Like in Cornwall, do you remember? The sky was cloudy, and we couldn't see a bit of the eclipse. But at that moment when the sky went dark, everybody got excited. Something primeval, I suppose."

"Would you like a drink? I've got a flask of tea. The milk's a bit off, I'm afraid."

"I'm fine, thanks."

"I got up early and managed to get my bulbs in. I didn't have time to trim that clematis, though. I got it all ready for the winter, I think."

"I'm glad."

"I'd rather be out here than indoors, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, yes."

"I thought about bringing blankets. I didn't know if it would get cold."

"Not much. The air will keep its heat for a bit. There won't be time to get very cold."

"I was going to fix up some electric lights out here. But the power's been off for days."

"The rushes are better, anyway. I would have been here earlier. There was a jam by the church. All the churches are packed, I imagine. And then I ran out of petrol a couple of miles back. We haven't been able to fill up for weeks."

"It's all right. I'm glad to see you. I didn't expect you at all. I couldn't ring." Even the mobile networks had been down for days. In the end everything had slowly broken down, as people simply gave up their jobs and went home. Maureen asked carefully, "So how's Bill and the kids?"

"We had an early Christmas," Caitlin said. "They'll both miss their birthdays, but we didn't think they should be cheated out of Christmas too. We did it all this morning. Stockings, a tree, the decorations and the lights down from the loft, presents, the lot. And then we had a big lunch. I couldn't find a turkey but I'd been saving a chicken. After lunch the kids went for their nap. Bill put their pills in their lemonade."

Maureen knew she meant the little blue pills the NHS had given out to every household.

"Bill lay down with them. He said he was going to wait with them until he was sure—you know. That they wouldn't wake up, and be distressed. Then he was going to take his own pill."

Maureen took her hand. "You didn't stay with them?"

"I didn't want to take the pill." There was some bitterness in her voice. "I always wanted to see it through to the end. I suppose it's the scientist in me. We argued about it. We fought, I suppose. In the end we decided this way was the best."

Maureen thought that on some level Caitlin couldn't really believe her children were gone, or she couldn't keep functioning like this. "Well, I'm glad you're here with me. And I never fancied those pills either. Although—will it hurt?"

"Only briefly. When the Earth's crust gives way. It will be like sitting on top of an erupting volcano."

"You had an early Christmas. Now we're going to have an early Bonfire Night."

"It looks like it. I wanted to see it through," Caitlin said again. "After all I was in at the start—those supernova studies."

"You mustn't think it's somehow your fault."

"I do, a bit," Caitlin confessed. "Stupid, isn't it?"

"But you decided not to go to the shelter in Oxford with the others?"

"I'd rather be here. With you. Oh, but I brought this." She dug into her coat pocket and produced a sphere, about the size of a tennis ball.

Maureen took it. It was heavy, with a smooth black surface.

Caitlin said, "It's the stuff they make space shuttle heatshield tiles out of. It can soak up a lot of heat."

"So it will survive the Earth breaking up."

"That's the idea."

"Are there instruments inside?"

"Yes. It should keep working, keep recording until the expansion gets down to the centimetre scale, and the Rip cracks the sphere open. Then it will release a cloud of even finer sensor units, motes we call them. It's nanotechnology, Mum, machines the size of molecules. They will keep gathering data until the expansion reaches molecular scales."

"How long will that take after the big sphere breaks up?"

"Oh, a microsecond or so. There's nothing we could come up with that could keep data-gathering after that."

Maureen hefted the little device. "What a wonderful little gadget. It's a shame nobody will be able to use its data."

"Well, you never know," Caitlin said. "Some of the cosmologists say this is just a transition, rather than an end. The universe has passed through transitions before, for instance from an age dominated by radiation to one dominated by matter—our age. Maybe there will be life of some kind in a new era dominated by the dark energy."

"But nothing like us."

"I'm afraid not."

Maureen stood and put the sphere down in the middle of the lawn. The grass was just faintly moist, with dew, as the air cooled. "Will it be all right here?"

"I should think so."

The ground shuddered, and there was a sound like a door slamming, deep in the ground. Alarms went off, from cars and houses, distant wails. Maureen hurried back to the pergola. She sat with Caitlin, and they wrapped their arms around each other.

Caitlin raised her wrist to peer at her watch, then gave it up. "I don't suppose we need a countdown."

The ground shook more violently, and there was an odd sound, like waves rushing over pebbles on a beach. Maureen peered out of the pergola. Remarkably, one wall of her house had given way, just like that, and the bricks had tumbled into a heap.

"You'll never get a builder out now," Caitlin said, but her voice was edgy.

"We'd better get out of here."

"All right."

They got out of the pergola and stood side by side on the lawn, over the little sphere of instruments, holding onto each other. There was another tremor, and Maureen's roof tiles slid to the ground, smashing and tinkling.

"Mum, there's one thing."

"Yes, love."

"You said you didn't think all those alien signals needed to be decoded."

"Why, no. I always thought it was obvious what all the signals were saying."

"What?"

Maureen tried to reply.

The ground burst open. The scrap of dewy lawn flung itself into the air, and Maureen was thrown down, her face pressed against the grass. She glimpsed houses and trees and people, all flying in the air, underlit by a furnace-red glow from beneath.

But she was still holding Caitlin. Caitlin's eyes were squeezed tight shut. "Goodbye," Maureen yelled. "They were just saying goodbye." But she couldn't tell if Caitlin could hear.

Jesus Christ, Reanimator

Ken Macleod

Ken MacLeod (kenmacleod.blogspot.com) was one of the most exciting new science fiction writers to emerge during the '90s. His "Fall Revolution" quartet and "Engines of Light" trilogy are typical of his work, focusing on politics and economics, but still delivering the kind of widescreen, high-bit-rate, action-packed qualities that science fiction adventure demands. His most recent book is the near future SF novel The Execution Channel.

The story that follows, which has easily the best title of the year (a play on the title of an H. P. Lovecraft classic), is a satirical look at what might happen if the second coming actually arrived.

The Second Coming was something of a washout, if you remember. It lit up early-warning radar like a Christmas tree, of course, and the Israeli Air Force gave the heavenly host a respectable F-16 fighter escort to the ground, but that was when they were still treating it as a UFO incident. As soon as their sandals touched the dust, Jesus and the handful of bewildered Copts who'd been caught up to meet him in the air looked about for the armies of the Beast and the kings of the earth. The only soldiers they could see were a few terrified guards on a nearby archaeological dig. The armies of the Lord hurled themselves at the IDF and were promptly slaughtered. Their miraculous healings and resurrections created something of a sensation, but after that it was detention and Shin Bet interrogation for the lot of them. The skirmish was caught on video by activists from the International Solidarity Movement, who happened to be driving past the ancient battlefield on their way to Jenin when the trouble started. Jesus was released a couple of months after the Megiddo debacle, but most of the Rapture contingent had Egyptian ID, and the diplomacy was as slow as you'd expect.

Jesus returned to his old stomping ground in the vicinity of Galilee. He hung around a lot with Israeli Arabs, and sometimes crossed to the West Bank. Reports trickled out of a healing here, a near-riot there, an open-air speech somewhere else. At first the IDF and the PA cops gave him a rough time, but there wasn't much they could pin on him. It's been said he avoided politics, but a closer reading of his talks suggests a subtle strategy of working on his listeners' minds, chipping away at assumptions, and leaving them to work out the political implications for themselves. The theological aspects of his teaching were hard to square with those previously attributed to him. Critics were quick to point out the discrepancies, and to ridicule his failure to fulfill the more apocalyptic aspects of the prophecies.

When I caught up with him, under the grubby off-season awnings of a Tiberias lakefront cafe, Jesus was philosophical about it.

"There's only so much information you can pack into a first-century Palestinian brain," he explained, one thumb in a volume of Dennett. "Or a twenty-first-century one, come to that."

I sipped thick, sweet coffee and checked the little camera for sound and image. "Aren't you, ah, omniscient?"

He glowered a little. "What part of 'truly man' don't you people understand?" (He'd been using the cafe's Internet facilities a lot, I'd gathered. His blog comments section had to be seen to be believed.) "It's not rocket science  . . . to mention just one discipline I didn't have a clue about. I could add relativity, quantum mechanics, geology, zoology. Geography, even." He spread his big hands, with their carpenter's calluses and their old scars. "Look, I really expected to return very soon, and that everyone on Earth would see me when I did. I didn't even know the world was a sphere—sure, I could have picked that up from the Greeks, if I'd asked around in Decapolis, but I had other fish to fry."

"But you're"—I fought the rising pitch—"the Creator, begotten, not made, wholly God as well as—"

"Yes, yes," he said. He mugged an aside to the camera. "This stuff would try the patience of a saint, you know." Then he looked me in the eye. "I am the embodiment of the Logos, the very logic of creation, or as it was said in English, 'the Word made flesh.' Just because I am in that sense the entirety of the laws of nature doesn't mean I know all of them, or can override any of them. Quite the reverse, in fact."

"But the miracles—the healings and resurrections—"

"You have to allow for some  . . . pardonable exaggeration in the reports."

"I've seen the ISM video from Megiddo," I said.

"Good for you," he said. "I'd love to see it myself, but the IDF confiscated it in minutes. But then, you probably bribed someone, and that's  . . . not something I can do. Yes, I can resurrect the recent dead, patch bodies back together and so on. Heal injuries and cure illnesses, some of them not purely psychosomatic. Don't ask me to explain how." He waved a hand. "I suspect some kind of quantum hand-wave at the bottom of it."

"But the Rapture! The Second Coming!"

"I can levitate." He shrugged. "So? I was considerably more impressed to discover that you people can fly. In metal machines!"

"Isn't levitation miraculous?"

"It doesn't break any laws of nature, I'll tell you that for nothing. If I can do it, it must be a human capability."

"You mean any human being could levitate?"

"There are recorded instances. Some of them quite well attested, I understand. Even the Catholic Church admits them."

"You could teach people to do it?"

"I suppose I could. But what would be the point? As I said, you can fly already, for all the good that does you." As if by coincidence, a couple of jet fighters broke the sound barrier over the Golan Heights, making the cups rattle. "Same thing with healing, resurrections of the recent dead, and so on. I can do better in individual cases, but in general your health services are doing better than I could. I have better things to do with my time."

"Before we get to that," I said, "there's just one thing I'd like you to clear up. For the viewers, you understand. Are you telling us that after a certain length of time has passed, the dead can't be resurrected?"

"Not at all." He signaled for another pot of coffee. "With God, all things are possible. To put it in your terms, information is conserved. To put it in my terms, we're all remembered in the mind of God. No doubt all human minds and bodies will be reconstituted at some point. As for when—God knows. I don't. I told you this the first time."

"And heaven and hell, the afterlife?"

"Heaven—like I said, the mind of God. It's up in the sky, in a very literal sense." He fumbled in a book-bag under the table and retrieved a dog-eared Tipler. "If this book is anything to go by. I'm not saying you should take The Physics of Immortality as gospel, you understand, but it certainly helped me get my head around some of the concepts. As for hell  . . ." He leaned forward, looking stern. "Look, suppose I tell you: if you keep doing bad things, if you keep refusing to adjust your thoughts and actions to reality, you'll end up in a very bad place. You'll find yourself in deep shit. Who could argue? Not one moral teacher or philosopher, that's for sure. If you won't listen to me, listen to them." He chuckled darkly. "Of course, it's far more interesting to write volumes of Italian poetry speculating on the exact depth and temperature of the shit, but that's just you."

"What about your distinctive ethical teaching?"

He rolled his eyes heavenward. "What distinctive ethical teaching? You'll find almost all of it in the rabbis, the prophets, and the good pagans. I didn't come to teach new morals, but to make people take seriously the morals they had. For some of the quirky bits—no divorce, and eunuchs for the Kingdom and so forth—I refer to my cultural limitations or some information loss in transmission or translation."

I'd already seen the interrogation transcript, and the blog, but I had to ask.

"Could you explain, briefly, the reason for the delay in your return?"

"Where I've been all this time?"

I nodded, a little uneasy. This was the big one, the one where even those who believed him could trip up.

"I was on another planet," he said, flat out. "Where else could I have been? I ascended into heaven, sure. I went up into the sky. Like I said, levitation isn't that big a deal. Gravity's a weak force, not well understood, and can be manipulated mentally if you know how. Surviving in the upper atmosphere, not to mention raw vacuum, wearing nothing but a jelebah—now that's difficult. As soon as I got behind that cloud I was picked up by an alien space ship that happened to be passing—you can call it coincidence, I still call it providence—and transported to its home planet. I'm not at liberty to say which, but—assume you can't go faster than light, think in terms of a two-way trip and a bit of turnaround time, and, well—you do the math."

"Some people," I said, trying to be tactful, "find that hard to believe."

"Tell me about it," he said. "They'll accept levitation and resurrection, but I mention an extrasolar civilization and I'm suddenly a fraud and a New Age guru and a flying saucer nut. Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing camels." He shrugged again, this time wincing slightly, as if there was a painful stiffness in one shoulder. "It's a cross I have to bear, I guess."

What I was thinking, completely irreverently and inappropriately, was the line you lucky bastard! from the scene in Life of Brian. I'd stumbled at this point, like so many others. It was all too Douglas Adams, too von Däniken, too much a shaggy god story. Just about the only people who'd swallowed it so far were a few Mormons, and even they were uncomfortable with his insistence that he really hadn't stopped off in America.

We talked some more; I thanked him and shook hands and headed back to Lod airport with the interview in the can. When I glanced back from the corner Jesus was well into a bottle of wine and deep conversation with a couple of off-duty border cops and an Arab-Israeli tart.

I couldn't pitch the interview as it stood—there was nothing new in it, and I needed an angle. I settled on follow-up research, with scientists as well as theologians, and managed to pull together an interdisciplinary meeting in Imperial College, London, held under Chatham House rules—quotes on the record, but no direct attributions. The consensus was startling. Not one of the clergy, and only one of the physicists, thought it at all probable that we were looking at a return of the original Jesus. They all went for the shaggy god story.

"He's a Moravec bush robot," an Anglican bishop told me, confidently and in confidence.

"A what?" I said.

He sketched what looked like a tree, walking. "The manipulative extremities keep subdividing, right down to the molecular level," he said. "That thing can handle individual atoms. It can look like anything it wants, walk through walls, turn water into wine. Healing and resurrection—provided decay hasn't degraded the memory structures too far—is a doddle."

"And can it make Egyptian Christians float into the sky?" I asked.

He pressed the tips of his fingers together. "How do we know that really happened? His little band of brothers could be—more bush robots!"

"That's a stretch," said the Cambridge cosmologist. "I'm more inclined to suspect gravity manipulation from a stealth orbiter."

"You mean the ship's still up there?" That was the Jesuit, skeptical as usual.

"Of course," said the cosmologist. "We're looking at an attempt to open a conversation, an alien contact, without causing mass panic. Culturally speaking, it's either very clever, or catastrophically inept."

"I'd go for the latter," said the Oxford biologist. "Frankly, I'm disappointed. Regardless of good intentions, this approach can only reinforce religious memes." He glanced around, looking beleaguered ("like a hunted animal," one of the more vindictive of the clergymen chuckled afterwards, in the pub). "No offense intended, gentlemen, ladies, but I see that as counterproductive. In that part of the world, too! As if it needed more fanaticism."

"Excuse me," said the bishop stiffly, "but we're not talking about fanaticism. Nor is he. He is certainly not preaching fanaticism. Personally, I'd almost prefer to believe he was the original Jesus come back. It would be quite a vindication, in a way. It would certainly make the African brethren sit up and take notice."

"You mean, shut up about gay clergy," said the Jesuit, rather unkindly.

"You see?" said the Oxford man, looking at me. "It doesn't matter how liberal he sounds, or how any of them sound. It's all about authoritative revelation. And as soon as they start arguing on that basis, they're at each other's throats." He sighed, pushing biscuit crumbs about on the baize with a fingertip. "My own fear is that the aliens, whoever they are, are right. We're too primitive a species, too mired in all this, too infected by the mind virus of religion, to be approached in any other way. But I'm still afraid it'll backfire on them."

"Oh, there are worse fears than that," said the computer scientist from Imperial, cheerfully. "They could be hostile. They could be intentionally aiming to cause religious strife."

That statement didn't cause religious strife, exactly, but it came damn close. I waited until the dust and feathers had settled, then tried to get the experts to focus on what they all actually agreed on. As I said, the consensus surprised me. It added up to this:

The supposed Second Coming had no religious significance. The man calling himself Jesus was almost certainly not who he claimed to be. He was very likely an AI entity of some type from a post-singularity alien civilization. Further interventions could be expected. Watch the skies.

I wrapped all this around the interview, ran a few talking-head sound bites from the meeting through voice-and-face-distorting software filters, and flogged it to the Discovery Channel. This took a couple of weeks. Then I caught the next El Al flight from Heathrow.

I was sitting in a room with a dozen men, one of them Jesus, all sipping tea and talking. All of them were smoking, except Jesus and myself. I'd caught up with him again in Ramallah. The conversation was in Arabic, and my translator, Sameh, was so engrossed in it he'd forgotten about me. I must admit I was bored.

I was, of course, excited at the idea that this man, if he was a man, represented an alien intervention. I was just as excited by my doubts about it. There was, as the bishop had implied, something quite tempting about the notion that he was who he said he was. The original Jesus had explained himself in terms of the religion of his place and time, and had in turn been explained in terms of contemporary philosophy. It begins in the arcane metaphysics of Paul's letters, and in the Stoic term "Logos" in John, and it continues all the way to the baroque Platonic and Aristotelian edifices of theology. So it was perhaps not entirely strange that this Jesus should explain himself in modern philosophical terms from the very beginning.

Right now, though, he was trying to explain himself to Muslims. The going wasn't easy. I couldn't follow the conversation, but I could hear the strain in the voices. The names of Allah and the Prophet came up frequently. For Muslims, Jesus is a prophet too, and there were plenty of the faithful who didn't take kindly to this man's claims. The gathering here, fraught though it was, was the most sympathetic a hearing as he was likely to get.

In terms of publicity Jesus wasn't doing too well. He'd had his fifteen minutes of fame. Religious leaders had refused to meet him—not that he'd asked—and even the scientists who were prepared to speculate publicly that he was an alien were reluctant to do anything about it. I mean, what could they do about it—cut him up? The defense establishment may have taken seriously these scientists' claims about alien intervention, but there's only so many times you can draw a blank looking for a stealth orbiter before you conclude that there's no stealth orbiter. The general feeling was that something odd had happened, but nobody could be sure what, and for all anyone knew it could have been a bizarre hoax. There were photographs, videos, eyewitness accounts, radar traces—but that kind of evidence can be found any month in Fortean Times and debunked every quarter in Skeptical Inquirer.

The only people—apart from his own small following, most of it online—who paid close attention to his activities were fundamentalist Christians. Not because they believed him. Oh, no. They believed me. That's to say, they believed the religious and scientific experts I'd cited in the documentary. They were quite happy with the notion that he was an alien entity of some kind. To them, an alien meant a demon. Worse, a demon walking around in human shape and claiming to be Jesus could only mean one thing: the Antichrist.

I only found that out later.

Handshakes all round. Smiles. Frowns. Jesus and two of the men—followers, I'd gathered—went out. I and Sameh accompanied them into the muddy street. Breezeblock buildings, corrugated zinc roofs, mud. Ruins here and there. It was nearly dusk. Lights in windows, braziers at stalls, the smell of frying chicken. A big Honda people-carrier drove slowly down the crowded, potholed street, conspicuous among old Renaults and VW Polos and Yugos.

We stood about—a moment of uncertainty about where to go next. Some problem with the traffic. Sameh was talking to the followers, Jesus was gazing around, and I was fiddling with the camera.

I saw a flash. That is to say, for a second I saw nothing else. Then I saw nothing but sky. Everything had become silent. I saw two bright lights moving fast, high above. My legs felt wet and warm. I pressed the palms of my hands on damp gravel and pushed myself up to a sitting position. I could see people running around, mouths open, mouths working; cars accelerating away or coming to a halt; everything covered with gray dust; but I could hear nothing. A little way down the street, smoke rose from a flowerlike abstract sculpture of bent and twisted metal: the Honda, its wheels incongruously intact.

I saw Jesus run towards it. Sameh and the two followers were facedown on the street, hands over the backs of their heads. They didn't see what I saw. I don't know how many people saw it. He leaned into the wrecked Honda and started hauling out the casualties. He dragged out one corpse, whole but charred. He laid it down and pulled out something that might have been a torso. Then he clambered in and started heaving out bits of bodies: an arm, half a leg, a bearded head. More. It was like the back of a butcher's shop.

He vaulted out again and knelt on the road. I saw his hands move, with effort in the arms, as if he was putting the bits together. He stood up. Three men stood up beside him. They looked down at the rags that clothed them, and then at the wreck of their vehicle. They raised their arms and cried out praise to Allah. Jesus had already turned his back on them and was hurrying towards me. He wore jeans and scuffed trainers, a shirt and sweater under a new leather jacket. He was looking straight at me and frowning.

Sound and pain came in a rush. My ears dinned with yells, car horns, screams. My thighs felt—

I looked down. My thighs felt exactly as you would expect with a chunk of metal like a thrown knife in each of them, stuck right into my femurs. I could see my blood pumping out, soaking into the torn cloth. Everything went monochrome for a moment. I saw his hands grab the bits of metal and tug. I heard the grate of the bones. I felt it, too. I heard a double clatter as the metal shards fell on the road. Then Jesus laid his hands on my legs, and leaned back.

"Up," he said.

He held out a hand. I caught it and stood up. As I got to my feet I saw the pale unbroken skin of my thighs through the ripped fabric. My camera lay crushed on the ground. Sameh and the two followers picked themselves up and brushed themselves off.

"What happened?" I asked Jesus, but it was Sameh who answered.

"Another targeted killing," he said. "That Honda. I knew it had to be a Hamas big shot inside." He stared across at the wreck. "How many?"

I pointed at the men, now the center of a small crowd.

"None."

"None?"

"They had a miraculous escape," I said.

Jesus just grinned.

"Let's go," he said.

We departed.

Jesus had a knack for making his movements unpredictable. I and Sameh stayed with him and his followers, jammed in the back of a taxi, to Jerusalem. Through the wall, through the checkpoints. Jesus nodded off. The followers talked to Sameh. I sat bolt upright and replayed everything in my mind. I kept rubbing my thighs, as if I had sweaty hands. When we got out of the taxi at the hotel Jesus seemed to wake up. He leaned forward and said, "Would you like to meet me tomorrow, privately?"

"Yes," I said. "Where?"

"You know where the tours of the Via Dolorosa start?"

I nodded.

"There," he said. "Alone."

I was still struggling for a remark when the taxi door slammed.

I pushed past guides and through coach parties, looking for him. He found me. He had a camera hung from around his neck and a big hat on his head, a white T-shirt under his jacket. We fell in at the back of a dozen or so people following a guide who shouted in English. I think they were Brits. Jesus rubbernecked with the rest of them.

"I saw the Gibson film on DVD," he said.

"What did you think of it?" I asked, feeling a little smug.

"I liked it better than yours," he said.

"I just report," I said.

"You could have done better," he said. "'Moravec bush robot!' I ask you."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Do you deny it?"

He looked at me sharply. "Of course I deny it. What use would a robot be to you?"

"And the whole alien intervention hypothesis?"

The crowd stopped. The guide declaimed. Cameras clicked. We shuffled off again, jostling down an alley.

"Yes, I deny that also."

"And any other natural explanation?"

His lips compressed. He shook his head. "If you mean a hoax, I deny that too. I am who I say I am. I am the natural explanation."

The man in front of us turned. He wore a baseball cap with a Star of David, and his shirt was open at the neck to display a small gold cross on a chain. He reached inside his heavy checked jacket.

"Blasphemer," he said.

He pulled out a handgun and shot Jesus three times in the chest.

I grabbed Jesus. Two men barged out of the crowd and grabbed the assassin. He'd already dropped the gun and had his hands up. The two men wrestled him to the ground at gunpoint, then dragged him to his feet. Screams resounded in the narrow space.

"Police!" the men shouted. One of them waved a police ID card, like it wasn't obvious. I learned later that they'd been shadowing Jesus from the beginning.

The assassin held his hands out for the plastic ties. He kept staring at Jesus.

"Save yourself now!" he jeered. One of the undercover cops gave him the elbow in the solar plexus. He doubled, gasping.

Jesus was bleeding all over me. "Lay off him," he wheezed. "He doesn't know what he's done."

The man strained upright, glaring.

"Playacting to the end, demon! I don't want forgiveness from you!"

Jesus waved a hand, two fingers raised, in a shaky blessing, and sagged in my arms. I staggered backwards. His heels dragged along the ground. One of his shoes came off.

It took a long while for the ambulance to nose through the narrow streets. Jesus lost consciousness long before it arrived. I stayed with him to the hospital. The paramedics did their best—they're good with gunshot wounds in the Holy Land—but he was dead on arrival.

Jesus, DOA.

I couldn't believe it.

I watched every second of the emergency surgery, and I know he was a man.

The autopsy should have taken place within twenty-four hours, but some procedural dispute delayed it for three days. I managed to attend. It didn't even take much effort on my part—I was a witness, I had identified the body when it was pronounced dead. On the slab he looked like the dead Che Guevara. The pathologists opened him up, recovered the bullets, removed organs, and took tissue samples. Results came back from the labs. He was human right down to the DNA. So much for the bush robot theory. There was a burial, and no resurrection. No levitation and no infinitely improbable rescue. Some people still visit the grave. One thing I'm sure of: this time, he's not coming back.

There was a trial, of course. The assassin, an American Christian Zionist, disdained the prompting of his lawyer to plead insanity. He proudly pleaded guilty and claimed to be acting to thwart the attempts of the Antichrist to derail the divine plan for the End Times. I was a witness for the prosecution, but I suspect my testimony had as much effect as the rantings of the accused in the eventual ruling: not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The assassin did six months in a mental hospital. After his release he made a splash on the U.S. fundamentalist lecture circuit as the hero who had shot one of the Devil's minions: the false messiah, the fake Christ. The man he killed wasn't the real Antichrist, it's been decided. The Antichrist is still to come. Millions still await the real Rapture and the return of the real Jesus.

Perhaps it was some obscure guilt about my own inadvertent part in Jesus' assassination that drove me to research his writings and the live recordings of his sayings and miracles. They're all online, and the authentic ones are carefully kept that way by his followers: online, and authentic. There's enough apocryphal stuff in circulation already, and far more interest in him than when he was alive.

The odd thing is, though, that if you trawl, as I've done, through his blog posts, his devastating put-downs in the comment sections, and the shaky cell phone and home-video recordings of his discourses, it has an effect on how you think. It isn't a question of belief, exactly. It's more a question of examining beliefs, and examining your own actions, even your thoughts, as if under his skeptical eye, and in the echo of his sardonic voice. It works on you. It's like a whole new life.

Sorrel's Heart

Susan Palwick

Susan Palwick (improbableoptimisms.blogspot.com) published her first story, "The Woman Who Saved the World," in 1985. An Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, she has gone on to publish three novels, including Flying in Place and The Necessary Beggar, and a handful of intelligent, challenging short stories which have been collected in The Fate of Mice. Her most recent book is Shelter, a major new science fiction novel.

The strange, dark science fiction tale that follows originally appeared in Palwick's collection The Fate of Mice, which stands as one of the best collections of the year.

He found the girl crouched in a ditch by the side of the deserted road, using a jagged rock to try to sever the muscled cords that connected her heart to her body. She was bleeding, of course, and she was weeping, too: her hair a brown tangled mass, yellowish-green snot running down her face, her hands slimy with dirt and gore. She might have been eight or ten, half his own age, or older than that but starved, her thin ribs showing through a tear in her shirt. The tear, he guessed, had once been a hole she'd made for her heart to go through, but had widened with wear and weather; it now showed so much of her scrawny chest that he wondered why she wore a shirt at all. The shirt might have been pink once. She tried to cut the pulsing cords, sawing at them, and when that didn't work, she began to bash them with the rock, crying out in pain with each impact.

"Don't do that," he said, and she looked up, quivering, flinching away as if from a blow. He himself had just walked ten miles or so, fleeing the fire he had set, and was pleasantly tired from the exercise. The stink of charred fur still clung to him, heady incense. "Can't live without a heart."

She squinted at him. "Hurts too much."

He inclined his head politely. "You born that way?" There were all kinds of stories: people born with their skeletons outside their bodies, people born with two heads or none. He'd seen a lot of other freaks, but this was the first that truly interested him. When she bent her head in a shy nod, he said, "Where your people?"

"Don't want me. I'm a freak. Where yours?"

He shrugged. "Never had none. Gave me to the North Wind when I was but a baby. Been wandering ever since. You hungry?" He reached out his hand to her: she didn't take it, but clung to the rock. Her heart pulsed, throbbing.

"You smell," she said.

"Yeah. I know. No chance to wash."

"What's that smell from?"

"Kittens. In a barn. I burned them. They screamed, but only for a second." One hand came up from the rock, now, to cover her mouth, and her eyes brimmed over again. Her heart writhed for a moment before it resumed its steady beat, and he smiled for the first time since he'd seen her. "That hurt you, huh? You'd save them if you could."

"You're a monster. They'll get you. The freak patrol."

"They'll try to get me. They'll try to get you, too."

She raised her chin. "Nobody out here anyway, is there? All the normals went away."

"For now. They'll be back. They never go away for good." He knelt down next to her, mind racing. He made his voice as gentle as he could. "Listen. We can help each other."

She shrank away again. "Won't help you burn cats."

"No no no. I know you won't. You'll help me not burn them."

She squinted. "How?"

"You'll listen to me." He'd always been smart, always been able to think quickly; it was how he'd lived this long. "You'll listen to what I want to do. And it'll hurt you, but not as much as it would hurt them, the animals and whatnot, and then I won't have to do it. Because hurting you will be enough. And I'll help you hide from the normals, get you food and that. You wouldn't last on your own. Me neither. We'll both last longer this way."

She pulled her knees up, as if to protect the heart now nestled between them and her chest. "Don't want to hurt. Told you that. Want to stop hurting. Gotten hurt already."

"How?" She had her own stories; of course she did. She could feed him that way, too.

She looked away. "Poking it with sticks. My heart. Throwing rocks at it. Calling me names. Trying to hurt me, like you want to do."

He couldn't see her heart now, but he knew it was writhing again. He smiled. "That pain ever save anything? Save kittens? Save, oh, baby birds? Let me tell you what I did one time—"

"Stop it!" Her voice was a thin howl.

He went on, implacable. "Let me tell you what I want to do next. Let me tell you this idea I have about horses. An old horse, an old mare just up the road here. A sorrel mare. I want to take red-hot irons and poke out her eyes and then stick a red-hot iron up—"

She was lying on the ground now, sideways, her heart still hidden: but all of her was writhing, hands clenched over her ears, tears streaming down her face. "Stop it! Stop it!"

"All right," he said, as light-headed as if he'd been drinking wine. "You just did. You stopped it. Look at me." He reached out a tender hand to touch her knee, just barely brush it; she flinched away, but he reached out again, and this time she let his hand stay there, although she whimpered. "Look at me," he said again, and she did, finally. Her eyes were a muddy brown, red with crying. "You saved that sorrel mare. Just now. By listening. By letting me hurt you, by letting me see how it hurt you. You saved her. I won't touch her now. I promise. I don't need to anymore. It's done. You did that."

"You're a monster."

"I am. But I always tell the truth. Everything hurts you: everything hurts your heart, because it's out there where everything can touch it. Right?" She nodded, as he had known she would, and he removed his hand from her knee. "I'll never touch you again, not unless you want it. All I'll use is words. Listen: you cut your heart away, you die. You don't hurt anymore, but things die, because I kill them. You walk away from me and live, you still hurt, and things still die, because I kill them. You stay with me, you still hurt, but those things don't die. You save them. And maybe you save me, too, from the freak patrol."

She was listening, although she hadn't said anything. Her eyes were fixed on his. She had lowered her knees a little, and he could see her heart, beating more calmly now. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a translucent stone he'd found weeks ago, a rock the color of the sea; he hadn't known until now why he'd been carrying it with him. When she saw it her eyes widened and she smiled, startled, and he said, "See? There's beauty too, in the world. Good things, not just hurtful ones. Reasons to stay. Your heart is beautiful."

The smile faded. "No it ain't."

"I say it is, Sorrel. That's what I'm going to call you. Your heart is beautiful to me. Your heart is a reason to stay in the world. Come on now: get up, and we'll go get food."

She couldn't get up: she was after all too weak, from lying in the ditch and trying to hurt herself. She'd been there for hours, maybe days. At last he asked permission to pick her up, and she gave it, and he lifted her in his arms and carried her, his own heart filled with unaccustomed peace. She weighed hardly anything. He looked down at her, her head cradled on his shoulder in sleep, and he wanted to kiss her forehead. But he didn't, because he hadn't asked her leave.

They were together for years after that. He called her Sorrel, and she called him Quartz. He grew into a quiet man, a man neither thick nor thin, with hair the color of wheat and eyes that gazed into far distances and sometimes went dead and blank, and at those times he would tell her what he wanted to do, tell her his yearning dreams, tell her about torn skin and roasted flesh and organs torn from their bony cradles, and she would weep and moan and clutch herself until he was done. When he was done, he would dry her tears and tell her he loved her, and if indeed he was capable of love, then it was true. He was true to his promise, certainly: he never performed the deeds he described to her in such vivid detail. And certainly he found her beautiful, and not just her heart: for if he had grown into a man few people noticed, she had grown tall and lovely, her hair a reddish-brown cascade of curls and her body as graceful as autumn aspens.

And yet he kept his own promise not to touch her, until the night when she crept into his bed and asked him to. Then he did his clumsy best to give her pleasure, and she did her best to teach him, although pain came far more naturally to him, and fear to her. He had been used to meeting his own needs with his own hands, and he found the rhythms of another's flesh unnerving, as unnatural as walking on some other creature's legs. When Sorrel cried out beneath him and then began to weep, he thought that he had broken his promise, that he had hurt her with something other than words; he could feel her heart, crushed between them, beating frantically, and he feared that she would die. But at last she opened her eyes and laughed up at him, and he kissed her on the forehead then, as he had wanted to so many years before.

They were in a barn that night, much like the one where he had burned the cats so long ago. The farmhouse was deserted, and Quartz and Sorrel had raided it for quilts to wrap around themselves and books to use as fuel. They would not destroy the house itself, which might give needed shelter to other freaks some other day. The normals were long gone, the place bereft of food and livestock; this family might not be coming back. It was dangerous to linger in places known abandoned, because that was where the freak patrols hunted, knowing anything left alive would be twisted and diseased. Sometimes there were tales of bands of freaks, groups who had ganged together for protection, but they were hunted and slaughtered, always: no safety in numbers, and even if the stories were invented to prevent such bands from forming, Quartz and Sorrel put their trust in speed and secrecy. They kept always on the move, stopping in normal towns when they had no other choice. At such times they would wrap Sorrel's heart in a shawl and pretend that it was a nursing infant, and when townsfolk asked to see the child, or commented with narrowed eyes on how it never cried, Quartz would bully and bluster, cursing them for daring to disturb his wife, showing them his scarred fists. Did they want to fight? Did they? Dared they suggest that he, so clearly normal, would wed some filthy freak, or father one?

The challengers backed down, always: not from Quartz' words, which meant little—for there were those who would rape any freak, male or female, left unprotected, and countless freaks had been born to normal parents—but from his fierce body, and from his eyes. He would let himself go stone-cold then, let the cruelty come out, and they could see it plain enough. Sometimes he almost wished for a fight, but always when the attackers backed off, he and Sorrel fled. There had been close calls, too many to remember. Always he marveled that no one followed them. And sometimes they would near a town, or enter one, and hear reports of what had just occurred: a shopkeeper saying, That tinker with horns and a tail, we hung him sure enough, or children laughing about last night's sport, The lady who crowed like a rooster, we chased her through the streets until the dogs got her, or women gossiping idly in the market, Oh, of course they had to kill the devil-child, born with a fish's tail, and killed the mother too, it was only a mercy, who knows what else she might have birthed. And sometimes they heard nothing, but saw instead: gutted three-legged corpses by the side of the road, heads with no mouths rotting on fenceposts, misshapen bodies dragged behind carts.

All such towns they skirted, or left as quickly as their legs would carry them. And soon enough Sorrel told him, "If that's normal, you must be normal too, Quartz, freak only that you've found a way not to do it." They were curled in a ditch, then, not so different from the one where he had found her, save that it was night, and warm, and stars and a round moon shone overhead.

"No. They hurt freaks. It's the normal I want to hurt, what's whole and healthy."

She shook her head. "No different. You could—you could live normal. Give me up, give up the danger. Cut my heart from my body and leave me, live in some town, take joy in their hunts and hatreds."

"None," he answered, stubborn. "I'd have no joy in that: only in hurting what they love. Kittens and horses, baby birds, their own children, maybe."

"They don't love me." Her voice was quiet. "Hurting me is what saves the kittens and babies, the things they love that you hunger to hurt instead. That's how you said it worked, all those years ago. But they don't love me. They'd kill me if they saw me uncovered."

That stopped him. He raised himself on one elbow and peered down at her in the moonlight. He could feel himself frowning. What did she mean? "You don't want me to hurt you anymore? You're tired of saving those other creatures, when you can't save freaks from the normals? You want to die again. You want me to go live in some town where—"

"No. No, Quartz. None of that. None of it. All I mean," and then she stopped, for so long that he thought she'd fallen asleep, or forgotten what she meant. "All I mean," she said at last, and suddenly he found that he could breathe again, "is that when you found me, you said I'd protect you. But you don't need me for that. You don't need me to stop you from being what you are. You could be what you are; you could live among them, and they'd never know no difference."

She looked up at him, and he saw tears shining in her eyes. "Quartz, when you found me, you said as how you needed me. But you don't, not now. If you're with me, you're with me because you want me. I'm a choice then, after all. Not a cage or a burden. You see?"

He saw. He sat up, and took her heart in both his hands, and kissed it, feeling it pulse against his lips. "I told you it was beautiful," he said.

Not long after that—and later they thought perhaps it had happened that very night—she told him she was with child. She could tell, she said, although her belly was still flat. She knew. And she was afraid. Afraid that he'd hurt their child, Quartz thought she meant at first, when she told him about the fear; but no, her fear was different.

"My mama died giving birth to me," she said softly. They were sitting under a rare tree off the road, sitting in the shade: sometimes a cart passed by, and then they'd nuzzle each other and pretend to be young lovers, which was true enough. "She died because I wasn't shaped right, because I tore her up inside, and I almost died too, because my heart got trapped inside her. The midwife had to reach in to pull it out, and then my mama died, and my daddy and my aunt had to pay the midwife all the money they had not to kill me too, not to tell anyone what had happened. They had to run. And finally they were tired of running, tired of having to hide me, and they left me behind, abandoned me so they could live as normals."

"We won't leave our baby, Sorrel."

"What if I die? What if the baby dies? Having babies is hard work. No midwife will help me, Quartz. We don't have money to pay anybody, to buy silence."

"We'll figure something out. Hush now. Hush, Sorrel." But fear rose in him, too. They couldn't always be moving, with a child. They'd have to settle somewhere, and where was safe? "We'll go to the mountains, the high places. We'll find our way there before you're too big."

"That's where the worst freaks are," she said. "The ones who eat people, the monsters who'd eat us too, oh Quartz, you've heard the tales—"

"Tales. That's all they are. Tales told by normals, and how much truth can those hold? Who's been to the mountains and come back to tell the tales?"

"Nobody! Because they get eaten!" Her heart fluttered wildly, and he put out a hand to soothe it.

"Sorrel, hush. They don't come back to say, so we don't know. Maybe they don't come back because it's so beautiful, because they're happy. Maybe they don't come back because—because the freaks welcome them and they don't want to go back to hurting folks. Maybe all the freaks there are the ones who've gone to have their babies in peace, like we'll do, Sorrel."

She shuddered, her heart still racing. "And maybe there's no freak settlement in the mountains at all. Maybe the normals put that story out so they can trap and kill any freaks who try to go there, jump them on the road."

He'd thought that, too, more than once. It was why he had never suggested going there until now. He closed his eyes. "We have months. We have months to get there. We'll find a side road, a secret way. A cave. We'll be careful."

And so they began to walk towards the mountains, visible only as a faint blue line in the distance, and then only in the clearest weather. They walked as quickly as they could, and yet they found the going slow. Sorrel was sick and grew weak; she craved foods Quartz could only get in towns, butter and cheeses and cured meats, and he had to take to thieving to meet her appetites. Her ankles swelled as her stomach did, and sometimes, when she cried out in pain, Quartz found himself cursing the child, wishing that this baby would either lose itself or come more easily. He himself was afraid, afraid. He had never wished to nurture any small thing, only to harm it, and he found himself craving release, longing to torture rabbits he startled in the fields or the piglets they passed being driven to market, hungering for the feel of blood flowing through his fingers, for the stench of burned flesh and the agonized screams of the slaughtered.

He shared one such fantasy with Sorrel, but her grimaces were so dreadful, her heart so reckless in its pounding, that he stopped, knowing his own face ashen. She could not protect him anymore. Her world was all the child within her belly, and so must his be. And so he tried to content himself with hunting game she did not wish to eat, with skinning fowl whose smell, as they roasted, made her retch.

And yet the baby clung, and her belly grew, and the mountains grew nearer. They walked uphill now, more and more slowly, and their choices of road narrowed. Quartz scouted other paths as Sorrel slept, but found only wildernesses of brambles, pathless forests, sheer rocky slopes: places that would be difficult for him to travel, impossible for her. There was one road only, now. And he thought of the tales, the tales of how no one survived in the mountains, and dread settled in his gut, as heavy as if he too bore a child.

There was one road only, and it led to a small village they must pass to reach the heights. They arrived there at dusk, Sorrel exhausted and dragging. They stood in a square surrounded by houses and barns: Quartz could hear bleating and neighing, and had to close his eyes to fight his lust for torn flesh, for pain and blood. He opened them only when he heard panting next to him: Sorrel, fighting for breath. He put his hand on the cloth covering her heart; it beat alarmingly, very very fast and then too slow. "The baby," she said. "I think—"

"Too early," he said. "It's too early, Sorrel, it can't be coming yet." Only seven months had passed, and they weren't in the mountains. They weren't safe yet.

"Babies come when they will," someone said, and Quartz looked up to find a woman in front of them, staring at them in the fading light. She was wearing a red kerchief, and immediately the color made him yearn for blood. "What's that your wife's holding in her arms?"

Quartz swallowed. "An infant, we—"

"She's so big with one child, and has another so small?"

"Wet-nurse," Sorrel said, her voice somewhere between a whisper and a moan. "My sister's child. I had a baby died, and my sister died and I took hers, and then we made this one who's coming, see. Goodwife, I need to lie down now."

Quartz had no idea if the woman in red had been convinced by Sorrel's explanation or not, although it was far cleverer than anything he'd have been able to invent, quick brain or no. "I can work," he said, his voice tight. "To pay for any help you give us. I'm good with my hands. I can thatch roofs, slaughter animals."

No one was listening to him. The woman in red had taken Sorrel's arm, with a clucking sound, and was leading her towards one of the houses. Quartz followed numbly. How many people lived here? All he had seen so far was the one woman, whose kerchief looked so much like blood, and he could kill her sure, could wring her scrawny neck as if she were only a chicken. He let himself picture that for a moment, imagine how her spine would feel snapping under his hands. He let the lust for pain fill him. And then Sorrel screamed.

Sorrel screamed, and he ran to follow the sound, found himself standing in one corner of a lamplit room as the woman carried in towels and basins of water and Sorrel thrashed on the bed, moaning, and now the woman was doing something between Sorrel's legs and now Sorrel was screaming again and now the woman was pulling her wrap away, trying to give her more freedom of movement maybe, pulling away her clothing to reveal her heart beating there, her heart pounding on her chest, just as Quartz had seen it that day so many years ago when Sorrel had sat in the ditch, battering herself with the jagged rock.

He had to protect her. He had promised. He had promised, and he had never failed in that promise, whatever else he had done or not done. He had promised that only he would hurt her, no one else. The woman with the red kerchief was reaching for Sorrel's heart as Sorrel screamed, and Quartz leaped forward, tears choking him, and a rush of blood and something else poured out of Sorrel—blood, too much blood—and the woman grabbed Sorrel's heart and Quartz tackled her, made her let go of Sorrel, dragged her as far away from the birthing bed as he could to protect the beating heart there. And then he strangled the woman in the red kerchief, killed her as he had wished to do since the moment he first saw her; he dug his fingers into her throat and felt her own heart stop beating. This wasn't even cruelty. It was justified. She had reached for Sorrel's heart before ever he reached for hers.

The lamp had gone out, kicked over or snuffed by the wind of the fight. Quartz smelled blood and shit, heard only a thin wailing cry. "Sorrel?" he said. He could not hear her heart. "Sorrel!" He began crawling towards the bed on all fours, afraid that he would trip and fall on her, hurt her, if he tried to walk in this crowded, wet darkness. "Sorrel, can you hear me?"

And then he saw flickering light outside, heard voices and footsteps, and here were more lamps now, held by a group of men who pressed in through the door, who had cudgels and knives—Quartz could see the metal shining in the lamplight—and they were surrounding him and surrounding the bodies, and he heard someone say, "The baby's alive. Little girl. Looks normal, but who can tell? The mother wasn't."

"We heard the screaming," one of the men said to Quartz, and Quartz did not know why his voice was so kind. "We came to help you. You got them, didn't you? Nobody right's lived in this place for years, so when we heard voices, we knew it must be freaks."

"What?" Quartz said. The man who had spoken to him was holding up the red kerchief; someone else kicked the dead body, and through the gaps between people's legs, Quartz saw now that there had been no hair or skull under that kerchief, but only brain, a grey wrinkled thing that maybe had pulsed once like Sorrel's heart, but now was still. A foot came down and ground the brain into slimy mush.

"Freak," someone said, and Quartz closed his eyes. The woman in the red kerchief had been reaching for Sorrel's heart in love or joy or anyway knowledge, not hatred. She had been reaching out to claim one of her own. He had understood nothing he had seen.

"Must've holed up here to have the whelp," someone grunted. "Some sicko raped her maybe, or she got knocked up by one of her own who didn't want her, and this one came too, to help her." They hadn't connected Quartz to the women yet. Of course not; he looked normal.

Now someone was talking to him. "You found them here and took care of them, right? Good man. Wish we'd gotten here in time to help."

"Give me the baby," Quartz said. He forced himself to stand up. "Give me the baby, if she's normal." How was he going to feed her? "Give me the baby. She's mine. My spoil for what I've done, for killing those two." The words caught in his throat. "Give me the baby and bring me some milk. There are animals here. Find one I can milk."

"You want to raise a freak-whelp? Be a while before you can use her." Laughter.

But they brought her, the tiny mewling naked thing: someone had cut the cord that had bound her to her mother, as Sorrel had so long ago wanted to cut the cord that held her to her own heart. The baby was howling, and Quartz took off his shirt and wrapped her in it and looked down at her, knowing that he was truly a freak now too, because now he held his own heart in his hands. He cradled in his arms what was most precious and fragile, what could most easily be taken from him: what, if it was hurt, would cause him the deepest and most unending pain. He must not weep, because the men around him would not understand. He bent and kissed the baby's forehead; and when they snickered, felt the old blood-fury seize him.

Urdumheim

Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick's (www.michaelswanwick.com) first two short stories were published in 1980, and both featured on the Nebula ballot that year. One of the major writers working in the field today, he has been nominated for at least one of the field's major awards in almost every successive year, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and Locus awards. He has published six collections of short fiction, six novels—In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Jack Faust, and Bones of the Earth—and a Hugo Award-nominated book-length interview with editor Gardner Dozois. In recent years Swanwick has also established himself as the modern master of the short-short story, publishing several hundred short-shorts, most notably "The Periodic Table of Science Fiction" and "The Sleep of Reason." His most recent books are new short story collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow, and major new fantasy novel The Dragons of Babel.

Swanwick is a consummate master of the short story, as the rich, strange novelette that follows clearly shows.

Every morning King Nimrod walked to the mountain, climbed its steep sides to the very top, and sang it higher. At noon ravens brought him bread and cheese. At dinner time they brought him manna. At sunset he came down. He had called the granite up from under the ground shortly after Utnapishtim the Navigator landed the boats there. First Inanna had called upon her powers to put the rains to sleep. Then Shaleb the Scribe had picked up a stick and scratched a straight line in the mud, indicating simply: We are here. Thus did history begin.

But before history existed, before time began, King Nimrod led the People out of Urdumheim. Across the stunned and empty spaces of the world they fled, through the plains and over the silent snowy mountains, not knowing if these places had existed before then or if their need and desire had pulled them into being. The land was as large as the sky in those days, and as unpopulated. But in no place could they linger, for always their enemies were close on their heels, eager to return them to slavery.

So came they at last to the limitless salt marshes that lay between the land and the distant sea. It was a time of great floods, when the waters poured endlessly from the heavens and the grass-choked streams were become mighty rivers and there was no dry ground anywhere to be seen. They built shallow-drafted reed boats then, well-pitched beneath, and set across the waters, where no demon could follow. Skimming swiftly over the drowned lands, they drove into the white rains, seeking refuge. Until at last they came upon what was then an island barely distinguishable from the waters. Here they settled, and here they prospered.

They were giants, that first generation, and half the things in the world were made by them first. Utnapishtim invented boats and navigation. Shaleb invented writing and record-keeping. Inanna invented weaving and the arts of lovemaking. Nimrod himself was responsible for bridges, houses, coins, and stoneworking, as well as cultivation and animal husbandry and many other things as well. But greatest of all his inventions was language. The People could not speak before he taught them how.

I was a boy when the winged lion came. That morning, Ninsun had set me to work pitting cherries. It was a tedious, fiddling chore, and because Ninsun had gathered four bushels, it lasted for hours, but there was no way out of it. So as I labored, I asked her questions about the way things used to be and why things were as they are now. Of all the First, she was the least closed-mouthed. Which is not to say she was at all talkative.

"Why is there work?" I asked.

"Because we are lucky."

It didn't seem lucky to me to have to work, and I said so.

"Work makes sense. You labor, you grow tired. You make something, you're better off than you were before. Imagine the world if it weren't that way."

"What was the world like before the People came here?"

"There are no words to describe it."

"Why not?"

"Because there was no language. Nimrod invented language as a way for us to escape from Urdumheim."

"What was Urdumheim like?"

"King Nimrod gave it that name afterwards so we could talk about it. When we lived there, it wasn't called anything."

"But what was it like?"

She looked at me without answering. Then abruptly she opened her mouth in a great O. The interior of her mouth was blacker than soot, blacker than midnight, black beyond imagining. That horrible hole in reality opened wider and wider, growing until it was larger than her face, larger than the room, until it threatened to swallow me up and along with me the entire village and King Nimrod's mountain and all the universe beyond. There were flames within the darkness, though they shed no light, and cold mud underfoot. My stomach lurched and I was overcome by a pervasive sense of wrongness. It seemed to me that I had no name and that it was thus impossible to distinguish between myself and everything else, and that therefore I could by definition never, ever escape from this dreadful and malodorous place.

Ninsun closed her mouth. "It was like that." The clay pot where we dumped the discarded pits was full, so she tossed them out the window. "This is almost done. When we're finished here, you can run along and play."

I don't think that Ninsun was my mother, but who can tell? We had not invented parentage at that time. No one had ever died, and thus no one had foreseen the need to record the passing of generations. Children were simply raised in common, their needs seen to by whoever was closest.

Nor was I the child Ninsun thought me. True, when she released me at last, I did indeed react exactly as a child would in the same circumstances. Which is to say, I was out the door in an instant and hurtling across the fields so fast that a shout to come back would never have reached my ears. My reasons, however, were not those of a boy but of a man, albeit a young one still.

I plunged into the woods and cool green shadows flowed over my body. Only when I could no longer hear the homely village noises of Whitemarsh, the clang of metal in the smithy and the snore of wood at the sawyer's, did I slow to a walk.

Whitemarsh was one of seven villages on an archipelago of low hills that rose gently from the reeds. On Great Island were Landfall, Providence, and First Haven. Further out on islands of their own were Whitemarsh, Fishweir, Oak Hill, and Market. Other, smaller communities there were, some consisting of as few as three or two houses, in such profusion that no man knew them all. But the chief and more populous islands were connected by marsh-roads of poured sand paved with squared-off logs.

By secret ways known only to children (though I was no longer a child, I had been one not long before), I passed through the marshes to a certain hidden place I knew. It was a small meadow clearing just above the banks of one of the numberless crystal-clear creeks that wandered mazily through the reeds. In midday the meadow lay half in sun and half in shade, so that it was a place of comfort whatever the temperature might be. There I threw myself down on the grass to await Silili.

Time passed with agonizing slowness. I worried that Silili had come early and, not finding me there, thought me faithless and left. I worried that she had been sent to Fishweir to make baskets for a season. A thousand horrid possibilities haunted my imagination. But then, at last, she stepped into the clearing.

I rose at the sight of her, and she knelt down beside me. We clasped hands fervently. Her eyes shone. When I looked into those eyes, I felt the way the People must have when the first dawn filled the sky with colors and Aruru sent her voice upward to meet them and so sang the first song. The joy I felt then was almost unbearable; it filled me to bursting.

We lay together, as we had every day for almost a month, kissing and fondling each other. Silili's skin was the color of aged ivory and her nipples were pale apricot. Her pubic hair was light and downy, a golden mist over her mons. It offered no more resistance than a cloud when I ran my fingers through it. She stroked my thighs, my chest, the side of my face. Then, blushing and yet not once taking her eyes from mine, she said, "Gil  . . . I'm ready now."

"Are you sure?" It is a measure of how deeply I loved Silili that I asked at all instead of simply taking her at her word. And a measure of how much I wanted her that when I asked I did not stop stroking her gently with one finger, over and over, along the cleft between her legs, fearful that if I removed my hand her desire for me would go with it. "I can wait, if you want."

"No," she said, "now."

We did then as lovers always do.

Afterwards, we lay together talking quietly, sometimes laughing. Inevitably, our conversation turned to what we would be wearing when next we saw each other.

Children, of course, go everywhere naked. But after this, Silili and I would need to wear clothing in public. Tonight she would go to Inanna and beg enough cloth to make a dress, and thus claim for herself the modesty of a grown woman. Like any male my age, I had already made a shirt and trousers and hidden them away against this very day.

Silili brushed her hands down the front of her body, imagining the dress. "What color should it be?" she asked.

"Green, like the forest. Reddish-orange, like the flames of the sun."

"Which am I to be, then—forest or sun? You are as inconstant as the sky, Gil."

"Blue," I said, "like the sky. White, like the moon and the clouds. Red and yellow and blue like the stars. Orange and purple like the sunset or the mountains at dawn." For she was all things to me and, since in my present frame of mind all things were good, all things in turn put me in mind of her.

She made an exasperated noise, but I could tell she was pleased.

It was at that instant that I heard a soft, heavy thump on the ground behind me. Lazily, I turned my head to see what it was.

I froze.

An enormous winged lion stood on the bank of the stream opposite us. Its fur and feathers were red as blood. Its eyes were black from rim to rim.

Silili, who in all her life had never feared anything, sat up beside me and smiled at the thing. "Hello," she said. "What are you?"

"Hello," the great beast replied. "What are you? Hello. Hellohellohello." Lifting its front paws in the air, it began to prance about on its hind legs in the drollest manner imaginable. "What are you are what. You are what you are what you are. Hello? Hellello. Lo-l o-lo-lo-lo! Hell you are lo you are. What what what!"

Silili threw back her head and laughed peals of silvery laughter. I laughed as well, but uneasily. The creature's teeth were enormous, and it did not seem to me that the cast of its face was at all kindly. "A lion?" Silili asked. "A bird?"

"A bird a bird a bird! A lion a lion a bird!" the beast sang. "You are a lion you are hello what are a bird hello you are a what a what hello. Bird-lion bird-lion lion lion bird!" Then he bounded up into the air, snapped out his mighty wings, and, flapping heavily, flew up and off into the sky, leaving nothing behind him but a foul stench, like rotting garbage.

We both laughed and applauded. How could we not?

But when later I returned to Whitemarsh, and my sister came running out from the village to meet me, I raised my hand in greeting and I could not remember what word I normally used in such circumstances. I wracked my brain for it time and again, to no avail. It was completely gone. And when I tried to describe the beast I had seen, I could remember the words for neither "bird" nor "lion."

Still, that strange incident did not stay long in our minds, for that was the summer when Delondra invented dancing. This was an enormous event among our generation not only for its own sake but because this was the first major creation by anyone who was not of the First. As adults we had to spend our days in labor of various sorts, of course, but we met every evening on the greensward to dance until weariness or romance led us away.

Music had been invented by Enlil years before and we had three instruments then: the box lute, the tabor, and the reed pipe. When the evening darkened, we lit pine-tar torches and set them in a circle about the periphery of the dancing ground and so continued until the stars were high in the sky. Then by ones and twos we drifted homeward, some to make love, others to their lonely beds, and still others to weep and rage, for our hearts were young and active and no way had yet been invented to keep them from being broken.

Which is what we at first thought had happened when Mylitta, who had hours before wandered off into the woods with Irra, returned in tears. (This was late in the summer, when we had been dancing for months.) Mylitta and Irra were lovers, a station or distinction we of the second generation had created on our own. None of the First had lovers, but rather coupled with whoever caught their fancy; but we, being younger and, we thought, wiser, preferred our own arrangements. Even though they did not always bring us joy.

As, we thought, now. Everybody assumed the worst of Irra, of course. But when Mylitta's friends gathered around to comfort her, it turned out that she had been frightened by some creature she had seen.

"What was it like?" Silili asked.

"White," Mylitta said, "like the moon. It came up from the ground like  . . . something long and slithery that moves its head like this." She moved her hand from side to side in a sinuous, undulating motion.

"A snake?" somebody said.

Mylitta looked puzzled, as if the word meant nothing to her. She shook her head, as if dismissing nonsense and, still upset, said, "Its mouth was horrible, with teeth set in circles. And it  . . . and it  . . . talked!"

Now the forgotten lion came to my mind again and, apprehensively, I asked, "Did it say anything? Tell us what it said."

But to this Mylitta could only shake her head.

"Where is Irra?" Silili asked.

"He stayed behind to talk some more."

There was then such a hubbub of talk and argument as only the young can have. In quick order we put together a party to go after our friend and bring him back to us safe. Snatching up knives and staves—knives had been invented long ago, and even then staves had been employed as weapons—we started towards the woods.

Then Irra himself came sauntering out of the darkness, hands behind his back, grinning widely. Mylitta ran to his side and kissed him, but he pushed her playfully away. Then he made a gesture that took in all of us, with our knives and staves and grim expressions, and raised one eyebrow.

"We were going to look for you."

"Mylitta said there was a . . ." With Irra's eyes boring into mine, I could not think of the word for snake. "One of those long, slithery things. Only large. And white."

"Why won't you talk?" Mylitta cried. "Why don't you say anything?"

Irra grinned wider and wider. And now a peculiar thing happened. His face began to glow brighter and brighter, until it shone like the moon.

He held out his hand, fingers spread. Then he squeezed it into a fist. When he opened it again, the fingers had merged into one another, forming a smooth brown flipper. "The  . . . whatever  . . . showed me how to do this."

Nobody knew what to make of his stunt. But then Mylitta started crying again, and by the time we had her soothed down, Irra was gone and it was too late for dancing anyway. So we all went home.

After that evening, strange creatures appeared in more and more profusion at the edges of our settlements. They were never the same twice. There was a thing like an elephant but with impossibly long legs, like a spider's. There was a swarm of scorpions with human faces that were somehow all a single organism. There was a ball of serpents. There was a bird of flame. They arrived suddenly, spoke enigmatically, and then they left.

Every time somebody talked to one of these monsters, words vanished from his or her vocabulary.

Why didn't we go to our elders? The First had powers that dwarfed anything we could do on our own. But we didn't realize initially that this was anything to do with them. It seemed of a piece with the messy emotional stuff of our young lives. Particularly since, for the longest time, Irra was at the center of it.

We did not have a name for it then, but Irra had become a wizard. He had a wizard's power and a wizard's weirdness. He would pop up without warning—striding out of a thicket, jumping down from a rooftop—to perform some never-before-seen action, and then leave. Once he walked right past Mylitta and into her house and before her astonished eyes urinated on the pallet where she slept! Another time, he rode across the fields on a horse of snow, only half-visible in the white mist which steamed off its back, and when the children came running madly out to see, shouting, "Irra! Irra!" and "Give us a ride!" he pelted them with snowballs made from the living substance of his steed, and galloped off, jeering.

These were troubling occurrences, but they did not seem serious enough to warrant bothering the First. Not until I lost Silili.

I was working in the marshes that day, cutting salt hay for winter fodder. It was hot work, and I was sweating so hard that I took off my tunic and labored in my trousers alone. But Silili had promised to bring a lunch to me and I wanted her to see how hard I could work. I bent, I cut, I straightened, and as I turned to drop an armful of hay I saw her standing at the edge of the trees, staring at me. Just the sight of her took my breath away.

I must have looked pleasing to her as well for, without saying a word, she came to me, took my hand and led me to that same meadow where we first made love. Wordlessly, then, we repeated our original vows.

Afterwards, we lay neither speaking nor touching each other. Just savoring our closeness. I remember that I was lying on my stomach, staring at a big, goggle-eyed bullfrog that sat pompously in the shallows of the stream, his great grin out of the water, his pulsing throat within, when suddenly the ground shook under us and a grinding noise filled the air.

We danced to our feet as something like an enormous metal beetle with a kind of grinder or drill in place of a head erupted from the ground, spattering dirt in all directions. The gleaming round body was armored with polished iron plates. A crude mouth opened at the end of an upheld leg and said, "Who." Then, "Are." And finally, "You?"

"Go away," I said sulkily.

"Goooooooo," it moaned. "Waaaaaaaaaay. Aaaaaaaaa."

"No!" I pelted the thing with clods of dirt, but it did not go away. I snatched up a stick and broke it across the beetle's back, to no visible effect. "Nobody wants you here."

"Noooooobody." Its voice was rough and metallic, like nothing I had ever heard before. It reared up on its four hind legs, waving its front pair in the air. "Waaaaaaants." I smashed a stone against one of those hind legs, snapping it off at the joint. Untroubled, it snatched up Silili with its forelegs. "Yoooooouuuuu!"

Then the monstrosity disappeared into the forest.

It had all happened too quickly. For the merest instant I was still, stunned, unable to move. And in that instant, faster than quicksilver, the beetle sped through the trees so nimbly that it was gone before I could react. Leaving behind it nothing but Silili's rapidly dwindling scream.

"Silili!" I cried after her. "Come back! Silili!"

Which is how, fool that I was, I lost her name.

Afterwards, however, I discovered that the limb I had torn from the beetle was that same one which held the creature's mouth. "Where is she?" I demanded. "Where has she been taken to?"

"Ur," it said. "Dum." A long silence. "Heim."

I ran back to Whitemarsh. There was an enormous copper disk, as tall as I was, leaning against the side of the redsmith's forge. I seized a hammer and began slamming on it to raise a great din and bring out everyone within earshot. They say that this was the first alarm that was ever sounded, but what did I care for that?

All the village came running up. Several of the First—Ninsun, Humbaba, two or three others—were among them.

I flung down the hammer.

"Girl!" I cried. Then, shaking my head, "Not girl—woman!" I had questioned the beetle-limb most of the way back to Whitemarsh before concluding that I would learn nothing useful from it and throwing it away in disgust. The interrogation had been a mistake, however, for it half-drained me of language. Now, because I had lost the word lover, I slapped my chest. "Mine." And, howling, "Gone, gone, gone!"

A gabble of voices, questions, outraged cries rose up from the crowd. But Ninsun slammed her hands together and silenced them all with a glare. Then she folded herself down and patted the ground beside her.

"Sit," she said to me. "Tell."

It took time and labor, but I eventually made myself understood.

"When did this begin?" Ninsun asked and, when everybody began talking at once, "You first," she said, pointing. "Then you. Then you." The story that she eventually stitched together was clumsily told, but the old woman nodded and clucked and probed until it had all been brought to light. At last she sighed and said, "The Igigi have come, then."

"What are the Igigi?" Mylitta asked. My body had caught up with the horror of Silili's loss by then. I was heavy with grief and speechless with despair.

"'Igigi' is just a name we gave to them so we could talk about them."

"Yes, but what are they?" Mylitta insisted.

"There are not the words to describe the Igigi."

A frustrated growl rose up from the assembled young. I noticed the First scowling at each other when this happened.

"It is the Igigi," Ninsun said, "who ruled over us in Urdumheim. Surely I have told you about them before?"

Some of us nodded. Others shook their heads.

"The Igigi are logophages." Ninsun regarded us keenly from under those bushy eyebrows of hers. "Nimrod put much of his power into words, and they make us strong. The Igigi feed upon words in order to deny us that strength. Thus they gain power over us."

"Girl-woman-mine," I reminded her. I flung an arm out toward the forest and then drew it back to me. "Woman-to-me. Woman-to-me!"

"Enmul," Ninsun said. A boy who was known to all for his speed and endurance stepped forward. "Run to the top of Ararat. Bring Nimrod here."

King Nimrod came down from the mountain like a storm cloud in his fury. His hair and robes lashed about him, as if in a mighty wind, and sparks shot out from his beard. "You should have told me this long ago," he said to me, glowering, when Ninsun had told him all. "Fool! What did you think language is for?"

Humbly kneeling before him, I said, "Girl-woman-mine." Then I slammed my heart three times to show that I hurt. "Lost-fetch-again!"

With a roar, the king knocked me flat with his enormous fist. When I stood up, he struck me down again. When I stretched out a hand in supplication he kicked me. Finally, when I could not move, Ninsun snapped an order and I was lifted up by the arms and carried away. Radjni and Mammetum laid me down in the shade of a tree, cleaning my wounds and applying mint leaves and mustards to my bruises.

Miserably, I watched as King Nimrod sent runners to every village and outlying house, to gather the People together. Already the First were gathering (they did not need to be sent for), and it was not long before there was such an assembly as had never gathered before nor has since, nor ever will again: all the People in the world.

King Nimrod then spoke: "Oh ye of little faith! I sang high the mountain so that it might be a fortress and protection for the People in times of peril. When I was done, Ararat was to tower so high it would touch the sky, where no demon would dare go. Then would we have made our homes there and been safe forever.

"Alas, our enemies have arrived before my work was done. The slopes of Ararat will slow but not stop them. So before their armies converge upon us, we must prepare to defend ourselves."

All this I narrate as things I have heard and know to be true. Yet, even though I was there, Nimrod's speech was incomprehensible to me. This is what I actually heard:

faith! mountain

fortress protection Ararat

tower demon

safe forever.

Alas enemies Ararat

armies converge

After a hurried consultation among the First, Shaleb the Scribe began sketching plans for a defense. With a gesture, he stripped the land before him of vegetation. Enkidu handed him a staff and he drew a circle: "Ararat," he said. Along its flanks, he drew three nested semicircles: "Curtain wall. Barbican. Palisades." Squiggly lines made a river. He drew a line across it: "Dam." Other lines represented streams. He reshaped them: "Channels."

So it began. At King Nimrod's orders, we cut down trees and built palisades. We dug trenches, redirected streams, created lakes. Foodstuffs were brought in and locked away in warehouses we built for that purpose. Weapons were forged. All this was done under direction of the First. Those of the second generation who'd had the least exposure to the Igigi were made overseers and supervisors, in proportion to their ability to understand directions. Those who could follow only the simplest orders were made runners and carriers. Down at the very bottom of the social order were those such as I who could not be trusted to comprehend the plainest commands and so were used as brute labor, hauling logs or lugging stones, driven to obedience by kicks, cuffs, and curses.

I will not dwell upon my misery, for all that it was compounded by being so richly deserved. Suffice it to say, I suffered.

Then one day a pillar of smoke appeared on the horizon. We put down our shovels and axes—those who were trusted with tools—and as we did so a second pillar arose, and then a third, and a fourth, and a hundredth, until we could no longer count them all. Dark they rose up and wide they spread, until they merged and turned the sky black.

Inanna, who was best-liked of all the First, passed through the camp, handing out strips of cotton cloth. So quick was she that her feet never once touched the earth, and to each one she met she said, "The Igigi are burning the forests. When the smoke comes, fold this cloth like so, dip it in the water, and hold it to your face. This will make breathing easier." When she saw that I did not understand her instructions, she took me by the hand and comprehension flowed through me like a stream of crystal-clear water.

All in an instant, I understood the magnitude of her sacrifice. For the trickle of power that had flowed out of her was gone forever. She would never have it again.

Shocked, I bowed low before her.

My face must have revealed my every thought, for Inanna smiled. "I thank you for your sympathy," she said. "But your gratitude comes too soon. I cannot stay here, holding your hand, and without my touch you will revert to what you were before. But be patient. Be brave. Work hard. And when all is done, there will be a time of healing."

Then she was gone, and with her the temporary gift of understanding.

That night, for the first time, I wept for myself as well as for Silili.

In the morning, walls of flame converged upon us, destroying forests and reed marshes alike. But Inanna's charm was strong, and Shaleb had so cunningly redirected the waters that the flames could not reach us. Even so, the sun did not shine that day, and when night came, we could see the campfires of the Igigi, ring upon ring of them through the murky distance. Their numbers were legion. My heart grew cold at the sight.

For an instant I felt a bleak and total despair. And in that instant, I leapt up from where I had been lying, exhausted, and seized a rope, looped it around a nearby log, and turned to the nearest supervisor. It was Damuzi, who had never been particularly fond of me.

I snorted, as if I were an ox. Then I tugged at the rope. I looked around me, from one quarter of the camp to another. Then I snorted again.

Damuzi looked astonished. Then he laughed. He pointed to a far section of our defenses where the palisades were incomplete. His finger moved from palisades to logs, back and forth repeatedly, until I nodded my comprehension: As many logs as I could manage. Mylitta, who, through her frequent exposure to Irra, had become a man-beast like myself, had been watching us intently. Now she leaped up and looped a length of rope around the far side of my log. She looked at me and snorted.

Together we pulled.

The next day, the Igigi had advanced so close that they could be seen, like swarming insects, on the far side of the lake we had created as our first line of defense. Those who could—those with wings or the ability to swim—attacked us directly. A monstrous feathered serpent came twisting through the water and smashed into the lakefront wall with such force that logs splintered and buckled. Meanwhile, creatures that were something like bears and something like squids descended from the sky and tried to seize People in their tentacles.

Though we cast them back, they kept returning. Pain meant nothing to the Igigi and so varied were their forms that it was difficult to find a way to cripple them all. Even King Nimrod was hard pressed to counter them.

It was then that Humbaba came lumbering forward. "Great hunter, draw your bow!" he cried. And when Nimrod had done as he directed: "Point it toward the nearest of the foe. Let loose thy arrow. Speed it toward the abomination's body!"

The arrow sped. When it struck the feathered serpent, the demon threw back its head and howled. Then it fell and did not rise again.

"What wonder is this?" somebody asked.

"It is my greatest gift, for once given it cannot be taken back," Humbaba said. "I call it death."

At his direction, we set upon the invaders with sticks and knives and rocks. They fell before our onslaught and, briefly, all was satisfactory. But in the aftermath, there lay one body on the ground which was not that of an Igigi. It belonged to Shullat, who was gentle and fond of animals and of whom nobody ever had a bad word to say.

Shullat's death saddened us all greatly, for she was the first of the People ever to die.

That same day, shortly after sundown, Atraharsis passed through the camp distributing spears and knives as long as a tall man's arm. These latter were unknown to us before this, and he had to demonstrate their use over and over again, the sweat on his face glistening by the light of our campfires.

He did not offer any to the oxen, of course, for we were no longer People. But I watched carefully and when I thought I understood how the knives were to be used, stood before him and made a coughing sound to get his attention. Then I pointed to the long-knife, made a slashing motion, and said, "Swssh."

Atraharsis stared in astonishment. I gestured in the direction of the Igigi hordes. Then I turned my back on them and, waving my arms in a whimsical fashion, cried, "Uloolaloolaloo!" in as close as I could manage to the demons' nonsense-speech.

Those standing nearby laughed.

I pretended I held a long-knife and spun around. I jabbed. "Swssh!" I became an Igigi again, clutched my stomach, and made "Glugluglug" noises to indicate blood flowing out. Finally, I became myself and, face furious with hatred, hacked and slashed at my imagined foe. "Swssh! Swssh! Swssh!"

Then I pointed to the bundle of long-knives in Atraharsis's arms. "Swssh." I held out my hand.

Atraharsis's face darkened.

He aimed a kick at me.

I danced back and nearly fell into the campfire. He advanced upon me, speaking angrily. Out of all he said, I caught only the words "traitor" and "Igigi." But it enraged those listening and they rained blows upon me.

All in a panic, I broke free of the throng and tried to escape their wrath. Jeers and clods of mud flew after me. The children pursued me with sticks.

I was harried across the camp all the way to the outermost palisade. There I slipped through the half-rebuilt gap in the wall created when the feathered serpent had smashed into it. I ran up the new lakefront until it opened out into marshland again, and there I lost my pursuers. For a time I wandered, lost and miserable, among the reeds and island copses, with nowhere to go and no place I could stay. Then a pack of seven-tailed wolves that glowed a gentle blue in the moonlight surrounded me and took me captive.

I became a prisoner of the Igigi.

Now began for me the darkest part of that dark era. Every day I was driven along with the other captives to the lakeside across from the First Haven fortifications. The first time, we were lashed with whips that stung like scorpions while we tried desperately to intuit what we were meant to do. Finally, randomly, one of our number began scooping up mud with his hands and the whips moved away from him. We others joined him with hands and flat stones and scraps of wood and soon it became apparent that we were digging a trench to drain the lake.

How often I looked up from my work to stare longingly across that lake! The Igigi continued to attack the People by ones and threes. Sometimes they returned with captives, but more commonly they were slain. Yet they seemed not to learn from this, for they neither lessened nor increased their attacks, nor did they alter their tactics.

Nighttimes, we were herded into a walled enclosure (we had built it ourselves, of course) where we were fed from a trough and slept huddled together like animals. If I'd thought I was an ox before, I was doubly so now, for my fellows were no longer recognizable as People. They had given up all hope of rescue, and when I tried to re-create my crude system of snorts and signs with them, they did not respond. They crapped and coupled in the open as the urge took them and pissed right where they stood. Their eyes, when they looked upon me at all, were dull and lifeless.

They had despaired.

Almost, I despaired as well. But the Igigi had taken Silili from me and that meant that she was out there, somewhere, in their vast encampment. So my thoughts were foremost and forever upon her and even when I was most exhausted I never ceased from looking for her. Hopeless though my cause might be, it maintained me when nothing else could.

Then, one evening, Irra came to the slave pens. He was dressed in spotless white blouse and trousers. There was a coiled leather strap in his hand and a knowing smile on his face.

Reflexively, I tried to cry out his name—but of course that had disappeared from my mind long ago—and managed only a kind of barking sound.

Unhurriedly, Irra tied the strap about my neck. Then, holding one end in a negligent hand, he turned and walked away.

Perforce, I followed.

We walked not toward the dam but through the Igigi encampment. What a foulness they had made of the clean, stream-fed lands! The trees were uprooted and the marsh grasses burnt to stubble and ashes. Craters had been blasted in the earth. The ground was trampled into mud. This did not bother Irra, for he walked a hand's-breadth above it, but there were places where I sank to the knees in cold muck and was half-choked by his impatient tugging on the leash before I could struggle free. Dimly, then, I began to realize that Urdumheim was not a place but a condition  . . . and that, struggle though I might, I was helplessly mired within it.

Eventually we came to a halt in a place that was neither better nor worse than any other in that horrid and despoiled landscape. Here, Irra pulled a small but obviously sharp knife from his pocket. He held up his little finger before my face and made a long and angry speech, not a word of which I understood.

Then he cut off the tip of his finger.

Blood spurted.

Irra thrust the finger-stub at me, and I backed away uncomprehendingly. With a noise of disgust, he pried open my mouth and shoved the gobbet of flesh in. I gagged, but he forced me to swallow.

"Can you understand me now?" he asked.

I could!

"This will only work between the two of us," Irra said sternly. "Do not think you can return to the People now, for you cannot. To them, you will remain as dumb as a stone and their speech shall be to you as the twittering of birds."

"I understand." I almost didn't care, so great was my relief to be able to speak again. I felt as if a part of my mind had been restored to me. I could think clearly for the first time since my capture.

"Then follow me."

Deep in the Igigi encampment, we came upon a tremendous fish. It was larger by far than any whale. A silvery film covered the vast, listless eye that stared blindly at the sky from its rotting side. Flies swarmed all about it and the smell was so terrible I almost vomited. Irra had to half-choke me to keep me going. The stench grew worse the closer we got, until we reached the pink gill slit and so passed within.

The interior was opulent beyond imagining. Polished stone floors supported pillars of agate and turquoise and jade, which rose to a vaulted ceiling so high that shadows nested in it. Flambeaux lined the fishbone-ribbed walls and wavering lines of white candles floated high in the air above. Beneath them clay-fleshed homunculi stumped and winged eyeballs flew and giant snails slid, all passing to and fro without any visible purpose amid splendors that dwarfed everything the People had. Such was the power of the Igigi. Yet they had forced their captives to slave in the mud to build what they could have made with a thought!

To the far end of the great room, a sweep of serpentine steps rose to a dais atop which were what at first appeared to be two mounds of garbage, but on approach revealed themselves as crudely built thrones.

We stopped at the foot of the dais, and the figures seated upon the thrones arose.

"Kneel!" Irra whispered urgently. He did not name the two, but by the awe and disgust I felt within me, I knew them for who they were.

The King and Queen of the Igigi advanced to the top of the steps and stared down on us.

The Queen's face was perfection itself, as sweet and beautiful as the dawn of the very first day. She wore a billowing robe of soft scarlet feathers which opened here and there to reveal a body that would have been as ravishing as her face were it not for her breasts, which reached down to the ground and dragged on the floor behind her.

The King was entirely naked, but his legs were jointed wrong, forcing him to walk backwards, buttocks-first. He had no head, but when he came to a stop and turned, I saw that his features were on his chest and abdomen, so that when he opened his mouth to speak, his stomach gaped wide and his penis waggled on his chin like a goatee.

The hall hushed in anticipation of his words.

"Brekekekek koax koax!" he cried. "Tarball honeycrat kadaa muil. Thrippsy pillivinx. Jolifanto bambla o falli bambla. Aeroflux electroluxe. Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky! Grossiga m'pfa habla horem. Archer Daniel Midlands codfeather squinks. Spectrophotometer. AK-47. Rauserauserauserause. Zero commercials next!"

The Queen threw back her head and laughed like a hyena.

"They demand to know," Irra said, "what new thing this is that the First have done. We send out our best warriors and they do not return. Why?"

I said nothing.

"Why?" Irra repeated angrily. But still I did not respond.

The Queen looked at the King and yipped sharply twice.

"I don't think we need to be subliminable," the King said. "I think we agree, the past is over. I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order—order out of chaos. But we will. I understand reality. If you're asking me  . . . would I understand reality, I do. There will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences. Our enemies never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. I understand small business growth. I was one. They misunderestimated me. My answer is bring 'em on."

"He says that if you do not speak voluntarily, you will be made to speak."

I crossed my arms.

The King shrugged. Almost casually, he said, "Pain."

"Paain," the Queen repeated. "Paaaaaiiiinnnn," she moaned. She made it sound as if it were a good and desirable thing. Then she nodded in my direction.

Pain fell on me.

How to describe what I felt then? Perhaps once, when you were chopping wood, your axe took an unlucky bounce off a knot and the blade sank itself in your leg, so that you fell down screaming and all the world disappeared save your agony alone. Maybe your clothes caught fire and when your friends slapped out the flames, the burning went on and on because your flesh was blackened and blistered. You could not reason then. You howled. You could not think of anything except the pain. That was how it was for me. I folded into myself, weeping.

"Kraw," said the King. "Craaaaaawwwawaw. Craw-aw-wul. Crawl."

Irra looked at me. "Crawl!" he said.

And, pity help me, I did. I crawled, I groveled, I wailed, I pleaded, and when at last my tormentors granted me permission to speak, I told them everything I knew. "It is called death," I said. "Humbaba invented it." And I explained its nature as best I could, including the fact that the People were subject to it as well as the Igigi. It would have been better, far better, had I said nothing. But the pain unmanned me, and I babbled on and on until Irra finally said, "Enough."

Thus it was that I became a traitor.

The next day the war began in earnest. Where before the Igigi had attacked in ones and threes, now they came in phalanxes. Where before they had taken captives, now they sought only to kill. Such were the fruits of my treachery.

The People fought like heroes, every one. They were heroes—the first and the best that ever were. They fought as no one had ever fought before or ever will again. Glory shone about their brows. Lightnings shot out of their eyes.

They lost.

Do I need to tell you about the fighting? It was as ugly and confusing then as it is today. There were shouts of anger and screams of pain. Blood gushed. Bodies fell. I saw it all from across the lake where—pointlessly, needlessly—we animals labored to widen the drainage canal. This despite the fact that the lake was half-empty already and its mud flats no hindrance to the attacking Igigi at all. But if we stopped we were whipped, and so we toiled on.

The palisades fell. Then the inner walls behind them.

The People retreated up the mountain. Halfway to the summit they had built a final redoubt and this they held against all the Igigi could throw against them. The sides of Ararat were steep and the way up it narrow, and thus the demons could only attack in small numbers. Always, Nimrod stalked the heights, his great bow in hand, so that they dared not approach by air.

At night, as I was herded back to the slave pens, I could see the lower slopes of Ararat ablaze with fires too numerous to count. These were not campfires such as armies build against the cold and to cook their food, for the Igigi needed neither warmth nor sustenance. They were built for no good reason at all, as acts of vandalism. The closer ones flickered as the bodies of the Igigi passed before them, for their numbers were legion.

One evening as the gates to the slave compound slammed shut behind me and I sank to the ground, too tired to struggle through the other animals and fight for food at the trough, it struck me that I was going to die soon and that under the circumstances this might well be no bad thing. As I was thinking these dark thoughts, the gates opened again and in rode Irra on a beast that stumbled and struggled to bear up under his weight. He leapt down from his mount and the beast straightened. It was a woman! She was naked as a child, but leather straps had been lashed about her so that her arms were bound tight to her sides. A saddle was strapped to her back, and there was a bit in her mouth.

For a second I thought it was Silili and my heart leapt up with anger and joy. I rose to my feet. Then I recognized her and my heart fell again.

"Mylitta," I said sadly. "You were captured too."

"She cannot understand you," Irra said. "Have you forgotten?"

I had. Now, however, I moved one foot like an ox pawing the ground: Hello.

Mylitta did not respond. Her eyes were dull and lifeless, and so I knew that she had, like so many other captives, given up all hope and sunk down into a less-than-animal state. Either she had been captured in an Igigi raid or—more likely, it seemed to me—she had slipped away to look for her lover. And, finding him, been treated thus.

I do not think I have ever hated another human being as in that instant I hated Irra.

"Stop staring at the beast!" Irra commanded. "Nimrod broods upon the mountaintop. Our King and Queen believe he contemplates some sorcery so mighty that even he fears its consequences. They feel his growing resolve upon the night winds. So he must be stopped. It is their command that you kill him."

"Me?" I struggled against the urge to sink back to the ground. "I can barely stand. I'd laugh if I had the strength for it."

"You shall have all the strength you need." Irra drew a peeled willow wand from his tunic and with it struck me between the shoulder blades. I grunted and bent over double as enormous wings of bone and leather erupted from my back. When I straightened, I saw that Irra had given himself bat-wings as well.

"Follow!" he cried, and leapt into the air.

Involuntarily, I surged after him. Below me, poor Mylitta dwindled into an unmoving speck and was lost among the other captive slaves. That was the last that ever I saw her.

We flew.

Under other circumstances, it would have been a glorious experience. Flying was easier than swimming. My muscles worked surely and strongly, and the wind felt silky-smooth under my wings. But the lands we flew over were ugly and defiled. Pits and trenches had been gouged into it for no purpose whatsoever. A constellation of trash-fires that had once been our crofts smoldered under us. The very clouds overhead were lit a sullen orange by them.

"Look upon your work," I said bitterly.

Irra swooped downward, drawing me involuntarily after him, so that we skimmed low over the mud-flats of the half-drained lake. They were littered with corpses. "Behold yours," he said. "And tell me—whose creation is the more monstrous?"

To this I had no response.

We flew in a wide circle around Ararat, in order to approach the redoubt from its less defended side. For hours we flew. From my lofty vantage I could see the multitudes of invaders infesting and defiling the land below. Their numbers took my breath away. It is scant exaggeration to declare that there was a nation of monsters for each one of the People. I did not see how we could possibly prevail. But at last, in the long gray hour of false dawn, we alit in the steep and disputed mountainside between the People's final fortress and the Igigi encampments. There, at a touch of Irra's wand, my wings folded themselves back into my body. Without dismissing his own wings, he proceeded to take a long and leisurely leak against a nearby boulder.

Finally, I spoke. "Mylitta loved you! How could you treat her so?"

Irra smiled over his shoulder. "You want reasons. But there are none. Even this stone is wiser than you are." He turned, still pissing. I had to jump backwards, almost spraining an ankle, to avoid being sprayed. "You see? The stone knows that the world is what it is, and so it endures what it must. You hope for better, and so you suffer."

Done, he tucked himself in and said, "Wait here." Then he threw himself into the air again, soaring higher and higher until he was no larger than a flea. Up he went and down he came. Yet as he drew closer he dwindled in size, so that he grew no larger to the eye. When he reached his starting place, he was as small as a midge. Three times he buzzed around my head.

Then he flew into my ear.

With a dreadful itching sensation that made me claw desperately at my head, Irra burrowed deep into my brain. Coming at last to rest, he said, "Climb upward. When you reach the redoubt, its defenders will recognize you and let you in. If your actions displease me, I will treat you thus."

I screamed as every bone in my body shattered and blood exploded from all my orifices.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the pain was gone. I was still standing, and unhurt. Everything but the pain had been an illusion. "That was but a warning," Irra said. "If you disobey or displease me in the least way, I will visit such torments upon you that you will remember the Igigi Queen's ministrations with fond nostalgia. Do you understand?"

Abjectly, I nodded my head.

"Then go!"

Like a mouse, I crept up the mountain's flank, using its trees and bushes for cover when I could and furtively clinging to the bare rock when I could not. Once, I caught a glimpse of Nimrod's gigantic figure as he stood at the topmost peak, back to me, contemplating the war below. His power was a palpable thing, and in that instant I felt sure that Irra's cause was hopeless for his merest glance, were it to fall upon me, would have burnt me to ashes. Simultaneously, I experienced an involuntary lifting of my spirits, for the upper slopes of Ararat were untouched by the Igigi and the scent of the pines was clean and invigorating. I began to hope and, hoping, began to scheme.

The redoubt, when we reached it, was less a thing than a congeries of defenses—here a wall, there a scarp at the top of which defenders stood with piles of stones. If the mountain had been taller and steeper, the People could have held it forever. But I had seen the Igigi's swarming millions and knew that inevitably Ararat must fall. Nevertheless, when I came strolling up King Nimrod's path, whistling and swinging my arms as Irra had directed me to do, I was waved on upward by the guards after the most cursory of examinations.

I was home again.

Despite everything, it felt wonderful.

The People were everywhere working urgently. Shelters were being built and defenses strengthened. Sparks flew upward from the smithies and baskets of apples and cattail roots were hustled away into newly dug caves. Most astonishing of all, the oxen were People once more! I saw them carrying long-knives and spears and huddled over plans for the defenses, arguing in grunts and snorts. They were clapped on the shoulder in passing by others who clearly could not understand them, and there were even those—I noticed them, though Irra did not seem to—who could speak both tongues. One tall woman strode by with a war-trident over her shoulder, singing words that sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. Clearly, the oxen-speech had evolved.

I was but newly arrived when my old friend Namtar rushed up and, dropping an armful of long-knives on the ground, hugged me.

I pawed the ground with one foot: Hello.

Namtar made a cage of one hand and whistled frantically like a captive bird. Then, opening the hand, he trilled like that same bird escaping. Finally, he said, "Eh?" Meaning: How had I escaped?

I slammed one fist into the other. Holding my hands out as if throttling a monster's neck, I twisted them. "Snap!" I lied: I fought my way free.

Namtar grinned appreciatively. Then he made a noise—"Shhhweeoo, shhh-weeoo!"—like the hurrying wind and pointing first to me and then to the swords, made a carrying gesture. He lifted his voice in a sweet, clear note, which could only refer to she who had invented song: He had to hurry. Would I bring these things to Aruru?

I snorted assent, and he was gone.

"That was well done," Irra said from within my ear. "Walk briskly. Wait until nobody is watching. Then get rid of this junk."

I dumped the long-knives on a dung heap, and threw an armload of hay over them so that no one would know. Soon after, somebody called me to her and gave me another chore. So went my day. I worked my way up the slope, smiling cheerfully (for Irra punished me if I was anything less than upbeat), accepting whatever work was given me and then abandoning it when I could and performing it with apparent enthusiasm when I could not. Three steps forward, two steps back. By degrees, I pushed toward Ararat's summit.

At midday I ate a meager lunch of two taro-cakes and an apple while sitting at the top of a short cliff. It was not far to its bottom, I reflected, only five body-lengths or so, yet the fall would certainly be enough to kill me.

Though he could not read them, Irra was able to intuit my thoughts. "Cast yourself off," he suggested mockingly. "If you die, so will I, and Their Anarchic Majesties' plans will come to nothing."

I shivered involuntarily at the awfulness of his suggestion. For, wretched as I was, I did not wish to die. Nobody truly knows what death is, and so we fear it above all things. Moreover, my dread was all the greater for the idea of death being so new to me.

And yet—was it an altogether ignoble idea?

Irra, I reasoned, taunted me because he thought that I would not—that I could not—kill myself, and surely this was an understandable thing to assume since nobody had ever done so before. But after all I had seen and experienced, nothing seemed impossible to me anymore. I went to the very brink of the precipice and looked down. I thought of the People and how much I loved them. I thought of Nimrod, their bulwark and strength. I thought of my joyless existence. But mostly I thought of Silili, lost to me forever. Then I did the bravest thing I had ever done in all my life.

Light and giddy with relief and fear, I stepped off.

Or, rather, I tried to.

My feet would not obey me. Will it though I might, I could not take that one crucial step forward. Deep within my ear, Irra laughed and laughed. "You see? I can control your actions. Never forget that."

All this time I had been thinking, and the more I thought, the less plausible it seemed that when I finally stood face to face with King Nimrod, I would defeat him in combat. A hundred such as I could not have done so. It did not matter what magics and powers Irra might have. The very idea was absurd.

Now I was angry enough to say so.

Irra was unmoved. "Humbaba invented death," he said complacently. "Between them, the Igigi and the People invented war. Great works come in threes. You and I, Gil, will create a third and final novelty, and in some ways it will be the greatest of all, for where the others are universal and impersonal, this will be singular and intimate."

"Will we?"

"Oh, yes, I call it murder."

Irra explained his intent. I was unimpressed. "How does this differ from simply killing somebody?"

"By its treachery. You will approach Nimrod with smiles and salaams. You will oil and braid his hair for him, all the while praising his wisdom and his strength. Then, with his back turned and he unsuspicious, you will pick up a rock and smash it down upon his head with all your might."

The picture he drew sickened me for I could imagine it all too well: The weight of the rock in my hands. The unsuspecting king. The sound of that great skull splitting. And afterwards, his blood on my hands. I would give anything not to have this crime on my hands. But Irra had already taught me that pain could render me helpless before it. I sobbed wordlessly.

"Come. We have mighty deeds to accomplish."

Irra walked me away from the cliff.

The sun was sinking in the west by the time I found myself standing outside a line of new-dug storage caves near the top of the redoubt. Only a steep and stony path separated me from the summit of Ararat, where King Nimrod stood thinking his dark thoughts alone. I put down the basket of bread I had carried hither. From one of the caves I retrieved a jug of oil.

Nobody was looking. I carried the oil and a loaf of bread upward.

Though Nimrod was king and mage, the crest of Ararat was stony and bare. No advisors waited upon him, nor was there any furniture of any sort. He sat brooding upon a rock outcrop, his bow and quiver at his feet. A goatskin of water rested in his shadow, along with a shallow clay bowl for him to drink from. And that was all.

"I remember you, little one," the king rumbled, glancing down at me. "Whatever became of your lover, your woman-to-me?"

Irra whispered: "He wills comprehension upon you. You may reply."

I made a bird of my hands and flew it off into the sky. "Chree!" I said, in imitation of its cry. Gone.

King Nimrod looked sad at that. He reached out one tremendous hand, closed it lightly on my shoulder, and squeezed gently. I thought he would say something consoling, then, and the very thought of him doing so when I had come to kill him nauseated me. But he said only, "Why are you here?"

I proffered the bread.

King Nimrod accepted it. The loaf was large enough to feed three ordinary men, but it looked small in his hand. He began to eat, staring moodily into the distance. Though the invaders had destroyed the trees and rushes, they could not make the waters go away, and so the setting sun filled the land with reflected oranges and reds, rendering it briefly beautiful again.

After a long silence Nimrod spoke to me as one might to a beloved dog—affectionately, but expecting neither comprehension nor response. He was speaking to himself, really, sorting out his thoughts and feelings. "Behold the world," he said. "For a time it was our garden. No more. When Humbaba introduced death, I thought it an evil that might be endured and later undone. For though I cannot negate its effects and those who have died will never return to us, yet I have power to put an end to death. It would drain me completely to do so. But afterwards, nobody would ever die again.

"Alas, the world is become a wasteland and there is no way back into the garden. Our choice now is enslavement or death. There is no third way."

I thought that Irra would make his play then, while Nimrod was distracted. But he was cannier than that. Perhaps he noticed some lingering trace of vigilance in the king. Perhaps, knowing that he would have but one opportunity, he was taking no chances. In any event, he waited.

"Ah, child! I am contemplating a great and terrible crime. Would you forgive me for it, if you understood its cost? For henceforth, every man and woman must grow old and die. Is slavery truly worse than that? Yet so great is my hatred for the Igigi that I would rather you and I and everyone else die and turn to dust than that we should submit to them again."

I could not bear to look at the king, knowing what I was about to do. So I stared down at the ground instead. There was the slightest motion in the gloom as a small and torpid animal shifted itself slightly.

It was a toad.

In that instant, a plan flashed into my mind. Casually, so as not to alert Irra, I squatted and picked up a stone. Then I cleared my throat: Watch.

King Nimrod glanced incuriously at me.

Forgive me, little brother, I thought, and I smashed the toad with the stone.

Beaming, I said, "Squirp!" In imitation of the sound it made.

Nimrod's face was a wall of granite. "Never do that again," he said. And, when I flung out an arm indicating all the lands below, infested with demons and suffering and death, "Yes, the world is full of cruelty. Let us not add to it."

He turned away.

Irra was furious. But in Nimrod's presence, he dared not punish me. "This is no time for playing games!" he cried. "After we have done our great deed, I promise you that there will be suffering enough for everyone and that if you want to be among the tormentors, that honor will be yours. But for now, you must think of nothing but our goal and how to reach it. Pick up the oil."

I did.

Standing before the king, I held up the jug in one hand and a comb which I had stolen earlier in the day in the other. I gestured toward his beard. Nimrod nodded abstractedly, so I poured oil into my hands and then, rubbing them together, applied it. I had to stand on tiptoe to do so. When his beard was fragrant and glossy, I began combing it out. Finally, I braided it in many strands, as befit a ruler of his dignity.

I had just finished when, with sudden resolution, King Nimrod stood. "I fear you will curse me every day of your short life for what I am about to do, little one," he said. His words were an almost physical force. I did not need Irra to tell me that he was willing comprehension upon me. "Yet I see no alternative. So it shall be done. This will take all my power and concentration, so I must ask that you not disturb me before it is finished."

At Irra's direction, I tugged my hair and made braiding gestures. "Eh?"

Nimrod laughed gently, as one might at the antics of a child. "If it makes you happy."

Closing his eyes, King Nimrod stretched out his arms to either side, palms upward. His fingers flexed, as if grasping for something in the air, and then clenched as if grasping that intangible thing. A low sound escaped from somewhere deep within his chest. It might have been the mountain talking. A shudder passed through his body, and then Nimrod stood as motionless as the moon before Humbaba had set it in the sky. His face was grim as granite.

After a few minutes, drops of blood appeared on his forehead.

"Go!" Irra whispered urgently.

I picked up a large rock and climbed to the top of the low crag behind the king. There, I set the rock down and, standing beside it, began to oil and comb his hair.

Thunder rolled in the distance, then fell silent. But there was an uneasiness to the silence. It was like unto a distant sound too vast and low to be heard which nevertheless can be felt in the pit of one's stomach and in the back of one's skull. Time passed. The sun touched the horizon and a thin line of liquid gold spread to either side faster than quicksilver.

"What is he doing?" Irra fretted. "What is he doing?"

I shrugged, and continued my work.

Never had the sun moved below the edge of the world so quickly. All the land beneath it was an oily darkness, as if something were moving there unseen. Perhaps, I thought, Nimrod was calling great armies of beasts to eat the Igigi. Perhaps he was turning the marshes to tar, to envelop and swallow up our enemies. If such was his contemplated crime—the death of billions—I did not care. Let it happen! Yet the tension in the air intensified as if somewhere too far away to be heard, a giant were silently screaming.

Nimrod was a statue. The blood from his brow ran down his face and pooled at his feet.

Then the horizon bulged.

Deep in the fastness of my mind, Irra cried in a tone of mingled horror and awe, "He is calling in the ocean! He is commanding it to come to Ararat."

I passed the comb through King Nimrod's hair over and over again, smoothing out the tangles. "So?"

"It will roll over the armies below. It will kill the King and Queen and all their servants!"

"Good. Then there will be a cleansing."

"There is still time!" I hopped down from the rock on which I stood, dropping the comb. I bent down to seize the rock in both hands. With a mighty effort, I raised it up to my chest. None of this had been my doing. Indeed, I tried desperately to resist it. But Irra had seized control of my body.

If Irra could control my body now, that meant he could always have done so. There had been no need for him to drive me with threats and pain. He had only done so in order to make me complicit in his guilt and thus increase my suffering, so that he might enjoy my revulsion and shame.

King Nimrod towered above me. With a jerk, Irra raised the stone up above my head. I gasped in pain.

That was the extraordinary thing. I had gasped in pain. Irra had not made me gasp. I had simply done so. Which meant that he controlled only those parts of my body he set his thoughts to controlling. All else was still mine.

I licked my lips to test my theory. And it worked. My mouth remained my own.

"Squirp!" I cried as loudly as I could.

Had Nimrod turned to see why I had made such an extraordinary noise, he would have died then and there, for already the stone was descending upon his head. But I had taught him the meaning of my new word, and so he instantly apprehended my warning. Using only a small fraction of his power, the mighty wizard caused tree branches to sprout from his head and shoulders and back. They burst through his skin and clothing. With dazzling swiftness, they divided and multiplied, the end of each branch and twig putting out a long, sharp thorn.

My stone crashed down into the tangled thorn-tree, snapping limbs but coming nowhere near King Nimrod's body, motionless at its center. Twisted black branches grew around me in a cage. The thorns grasped me tightly and I was flung high into the air.

A despairing wail escaped my lips. I did not know if it came from myself or from Irra.

Then, with a roar like the end of the world, I fell into darkness.

When I came to, it was morning and Irra's body lay on the ground beside me. I sat up and touched his throat. It was stone cold. Irra was dead.

Sore and aching though I was, I could not help but feel glad.

The sunlight was brighter than I remembered ever seeing it, and the air smelled of salt. I stared down the slopes of Ararat and for the first time in my life I saw the ocean. It sparkled and danced. White gulls flew above it with shrill cries. To one side, fierce waves crashed against the mountainside with a thunder and boom that said they had come to stay. First Haven was a seaport now and its inhabitants would henceforth be fishermen and sailors as well as hunters and crofters.

The Igigi were nowhere to be seen.

King Nimrod sat hunched nearby, his head resting in his hands. But when I tried to hail him, nothing came from my mouth but a wordless cry. So by this token I knew that our first language—the one that Nimrod had invented to deliver us from Urdumheim—was gone forever, drowned with our demonic foes.

At the sound of my voice, Nimrod stood. To my surprise, when he saw me he grinned broadly. He pawed the ground with one foot, as might an ox. Meaning: Hello. Then he rubbed his hands together and snorted: Let's get to work.

Uncomprehendingly, I watched as Nimrod stooped to pick up a stone from the ground. He held it out toward me. "Harri," he said. "Harri."

Then, like the sun coming out from the clouds, I understood. He was creating a new language—not a makeshift thing like my oxen-speech, but something solid and enduring.

"Harri," I said.

The king clapped me approvingly on the shoulder.

Then he went down the mountain to teach the People language for a second time.

Thus began the Great Work. For shortly thereafter, Nimrod set us to work building upon the base of Ararat a tower so tall that it would reach to the sky, and so large that a hundred generations would not suffice to complete it. Indeed, our monarch explained, it was entirely possible that the tower never would reach completion. But this did not matter. For within the tower a thousand languages would bloom and those languages, through exposure to each other, would be in constant flux and variation, every profession creating its specialized argot and every new generation its own slang. Like the tower itself, each language would be a work forever in progress and never completed. So that if the Igigi returned, they could never again prevail over us, though they stuffed their stomachs so full of language that they burst. In token of which, we named the tower Babel—"Mountain of Words."

Thus ends my story.

Except for one last thing.

One day, when I was working in the fields, Silili returned from the forest. She was scratched and bruised and filthy from living like an animal, and half-starved because unlike those who are born animals, she was not good at it. One of her fingers was crooked, for it had broken and not set well. She was naked.

I froze motionless.

Silili shivered with fear. She took a step into the field, and then retreated back to the shadow of the trees. Whether she remembered me at all, I could not say. But she was as wild and shy as any creature of the woods, and I knew that a sudden movement on my part would drive her away and I might never see her again. So slowly, very slowly, I crouched down and groped with a blind hand for the wicker basket in which I had brought my midday meal.

I opened its lid and reached within. Then I stood.

I held out a yam to her. "Janari," I said. This was our new word for food.

Timidly, she approached. Three times, she almost bolted and ran. But at last she snatched the yam from me and ravenously began eating it.

"Janari," I repeated insistently. "Janari!" And finally, "Janari," she replied.

It was a beginning.

All this happened long ago, when I was young and there was only one language and People did not die. All things were new in those days and the world was not at all like what it is today.

Holiday

M. Rickert

Mary Rickert grew up in Fredonia, Wisconsin. When she was eighteen she moved to California, where she worked at Disneyland. She still has fond memories of selling balloons there. After many years (and through the sort of "odd series of events" that describe much of her life), she got a job as a kindergarten teacher in a small private school for gifted children. She worked there for almost a decade, then left to pursue her life as a writer. Her most recent book is collection Map of Dreams.

The best fiction challenges us in some way. The frankly disturbing dark tale that follows, which originally appeared in Subterranean Magazine, was one of the most challenging published this year.

She says her name is Holiday, but I know she's lying. I remember her face. It was all over the news for weeks, years even, but of course she doesn't know that. I briefly consider telling her, saying something like, "Hey, did you know you're a star?" But that would necessitate bringing up the subject of her death, and I'm not clear if she knows that she's a ghost, or that almost everyone thinks her parents killed her. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing any kid should have to hear, so instead I say, "Holiday? That's a pretty name."

Her body starts jerking in a strange way as she moves across my bedroom floor, her arms held out, her hands moving to some secret rhythm, and I think she's re-enacting her death, the way some ghosts do, until I realize that she's tap dancing, her blonde curls bouncing, that little-Miss smile plastered across her face, bright red like she just finished eating a cherry Popsicle. I figured she came to tell me who offed her, but instead she came to dance and tell me lies.

"Why don't you come here," I pat beside me on the bed. Just like that she's gone. Like I'm a pervert or something. Poor dumb kid.

That's all there is until about a week later. This time I'm asleep on the couch and she wakes me up, singing a country western song. She's wearing a black cowboy hat with a big gold star on the front, a little black and red-fringed skirt, a denim shirt with silver buttons, and red tasseled cowboy boots that come about halfway up her calves. She looks pretty cute. She's singing in the dulcet tone of someone twice her age, and right away I understand the confusion people felt about her, the strange aura of sexuality that comes off her and shouldn't. When she sees me watching, she waves, her little fingers slightly bent, but she doesn't miss a beat, even when she winks.

This is so freaking weird I don't know what to do so I wait until she's finished and then I applaud.

She curtsies, holding out the skirt with the tips of her tiny fingers; her perfect blonde curls undisturbed by her dance and song.

"So," I say, "Holiday, right?"

She nods, her red lips smirked.

"You hungry?" I pick up the half-full bag of Doritos on the coffee table in front of the couch and extend it towards her. She shakes her head. "Wanna watch a movie?" I ask. She just stands there, staring at me, squinting slightly, looking like she just might start crying, as though I have awoken her from some dream about Barbie dolls and Christmas and a perfect life, into this reality of being murdered and stuck, for all eternity, at age six, tap dancing forever. I look through my DVD collection: Kill Bill, Seven Samurai, The Shining, Howard Stern's Private Parts (severely underrated and underappreciated, by the way), City of Women, My Architect, Wild Weather caught on Tape (a gift from an old girlfriend), and The Wet Women of California, which, swear to God, I had forgotten all about. None of it exactly seems like the sort of thing to watch with a six-year-old murdered kid, so instead I turn on the TV and settle on the cooking channel, but I guess it wasn't the right choice because next thing I know, I'm sitting alone watching this chick with a giant smile, pouring liquid over hamburger meat. "Hey," I say to the air, "come back, we don't have to watch this." But of course no one answers and no one appears. I pick up one of the DVDs, and put it in, just to get rid of the headache I feel coming on. In two seconds, I'm watching naked big-breasted women dive into the ocean, roll in the sand, and frolic with the waves and each other. I drink my warm beer and start to play with myself until I get the creepy feeling that maybe she's still in the room. I take my hand out of my pants, flick off the DVD, and turn over, my face pressed against the couch.

The next day I go to the library. She was only a local story for a few hours before the national media came to town; there's a whole shelf devoted just to her. I page through the books and look at all the pictures. Yep, it's her all right. I don't check out the books, just in case she comes back. I don't want her to see them and get scared or anything. I don't know why she's coming to see me, but I want her to come back. When I read about how her father found her, wrapped in a blanket, as though someone was worried she would be cold, but with that rope around her neck, and all the rest, I feel like something inside me wakes up, and it's not a completely disturbing feeling. I spend the whole day at the library and when I leave I'm tired, and hungry, but before I do anything else, I go to Wal-Mart and buy the boxed collection of Shirley Temple DVDs. They were her favorite. Next time she comes, I'm going to be prepared. Sarah Vehler, who was in my brother's class in high school, is the checkout girl. She's gained about five hundred pounds since then and I barely recognize her, but she recognizes me just fine. "I didn't know you have kids," she says. What am I supposed to do, tell her I've got a ghost? Instead, I just shrug. Maybe that was a mistake. I don't know. This was all new territory for me. I tried to do what was right.

When Terry, my agent, calls to see how the book is coming along, I tell him it's just fine. "But hey," I say, "I'm thinking of going in another direction, sort of."

"Shoot," Terry says.

I stumble around a bit and even though he's thousands of miles away, I know he's chewing his Nicotine gum faster and faster until finally he says, "Listen, just give it to me in a sentence, all right?"

"I wanna write about—" and I say her name.

"Who?"

For a long time she was everyone's little girl. The whole country followed her story and wanted vengeance for what was done to her, but now, hardly anyone even remembers her name.

"Oh, wait, the little Miss America kid, right? What's she got to do with anything? Did your parents know her parents or something?"

"Well, not exactly, but—"

"Don't blow this, OK? Memoir writing isn't what it used to be, all right? Just stick to the facts, make sure it's all documented."

"But I—"

"Stick to your own story. You got enough there to keep you busy, right?"

"But Terry," I say, "when I think about her, I mean, don't you think what happened to her was a real travesty?"

"Travesty? Right. Of course it was. But what happened to you was a real travesty too, wasn't it? Your whole family torn apart by false accusations, your father dying in prison for something he didn't do. That's the travesty you know. That's the one you can write about."

"I just think—"

"Ok, I know what's happening here. Something in your mind, in your sub-conscious is trying to distract you from writing this, am I right? Huh?"

"I guess," I say, glancing at my computer.

"Tell you what, why don't you just take a couple of days? Give yourself a break. Watch movies. Take walks in the park. Get laid. Take some time off, is what I'm saying, not weeks or anything but you know, take a few days, then you can come back to this all refreshed, OK?"

"OK," I say.

"Who cares if you're a few days late, right?"

"Right."

"Just forget about the kid," he says. "She's not your story."

We say goodbye and I walk over to the computer and click on the file. I stare at the blank screen, certain that if I could just come up with the title, I could probably sail through the whole thing. But the title is illusive. Instead I take Terry's advice and watch a movie, several in fact. Shirley Temple in black and white, highly, highly underrated. I don't even know when she appears. But suddenly we are sitting on the couch, laughing. It feels so good to laugh like that I decide not to say anything. I don't want to scare her off. I don't know when she left. I fell asleep and when I woke up, she was gone.

The next day I sit staring at the screen on my computer for two hours, I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but I timed it. I try several titles. "My Father's Rules." "I Am Not His Son." "Rising Above the Prison He Resides In." "Last Chance." You get the picture, right? Crap. I click off the computer and take Terry's advice. I go to the park.

They are so young. So perfect, with their perfect skin and little teeth and they are dirty, and bratty, and crying, and laughing, and completely absorbed by the sand in the sandbox, or the need to traverse the bars, dangling above the dangerous ground, holding tight, and it's obvious it hurts, but they are determined, stubborn, wild, beautiful. I could watch them for hours, but instead I just watch for a little while, I know too well what the grownups will think about someone like me, a young man, all alone, watching children play. I turn away, hunched against the sudden cold, walking slowly, soon no longer able to hear the laughter and the sound of their voices, shouting names, or shouting nonsense.

God, how I envy them.

When I get home my brother is standing on my porch, hunched into his jacket, his hands in his pockets. "Hey," he says.

"Hey," I say. "What's up?"

He shrugs, glances at my door, and then gives me that pretend smile of his.

"I don't have any," I say.

"What? Oh, that hurts, bro," he says. "I'm sincerely hurt. I just thought, you know, I'd stop by."

I nod, but I do it with a smirk so that he knows I know the truth even if we are going to play this game. I take the key out of my pocket and let us into the house.

"Christ," he says.

"What?"

"Don't you ever clean up after yourself? Mom would shit if she saw this."

"Well, she's not going to see it, all right? We both know that. What do you want?"

He shrugs, but he's casing the joint. I'm a writer. I notice these things.

"Man, I'm just so hurt, bro," he says. "What, you think I only come when—"

"Yeah," I say. "Yeah, I do."

We stand there, staring at each other, then he shrugs and walks into my living room, sits on the couch—I'm only half paying attention—he picks up the remote control. "Wait," I say, but it's too late: Shirley Temple is dancing across the screen, all dimples and innocence.

I don't know what to do so I just stand there.

He's laughing so hard, he's bent over at the waist, and I start laughing too, and that's when he jumps up and grabs me by the collar and pushes me against the wall.
"I should fucking kill you," he says.

"It's not like that. I'm doing some research."

"Fucking pervert."

"I'm not the one," I say, only 'cause I'm desperate, only 'cause he's got this look in his eyes like he might really kill me.

He pushes me harder into the wall. He leans against me. "What did you say?"

"I'm not the one he liked most," I say, and he lets go as if I'm on fire. For a moment we are just standing there, breathing heavy and staring at each other. I try to make it right. I reach over to touch his shoulder but he jerks away.

He wipes his hand through his hair, licks his lips, and then wipes them with the back of his hand, and his eyes stay cold.

"Come on," I try again.

He leans toward me, like he would kill me if he could stand to touch me. He speaks, real slow, breathing onion into my face: "But you're the one who's grown up to be just like him."

"It's fucking research," I shout. He nods, like, sure, he doesn't believe me. He walks out of my house, my fucking addict brother, thinking he's got it all together and that I'm the one falling apart. I lock the door behind him, and when I turn, she's there, tap dancing across the kitchen in the outfit that caused all the controversy, the one with the feathers, and the black net stockings. "Oh, hi," I say, "Did you catch any of that?"

She pirouettes in a furious twirl, a great flurry of tapping feet, and another twirl; I am sincerely amazed and clap until my hands feel raw. She smiles and smiles and then waves her arm, like a magician's assistant, and that's when I see the other little girl. She's taller, her skin is black, her hair in two ponytails high on her head, she's dressed just like a regular kid, a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. "Hi," I say. "What's your name?"

She smiles, but it is a shy smile, her lips closed.

"Her name is Holiday too."

I nod, puzzling this out.

"And today is her birthday."

I turn to the girl who looks up at me with her beautiful black eyes.

"Your birthday?"

Both girls nod solemnly.

"Well, I don't . . .let me see what I can find. I wasn't expecting . . ." I rummage through the kitchen drawers and cabinets, making excuses all the while. "I wish I had known, I'm just so unprepared. A birthday? If I had known, I would have, I mean, balloons and cake . . ." The girls look up at me, bright-eyed. "But I'm sorry, I don't, this is the best I can, Happy Birthday," I say, and set a plate on the table. In the middle of the plate is a jelly sandwich, and in the center of the sandwich is the stub of a lit candle left over from when I was still trying to impress dates. The whole thing looks pretty lame but the girl claps all the same. She tries valiantly to blow the candle out, and then they both try, and after a while they just look up at me, and I do it for them.

I'm not sure what to do next so I ask them if they want to watch Shirley Temple movies, and we go into the living room and sit on the couch, and I think they had a good time, though in the morning I discover the jelly sandwich untouched on the plate. It's stale but I eat it just the same, sitting in front of the computer, searching the Internet sites of missing and murdered children, looking for the birthday girl, but I never do find her.

Suddenly it's like I'm running some kind of day care center for dead kids. She keeps bringing them to me, I don't know why. We watch Shirley Temple movies, though she's the one who likes them best, and, I have to admit, she can be pretty bratty about it at times. Actually, they all can be pretty bratty. They're little kids, what can I say? They fight over which movie to watch, they run up and down the stairs, they jump off the kitchen table and the back of the couch. I recognize some of them. Without asking, I know some of their names. I mean, come on, some of these kids are famous. Others, like the little black girl, I never do figure out. When they're all around, I sometimes think I'm going to lose it, but when no one comes, when it's just me, all alone, staring at the computer again, still trying to find the perfect title, the perfect little phrase to describe what happened to my family, I miss their smelly mouths, their waxy ears, their noise, their demands, their little bodies twisted in odd positions of sleep and play, and I miss their laughter, the gorgeous sound of their laughter. Her dancing. I miss her dancing. And I miss her, most of all.

But she says it's getting boring at my house. She says it's too noisy. She says she might not come around anymore and when I ask her to dance she just shakes her head, no; she doesn't feel like it. That's when I say, without thinking about it or anything, why don't we have a party, and she says, "You mean like a jelly sandwich with a candle stuck in it?" (I told you, she can be bratty.) But I say, no, I mean like a big party, with balloons and party hats and papier-mâché streamers, would you like that? "And a Christmas tree?" she asks. Well, I wasn't really thinking of that but I can tell she wants one so I say sure. She smiles. "And big red Valentine's hearts?" I say, all right. "And Easter Baskets? And chocolate eggs?" And I say sure, of course, it'll be a holiday party, an every holiday party, and I don't say this part, but you know, for all the ones they've missed. She gives me a big hug then, her little arms tight around my neck and she kisses me right on the mouth.

I buy red, green, orange, and black streamers, balloons that have "Happy Birthday" printed on them, a paper tablecloth with turkeys and pilgrims on it. I get a seventy-five percent discount on the scarecrow, the ceramic pumpkin, and a clown costume, but I have to pay a ridiculous price for the fake Christmas tree already decorated with lights and ornaments. I buy cupcakes, even though I'm not sure any of the dead kids eat, and I buy two kinds of paper plates, one with Barbie on them, and the other, with dinosaurs. I get several different kid DVDs (I have to admit even I'm getting a little sick of Shirley Temple) and a CD of Christmas classics.

Sarah Vehler is working again, she is standing there, chewing on a hangnail, and not checking anyone out but I stand in line behind a woman with two little kids, a boy and a girl. The boy is furiously sucking his thumb, and the girl is begging for candy. The woman, their mother, I assume, is ignoring them, paging through a People magazine. I smile at the little girl, and for just a second she stops asking for candy and stares at me. Her eyes remind me of beach glass. Sarah Vehler calls my name and when I look up, she waves me over. "Don't you have nothing better to do than stand in line all day?" she says. "Wow, looks like you're planning a full year of parties. How many kids you got anyway?" I shrug, and to change the subject tell her I like her earrings. I have long since learned that the real way to gain a woman's trust is to tell her you like her earrings but Sarah Vehler just looks at me like I said something crazy and of course that's when I realize she isn't wearing earrings. I laugh. "I mean last time," I say. "I remember the ones you had on last time, and I meant to tell you they were real nice." Then, things only get more ridiculous when she tells me she never wears earrings. "I'm sorry," I say, grabbing the bags and the box of cupcakes. "I thought it was you, but it must have been someone else." She just looks at me like she is thinking real hard, and then she says, "I saw your brother the other day and he says you don't have any kids at all."

I smile, to be polite, and then tilt my chin, like, you got another customer. She turns, and sees the guy who has a disturbingly blank expression on his face, but when she looks at me again, I shrug, as if to say, too bad we can't talk.

When I get home, I have to clean the place. I've let it go and my mother would shit if she saw it, but she never tries to visit, and doesn't even call. She's got her own life now, and doesn't like to be reminded of the old one, I guess, the one me and my brother are stuck in forever. I pick up beer cans and paper plates and realize this hasn't exactly been the best environment for children. I freaking hate to clean, but after a while I sort of get into it, I put one of the new DVDs in, I don't know what it was called but it was bright and noisy and cheerful, it kept me company. I even washed the windows. Then I hung up the streamers, twisting them from the ceiling in the kitchen and the living room, and I set up the tree, and the tablecloth, and the plates, and then I put the clown costume on, and I looked at myself in the mirror: I was wearing a bright red, yellow, blue, and green polka-dotted jumpsuit, giant red shoes that flopped six inches from my toes, a bright red wig, and a red nose. I looked at myself for awhile, trying to figure out who I reminded myself of, and then I flashed back to a birthday party—was it for me or my brother?—my father dressed up like a clown. I grab my phone and call. The answering machine picks up.

"The thing is," I say, "I mean, come on. Don't give up on me so fast, OK? It was just a movie. It's research, all right? Fuck. I mean really, fuck. Look, I didn't give up on you even with all the drugs and the stealing and shit, right? Right?" It seems like I should say something else, something perfect, but I can't think what that would be so I hang up and call Terry.

"The thing is," I say, "I haven't been completely honest."

There's a moment's pause. A long moment before he says, "Shoot."

"The thing is," I say, "what I want to write about isn't an innocent man." I wait, but he doesn't say anything. "The children . . ." She is standing there, in the middle of the living room, staring at the Christmas tree with the strangest expression on her face. She is dressed just like a regular little girl, in little girl pajamas and a bathrobe. I wave at her and point to the phone, signaling that I'll be winding the call up soon, but her expression doesn't change, she looks at me with confusion, and sorrow.

"What about the kids? What's your point? Can you just give it to me in a sentence?"

"The children were telling the truth, my father was not an innocent man."

Terry whistles, long and low. "Fuck," he says.

"You're the first person I ever told."

"Well, this puts us in the crapper without any shit, that's for sure."

"What?" She is reaching for the tree, touching it lightly with her fingertips, as though afraid it will disappear.

"Listen, if that's the case, what we got is just another story about a fucking pedophile. Those are a dime a dozen. The market is saturated with them. It's not a special story anymore, it's just . . . now wait a second, that kid, you're not saying he had anything to do with that kid's murder are you, 'cause if you were saying that, well then we'd have a story."

"No." She is petting the tree, and this part really gets to me, she leans in to smell it, even though it is fake, she presses her face real close to the branches and then she realizes I am watching and she looks at me again, but in a new way, like she has something she wants to say, like she needs me. "I gotta go," I say.

"I mean even if you think he could have possibly had something to do with it, that we might be able to sell. It gets tricky, 'cause you know all of a sudden everyone's fact checking the hell out of memoirs, but we might be able to work that angle, you know, not that you really believe he killed her, 'cause everyone knows her parents did it, right, but like you could tie her into your story and the idea that your father was someone like her father, you might have something there, OK? We might be able to sell that."

She has big eyes, and they are sad, and she wants to tell me something important, maybe she's going to tell me who did kill her. "Listen, I gotta go," I say. Terry keeps talking, he's getting excited now, just the way, all those years ago, everyone got excited about her murder. I click the phone off.

"What is it?" I say. "You can tell me."

"I wet myself," she says, in the softest little girl voice.

Sure enough, there's a wet stain down the front of her pajamas, and a puddle on the rug beneath the Christmas tree. "That's OK," I say, even as the dank odor reaches me, "sometimes that happens. Why don't you go in the bathroom and take off your clothes. Do you have a way, I mean, I don't know how this works, do you have some clean clothes with you?"

She shakes her head.

I nod, like, OK, no problem. The phone rings and she looks relieved when I don't make any move to answer it. Instead I search through the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor until I find a dingy white t-shirt and a brand new pair of boxer shorts, which of course will be huge on her, so I also give her a tie. She looks up at me with confusion when I hand her the stuff. "It'll be like a costume, for the party. Kind of different from the kind you usually wear, I know. Go in the bathroom, OK, and wash yourself off and take off your wet pajamas and put on the t shirt, and these shorts, and tie these with this, see, like a belt."

"Will you wipe me?" she says.

I shouldn't be surprised by this; I've read all about how she still asked people to wipe her, even though she was dressed up like a movie star. "No. You have to do it yourself, ok?"

She shakes her head and starts to cry.

One thing I can't stand is a crying kid. "OK," I say, "OK, just don't cry, all right?"

We walk into the bathroom and I help her out of her pajamas, her skin is white, pure as fresh soap, and she is completely unembarrassed of her nakedness. She smiles when I wipe her, first with toilet paper, and then with a towel dampened with warm water and I just try not to think about anything, about how tiny she is, or how perfect. I help her put the clean t-shirt on and the boxer shorts, which I cinch around her little waist with the tie and by then she is laughing and I am too and we stand before the mirror to look at ourselves but all I see is me, in the ridiculous clown costume. Where does she keep disappearing to? I call her name, searching through all the rooms, thinking she's playing some kind of game, but I can't find her anywhere. The doorbell rings and I run to answer it, laughing because it's very funny the way she's hidden outside but when I open the door, my brother is standing there.

"Oh, fuck," he says.

"It's not the way it looks."

He looks behind me, at the streamers, the table set with Barbie and dinosaur plates, the cupcakes, the Christmas tree. "Fuck," he says.

"No, wait," I holler, and when he doesn't stop I follow him, flopping down the stairs. "Wait," I say, running after him, though it is difficult in the too-big red shoes, the red wig bouncing down my forehead, "it's not how it looks."

He turns, and I smile at him, knowing he'll understand, after all, we share the same childhood, but instead he looks at me with a horrified expression, as if I am a terrifying ghost, and then he turns his back on me and runs. I don't try to follow him; instead I walk back to my house. Someone in a passing car shouts something and throws a paper cup of soda at me, but misses. I am surprised by this, it seems to me clowns deserve a little respect; after all, they only exist to make people laugh.

When I get back inside, I shut the door and sit on the couch in front of the TV and watch the cartoon people, who are shaped like balloons. There are no dead children and there are no secrets in a world where everyone is brightly colored and devoid of the vulnerabilities of flesh. In balloon world all the problems explode or float away. Even though it's been cold and cloudy for weeks, the sun comes out and fills the room with an explosion of light until I can no longer see the picture on the TV screen. One of the streamers comes loose and dangles over my head, twirling, and I can't help but think, that in spite of what Terry said, there is plenty of shit for the crapper, but it doesn't matter, because in the distance, I hear the soft hum of a little girl singing. And just like that my mood improves, because I am waiting for the children, and just thinking about them, makes me smile.

The Valley of the Gardens

Tony Daniel

Writer, novelist, and poet, Tony Daniel published his first work in 1990. His first novel, Warpath, appeared in 1993 and was followed by Earthling and the science fiction diptych Metaplanetary and Superluminal. His short fiction has been collected in The Robot's Twilight Companion.

The moving story that follows takes the stuff of space opera—grand romantic adventure set on a galactic scale—and proves once again that the story is always about the people at the heart of the tale.

For weeks, Mac walked the fence. It formed the border where his land topped the mountainous ridge and sided the western slope where the Valley of the Gardens gave way to the Extremadura, Cangarriga's vast northern desert. To the unaided human eye, the fence was made of stone, with pillars of rocks serving as posts every few hundred feet. Within the pillars were steel posts set in concrete that communicated with the jack-rock below. The fence ran deep into the substrate of the land—coded, modified, recoded, and shored up with millennia of layered routine and subroutine—so beyond Mac's comprehension that he might as well call it ensorceled. But, magic or not, the fence had to be fixed, and to fix a fence properly you had to walk it, find the gaps and fill them in.

And the gaps this season were wider than any he ever remembered. The desert on the other side was encroaching, making inroads many feet long down his side of the ridge, and spreading its wildness, its potential pestilence, with it. His own land even on this high ground was tended ground. It might appear free, but that was merely because the land needed to be let alone sometimes. This ridge had been a vineyard before, and would be again someday. Now it was covered with broom grass interspersed with clumps of sage and rosemary. Restoration planting—as carefully planned as the straightest flower row.

The desert had broken through in multiple places in spear points of sand and creosote seedlings. He had more to do than he'd first anticipated. It surprised him. It alarmed him. In fact, his anxiety over the fence had worked its way into his dreams—and even into a couple of his nightmares.

He was reminded of fence gaps whether he was working the line or not. He'd be down below in the valley at some other task and suddenly hear the knowing screech of a desert grackle or be startled by the bounce and buzz of one of the enormous variegated grasshoppers blown into the valley by the winter westerlies in Cangarriga's northern hemisphere and feel shock, betrayal, by the fence. It was supposed to keep such things out—and away from his crops. At odd moments, he found himself suddenly fantasising that a gap in the fence had let in bad code and his upper fields were being subverted and ruined. He'd even start quickly in their direction until he came to his senses and realised he'd only been daydreaming. Dayworrying. He'd had a real dream one night featuring the valley as well. Every surface in it had glowed with a sickly yellow infection—the rosemary, sage and pine covered in a tacky, malfunctioning secretion. And he'd had several dim but troublesome nightmares featuring himself leaving, running through a break in the fence like a madman and disappearing (in the dreams, he was both observer and insane escapee) into the shimmer of the Extremadura vastness.

He couldn't be sure if it was himself or the valley itself that was bringing on the anxiety. Like the fence, Mac was deeply intertwined with the land in ways seen and unseen. But when he checked with other farmers, and with the villagers downvalley in Sant Llorenz, no one had noticed much different.

Maybe it was all just him.

In what was ancient custom while fence-mending, he'd been joined on most days by a Faller nomad, a representative of his neighbors—his sometime enemies and trading partners on the desert side. The Faller walked with him and watched Mac as he worked, allegedly there to be sure that Mac kept to the line and did not cheat the fence outward, but mostly attempting to talk Mac into trading off-planet tech for their desert gleanings. Whatever its purpose, this tradition served to keep the line stationary. For a fence nearly fifty thousand years old, one inch of movement for every season of fence-mending would lop off a great deal of new land, or lose a large field to wildness if pushed in the opposite direction.

For his part, Mac wanted not a speck of the Extremadura. It wasn't just desert, it was wild desert—never terraformed, but created as a battlefield, its source code hopelessly jangled, belligerent and untamed. Its jack-rock was still tainted with nox, the nanotech leavings of that war, never completely defanged. In addition, the Extremadura teemed with every manner of beast, all of them possessing a crazy sentience of sorts emanating from the jack-rock below. Yet people lived there. Nomads like Theresa.

Theresa had come on his second week working the fence, after her brother, the official watcher, had suffered some sort of injury and had to convalesce. She was a daughter of the Faller's clan that roamed this portion of the Extremadura, herding and harvesting whatever usable excretions the desert produced. The Fallers had been on Cangarriga since time immemorial, since the war itself, and were as much a part of the desert as Mac was a part of the valley.

If the valley was beauty and order, the desert was its opposite: wild almost beyond comprehension. It had taken root in the nomads as well. None was alike in appearance or even inner makeup. Some had grown carapaces, had beetled over with chitinous coats sporting insect-like wings that served as solar collectors and message transceivers. Others had grown odd appendages that served arcane purposes, or no purpose at all: roots, antlers. The girl appeared normal but for her forehead, which was nubbined with the buds of two tiny horns.

The weird was commonplace in the desert. What the nomads made their living from, such that it was, was finding the utterly unusual and unique. Over tens of thousands of years, even random computing was bound to churn out a few odd results that might be sold or traded for food and the various gewgaws the nomads lusted after.

Mac reflected that he ought to know; he'd done his share of trading over the years. He usually let his nonsentients analyse the goods, and he himself only had a general awareness of what he bought from the nomads. Customarily, these were things such as solutions to mathematical conundrums, oddball, incredibly compact methods for file archiving, or remixes of movies, novels, or music that might strike someone's fancy on some other world, but had never struck his. In exchange, he sold the nomads the motorcycles they adored, tents, drills, old analyser parts, obsolete robots and cracked-code nonsentient algorithms. Across the desert was strewn the detritus of humanity, the leavings of the religious pilgrimages that had occurred for several centuries after the war ended. Some of the junk was transformed in an odd or beautiful manner, brought back to a twilight life or function by interaction with the jack-rock and other castaway items. Most desert artifacts were worthless, however—as useless and stupid as the washing machine full of regenerating stones the nomads had once tried to sell him.

Much better to live in the Valley of the Gardens, where the land was loved, tended and bountiful.

He'd tried to tell Theresa that in one of their conversations.

"Until you set foot over the line and enter the valley, you'll never know what a shithole you live in," he'd said. "Give it a try, one try, and you're never going back."

Of course, he had no real idea what he was talking about. He'd never been more than a footstep into the Extremadura.

Mac had been teasing Theresa the day he challenged her to cross over, but the next time they met—she tried it. Without a word of warning, she hopped through a tumbled section of fence and stood on his property.

And hopped right back—as if touched by flame.

He'd checked the log that evening and saw that his encroachment protocols hadn't even been triggered by her presence. It was as if a leaf had fallen, or butterfly had flitted, over the edge, rather than a girl.

She was so light. A thing of the air. She spoke of the mountains to the south, mountains he'd only seen from trips into orbit, but where she'd been born and raised. She was a creature of high passes. Winter, or the slight chilling of a world that was always warm since the terraforming, was the time the nomads travelled to the flats—an area she hated.

"That's why I keep coming up here to walk with you," she told him. "This little ridge is the closest thing to a mountain I'll see until summer."

He didn't speak much, but asked questions and listened. Mostly what he did was work on the fence: he lifted and placed stones and scanned for true. Every hundred feet, he dug a posthole and set a metal tie into the jack-rock below with jack-ready concrete he mixed in a small green wheelbarrow. Theresa watched, occasionally pitched a stone that had fallen on her side back over to him, told him of her life in the desert mountains.

She was a goatherd. Often she lived in the high passes for weeks on end without seeing another human. The goats were for milk and occasional slaughter, and her main task was to keep desert predators away—which she did with a wicked weapon of a crook she described for Mac—and to rescue animals that got in tricky situations even for goats. Her horn nubbins were her connection to the herd. They were an artifact that had been passed down through generations of women in her clan.

Theresa cherished her desert mountains in the same way he cherished his valley, only she didn't own the land in the same way he did. She was also the furthest thing possible from a farmer. She wasn't anything like any of the other girls in the village either, with whom he'd had his brief affairs. She picked at her horns, leapt about as she spoke like a child at play. He found her irresistible.

By the end of a month of fence-mending, he realised he'd fallen in love with Theresa. And that they could never be together. She came to understand the first along with him—that had been about the time she'd made her jump through the wall—but it took her longer to grasp the second. They might live on the same planet, but aeons of existence on opposite sides of the impenetrable divide had made them into practically separate species. Practically, but not quite.

Mac did love Theresa. Of that there was no doubt. And when the fence was done, he still found reasons to return to the boundary line, as did she. And one pleasant day in early spring they discovered that, while neither could abide the other's country, there was one place they could meet and touch.

On the fence.

There were places where it was wide enough and flat enough on top that two might lie side by side if they turned towards one another. Or one climbed upon another and made love to her. Again and again.

But no one could build a life upon a fence. Spring came in full, and it was time for Theresa to go back to her mountains. Her clan lingered until the first duststorm passed through, and then packed away their tents, their prospecting gear, and hitched travelling trailers to their motorcycles, then headed out over the rock-strewn sand. He watched it all, saw them disappear in the distance using a delicate crystalline viewing scope Theresa had given him as a parting gift.

The telescope was a crusty brown thing on the outside, but sparkling clear within, like a split geode. Unlike a geode, it was a tube, and its crystals must have had quantum information transferring functions far beyond the chemistry of unjacked geology, because with the telescope he could see a hundred miles. And not just see. Hear. Smell. Even sense the touch of whatever he was focusing on. Theresa had claimed the scope was an Extremadura extrusion, that there was a hidden depression in mid-desert known only to the Faller where telescopes and monoculars of every variety grew. He'd wanted to pay, but she'd scoffed at the offer.

"It's not for you to ever trade away either," she told him.

Through this, he watched her go.

I clung to Jasmine, centred our weight and rode the zip line down at terminal velocity. The line was reeling out both ways as we fell from geosynch—one end towards the planet surface, one out into space as a counterbalance.

Buboes erupted all around us in the planet's upper atmosphere, not there a moment before, then, like eyes startled open, there, and spewing gamma rays, mutagens, disassemblers. Martin and Wu couldn't pull up in time and they rappelled right through a cloud of the nox. It etched and dimpled them until their valence defences overcame it. But by that time their zip line was severed and the heat shield they rode upon had lost its contour. They burnt when we entered the stratosphere. Others were luckier in their dying as the enemy emerged, fired and blew them from the sky straightaway.

Of course one might consider this a bit of luck. If you died upon entry, there wasn't any chance of getting sucked into a bubo during a direct encounter down on the turf. Because they spewed out the gob and the nox until they had you.

And then they reversed the process, and fed.

"Pock, pock, pock," Jasmine said. "The octopus is hungry." Her theory was that the buboes were like suckers on a giant kraken that surrounded the local continuum like an octopus might swarm a snowglobe. We two-dimensional creatures living on the curve of the surface would see only the suckers until the globe cracked and shattered. And even then among the shards we would never have seen the cause of our ruin.

For all I knew at the time, she was right. The scientists had lots of theories about what the hirudineans actually were, of course. Different physics from us. From everything, as a matter of fact. Skewed values for the ratio of the mass of proton and electron, the strength of the electroweak force.

The hirudineans were from a time so close to the Big Bang that questions of origin hardly mattered. They were far more ancient than us heavy-element- species, and even older than the H and He nebulars, those sentients from the gas giants that had populated the galaxies before there was any such thing as carbon or iron.

Anyway, said the scientists, when the rest of reality aligned itself to its current state of affairs, the hirudineans did not. By that time, hardly a blink of the cosmic eye, they had reached the sentience threshold, achieving consciousness in a fermion condensate base. They built molecules from a soup of quarks without going through the step of creating the ensuring atoms and, with these, made the first bridge drives—at a time before there were stars to which to travel. They had migrated—not into the universe, but out, taking their weird physics with them. They. Or it. No one was sure. Now they—or it—had returned.

Or so the scientists thought. We skyfallers had our own notions, based upon the soldier's mixture of experience and superstition. To tell the truth, I never much cared about root causes and definitive classification back then. I was bloody-minded, full of rage and sorrow. The hirudineans had wiped out my three sons on Mars, before they'd eaten the sun of humankind—the real, original sun—a feat even the nebulars had never been able to accomplish during our war with them, and had driven us into the darkness. They'd nearly killed me at Gang Kao, and my wife had died in the evacuation when a stealth disassembler disguised as a shuttle bulkhead dissolved, spraying us passengers into space. She was not space-adapted. I was.

A rescue drone picked me up as I spiralled towards the outer system holding my wife's exploded body in my arms.

I'd joined the army soon after. What else was there to do? Based on my background as an artist, they'd wanted to make me a graphic designer, but after a couple of years churning out dubiously effective recruitment prop, I wrangled my way into the skyfaller regiment. I was an old man even then—and nothing if not patient in my thirst for revenge.

That was many falls ago. Jasmine was my fifth variant. I'd lost the other four as humanity had lost, in battle after battle across the Milky Way—fights that echoed conflicts taking place across billions of light-years in the entire local galactic cluster. Our little slice of reality had the bad luck to be the entry point for the hirudinean incursion.

My other four variants had been close to me, of course, as comrades-in-arms always are. Jasmine was the first whom I would have called a friend. She was thirtieth generation, cloned from one of the best fighters during the nebular wars. Her angel was an AU away, dipping down into this system's solar corona and sending energy her way through the quantum tunnel formed by her entanglement with Jasmine, her twin sister. A variant needed every particle in her being to take the transfer of power. In order to then channel that energy into a more lethal form, she must also be physically transformed by her valence assemblers. She must take on the simple geometry of a cylinder, and store her mind and reassembly instructions elsewhere. That was where I came in. I was the shooter. I held the cylinder in my arms, pointed it at the enemy, and directed her fire.

And I was the protector. I melded with her mind, stored her thoughts inside me in a twisted singularity apart from the quantum entanglements of this world, so that she could be reconstituted as a person after the firefight. Like every skyfaller, I had a black hole for a heart.

Jasmine was my rifle, and I was the guardian of her soul.

We hit the ground and I took a moment to shake off the shock, then armed her up and crawled out of the impact crater we'd created.

Cangarriga. Humanity's last stand.

All became impression for me. Orange-tinged sky. The wind full of ashes. The sickly sweet carbolic tang of the air when the hirudinean buboes popped into being. The odor of burnt flesh and ozone leavings after the passage of power from their maws.

Fire shooting from Jasmine in my outstretched arms—thick streams of radiation, undulating on all wavelengths, some electromagnetic, some heavy particle, some superconducting quantum interference clumps, as large as pebbles but with the kinetic energy of a solar corona.

Buboes swelling with the overload, imploding with little gaseous whumps when they died.

But they killed us too. With a wink. A bubo "eye" would close, wither down to nearly nothing in an instant, and then pop back open. Vomit would pour forth. What the nox was, I'll leave up to the engineers to explain. Some sort of extra-universal nanotech horror. I only know that it was liquid, or at least moved like liquid, and felt like acid when it spattered you. No valence defence could withstand a direct hit. It ate through my arm twice, my shoulder once, and my body had all it could do to regenerate the severed tendons, nerves and muscles. If I'd taken a hit to an organ, I'd have been nothing but a backed-up file in one of the archive ships headed out of the local cluster at below light-speed. I might live again in a few billion years, or I might be rejuvenated just in time to watch the hirudinean bask in final triumph. A skyfaller's version of the afterlife wasn't very comforting.

We fought for a Cangarriga day-and-night cycle—which, for this world, was close to standard Earth-time. It took me a while to notice how Earthlike the planet was in other respects as well, since I was too busy digging foxholes, hiding behind anything solid and—finally—retaking the small settlement we'd come to defend. We moved into the village of Sant Llorenz at sunset on the second day. It was a ghost town. The hirudineans had exterminated most of the population before we arrived, sucking away the order—and life—from those they didn't kill outright. Oh, they left a few behind; they always did—an assortment of disassembled and remade settlers halfway inside walls where they flailed about and expired when we extracted them, or with heads separated from bodies, yet maintained alive by a few necessary blood vessels so that the victims could observe their own decapitated state as they slowly died.

This was one of the few ways we knew the hirudineans were intelligent. Their sick sense of humour.

After the screams of the dying echoed their last, I looked around and found myself in a beautiful basin set between a half-crescent of craggy hills. Jasmine reconstituted into a woman beside me and was just as stunned as I was.

The place was beautiful. It had been terraformed for nearly a millennium prejack, and the vegetation was engineered based on the biome from the hills of northern Spain. The ground was yellow-white and sandy, with a darker basalt substrate below. We were surrounded on all sides by green: evergreen, hardwood oca and soft pine. Rosemary and sage formed the underbrush. The mountainsides were dry, but not arid. A first generation of trees in the surrounding hills had been burnt for charcoal by the original colonists, who had arrived, as settlers will, clueless, urban and without an adequate power plant. Some of them had found a way to weather the winters using the most primitive tech imaginable and, occasionally, a depression of blackened soil in the recovered woodland marked an ancient carbonero pit.

We learnt the planet's name, Cangarriga, and that this area was called the Valley of the Gardens.

I had been wounded in the fighting, a hole neatly drilled through buttocks, with nox traces still inside. My valence defences were winning against it, but I walked with a limp for several days. I was also in much pain, especially at first. I convalesced with Jasmine by my side.

Meanwhile, the regiment invested the planet, most of which was desert where the terraforming hadn't taken hold (old-time techniques had always been hit-or-miss). My company was lucky enough to remain in the verdant valley. Overhead, the angels and motherships clustered in close orbits around the sun, the planet itself relatively unprotected. We were running low on ships. The Allied Species had lost badly in a nearby sector—to go along with everywhere else—and the hirudineans were following up with a withering counterattack. They'd soon be coming back, and we skyfallers would be expected to hold Cangarriga as a shield for retreating AS forces. If we went down too quickly—for not many doubted that we would go down eventually—the loss would likely turn into a rout and the sacrifice of a billion and a half lives made null in a matter of days. Humanity would be on the run from its own galaxy.

So we lived in the twilight between battles, Jasmine and I. This was the longest time I'd ever spent with a variant. The others had been killed or had lost their angels to hirudinean attack—and the loss of an angel nearly invariably signalled the end of her variant clone. It was hard on heart and soul to lose one's second self and shared mind.

Jasmine and her angel had been teachers before joining the regiment. They'd served on one of the old crèche ships created to fight the old wars. It had been blasted from the sky while they were on leave, and twenty thousand children—one-fifth of them Jasmine-models—had been obliterated. Jasmine was herself, of course, not the original for her genome—not by many generations—but she was of the special breed of the quantum entangled, the sister-minds that had turned the tide humanity's way in the war with the nebulars.

Jasmine and I spent our off hours together on Cangarriga, roaming the hills that enclosed the valley we garrisoned. I soon discovered that the cliffs at the valley head were riddled with caves and sinkholes—the entrances of which yawned in man-swallowing cracks leading down to black abysses. My sort of thing, back then. Spelunking with my boys had been a hobby we'd all shared. I crawled into a few of these caves and I found a cavern complex that ran throughout the hills. It was not water-created, but formed by lava tubes and magma bubbles—a relic of the planet from the days before the drone from Earth had arrived with its rainfall of tiny builders and shapers. I even coaxed Jasmine to accompany me on some of these trips, which she gamely did, although her IR visual enhancements were standard, while mine were fine-tuned for caving. Meanwhile, near the compound where we were barracked, she started a herb garden. It was an ephemeral gesture, and both of us knew it. But, somehow, it did not seem futile.

Our friendship, which had grown of necessity by proximity and intimate knowledge of one another, became something more then. Perhaps it was the pressure of knowledge of the end, the doom hanging over our heads. But I like to think it was more than that, that we shared a tough, creative nature—she with her little garden and her former profession of teaching, I with my former life as an artist. She and her angel sang lovely songs to one another when they thought no one was listening.

One thing we unequivocally shared was an understanding of what losing those you love meant. Because of this, we had been reluctant to let our feelings develop further. But as the days became weeks and the nearby stars which shone so brightly in the moonless night sky became mere photonic remnants, images of things we knew, via the subnet, to be gone, we at last concluded that our remaining life was bound to be very short and that we'd likely leave it together.

"And anyway," Jasmine told me one evening, "she wants me to do it." We were standing guard at the time—more to keep the wild pigs that roamed the wooded ridges away from the food supplies than from fear of invasion. We'd likely learn of a hirudinean approach over the subnet. They created a sort of subatomic pressure wave when they were building for attack.

"Your angel wants you to?" I asked.

Jasmine nodded. "She's lonely on patrol, and if it happens to me, it'll happen to her." She smiled slyly. "Ever been in a threesome?"

There is a curious discipline among skyfallers. We're an elite, and, as such, we generally police ourselves. Fraternisation between faller and variant is frowned upon, and hooking up officially forbidden. But it is done, and done often. After all, there's a long tradition of marines sleeping with their rifles.

I made the request of a day's leave from my captain. He understood what I was asking, and, perhaps because I was still recovering from my wound and he felt he owed me something, offered me the residence, untouched by the fighting, which he'd taken over near the village outskirts. He could move into the village of Sant Llorenz for a day, he told me, no problem.

The house was called Rosinol, and, before he vacated the premises, my captain told me the story of the dead settler to whom it had belonged. One hot summer many years ago, its owner had been accused of accidentally setting the whole valley aflame during a drunken barbecue in his yard. This had been nonsense, and the charges had eventually been dropped, but the man had been mortified by the accusation and had moved into the village and never returned to Rosinol from that day forth. In the decades since, his rosebushes, for which he'd won prizes, had grown wild, covering the fence, then the yard, then the house itself—even the roof and chimney. At this late date in the summer, the mass of house-shaped roses was a riot of colours: red, pink, yellow, white. The accused man's barbecue grill still sat in the back meadow, a stark scarecrow robot, not yet crumbled to rust, as Jasmine and I took up residence the next morning. It was hard to believe that none of the past mattered anymore—the humiliation, the hidden truth, the pathos. The settlers were gone, all of them, and only the rosebushes remained.

We made love in the master bedroom with rose tendrils tingeing what sunshine passed through its bay window with a green and living light. I tried to be tender with her, for she was technically a virgin—remade so many times that her body was practically that of a child. She was a child with a woman's experience, however, and she showed no similar ginger feeling towards me, but pulled me down to ready her, then up by the hair to position me over her, and said "now," and I plunged inside. She kept me on top only because of my wound.

She gushed when I broke her and we bloodied the sheets something terrible, until I finally stripped them off and set them to cleansing, then found a towel, put it under us, and fucked her until we were both too sore to move.

I lay in bed and thought: This is the last time. If I lose Jasmine, there will never be another.

Turned out we had timed it right. Within hours after we came off leave, the hirudineans attacked.

Summer came to the Valley of the Gardens. The stone roses were blooming in the fields. They were blue-white in the sun, spangled through with shiny specks of red and black obsidian from the days before the planet was remade by man. The "roses" themselves looked more like gigantic cauliflowers. They took their name from the long, brittle vines running along trellises from which the blooms depended. The stone roses were not exactly plants, of course, but crystallised mineral. Yet they were alive in a real sense with the jack-rock's swirl of near-sentience, and they cross-fertilised one another ceaselessly. Mac took two crops a year, one in early summer and the other in autumn, hiring villagers each time to help him during the two or three weeks that a harvest usually lasted. In the autumn, his harvest and that of the other farmers in the valley was followed by a festival in Sant Llorenz.

After harvest, he crushed the stone flowers in the make vat by his barn, added water piped from the fountain spring at the upper end of the valley and finally worked the mix into a slurry. He skimmed this off with a rake, and then his hands, and finally ran the drip into a settling pond nearby, where it sat for a month as the portal stone slowly coalesced. The land surrounding the pond shone bone-white with a salty crust of summer extrusion from the final melding. Only the portal stone would be going to the stars. Everything else would stay right here on Cangarriga, to be plowed under and reused for another season, and the season after that, and after that—for as long as wind and sun turned the worlds and some people, somewhere, wanted gateways to wander between the spaces between them.

The physics of being were different in the Valley of the Gardens, and exploiting this odd difference—really no more than a thousandth of a percentage in this force, a hundredth in that constant—was what allowed the known species of the local cluster instantaneous travel between the stars. The portal stone would go through many more stages of completion on a dozen other worlds—but Cangarriga was where all portals were born. That was why the system was protected and hidden from much of the outside world. The starlight in the sky at night was deliberately scrambled into random, changing patterns so that visitors who arrived by portal could not work out their location through triangulation. Some claimed the entire star system had been moved from its original location, but Mac doubted this. Mostly the place had just been forgotten about as gates became more common and portal stone a commodity—albeit an expensive one.

It was near sunset, and Mac listened in on the port-net's information buzz, as last orders for the day arrived, invoices were dispatched, calls made and received from elsewhere and elsewhen. People with family out there. Mac didn't have any himself—only his da, Old Jari. His ma had migrated off planet these twelve hundred years, and given up on him and his father. Not that Mac blamed her. Or remembered her. He'd only been a baby when she left. These days Jari was little more than a knobby root who sat in the rosefield day and night humming protocols for growth, hoeing out the viruses, sports and weeds, and not saying anything much for sometimes years on end.

It was hard to live with a man like that, even when he was your father. Mac wasn't even sure if Jari knew anymore who he was. He'd never known his da to take off a Sunday for recollection and archiving, and when you didn't do that, he'd been taught by the priest, you were on the road to evaporation. Of course, his father was old—one of the oldest of the villagers—and once someone was fully invested into their singularity, the past was as accessible as the present. Or so the priest had also told him. To Mac, age seemed to merely make his da more vague and irascible.

He found his father up the valley, slowly hoeing down a row of stone-rose furrows. The blooms rose up and drank in the afternoon sun, converting it to energy and then to something else, working its curious physics upon the photons themselves. Mac had had the math drummed into him once, and it was still there if he wished to reach through the layers and find where that particular understanding was stored. It was paradoxical that the young sometimes had trouble remembering things that happened a mere century ago, when the old who had reached their full mental growth and inscribed themselves into their singularity could access millennia of memory without batting an eyelash. But singularities required more than two thousand years after implantation to twist and compress into enough complexity to serve as anything more than an archive for the most basic of sensory impressions. Most of Mac's dynamic memories were stored in the land—particularly the land around his house, and the jack-rock of the caves that he knew lay beneath it.

This was the reason he couldn't leave the valley. Until he was fully inscribed into his singularity—and that would be five hundred years from now, at least—leaving the Valley of the Gardens would be, literally, the same as leaving himself. His brief jaunts in the planetary shuttle up to the solar collection station had been unnerving enough.

He was still a kid, and, except in extreme cases, the portals were for adult use only.

The thing was, he felt five hundred years ahead of schedule. He had since he'd met Theresa and made love to her on the fence. In one sense, his connection to the jack-rock of the land was far from mystical. He was a veritable nexus of command and control operations for every facet of the farm. Not a crystal grew or tree budded without his being aware of it, dimly or otherwise, as the situation demanded. They called it the Valley of the Gardens for a reason. He was a gardener.

But there was something else now. The feeling of something almost frantic in the land. Flowers blooming as if they would never get a chance to bloom again. Weeds running riot in the rosefields. This was why Jari had spent so much time hoeing these days. These years.

"Da, I want to talk to you," Mac said. He strode across the furrows, gingerly stepping over the delicate living stone that grew between them.

His father did not answer, and continued his hoeing. There were real, actual weeds. And there were stray routines that inhabited them, that damaged the inner working of the crop flowers.

Mac reached Jari, touched his shoulder.

"Da!"

Jari stopped hoeing, but neither looked up nor answered. Mac felt lucky. This was more reaction than he'd gotten from his father in a month of Sundays. Jari's tangled hair fell down to his feet. His beard, a mass of curls, hung like a great bib from his chin, reaching nearly to his belly. And Jari's nails—they were uncut. Gnarled and brown spirals.

"I've met a girl," said Mac. "A woman."

Mac looked down at his da's toes, sticking out of rope-soled sandals. Battered, broken-nailed.

"Faller," his father said.

"Yes." Mac didn't even bother asking how his father knew this.

"And you want to know why she can't cross over the fence."

"I want to know how I can be with her. Together with her."

To Mac's surprise, Jari straightened up, brushed the hair from his eyes. Mac hadn't seen those eyes for a long time. He'd become so accustomed to thinking of his father as a stooped nebbish, he'd forgotten there was an actual human face under there.

"Other people visit the village, come in the valley. Why can't she?" Mac asked.

"Why don't you go over into the Extremadura?"

"You know why," Mac replied. "My memories are here. The fence cuts off my access."

His father nodded slowly, and his hair fell back over his face. The curtain closed over the man. Still his voice emerged once more from the shrubbery.

"She's got nox traces in her," Jari said. "Valley's likely rejecting it, not her."

"But all that was neutralised years ago."

"The war's not over," he said. "Not yet."

Jari hunched over once more and resumed his slow hoeing down the rose furrows. Mac knew further questions would be met with stone silence. It had been infuriating him for centuries. Mac considered himself a patient person. He understood holding one's tongue until there was something worthwhile to say. He'd even admired his da for it at one point. But enough was enough.

Cryptic pronouncements. Answers that provoked more questions. Always the long view. Never a solution for the moment.

Seemed like every time he got around his father, he got irritated. Maybe the problem was with him, but Mac couldn't do anything about it. The villagers thought his father was wise, but there came a time when something had to make a common sort of sense in the here and now. But he supposed his da would never see that. Or had seen it and dismissed it millennia ago.

So it shocked him when his father called out to him as he was stalking away across the field, wondering why he'd come at all.

"When he comes," said Jari, "you may can go and get her."

Mac turned, put his hands on his hips. He almost didn't want to give his father the pleasure, but in the end his curiosity got the better of him. "Who's coming, Da?"

But his father had resumed his hoeing, and there was no reply. It was as if a rock had spoken, and then gone mute again. You almost wondered if you had heard anything in the first place.

There were more of them this time, if that were possible. They popped into existence all around the village. Guarding the planet's star, our angels and motherships faced a thousand times as many hirudineans in space. The buboes appeared from seemingly nowhere, disgorged their toxins, their blasts of unstable "energy-like" gob lethally spewed from otherwhen. They were parasites, feeding on order. They were after the local sun as an afterthought—it was the rich complexity of planetary physics they truly wanted. But the hirudineans knew that to kill the star cut off power to the humans on the encircling planets and left them defenceless. Then the feast could begin.

The angels held on as best they could, and through quantum tunnels they fed us the sun's fire. They fed Jasmine. And she took it, transformed it, and flamed forth. I used her as the weapon she was, directed her fire, attempted to lance the pustules forming in the air about us.

Planetside, it was like trying to hold back a nightmare rain. We'd invested Cangarriga with a thick layer of jack-rock by this time, and we thus had an advantage against their disassemblers and other nano-based spew. This saved us from being wiped out in the first wave by the nox. The descending liquid gob, their energy attack, was bad enough. It burnt through the woods, leaving razed forests of cinder stumps in its wake as it struck and rolled down the sides of the valley. The buboes worked together, concentrating their energy. They hung like diseased moons in the air, oozing, sputtering, flaming forth from their gaping, lipless mouths after they recharged. They formed a half-globe around us, a northern hemisphere of destruction.

We'd set up fields of fire, stationed ourselves as best we could using the cover we had in the village. The skyfallers in the surrounding region were not so lucky. Most of the planet was lifeless desert—what some history-conscious faller had named "Extremadura" after an area on old Earth. There were many more of them, and they were mercilessly annihilated, with maybe one in a hundred surviving the first assault. But they kept fighting back. We all did.

Because we knew that for those who survived the fighting, there would be the absorption, the eating. The hirudineans took no prisoners.

We used internal calculators to determine the moment when a bubo withered down to near nothing, but was still present. We sought to hit them in midblink with our variant rifles. It did some good.

Occasionally we'd knock one out and it would disappear with a hiss and wheeze into a puff of excrescence. But there were too many this time. And when we couldn't blow them away, they grew, extruding from their entry points in sickening stalks with no anchor except a point in space above us.

And, one by one, they picked us off. The gob rained down. The stalks extruding it grew longer, closer. When the stalks reached the ground—or any human, machine or order-rich object in between—they would reverse their flow, begin their long-term task of parasitisation.

Whole sections of the galaxy had been sucked dry in just such a manner.

The subnet crackled with death all around us, death above in space. Our forces outside the valley had been defeated and lay dead in what had become a glassine desert. Our captain was dead. We had to get out of there.

"Get to the caves!" I shouted. "The fucking caves!" The others—there were maybe twenty of us remaining—heard me over the subnet. I quickly passed along topo with the cavern entrances marked. Almost without thought, the company peeled away, followed me—not as if I were a leader, but as a flock might follow a random bird in flight. We made for the nearest entrance, a sinkhole, and threw ourselves in. At the bottom, we wormed our way into the underground system through a hole in the bottom of the hole.

I knew this wouldn't stop the hirudineans. But it did slow them down. The jack-rock was now between us and them, and its clacking countercodes and security algorithms kept them from fixing on us precisely. I like to imagine some of the buboes lost their bearings entirely and spun away helplessly into space, or simply crackled out of existence, but I have no way of knowing. I was running and couldn't look back.

Around one bend, through a crack in the wall, into a wider cavern. I led us deeper—as deep as I had ever been. After that, I stood exhausted, uncertain.

"Where to?" a soldier near me asked. His name was Markinken. He was a noncom master sergeant and my supposed superior.

"Deeper," I said. "Somehow."

We were navigating by IR at that point. Jasmine must have seen the flush in my face as my fear rose in a blood-hot plume to my skin.

"Follow me," she said. We did for a few steps, all of us. And then Jasmine stopped. Stopped moving. Stopped breathing for a few seconds, even. Finally, she spoke in a numb voice.

"She's dead."

Her angel.

The angels of the other variants winked out one by one at that point as well, their entanglements at an end, their connections severed. Our weapons, the only weapons that had ever worked against the hirudineans, were gone.

We sat in darkness a long time then. I didn't know where to go. To tell the truth, I'd lost my bearings so completely by that point that I was afraid that if we went forward I might be leading us up as easily as down. Jasmine sat and hugged her legs to her chest. After a moment, she tipped over onto her side in a full foetal position. I sat next to her, lifted her head up, placed it on my lap. I stroked her hair.

Then she sat up, rigid and alert, her aura coursing red in the darkness.

"Something," she said.

"The buboes?"

"No."

"What then?"

"Her."

She meant her angel. "Still alive?" I stupidly asked.

She shook her head. "Not alive. Not exactly."

Jasmine stood up, suddenly alert. I stood beside her. "How can that be?" she whispered to herself.

"Tell me what's going on," I said. "What are you feeling?"

A shudder ran through her. "It ate her. Whole. I can sense it. I can sense everything. The other side."

"The place where the hirudineans exist?"

"No," she said after a moment. "The place that is the hirudineans."

Winter came to the valley. Mac went every day to watch for her approach through his telescope. One day, there she was. A speck in the brightness at first. Closer. The cloud of motorcycle dust. The tents and cattle. He could see it all through the device, but he could only watch and wait to touch her.

She came as soon as her clan was settled. They met at the fence.

"I watched you as long as I could."

"I knew you'd be watching," Theresa said. "I felt you as soon as we hit the flats."

"My da says you can't cross because you've got the nox inside you," Mac said, "but that can't be right. We trade. Artifacts can cross the fence. The telescope did."

"Something stops me," she said. "When I stepped over, it's like the world was yanked from under me. Like I'd fallen into a hole, and that I'd keep falling forever if I didn't jump back."

"That's how it feels when I'm cut off from my memories."

"So here we are again."

"Here we are."

"Maybe it's just not our time yet," she said. "Maybe something will change."

Mac laughed. "In the Valley of the Gardens? Nothing ever changes here."

But at the fence they could touch one another. That was something, at least.

The winter passed. She left for her distant mountains with spring.

Something, but not nearly enough.

Jasmine explained what she could. I hardly understood a word she said at the time, but I've pieced it together in the years since. The long, long years.

The quantum entanglement between Jasmine and her angel twin had reasserted itself, and communication was reestablished. The hirudinean universe wasn't that different from our own in terms of physical constants. Just different enough to set up an energy differential. Over the aeons, the hirudineans had parasitised our universe from their pocket creation, feeding off these tiny differences. They'd been merely a nuisance at first, an almost imperceptible suck on the laws of conservation. But as our universe had grown, so had the hirudinean appetite.

I say its appetite because "they" were an interlaced group mind. Jasmine's instinct had been right. The buboes were more like octopus suckers than individual organisms. They were like the tips of fingers touching a windowpane at different places on a frosty day. Each fingertip seemed separate, but all actually belonged to one hand.

Jasmine's angel had remained conscious during her passage into the maw of the hirudinean. Why, when so many millions of other angels had been utterly destroyed in the process?

Maybe it was because the war was so near its end. The hirudineans had won. It sensed its victory.

Overreach. Hubris. The desire to toy with its victim.

The fact that soon there would be no more sentients to talk to. To torture. To get its sick jokes.

It wanted to keep one human alive to play with for a while.

"I was right," Jasmine said. "It's an octopus." She smiled. It was a slight smile, cold—as cold as a glance from another universe. Alien. Frightening. "All I have to do is reach through one of the buboes. Touch her. And we can choke it, shut it down, she and I."

When the first hirudinean bubo arrived, it was no longer trying to destroy us. With the defeat of our angels, we skyfallers were no longer a viable enemy. We were food.

The remains of the company attacked. But without massive energy from the sun, it was useless. Our conventional weapons glanced off without effect.

The eye grew nearer.

Hungrier.

One by one, the company members rushed it, flung themselves at it—sacrificed themselves so that Jasmine and I could inch closer. We needed it to try to swallow her whole, just as it had her angel.

And then we were as close as we were going to get. I took Jasmine in my arms, held her not like a weapon, but, I like to think, as a dancer holds a ballerina, suspended just before the next movement. She did not transform, but remained a woman to the last.

She signalled me that we were close enough.

"What if you're wrong?" I said.

"Throw me."

"If you don't die, you'll be alone."

"I'll always have Rosinol," she said. Then she turned her head away from me, faced the maw of the bubo. "Now throw me in, you stupid bastard, before it's too late!"

And so I did. I swung her back, then heaved her into the wound in reality that floated before us. She went inside. Head, torso, one bent leg.

And then stopped. One leg was still extended. Still in the world. Had it got her, then? Was it about to chomp down, finish swallowing her?

Less than a second later the bubo began to brown. It expanded and contracted rapidly, now attempting to expel what it had so eagerly consumed. Nothing doing.

I knew that she had touched her angel when the bubo went totally dark around her leg. The hirudinean was still there, and she was still there. The bubo became a black disk, the size of a picture mirror, perhaps. It gave off no light, no electromagnetic radiation in any of the bands I was equipped to observe. The only reason I could see it was because of Jasmine's leg, absurdly sticking out.

I had the irresistible urge to touch her.

Warm. But not moving. Suspended there in mid-throw. I touched the surface of the blackened hirudinean. It had resistance and a bit of give as well—as if I were touching the surface of a hardened gel. But it didn't dimple or move in any way, and when I pulled my fingers back, they were cool and dry.

Outside, in the rest of the universe, the buboes were gone. I listened on the subnet. Queried. Confirmed. The hirudinean attack had simply evaporated. Across worlds. Across galaxies.

Only this one remained.

Jasmine was the wrench in the machinery, the virus in the system.

She had choked the octopus.

The man who stepped from the portal that day looked neither particularly old nor particularly young. In a distant past, almost beyond memory, he might have been called middle-aged. He walked slowly down the pebble-strewn, dusty central road of the Valley of the Gardens. The sun was near noon and the man cast a stub for a shadow. The man's hair was grizzled grey, with black undertones, as was his neatly trimmed beard. He wore rope-soled sandals that were beaten to an oakum frizz and seemed barely to hang together on his feet.

When he reached Mac's house, he stopped, stood by the courtyard gate, then opened it and walked to the door. He rapped on the wood quickly, loudly, with his knuckles.

"Nobody home," said Mac, as he rounded the house, carrying a load of wood in his green wheelbarrow.

The man gazed at Mac for a long moment without saying anything. Mac started to feel uncomfortable under his gaze. He lowered his load, stood straight, and stared back.

"Can I help you with anything? We don't get many visitors this time of year."

"Maybe," said the man. "I noticed that most of the houses in the valley have little plaques with their names on it. But I don't see one here. So I was wondering—does this house have a name?"

"Sure it does," said Mac. "Doesn't need a plaque. Everybody knows it's Rosinol."

The man sighed, audibly. To Mac, it sounded like relief, a burden dropped. "Do you put people up here?" the man said. "For a price, I mean? Bed-and-breakfast?"

"Not usually," said Mac. "But what did you have in mind?"

The man smiled. His teeth, white and perfect, flashed. He stroked his beard. His gaze became distant and he laughed softly. "I stayed here once before. Many years ago. I have fond memories of the place. I have some business in the valley that will keep me overnight. Would you mind giving me a place to stay? I haven't got much money on me, but I can pay you"—the man returned his gaze to Mac—"with a story."

Mac nodded. "How'd you know that's about the only thing I'd agree to?" he said.

The man gestured at the house, the beautifully kept rose garden in its courtyard, now dormant and trimmed back for winter, but still lovely in its tangle. "When a man's already got everything, that's about all a traveller has to offer."

"I haven't got everything," Mac said. "Not close. But come on inside and let's have something to drink. My father's about. He may drop by. Been acting a bit queer lately, though."

"I'd be interested to see him," the man replied, "after all these years."

"Now I really want that story," Mac said. He led the way into the warmth of the house.

" . . .the Valley of the Gardens was quite a famous place after she stopped the war. People made pilgrimages here. Religions formed. For a while, this world became a shrine. Sojourners camped in the desert on the other side of the mountain. Some of the surviving skyfallers, too, hung around after they were discharged. Thousands filled the plains at a time, millions at some points."

The man sat across from Mac in the Rosinol living room. They sipped red wine from Mac's own vineyards, now laid up these past twenty-five years and at a pitch-perfect age, even if he did say so himself.

"For a long time, I was the caretaker. I guarded the caves, let only certain scientists in. Two universes meet here. Jasmine holds on to her angel there, but part of her sticks out here in the valley. It's as simple as that. Physical law is indeterminate. We determined it was a small area—a dozen square miles. Constants migrate back and forth over this small space. We fenced in this area. Cultivated it. The hirudineans wanted to parasitise our universe to enlarge their own. Now both exist side by side, and Jasmine is the bridge."

"People hardly know this place exists anymore," said Mac.

"You can't blame them," said the man. "So much else has happened."

"Or maybe it was hidden on purpose," Mac said.

"And maybe you're just a bunch of damned provincials. Nobody's held prisoner on Cangarriga. It's just the locations have been a bit obscured to keep the valley pristine." The man sipped his wine. "Something else happened too. Something we've yet to explain, although we've been studying it all these years. It wasn't just the hirudinean universe that's been seeping into the valley. It's Jasmine. She began to influence things. She'd been a gardener before the war. The valley had been beautiful when we arrived, but it took on a new lustre. You knew somebody was in charge. Then the first stone roses grew, with their gateway properties. We knew then. We called in the scientists, and they were able to analyse the port stone, enhance its ability to exist in two realities at once. Make use of it. And that's how we cut star travel time down by decades, intergalactic travel down by lifetimes. How the portal system developed."

"You say 'we,' but you left."

"Yes," said the man. "But I also stayed. I made myself a quantum-
entangled clone, an angel of my own, to guard this valley. To stand watch over her grave. I've seen it all, no matter where I've been. He and I are always together."

"My da," said Mac.

"Yes," the man replied. He took up his wine glass, took a long sip, wiped a drop from his beard. Outside, the sun had gone down and the stars twinkled in the Cangarriga night with no moon, ever, to dilute their light.

"So you're my . . .my real father."

"No," said the man. "Your father is your father."

"And my mother?"

The man took another sip, considered, then drained his glass. "What do you remember?"

"She left before I was old enough to remember," Mac said. "Da told me."

"She's here, son. She's been here all along."

"I'm a clone?" Mac said. "I'm your clone?"

"Your father's. But it comes to the same thing," the man replied. "Made from valley materials."

"Why?"

"You'll understand when you're a little older. For one thing, you'll be able to travel without a portal. At least, we think so. There's never really been anything like you before."

"So I can leave the valley?"

"That remains to be seen," said the man. "Jasmine's grip is loosening. She's sent messages to your father. Dreams. It takes years for them to take shape, decades to understand. That's what he's been doing all this time. Listening. Haven't you felt them too?"

"I don't know." But he did. The restlessness. The wilderness creeping in where the fence had fallen down. Was his love for Theresa merely the valley loosening its grip?

"So what happens when Jasmine lets go of her angel? Will the hirudinean come back, destroy us all?"

The man didn't answer directly. He stood up, turned to the living room's window. Outside, a single lamp glowed in the courtyard.

"What do you imagine it's been like for her, holding on, spread out over two worlds?"

"I guess the strain might get to you. You'd go a little crazy. You might start to hallucinate."

"Or dream." The man sat back down. "You're wrong about your father," he said. "He's a lot more human than I am."

"You're joking," said Mac. "He's gone beyond the vegetable stage. He's practically become a rock."

"Fifty thousand years. That many lifetimes lacquered on. It's a wonder he ever speaks at all. But you and I both know there's a man under there."

"But here you are, talking to me as free as can be, not bent over by time."

"Wise boy," the man said. "But still a kid. What is there beyond a stone? Beyond a storm?"

Mac shook his head. "A principle?" he said. "A law of nature?"

"What I am is a painter," the man said. He reached for the wine bottle. Fingered the picture on the label. A stone rose. "I was only a soldier for a little while."

Mac was confused. "You've come here to paint?"

The man set the wine bottle back down. "I came to meet my nephew, free my girl—and maybe in the process, I'll finish a painting I've been working on for quite some time." The man sat back in his chair, considered his wine glass. "I do need a brush, though."

"You need a—what?"

"Something to paint with."

"Well, good luck with finding one." Mac drained his glass, poured himself another from the half-empty bottle. He'd added some coded mash to the ferment that spread the taste out longer, held it in the mouth after swallowing for a few seconds. That had worked out nicely—again, if he did say so himself. Along with the portal stone, wine was another of the valley's principal exports.

The man held out his glass for a refill, with which Mac provided him. He drank, considered, and finally spoke. "The Extremadura has one purpose only."

"I'd always thought it was a fairly pointless place."

"That is the point. Aimlessness. A place to think. Slowly. Convolutedly. All those pilgrimages set the jack-rock in motion. Your father and I just tweaked it a bit, then left it alone. We asked it to come up with something to release Jasmine and keep the hirudinean in check. That's the problem it's been working on for all these centuries. Those trades you've made over the years with the Fallers? Discarded ideas. False starts. Sometimes useful, but never an answer. Now we think we've got something."

"What are you talking about?"

"The artifact your nomad girl gave you."

"My telescope? But that's nothing. That was a love gift. It doesn't have anything to do with all this."

"Exactly," said the man. "Do you think the gods speak in any other way?"

"You can't have it."

"I don't want it." The man took a sip, but kept Mac in his gaze. "All I want is for you to come with me tomorrow. Will you?"

To do what? Destroy the truce that had preserved the universe? Reveal the man for a charlatan? Likely, they'd clamber about in the caves until they both grew exhausted and decided to come home for supper.

"I suppose so," Mac said. "Yes, I'll come."

The man nodded. "Let's get some sleep," he said. "We have a long way to go in the morning."

Mac finished his wine. He stood with his glass and the bottle to take them away to the kitchen.

"You can leave the bottle if you don't mind," said the man. "It's about the best I've tasted in a really long time."

Mac nodded, pleased, and returned the bottle to the living room coffee table.

"Would you like to take the master bedroom? The one where  . . . you know."

"It's yours now, isn't it?" the man said.

"Yes," Mac replied. "Da hasn't slept inside for years."

The man considered. "I think I'd rather take the couch," he finally said.

"Then I'll get your linens," Mac said.

When he returned with them, the man was sitting quietly on the couch reading one of Mac's farming magazines. He'd poured himself another glass of wine. He set the glass down on the coffee table, accepted the sheets, blanket and pillow. Mac turned to go, and was halfway out of the room when the man spoke again.

"You know, I'm kind of worried about what she'll think when she sees me," he said. "I've gotten so old."

They left at dawn for the caverns. Mac brought along his telescope in a pack slung over his back. The man had asked for, and carried along with him, a ten-pound sledgehammer. After a while, the thing seemed so heavy in the older man's hands that Mac volunteered to carry it as well. The road ran down the centre of the valley, then switchbacked twice, rising towards the spring that fed the Sant Llorenz, the small creek that watered the bottomland and shared the same name as the village.

In a field not far up the road from the house stood Mac's da. Jari leant on his hoe and gazed at them, moving not a muscle. Mac knew he'd probably been in that position for two or three days. Waiting, thinking. Listening.

When the man saw Jari, he paused, looked him over.

Did they speak in their hidden, quantum-tunnel language? Or was there nothing left to say?

After a moment, the man began walking again, and, with a glance back at his da, who still hadn't moved, Mac followed.

After the second switchback, the road ran a bit farther, then dead-ended into a circular parking area for those who drove up from the village. A small trailpost pointed the way onward to the Sant Llorenz's origin in a rock-enclosed spring. Past the spring, the road became a trail and climbed steeply up Moncau, the peak that overlooked the valley. Rosemary and sage grew thicker here, and the spindly hardwood oca began giving way to pure pine forest as they climbed higher. The ground was rockier underfoot and the underlying stone—basaltic conglomerate—began poking through the topsoil. This was the jack-rock itself, inhabited by five hundred centuries of algorithms. Sometimes Mac swore he could hear the rock whispering, more talkative than his father.

The family land ran in a long, thin swath down one side of the creek, and here, past where the creek gave out, it was bounded by a row of stone markers and cairns set in a curving line up to the very tip of the peak. It was at the top of Moncau that this line met the fence that bordered the land on the ridge.

The hammer he carried grew heavier in Mac's hand, but he'd trucked much greater weights for longer distances before, and he wasn't bothered by the burden. What irritated him was the unwieldy nature of the tool. He hung it over his shoulder, tried walking with it as a cane, and eventually settled on grasping it just under the head and carrying it horizontal to the ground, its handle slung out behind him.

At first, the man led the way with an easy certainty, but as the trail rose and twisted, the man slowed, looked around. When they passed the little side path that led to the cave entrances, Mac realised that the man was lost.

Mac turned them around, found the pile of gravel—the remains of an aborted mining claim—that marked the side trail's split from the main, and brought the man to the entrance of the largest cave. Here the man seemed to regain his bearings, and he entered without hesitation, Mac following close behind. The man's hands began to glow faintly. He held them aloft in front of them, and in the utter blackness of the cave, this was all either of them needed to see.

They made their way down, and then farther down. Mac had often been in these caves and prided himself that he could never get lost in them, but it was now his turn to lose his sense of direction. Something in the jack-rock was deliberately confusing him. The man had no such problem. He'd obviously burnt the path he must follow into his memory, and it was as if the rock remembered him.

The cave was wet, dank. The rock in the walls was a combination of the hollowed-out black basalt underpinning the valley and later layers of water-deposited silicates which formed a pearly sheen over the darkness beneath. The floor was flat, its surface crazed, the bottom of an ancient fissure.

Down, through a lightning-like crack in the wall. Turn a corner. Down again.

And then they followed a tunnel with walls coated with the thick quartzite deposits brought from the valley above within the memory of man. Within this man's memory. The air was fresher here, a cool breeze wafting from some hidden vent. Stalactites hung from the ceiling, and stalagmites rose from the floor to meet them in enormous columns. The ceiling was high, but the way was narrow. At length they came to a blank wall, a true dead end.

"Here we are," said the man.

"Where?" said Mac. "I thought you said it was in a larger room."

"This used to be a larger room. This was where we met the last bubo."

Mac looked around. Nothing but stone.

"So where is it?"

The man lifted his glowing hand. "Let me just check—"

He waved it about as if it were a wand, first in one direction, then another. Finally, he ceased looking at where he was pointing and seemed to let the hand choose its own direction. It settled on a particularly large column, thick at the ends and just narrow enough in the middle to suggest the meeting of upper and lower excrescence that had formed it.

"We'll need the hammer now," the man said.

Mac examined the column, tapped it. It seemed thickly solid. "You want me to just take a swing at it?" he asked.

"Try for the middle," the man replied. "That's where I think you'll find the weak spot."

Mac did as he was told. He sent a mighty swing into the rock. The cavern resounded with the blow.

Nothing.

He struck again. And again. He may as well have been hammering on diamond.

"Hmm," said the man. He waved his hand in the direction of the column again and its glow grew brighter. "Yes, that's it." Then a brighter flash passed down the length of the man's arm, up his sleeve, and out the other hand. "Ah," said the man. "Right. The code. My old valence shield code." He scratched his head with his other hand. "What was that? Oh, yes." He swept his hand along the column, his fingers gingerly touching it.

"Hit it again."

Mac gathered himself. This time he flung everything he had into the blow—and the column shattered. Chunks of broken limestone showered down and lay in a rough semicircle around where the column had stood, looking like the hatch leavings of a giant egg.

And there it was, just as the man had described it. The black disk, about the size of a bedroom mirror. It floated motionless, disappeared when looked at from the side or the rear. A single leg protruded, extended like a bar horizontally, at about waist height for an average-sized man. The toes were curled and pointed, the stance of a gymnast, frozen in mid-flight. It was small, muscled, tight. The leg had been encased in the drip stone for all these years, a part of the land. And, just as the man had described it, the disk was uniformly black, its surface unreflective, like roughened ebony. A leg protruding from a nothingness. Macabre.

And this was the way humankind walked between the stars?

For a moment, Mac thought that the leg, too, had been turned to stone, but then the man went to stand beside it, touched it reverently. A dusting of stone came away on his fingertip.

Underneath was flesh. Alive? Mac could not tell. But not decayed.

The man pointed to a spot opposite him. "You stand here," he said. "Get ready to catch her."

Mac complied, put out his arms.

The man raised his hand, pointed it towards the disk. Hesitated.

"What are you waiting for?" Mac said. "Are you afraid you're going to wake it up?"

The man lowered his hand slightly, but still held it poised. "This is where I need a brush."

Mac was confused for a moment, then he realised what the man was talking about. "My telescope."

"It's up to you, but I think the general idea is to poke it into the bubo, just to the side of her leg."

"How do you know that?" said Mac. "How do you know anything?"

"Seems plausible," he said. "Got any better ideas?"

"And you want me to give it to you," Mac said, "like that?"

The man shook his head, considered one of his still shining hands. His face glowed a pale white in their light. It was bright enough to cast the man's shadow on the wall behind him.

"You're younger than I am," the man finally said. "I think you ought to catch her."

"You want me to give it to you?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because," said the man. "You should trust your family."

Mac shook his head. This is not for you to trade, she'd told him.

She would be coming in the winter.

Something had to change. He loved her. The valley had to let him go.

He couldn't trade the telescope, but he could give it away.

"Hell." He reached behind him, and into the pack. His hand closed on the rough silicate outer surface of the telescope. He withdrew it. For a thing of rock, it weighed little. It felt more like a delicate bird in his hand.

He put it to his eye and took what might be a last look through it. The vision was as if he were moving in an elevator through carved layers of rock. Up. To the Valley of the Gardens. Higher. Above Moncau. And spreading out. The Extremadura.

Then back down again in a plunging dive. Down through the caves. Into the hirudinean darkness.

A long, long passage without light, without sense.

Finally, past that darkness. Two hands, joined, grasping. Two identical faces, glowing blue-white against the general blackness—the same blue-white as the stone rose.

Eyes opening, seeing him. Hope.

He lowered the telescope, handed it to the man.

"I think it might work," he said.

The man smiled, nodded. "We'll see," he said. He took a deep breath, reached out with the telescope; it was only a forearm's length long, but seemed to grow as he pointed it—to telescope itself. He touched the edge of the black bubo disk just to the right of Jasmine's leg.

At first, nothing remarkable happened.

There was no flash of light, no explosion. Then the disk seemed merely to move away, to reduce itself gradually to a point, to dry up and drain away.

"Something—" said the man.

As the disk contracted, Jasmine's body was revealed. First her other leg, bent at the knee, the instep of its foot touching the opposite thigh. Then her hips. Her torso.

She started to sag, and Mac raised his arms under her, touched her legs—warm, alive—held her steady. Her shoulders. Her neck. Her face. Her open eyes.

They focused. Blinked. Green.

Theresa's were blue. In fact, she looked nothing like Theresa. For some reason, he'd imagined she would.

He caught her. He caught her, held her, and helped her straighten. Set her down on her feet and supported her. Surprisingly heavy. The man must have been brutish strong back then to be able to throw this woman into the hirudinean bubo. Or completely desperate.

Jasmine looked up at him. A woman. Pretty, but not beautiful. As unknowable as any other person, but not a creature from the beyond.

"Oh, no." A moment of terror. "Is it—"

Behind Jasmine, the bubo suddenly reappeared. And not as the black looking glass it had been, but as something pale white. Like a festering wound in the side of the world. Infected. Enflamed. Ready to disgorge something horrible, like the maw of a dragon.

The man thrust the telescope deeper into it. It struck with a wet splat, almost as if it were striking flesh. Putrid flesh. He pushed it harder, farther. It sank in smoothly, slowly.

A horrible shriek filled the cavern, like the sound of a surprised and enraged animal. A very large animal.

"Band down your frequencies," the man called out. "It's trying to blast us before we can do anything to it!"

Mac ordered his valence to close his ears; he held his hands over the woman's.

The shriek went on. Impossibly long—for this was a creature that need draw no breath. Rock cracked, fell about them. A layer of the lustrous mother-of-pearl patina of the cave shook loose and rained down upon them.

The man drove the scope deeper, deeper. Until his hand disappeared within. When he withdrew his hand, it was without the scope.

And the bubo went dark. The shriek abruptly fell away to silence, and the walls stopped tumbling down. The hirudinean seemed to tense up, to ripple like a shaken bowl of water. Then its surface was still. Black. Impenetrable.

"So I guess my telescope is gone." It took him a moment to realise that the words were his.

The woman gazed up at Mac. She still seemed bewildered, in shock.

"It's going to be all right," he said.

Another moment of numbness—and then a wan smile from her. Exhausted.

She backed away slightly, rubbed her upper arms, kneaded them with her hands. Her skin seemed several shades darker than his own. Where was this new light coming from? He saw that the entire cavern was glowing.

"You're the boy," Jasmine said. Her voice was low, an alto purr. Again, nothing like Theresa's musical soprano.

Mac started at her words. How did she know anything about him?

"In my dream." Then a moment of hesitation. A look of joy seeped into her expression. A smile of jubilation. "She's still there!"

"Who is?"

"My angel," said the woman, "my sister!" Her face grew softer. Her eyes lost their focus on him, seemed to be gazing at a distant sight. Or perhaps not so distant. "I can see her. I can hear her. I'm still with her! We've kept it choked." She focused again on Mac. "But how?"

"I don't really know." Mac gestured towards the man who was standing behind her. "He might."

Jasmine turned.

The man stood silently, waiting.

After a moment, Jasmine took a step towards him. She reached out her hand.

Mac watched the two embrace. He thought of the valley above. The fence. The desert beyond.

He wondered if he would find Theresa before winter if he set out tomorrow. Would the desert help him or hinder him on the journey? Would it notice him at all?

He wondered what it would be like to travel with no destiny but love.

He'd know as soon as he crossed the fence.

Winter's Wife

Elizabeth Hand

Elizabeth Hand (www.elizabethhand.com) published her first story in 1988 and her first novel, Winterlong, in 1990. The author of nine novels and three collections of short fiction, Hand has established herself as one of the finest and most respected writers of outsider fantasy and science fiction working today. Her work has won the Nebula, World Fantasy, James Tiptree Jr, International Horror Guild, and Mythopoeic awards. Her most recent books are novel Generation Loss and short novel Illyria. She is currently working on a new novel, Wonderwall.

The fine eerie tale of small town life that follows comes from Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois's fine anthology Wizards.

Winter's real name was Roderick Gale Winter. But everyone in Paswegas County, not just me and people who knew him personally, called him Winter. He lived in an old schoolbus down the road from my house, and my mother always tells how when she first moved here he scared the crap out of her. It wasn't even him that scared her, she hadn't even met him yet; just the fact that there was this creepy-looking old schoolbus stuck in the middle of the woods with smoke coming out of a chimney and these huge piles of split logs around and trucks and cranes and heavy equipment, and in the summer all kinds of chainsaws and stuff, and in the fall deer and dead coyotes hanging from this big pole that my mother said looked like a gallows, and blood on the snow, and once a gigantic dead pig's head with tusks which my mother said was scarier even than the coyotes. Which, when you think of it, does sound pretty bad, so you can't blame her for being freaked out. It's funny now because her and Winter are best friends, though that doesn't mean so much as it does other places, like Chicago where my mother moved here from, because I think everyone in Shaker Harbor thinks Winter is their friend.

The schoolbus, when you get inside it, is sweet.

Winter's family has been in Shaker Harbor for six generations, and even before that they lived somewhere else in Maine.

"I have Passamaquoddy blood," Winter says. "If I moved somewhere else, I'd melt."

He didn't look like a Native American, though, and my mother said if he did have Indian blood it had probably been diluted by now. Winter was really tall and skinny, not sick skinny but bony and muscular, stooped from having to duck through the door of the schoolbus all those years. He always wore a gimme cap that said WINTER TREE SERVICE, and I can remember how shocked I was once when I saw him at Town Meeting without his hat and he had almost no hair. He'd hunt and butcher his own deer, but he wouldn't eat it—he said he'd grown up dirt poor in a cabin that didn't even have a wooden floor, just pounded earth, and his family would eat anything they could hunt, including snake and skunk and snapping turtle. So he'd give all his venison away, and when people hired him to butcher their livestock and gave him meat, he'd give that away too.

That was how my mother met him, that first winter fifteen years ago when she was living here alone, pregnant with me. There was a big storm going on, and she looked out the window and saw this tall guy stomping through the snow carrying a big paper bag.

"You a vegetarian?" he said when she opened the door. "Everyone says there's a lady from away living here who's going to have a baby and she's a vegetarian. But you don't look like one to me."

My mother said no, she wasn't a vegetarian, she was a registered certified massage therapist.

"Whatever the hell that is," said Winter. "You going to let me in? Jesus Q. Murphy, is that your woodstove?"

See, my mother had gotten pregnant by a sperm donor. She had it all planned out, how she was going to move way up north and have a baby and raise it—him, me—by herself and live off the land and be a massage therapist and hang crystals in the windows and there would be this good energy and everything was going to be perfect. And it would have been, if she had moved to, like, Huntington Beach or even Boston, someplace like that, where it would be warmer and there would be good skate parks, instead of a place where you have to drive two hours to a skate park and it snows from November till the end of May. And in the spring you can't even skate on the roads here because they're all dirt roads and so full of pot holes you could live in one. But the snowboarding is good, especially since Winter let us put a jump right behind his place.

But this part is all before any snowboarding, because it was all before me, though not much before. My mother was living in this tiny two-room camp with no indoor plumbing and no running water, with an ancient woodstove, what they call a parlor stove, which looked nice but didn't put out any heat and caused a chimney fire. Which was how Winter heard about her, because the volunteer fire department came and afterwards all anyone was talking about at the Shaker Harbor Variety Store was how this crazy lady from away had bought Martin Weed's old rundown camp and now she was going to have a baby and freeze to death or burn the camp down—probably both—which probably would have been okay with them except no one liked to think about the baby getting frozen or burned up.

So Winter came by and gave my mother the venison and looked at her woodpile and told her she was burning green wood, which builds up creosote which was why she had the chimney fire, and he asked her who sold her the wood, which she told him. And the next day the guy who sold her the wood came by and dumped off three cords of seasoned wood and drove off without saying a word, and the day after that two other guys came by with a brand-new woodstove which was ugly but very efficient and had a sheath around it so a baby wouldn't get burned if he touched it. And the day after that Winter came by to make sure the stove was hooked up right, and he went to all the cabin's windows with sheets of plastic and a hair dryer and covered them so the cold wouldn't get in, and then he showed my mother where there was a spring in the woods that she could go to and fill water jugs rather than buy them at the grocery store. He also gave her a chamber pot so she wouldn't have to use the outhouse, and told her he knew of someone who had a composting toilet they'd sell to her cheap.

All of which might make you think that when I say "Winter's wife" I'm referring to my mom. But I'm not. Winter's wife is someone else.

Still, when I was growing up, Winter was always at our house. And I was at his place, when I got older. Winter chops down trees, what they call wood lot management—he cuts trees for people, but in a good way, so the forest can grow back and be healthy. Then he'd split the wood so the people could burn it for firewood. He had a portable sawmill—one of the scary things Mom had seen in his yard—and he also mills wood so people can build houses with the lumber. He's an auctioneer, and he can play the banjo and one of those washboard things like you see in old movies. He showed me how to jump start a car with just a wire coat hanger, also how to carve wood and build a treehouse and frame a window. When my mother had our little addition put on with a bathroom in it, Winter did a lot of the carpentry, and he taught me how to do that too.

He's also a dowser, a water witch. That's someone who can tell where water is underground, just by walking around in the woods holding a stick in front of him. You'd think this was more of that crazy woo-woo stuff my mother is into, which is what I thought whenever I heard about it.

But then one day me and my friend Cody went out to watch Winter do it. We were hanging out around Winter's place, clearing brush. He let us use the hill behind the schoolbus for snowboarding, and that's where we'd built that sweet jump, and Winter had saved a bunch of scrap wood so that when spring came we could build a half-pipe for skating too.

But now it was spring and since we didn't have any money really to pay Winter for it, he put us to work clearing brush. Cody is my age, almost fourteen. So we're hacking at this brush and swatting blackflies and I could tell that at any minute Cody was going to say he had to go do homework, which was a lie because we didn't have any, when Winter shows up in his pickup, leans out the window and yells at us.

"You guys wanna quit goofing off and come watch someone do some real work?"

So then me and Cody had an argument about who was going to ride shotgun with Winter, and then we had another argument about who was going to ride in the truck bed, which is actually more fun. And then we took so long arguing that Winter yelled at us and made us both ride in the back.

So we got to the place where Winter was going to work. This field that had been a dairy farm, but the farm wasn't doing too good and the guy who owned it had to sell it off. Ms. Whitton, a high school teacher, was going to put a little modular house on it. There'd been a bad drought a few years earlier, and a lot of wells ran dry. Ms. Whitton didn't have a lot of money to spend on digging around for a well, so she hired Winter to find the right spot.

"Justin!" Winter yelled at me as he hopped out of the truck. "Grab me that hacksaw there—"

I gave him the saw, then me and Cody went and goofed around some more while Winter walked around the edge of the field, poking at brush and scrawny trees. After a few minutes he took the hacksaw to a spindly sapling.

"Got it!" Winter yelled, and stumbled back into the field. "If we're going to find water here, we better find a willow first."

It was early spring, and there really weren't any leaves out yet, so what he had was more like a pussy willow, with furry gray buds and green showing where he'd sawn the branch off. Winter stripped the buds from it until he had a forked stick. He held the two ends like he was holding handlebars, and began to walk around the field.

It was weird. Cause at first, me and Cody were laughing—we didn't mean to, we couldn't help it. It just looked funny, Winter walking back and forth with his arms out holding that stick. He kind of looked like Frankenstein. Even Ms. Whitton was smiling.

But then it was like everything got very still. Not quiet—you could hear the wind blowing in the trees, and hear birds in the woods, and someone running a chainsaw far off—but still, like all of a sudden you were in a movie and you knew something was about to happen. The sun was warm, I could smell dirt and cow manure and meadowsweet. Cody started slapping blackflies and swearing. I felt dizzy, not bad dizzy but like you do when the schoolbus drives fast over a high bump and you go up on your seat. A few feet away Winter continued walking in a very straight line, the willow stick held out right in front of him.

And all of a sudden the stick began to bend. I don't mean that Winter's arms bent down holding it: I mean the stick itself, the point that stuck straight out, bent down like it was made of rubber and someone had grabbed it and yanked it towards the ground. Only it wasn't made of rubber, it was stiff wood, and there was no one there—but it still bent, pointing at a mossy spot between clumps of dirt.

"Holy crap," I said.

Cody shut up and looked. So did Ms. Whitton.

"Oh my god," she said.

Winter stopped, angling the stick back and forth like he was fighting with it. Then it lunged down and he yelled "Whoa!" and opened his hands and dropped it. Me and Cody ran over.

"This is it," said Winter. He pulled a spool of pink surveyor's tape from his pocket and broke off a length. I stared warily at the willow stick, half-expecting it to wiggle up like a snake, but it didn't move. After a moment I picked it up.

"How'd you do that?" demanded Cody.

"I didn't do it," said Winter evenly. He took the stick from my hand, snapped off the forked part and tossed it; tied the surveyor's tape to what remained and stuck it in the ground. "Wood does that. Wood talks to you, if you listen."

"No lie," I said. "Can you show me how to do that sometime?"

"Sure," said Winter. "Can't today, got a towing job. But someday."

He and Ms. Whitton started talking about money and who had the best rates for drilling. The next time my mom drove past that field, the drill rig was there hammering at the ground right where Winter's stick had pointed, and the next time I ran into Ms. Whitton in the hall at school she told me the well was already dug and all geared up to pump 100 gallons a minute, once she got her foundation dug and her house moved in.

Not long after that, Winter announced he was going to Reykjavik.

It was after school one day about a month later. Winter had dropped by to shoot the breeze.

"What's Reykjavik?" I asked.

"It's in Iceland," said my mother. She cracked the window open and sat at the kitchen table opposite Winter and me. "Why on earth are you going to Reykjavik?"

"To pick up my wife," said Winter.

"Your wife?" My eyes widened. "You're married?"

"Nope. That's why I'm going to Iceland to pick her up. I met her online, and we're going to get married."

My mother looked shocked. "In Iceland?"

Winter shrugged. "Hey, with a name like mine, where else you gonna find a wife?"

So he went to Iceland. I thought he'd be gone for a month, at least, but a week later the phone rang and my mom answered and it was Winter, saying he was back safe and yes, he'd brought his wife with him.

"That's incredible," said Mom. She put the phone down and shook her head. "He was there for four days, got married, and now they're back. I can't believe it."

A few days later they dropped by so Winter could introduce us to her. It was getting near the end of the school year, and me and Cody were outside throwing stuff at my treehouse, using the open window as a target. Sticks, a frisbee, a broken yo-yo. Stuff like that.

"Why are you trying to break the house?" a woman asked.

I turned. Winter stood there grinning, hands in the pockets of his jeans, his gimme cap pushed back so the bill pointed almost straight up. Beside him stood a woman who barely came up to his shoulder. She was so slight that for a second I thought she was another kid, maybe one of the girls from school who'd ridden her bike over or hopped a ride in Winter's truck. But she didn't have a kid's body, and she sure didn't have a kid's eyes.

"Justin." Winter squared his shoulders and his voice took on a mock-formal tone. "I'd like you to meet my wife. Vala, this is Justin."

"Justin." The way she said my name made my neck prickle. It was like she was turning the word around in her mouth; like she was tasting it. "Gleour mig ao kynnast per. That's Icelandic for 'I am glad to meet you.'"

She didn't really have an accent, although her voice sounded more English than American. And she definitely didn't look like anyone I'd ever seen in Maine, even though she was dressed pretty normal. Black jeans, a black t-shirt. Some kind of weird-looking bright blue shoes with thick rubber soles, which I guess is what people wear in Iceland; also a bright blue windbreaker. She had long straight black hair done in two ponytails—one reason she looked like a kid—kind of slanted eyes and a small mouth and the palest skin I've ever seen.

It was the eyes that really creeped me out. They were long and narrow and very very dark, so dark you couldn't even see the pupil. And they weren't brown but blue, so deep a blue they were almost black. I've never seen eyes that color before, and I didn't really like seeing them now. They were cold—not mean or angry, just somehow cold; or maybe it was that they made me feel cold, looking at them.

And even though she looked young, because she was skinny and her hair didn't have any gray in it and her face wasn't wrinkled, it was like she was somehow pretending to be young. Like when someone pretends to like kids, and you know they don't, really. Though I didn't get the feeling Vala didn't like kids. She seemed more puzzled, like maybe we looked as strange to her as she did to me.

"You haven't told me why you are trying to break the house," she said.

I shrugged. "Uh, we're not. We're just trying to get things through that window."

Cody glanced at Vala, then began searching for more rocks to throw.

Vala stared at him coolly. "Your friend is very rude."

She looked him up and down, then walked over to the treehouse. It was built in the crotch of a big old maple tree, and it was so solid you could live in it, if you wanted to, only it didn't have a roof.

"What tree is this?" she asked, and looked at Winter.

"Red maple," he said.

"Red maple," she murmured. She ran her hand along the trunk, stroking it, like it was a cat. "Red maple  . . ."

She turned and stared at me. "You made this house? By yourself?"

"No." She waited, like it was rude of me not to say more. So I walked over to her and stood awkwardly, staring up at the bottom of the treehouse. "Winter helped me. I mean, your husband—Mr. Winter."

"Mr. Winter." Unexpectedly she began to laugh. A funny laugh, like a little kid's, and after a moment I laughed too. "So I am Mrs. Winter? But who should be Winter's proper wife—Spring, maybe?"

She made a face when she said this, like she knew how dumb it sounded; then reached to take my hand. She drew me closer to her, until we both stood beside the tree. I felt embarrassed—maybe this was how they did things in Iceland, but not here in Maine—but I was flattered, too. Because the way she looked at me, sideways from the corner of her eyes, and the way she smiled, not like I was a kid but another grownup  . . . it was like she knew a secret, and she acted like I knew it, too.

Which of course I didn't. But it was kind of cool that she thought so. She let go of my hand and rested hers against the tree again, rubbing a patch of lichen

"There are no trees in Iceland," she said. "Did you know that? No trees. Long long ago they cut them all down to build houses or ships, or to burn. And so we have no trees, only rocks and little bushes that come to here—"

She indicated her knee, then tapped the tree trunk. "And like this—lichen, and moss. We have a joke, do you know it?"

She took a breath, then said, "What do you do if you get lost in a forest in Iceland?"

I shook my head. "I dunno."

"Stand up."

It took me a moment to figure that out. Then I laughed, and Vala smiled at me. Again she looked like she was waiting for me to say something. I wanted to be polite, but all I could think was how weird it must be, to come from a place where there were no trees to a place like Maine, where there's trees everywhere.

So I said, "Uh, do you miss your family?"

She gave me a funny look. "My family? They are happy to live with the rocks back in Iceland. I am tired of rocks."

A shadow fell across her face. She glanced up as Winter put his hands on her shoulders. "Your mother home, Justin?" he asked. "We're on our way into town, just wanted to say a quick hello and introduce the new wife—"

I nodded and pointed back to the house. As Winter turned to go, Vala gave me another sharp look.

"He tells me many good things about you. You and he are what we would call feogar—like a father and his son, Winter says. So I will be your godmother."

She pointed a finger at me, then slowly drew it to my face until she touched my chin. I gasped: her touch was so cold it burned.

"There," she murmured. "Now I will always know you."

And she followed Winter inside. When they were gone, Cody came up beside me.

"Was that freaky or what?" he said. He stared at the house. "She looks like that weird singer, Boink."

"You mean Björk, you idiot."

"Whatever. Where is Iceland, anyway?"

"I have no clue."

"Me neither." Cody pointed at my chin. "Hey, you're bleeding, dude."

I frowned, then gingerly touched the spot where Vala had pressed her finger. It wasn't bleeding; but when I looked at it later that night I saw a red spot, shaped like a fingerprint. Not a scab or blister or scar but a spot like a birthmark, deep red like blood. Over the next few days it faded, and finally disappeared; but I can still feel it there sometimes even now, a sort of dull ache that gets worse when it's cold outside, or snowing.

That same month, Thomas Tierney returned to Paswegas County. He was probably the most famous person in this whole state, after Stephen King, but everyone up here loves Stephen King and I never heard anyone say anything good about Thomas Tierney except after he disappeared, and then the only thing people said was good riddance to bad rubbish. Even my mom, who gets mad if you say something bad about anyone, even if they hit you first, never liked Thomas Tierney.

"He's one of those people who thinks they can buy anything. And if he can't buy it, he ruins it for everyone else."

Though the truth was, there wasn't much that he wasn't able to buy, especially in Paswegas. People here don't have a lot of money. They had more after Thomas Tierney's telemarketing company moved into the state and put up its telephone centers everywhere, even one not too far from Shaker Harbor, which is pretty much the end of nowhere. Then people who used to work as fishermen or farmers or teachers or nurses, but who couldn't make a living at it anymore, started working for International Tierney Enterprises. ICE didn't pay a lot, but I guess it paid okay, if you didn't mind sitting in a tiny cubicle and calling strangers on the phone when they were in the middle of dinner and annoying them so they swore at you or just hung up.

Once when she heard me and Cody ranking on people who worked at ICE, my mom took us aside and told us we had to be careful what we said, because even if we hated the company it gave people jobs and that was nothing to sneeze about. Of course a lot of those people who worked for ICE ended up not being able to afford to live here anymore, because Tierney gave all his friends from away the expensive jobs, and then they bought land here, which used to be cheap, and built these big fancy houses. So now normal people can't afford to live here, unless they were lucky enough to already own a house or land, like my mom and Winter.

But then Thomas Tierney got caught doing something bad, sneaking money from his company or something, and ICE got bought by a bigger company, and they shut down all their operations in Maine, and all the people who worked there got thrown out of work and a lot of them who did own their own houses or land got them taken away because they couldn't afford to pay their bills anymore. Then people really hated Thomas Tierney; but it didn't do any good, because he never even got in trouble for what he did, I mean he didn't go to jail or anything, and he didn't lose his money or his house down in Kennebunkport or his yacht or his private airplane.

As a matter of fact, the opposite happened: he bought the land next to Winter's. Winter dropped by the day he found out about it.

"That sumbitch bought old Lonnie Packard's farm!" he yelled.

Me and Cody looked at each other and sort of smirked, but we didn't say anything. I could tell Cody wanted to laugh, like I did—who the hell actually says "sumbitch"?—but at the same time it was scary, because we'd never seen Winter get mad before.

"I can't blame Lonnie," Winter went on, shifting from one foot to the other and tugging at his cap. "He had to sell his lobsterboat last year cause he couldn't pay his taxes, and then he had that accident and couldn't pay the hospital. And it's a salt farm right there on the ocean, so he never got much out of it except the view."

Cody asked, "Why didn't he sell it to you?"

Winter whacked his palm against the wall. "That's what I said! I told Lonnie long time ago, ever he wanted to sell that land I'd take it. But yesterday he told me, 'Winter, your pockets just ain't that deep.' I said, 'Well Lonnie, how deep is deep?' And he pointed out there at the Atlantic Ocean and said, 'You see that? You go out to the Grand Banks and find the deepest part, and I'm telling you it ain't deep as Thomas Tierney's pockets.'"

So that was that. Tell you the truth, I didn't give much thought to it. Where we snowboarded in the woods was safely on Winter's property, I knew that; besides which it was late spring now, and me and Cody were busy working on that half-pipe behind Winter's house and, once it was done, skating on it.

Sometimes Winter's wife would come out and watch us. Winter had made her a bench from a hunk of oak, laid slats across it and carved her name on the seat: VALA with carved leaves and vines coming out of the letters. The bench was set up on a little rise, so that you could look out across the tops of the trees and just catch a glimpse of the ocean, silver-blue above the green. Vala was so tiny she looked like another kid sitting there, watching us and laughing when we fell, though never in a mean way. Her laugh was like her eyes: there was a kind of coldness to it, but it wasn't nasty, more like she had never seen anyone fall before and every time it happened (which was a lot) it was a surprise to her. Even though it was warmer now, she always wore that same blue windbreaker, and over it a sweatshirt that I recognized as one of Winter's, so big it was like a saggy dress. It could get wicked hot out there at the edge of the woods, but I never saw her take that sweatshirt off.

"Aren't you hot?" I asked her once. She'd brought some water for us and some cookies she'd made, gingersnaps that were thin and brittle as ice and so spicy they made your eyes sting.

"Hot?" She shook her head. "I never get warm. Except with Winter." She smiled then, one of her spooky smiles that always made me nervous. "I tell him it's the only time winter is ever warm, when he is lying beside me."

I felt my face turn red. On my chin, the spot where she had touched me throbbed as though someone had shoved a burning cigarette against my skin. Vala's smile grew wider, her eyes too. She began to laugh.

"You're still a boy." For a moment she sounded almost like my mother. "Good boys, you and your friend. You will grow up to be good men. Not like this man Tierney, who thinks he can own the sea by buying salt. There is nothing more dangerous than a man who thinks he has power." She lifted her head to gaze into the trees, then turned to stare at me. "Except for one thing."

But she didn't say what that was.

I had always heard a lot about Thomas Tierney, and even though I had never seen him, there were signs of him everywhere around Shaker Harbor. The addition to the library; the addition to the school; the big old disused mill—renamed the ICE Mill—that he bought and filled with a thousand tiny cubicles, each with its own computer and its own telephone. The ICE Mill employed so many people that some of them drove two hours each way to work—there weren't enough people around Shaker Harbor to fill it.

But now it was empty, with big FOR SALE signs on it. Winter said it would stay empty, too, because no one in Paswegas County could afford to buy it.

"And no one outside of Paswegas County would want to buy it," he added. "Watch that doesn't drip—"

I was helping Winter varnish a crib he'd made, of wood milled from an elm tree that had died of the blight. He wouldn't say who it was for, even when I asked him outright, but I assumed it was a present for Vala. She didn't look pregnant, and I was still a little fuzzy about the precise details of what exactly might make her pregnant, in spite of some stuff me and Cody checked out online one night. But there didn't seem much point in making a trip to Iceland to get a wife if you weren't going to have kids. That's what Cody's dad said, anyway, and he should know since Cody has five brothers and twin sisters.

"I think they should make the mill into an indoor skate park," I said, touching up part of the crib I'd missed. "That would be sweet."

We were working outside, so I wouldn't inhale varnish fumes, in the shadow of a tower of split logs that Winter sold as firewood. I had to be careful that sawdust didn't get onto the newly varnished crib, or bugs.

Winter laughed. "Not much money in skate parks."

"I'd pay."

"That's my point." Winter shoved his cap back from his forehead. "Ready to break for lunch?"

Usually Winter made us sandwiches, Swiss cheese and tomato and horseradish sauce. Sometimes Vala would make us lunch, and then I'd lie and say I wasn't hungry or had already eaten, since the sandwiches she made mostly had fish in them—not tuna fish, either—and were on these tiny little pieces of bread that tasted like cardboard.

But today Winter said we'd go into town and get something from Shelley's Place, the hot dog stand down by the harbor. It was warm out, mid-August; school would start soon. I'd spent the summer hanging out with Cody and some of our friends, until the last few weeks when Cody had gone off to Bible Camp.

That's when Winter put me to work. Because along with the crib, Winter had started building a house—a real house, not an addition to the schoolbus. I helped him clear away brush, then helped build the forms for the foundation to be poured into. Once the concrete cured, we began framing the structure. Sometimes Vala helped, until Winter yelled at her to stop, anyway. Then she'd go off to tend the little garden she'd planted at the edge of the woods.

Now I didn't know where Vala was. So I put aside the can of varnish and hopped into Winter's pickup, and we drove into town. Most of the summer people had already left, but there were still a few sailboats in the harbor, including one gigantic yacht, the Ice Queen, a three-masted schooner that belonged to Thomas Tierney. According to Winter she had a crew of ten, not just a captain and mate and deckhands but a cook and housekeeper, all for Tierney; as well as a red-and-white-striped mainsail, not that you'd ever have any trouble telling her apart from any of the other boats around here.

When he saw the Ice Queen, Winter scowled. But there was no other sign of Tierney, not that I could see. A few summer holdovers stood in line in front of Shelley's little food stand, trying to act like they fit in with the locals, even though the only other people were contractors working on job sites.

And Lonnie Packard. He was at the very front of the line, paying for a hot dog with onions and sauerkraut wrapped in a paper towel. It was the first time I'd seen Lonnie since I'd heard about him selling his farm to Thomas Tierney, and from the look on Winter's face, it was the first time he'd seen him, too. His mouth was twisted like he wasn't sure if he was going to smile or spit something out, but then Lonnie turned and nodded at him.

"Winter," he said. He pronounced it "Wintah" in this exaggerated way he had, like he was making fun of his own strong accent. "How's it hanging?"

Winter poked at the bill of his cap and gave his head a small shake. "Not bad." He looked at Lonnie's hot dog, then flashed me a sideways grin. "Now that looks like lunch. Right, Justin?"

So that's how I knew Winter wasn't going to stay pissed about Lonnie selling his farm to Thomas Tierney, which was kind of a relief.

But Lonnie didn't look relieved. He looked uncomfortable, although Lonnie usually looked uncomfortable. He was a big rough-faced guy, not as tall as Winter but definitely plus-sized, with a bushy brown beard and baggy jeans tucked into high rubber fisherman's boots, which kind of surprised me since I knew he'd had to sell his boat. Then I remembered all the money he must have gotten from Thomas Tierney; enough to buy another boat, probably. Enough to buy anything he wanted.

"Gotta run," said Lonnie. "Got you an assistant there, eh, Winter?"

"Justin does good work," said Winter, and moved up to the window to place our order. For a moment Lonnie stared at him like he was going to say something else, but Winter was already talking to Shelley.

Instead Lonnie glanced at me again. It was a funny look, not like he was going to speak to me, more like he was trying to figure something out. Lonnie's not stupid, either. He puts on that heavy accent and acts like he's never been south of Bangor, but my mother said he actually has a law degree and fishes just because he likes it better than being a lawyer, which I think I would, too. I waited to see if he was going to talk to me, but instead he turned and walked quickly to where a brand-new SUV was parked in one of the spots reserved for fishermen, got inside and drove off. I watched him go, then angled up beside Winter to get my food.

Shelley gave me a quick smile and went back to talking to Winter. "See you're putting a house up by your place," she said, and handed him a paper towel with two hot dogs on it, a container of fried clams for Winter, and two bottles of Moxie. Winter nodded but didn't say anything, just passed her some money.

"Regular housing boom going on down there," Shelley added, then looked past us to the next customer. "Can I help you?"

We drove back to Winter's place and ate, sitting outside on a couple of lawn chairs and listening to woodpeckers in the pine grove. The air smelled nice, like sawdust and varnish and fried clams. When I was almost done, Vala stepped out of the schoolbus and walked over to me.

"Ertu búinn?" she said teasingly. "Are you finished? And you didn't save any for me?"

I looked uncertainly at Winter, still chewing.

"Mmm-mm," he said, flapping his hand at me. "None for her! Nothing unhealthy!"

"Hmph." Vala tossed her head, black ponytails flying. "Like I'd eat that—it's nothing but grease."

She watched disapprovingly as the last fried clam disappeared into Winter's mouth, then looked at me. "Come here, Justin. I want to show you something."

"Hey!" Winter called in mock alarm as Vala beckoned me towards the edge of the woods. "He's on the clock!"

"Now he's off," retorted Vala, and stuck her tongue out. "Come on."

Vala was strange. Sometimes she acted like my mother, grumpy about me forgetting to take my shoes off when I went into the schoolbus, or if me and Cody made too much noise. Other times, like now, she acted more like a girl my own age, teasing and unpredictable.

The way she looked changed, too. I don't mean her clothes—she pretty much wore the same thing all the time—but the way that sometimes she would look old, like my mom does, and other times she'd look the same age as me and my friends. Which creeped me out, especially if it was one of those times when she was acting young, too.

Fortunately, right now she was acting young but looking older, like someone who would be married to Winter. For one thing, she was wearing his clothes, a pair of jeans way too big for her and cuffed up so much you couldn't even see her shoes, and that baggy sweatshirt, despite it being so hot.

"I said come," she repeated, and whacked me on the shoulder.

I stood hastily and followed her, wondering if everyone in Iceland was like this, or if it was just Vala.

Under the trees everything was green and gold and warm; not hot like out in the full sun, but not cool, either. It made me sweat, and my sweat and the dim light made the mosquitoes come out, lots of them, though they never seemed to bother Vala, and after a few minutes I ignored them and (mostly) forgot about them. The ground was soft and smelled like worms, a good smell that made me think of fishing, and now and then we'd go by a kind of tree that smelled so good I'd stop for a second, a tree that Winter calls Balm of Gilead, because its buds smell like incense.

Winter owned a lot of land, more than a hundred acres. Some of it he cut for firewood or lumber, but not this part. This part he left wild, because it joined up with Lonnie's land—Thomas Tierney's land, now—and because it was old-growth forest. People think that all the woods in Maine are wild and old, but most of it isn't much older than what you'd find someplace like New Jersey—the trees were cut hundreds or maybe a thousand years ago by the Passamaquoddy or other Indians, and when those trees grew back they were cut by Vikings, and when those trees grew back they were cut by the English and the French and everyone else, all the way up till now.

So there's actually not a lot of true virgin forest, even if the trees look ancient, like what you see in a movie when they want you to think it's someplace totally wild, when it's really, like, trees that are maybe forty or fifty years old. Baby trees.

But these trees weren't like that. These were old trees—wolf trees, some of them, the kind of trees that Winter usually cuts down. A wolf tree is a big crooked tree with a huge canopy that hogs all the light and soil and crowds out the other trees. Wolf trees are junk trees, because they're crooked and spread out so much they're not much good for lumber, and they overwhelm other, smaller trees and keep them from growing up tall and straight so they can be harvested.

When I was little I'd go with Winter into the woods to watch him work, and I was always afraid of the wolf trees. Not because there was anything scary about them—they looked like ordinary trees, only big.

But I thought wolves lived in them. When I said that to Winter once, he laughed.

"I thought that too, when I was your age." He was oiling his chain saw, getting ready to limb a wolf tree, a red oak. Red oaks smell terrible when you cut them, the raw wood stinks—they smell like dog crap. "Want to know the real reason they call them that?"

I nodded, breathing through my mouth.

"It's because a thousand years ago, in England and around there, they'd hang outlaws from a tree like this. Wolf's-head trees, they called them, because the outlaws were like wolves, preying on weaker people."

Where the wolf trees grew here, they had shaded out most other trees. Now and then I saw an old apple tree overgrown with wild grape vines, remnants of Lonnie's family farm. Because even though this was old-growth forest, birds and animals don't know that. They eat fruit from the farm then poop out the seeds—that's how you get apple trees and stuff like that in the middle of the woods.

I was getting hot and tired of walking. Vala hadn't said anything since we started, hadn't even looked back at me, and I wondered if she'd forgotten I was even there. My mother said pregnancy makes women spacy, more than usual even. I was trying to think of an excuse to turn back, when she stopped.

"Here," she said.

We'd reached a hollow on the hillside above the farm. I could just make out the farmhouse and barn and outbuildings, some apple trees and the overgrown field that led down to the ocean. There was no real beach there, just lots of big granite rocks, also a long metal dock that I didn't remember having seen before.

It was still a pretty spot, tucked into the woods. A few yards from the farmhouse, more trees marched down to a cliff above the rocky beach. Small trees, all twisted from the wind: except for three huge white pines, each a hundred feet tall.

Winter called these the King's Pines, and they were gigantic.

"These trees are ancient," he'd told me, pointing up at one. "See anything up there?"

I squinted. I knew bald eagles nested near the ocean, but I didn't see anything that looked like a nest. I shook my head.

Winter put his hand on my shoulder and twisted me till I was staring almost straight up. "There, on the trunk—see where the bark's been notched?"

I saw it then, three marks of an axe in the shape of an arrow.

"That's the King's Mark," said Winter. "Probably dating back to about 1690. That means these were the King's Trees, to be used for masts in the King's naval fleet. See how high up that mark is? That's how old these trees are. Over three hundred years ago, this was a big tree. And it was probably at least three hundred years old then."

Now, with Vala, I could see the King's Pines jutting out above the other trees, like the masts of a schooner rising from a green sea. I figured that's what Vala was going to show me, and so I got ready to be polite and act like I already didn't know about them.

Instead she touched my arm and pointed just a few feet away, towards a clearing where trees had grown around part of the pasture.

"Whoa," I whispered.

In the middle of the clearing was a bush. A big bush, a quince, its long, thin branches covered with green leaves and small red flowers—brilliant red, the color of Valentines, and so bright after the dim woods that I had to blink.

And then, after blinking, I thought something had gone wrong with my eyes; because the bush seemed to be moving. Not moving in the wind—there wasn't any wind—but moving like it was breaking apart then coming back together again, the leaves lifting away from the branches and flickering into the air, going from dark-green to shining green like metallic paint, and here and there a flash of red like a flower had spun off, too.

But what was even more bizarre was that the bush made a noise. It was buzzing, not like bees but like a chainsaw or weed whacker, a high-pitched sound that got louder then softer then louder again. I rubbed my eyes and squinted into the overgrown field, thinking maybe Thomas Tierney had hired someone to clean up and that's what I was hearing.

There was no one there, just tall grass and apple trees and rocks, and beyond that the cliff and open sea.

"Do you see what they are?"

Vala's voice was so close to my ear that I jumped; then felt my skin prickle with goosebumps at her breath, cold as though a freezer door had opened. I shook my head and she touched my sleeve, her hand cold through the cloth, and led me into the clearing, until the bush rose above us like a red cloud.

"See?" she murmured.

The bush was full of hummingbirds—hundreds of them, darting in and out as though the bush were a city, and the spaces between the leaves streets and alleys. Some hovered above the flowers to feed, though most flew almost too fast to see. Some sat on the branches, perfectly still, and that was the weirdest thing of all, like seeing a raindrop hanging in the air.

But they didn't stay still; just perched long enough that I could get a look at one, its green green wings and the spot of red on its throat, so deep a red it was like someone had crushed its tiny body by holding it too hard. I thought maybe I could hold it too, or touch it, anyway.

So I tried. I stood with my palm open and held my breath and didn't move. Hummingbirds whizzed around like I was part of the quince, but they didn't land on me.

I glanced at Vala. She was doing the same thing I was, this amazed smile on her face, holding both arms out in front of her so she reminded me of Winter when he was dowsing. The hummingbirds buzzed around her, too, but didn't stop. Maybe if one of us had been wearing red. Hummingbirds like red.

Vala wasn't wearing red, just Winter's grubby old gray sweatshirt and jeans. But she looked strange standing there, eerie even, and for a second I had this weird feeling that I wasn't seeing Vala at all, that she had disappeared and I was standing next to a big gray rock.

The feeling was so strong that it creeped me out. I opened my mouth, I was going to suggest that we head back to Winter's house, when a hummingbird flickered right in front of Vala's face. Right in front of Vala's eye.

"Hey!" I yelled; and at the same instant Vala shouted, a deep grunting noise that had a word in it, but not an English word. Her hand flashed in front of her face, there was a greenish blur and the bird was gone.

"Are you okay?" I said. I thought the hummingbird's sharp beak had stabbed her eye. "Did it—?"

Vala brought her hands to her face and gasped, blinking quickly. "I'm sorry! It frightened me—so close, I was surprised—"

Her hands dropped. She gazed at the ground by her feet. "Oh no."

Near the toe of one rubber shoe, the hummingbird lay motionless, like a tiny bright green leaf.

"Oh, I am sorry, Justin!" cried Vala. "I only wanted you to see the tree with all the birds. But it scared me—"

I crouched to look at the dead hummingbird. Vala gazed back into the woods.

"We should go," she said. She sounded unhappy, even nervous. "Winter will think we got lost and get mad at me for taking you away. You need to work," she added, and gave me a tight smile. "Come on."

She walked away. I stayed where I was. After a moment I picked up a stick and tentatively prodded at the dead bird. It didn't move.

It was on its back and it looked sadder that way. I wanted to turn it over. I poked it again, harder.

It still didn't budge.

Cody doesn't mind touching dead things. I do. But the hummingbird was so small, only as long as my finger. And it was beautiful, with its black beak and the red spot at its throat and those tiny feathers, more like scales. So I picked it up.

"Holy crap," I whispered.

It was heavy. Not heavy like maybe a bigger bird would have been, a sparrow or chickadee, but heavy, like a rock. Not even a rock—it reminded me of one of those weights you see hanging from an old clock, those metal things shaped like pine cones or acorns, but when you touch them they feel heavy as a bowling ball, only much smaller.

The hummingbird was like that—so little I could cradle it in my cupped palm, and already cold. I guessed that rigor mortis had set in, the way it does when you hang a deer. Very gently I touched the bird's wing. I even tried to wiggle it, but the wing didn't move.

So I dropped the bird into my cupped palm and turned it onto its stomach. Its tiny legs were folded up like a fly's, its eyes dull. Its body didn't feel soft, like feathers. It felt hard, solid as granite; and cold.

But it looked exactly like a live hummingbird, emerald green where the sun hit it, beak slightly curved; a band of white under the red throat. I ran my finger along its beak, then swore.

"What the frig?"

A bright red bead welled up where the dead bird's beak had punctured my skin, sharp as a nail.

I sucked my finger, quickly looked to make sure Vala hadn't seen me. I could just make her out in the distance, moving through the trees. I felt in my pocket till I found a wadded-up Kleenex, wrapped the hummingbird in it and very carefully put it into my pocket. Then I hurried after Vala.

We walked back in silence. Only when the skeletal frame of the new house showed brightly through the trees did Vala turn to me.

"You saw the bird?" she asked.

I looked at her uneasily. I was afraid to lie, but even more afraid of what she might do if she knew what was in my pocket.

Before I could reply, she reached to touch the spot on my chin. I felt a flash of aching cold as she stared at me, her dark eyes somber but not unkind.

"I did not mean to hurt it," she said quietly. "I have never seen a bird like that one, not so close. I was scared. Not scared—startled. My reaction was too fast," she went on, and her voice was sad. Then she smiled, and glanced down at my jeans pocket.

"You took it," she said.

I turned away, and Vala laughed. In front of the house, Winter looked up from a pile of two-by-sixes.

"Get your butt over here, Justin!" he yelled. "Woman, don't you go distracting him!"

Vala stuck her tongue out again, then turned back to me. "He knows," she said matter-of-factly. "But maybe you don't tell your friend? Or your mother."

And she walked over to kiss Winter's sunburned cheek.

I muttered, "Yeah, sure;" then crossed to where I'd left the varnish. Vala stood beside her husband and sighed as she stared at the cloudless sky and the green canopy of trees stretching down to the Bay. A few boats under sail moved slowly across the blue water. One was a three-masted schooner with a red-striped mainsail: Thomas Tierney's yacht.

"So Vala," said Winter. He winked at his wife. "You tell Justin your news yet?"

She smiled. "Not yet." She pulled up the sweatshirt so I could see her stomach sticking out. "Here—"

She beckoned me over, took my hand and placed it on her stomach. Despite the heat, her hand was icy cold. So was her stomach; but I felt a sudden heat beneath my palm, and then a series of small thumps from inside her belly. I looked at her in surprise.

"It's the baby!"

"Eg veit," she said, and laughed. "I know."

"Now don't go scaring him off, talking about babies," said Winter. He put his arm around his wife. "I need him to help me finish this damn house before it snows."

I went back to varnishing. The truth is, I was glad to have something to do, so I wouldn't think about what had happened. When I got home that evening I put the hummingbird in a drawer, wrapped in an old t-shirt. For a while I'd look at it every night, after my mother came in to give me a kiss; but after a week or so I almost forgot it was there.

A few days later Cody got back from Bible Camp. It was September now. Labor Day had come and gone, and most of the summer people. School started up. Me and Cody were in eighth grade, we were pretty sick of being with the same people since kindergarten, but it was okay. Some days we skated over at Winter's place after school. It was getting crowded there with the piles of split firewood and all the stacks of lumber for the new house, and sometimes Winter yelled at us for getting in the way.

But mostly everything was like it usually was, except that Vala was getting more pregnant and everyone was starting to think about winter coming down.

You might not believe that people really worry about snow all the time, but here they do. My mother had already gotten her firewood from Winter back in August, and so had most of his other regular customers. Day by day, the big stacks of split wood dwindled, as Winter hauled them off for delivery.

And day by day the new house got bigger, so that soon it looked less like a kid's drawing of a stick house and more like a fairy tale cottage come to life, with a steep roof and lots of windows, some of them square and some of them round, like portholes, and scallop-shaped shingles stained the color of cranberries. I helped with that part, and inside, too, which was great.

Because inside—inside was amazing. Winter did incredible things with wood, everyone knew that. But until now, I had only seen the things he made for money, like furniture, or things he made to be useful, like the cabinets he'd done for my mother.

Now I saw what Winter did for himself and Vala. And if the outside of the little house looked like a fairy tale, the inside looked like something from a dream.

Winter usually carved from pine, which is a very soft wood. But he'd used oak for the beams, and covered them with faces—wind-faces with their mouths open to blow, foxes and wolves grinning from the corners, dragons and people I didn't recognize but who Vala said were spirits from Iceland.

"Huldufolk," she said when I asked about them. "The hidden people."

But they weren't hidden here. They were carved on the main beam that went across the living room ceiling, and on the oak posts in each corner, peeking out from carved leaves and vines and branches that made the posts look almost like real trees. There were huldufolk carved into the cupboards, and on benches and cabinets and bookshelves, and even on the headboard that Winter had made from a single slab of chestnut, so highly polished with beeswax that the entire bedroom smelled like honey.

So even though the house looked small from the outside, when you got inside you could get lost, wandering around and looking at all the wonderful carven things. Not just carved so the wood resembled something new, but so that you could see what was inside the wood, knots and whorls turned to eyes and mouths, the grain sanded and stained till it felt like soft, the way skin might feel if it grew strong enough to support walls and ceilings and joists, while still managing to remain, somehow, skin, and alive.

It was the most amazing house I've ever seen. And maybe the most amazing thing wasn't that it made me want to live in it, but that after spending hours working on it, I began to feel that the house lived in me, the way the baby lived inside Vala.

Only of course I could never tell anyone that, especially Cody. He would think I'd gone nuts from inhaling varnish fumes—even though I wore a dust mask, like Vala wore a fancy ventilating mask that made her look like Darth Vader.

She was working inside, too, building a stone fireplace. She found rocks in the woods and brought them up in a wheelbarrow. Big rocks, too, I was amazed she could lift them.

"Don't tell Winter," she whispered to me when I found her once, hefting a huge chunk of granite from the edge of the woods. "He'll just worry, and yell at me. And then I will yell at you," she added, and narrowed her spooky blue-black eyes.

Once the rocks were all piled inside she took forever, deciding which one would go where in the fireplace. When I made a joke about it she frowned.

"You do not want to make rocks angry, Justin." She wasn't kidding, either. She looked pissed off. "Because rocks have a very, very long memory."

It was early morning, just after seven on a Saturday. My mom had dropped me off at Winter's place on her way to see a client. It was a beautiful day, Indian summer, the leaves just starting to turn. I could see two sailboats on the water, heading south for the winter. I would rather have been skating with Cody, but Winter was anxious to get the inside of his house finished before it got too cold, so I said I'd come over and help trim up some windows.

Winter was outside. Vala, after yelling at me about the rocks, had gone up to the bedroom to get something. I yawned, wishing I'd brought my iPod, when upstairs Vala screamed.

I froze. It was a terrifying sound, not high-pitched like a woman's voice but deep and booming. And it went on and on, without her taking a breath. I started for the steps as Winter raced in. He knocked me aside and took the stairs two at a time.

"Vala!"

I ran upstairs after him, through the empty hall and into the bedroom. Vala stood in front of the window, clutching her face as she gazed outside. Winter grabbed her shoulders.

"Is it the baby?" he cried. He tried to pull her towards him, but she shook her head, then pushed him away so violently that he crashed against the wall.

"What is it?" I ran to the window. Vala fell silent as I looked out across the yellowing canopy of leaves.

"Oh no." I stared in disbelief at the cliff above the Bay. "The King's Pines—"

I rubbed my eyes, hardly aware of Winter pushing me aside so he could stare out.

"No!" he roared.

One of the three great trees was gone—the biggest one, the one that stood nearest to the cliff-edge. A blue gap showed where it had been, a chunk of sky that made me feel sick and dizzy. It was like lifting my own hand to find a finger missing. My chin throbbed and I turned, so the others wouldn't see me crying.

Winter pounded the windowsill. His face was dead white, his eyes so red they looked like they'd been smeared with paint. That frightened me more than anything, until I looked up and saw Vala.

She had backed against the wall—an unfinished wall, just gray sheetrock, blotched where the seams had been coated with putty. Her face had paled, too; but it wasn't white.

It was gray. Not a living gray, like hair or fur, but a dull mottled color, the gray of dead bark or granite.

And not just her face but her hands and arms: everything I could see of her that had been skin, now seemed cold and dead as the heap of fireplace rocks downstairs. Her clothes drooped as though tossed on a boulder, her hair stiffened like strands of reindeer moss. Even her eyes dulled to black smears, save for a pinpoint of light in each, as though a drop of water had been caught in the hollow of a stone.

"Vala." Winter came up beside me. His voice shook, but it was low and calm, as though he were trying to keep a frightened dog from bolting. "Vala, it's all right—"

He reached to stroke the slab of gray stone wedged against the wall, reindeer moss tangling between his fingers; then let his hand drop to move across a rounded outcropping.

"Think of the baby," he whispered. "Think of the girl . . ."

The threads of reindeer moss trembled, the twin droplets welled and spilled from granite to the floor; and it was Vala there and not a stone at all, Vala falling into her husband's arms and weeping uncontrollably.

"It's not all right—it's not all right—"

He held her, stroking her head as I finally got the nerve up to speak.

"Was it—was it a storm?"

"A storm?" Abruptly Winter pulled away from Vala. His face darkened to the color of mahogany. "No, it's not a storm—"

He reached for the window and yanked it open. From the direction of the cliff came the familiar drone of a chainsaw.

"It's Tierney!" shouted Winter. He turned and raced into the hall. Vala ran after him, and I ran after her.

"No—you stay here!" Winter stopped at the top of the stairs. "Justin, you wait right here with her—"

"No," I said. I glanced nervously at Vala, but to my surprise she nodded.

"No," she said. "I'm going, and Justin too."

Winter sucked his breath through his teeth.

"Suit yourself," he said curtly. "But I'm not waiting for you. And listen—you stay with her, Justin, you understand me?"

"I will," I said, but he was already gone.

Vala and I looked at each other. Her eyes were paler than I remembered, the same dull gray as the sheetrock; but as I stared at her they grew darker, as though someone had dropped blue ink into a glass of water.

"Come," she said. She touched my shoulder, then headed out the door after her husband. I followed.

All I wanted to do was run and catch up with Winter. I could have, too—over the summer I'd gotten taller, and I was now a few inches bigger than Vala.

But I remembered the way Winter had said You stay with her, Justin, you understand me? And the way he'd looked, as though I were a stranger and he'd knock me over, or worse, if I disobeyed him. It scared me and made me feel sick, almost as sick as seeing the King's Pine chopped down; but I had no time to think about that now. I could still hear the chainsaw buzzing from down the hill, a terrible sound, like when you hear a truck brake but you know it's not going to stop in time. I walked as fast as I dared, Vala just a few steps behind me. When I heard her breathing hard I'd stop, and try to keep sight of Winter far ahead of us.

But after a few minutes I gave up on that. He was out of sight, and I could only hope he'd get down to the cliff and stop whoever was doing the cutting, before another tree fell.

"Listen," said Vala, and grabbed my sleeve. I thought the chainsaw was still running, but then I realized it was just an echo. Because the air grew silent, and Vala had somehow sensed this before I did. I looked at her and she stared back at me, her eyes huge and round and sky-blue, a color I'd never seen them before.

"There is still time," she whispered. She made a strange deep noise in the back of her throat, a growl but not an animal growl; more like the sound of thunder, or rocks falling. "Hurry—"

We crashed through the woods, no longer bothering to stay on the path. We passed the quince bush shimmering through its green haze of feeding hummingbirds. Vala didn't pause but I slowed down to look back, then stopped.

A vehicle was parked by the farmhouse, the same new SUV I'd seen that day down at Shelley's hot dog stand: Lonnie Packard's truck. As I stared a burly figure came hurrying through the field, the familiar orange silhouette of a chainsaw tucked under his arm. He jumped into the SUV, gunned the engine and drove off.

I swore under my breath.

"Justin! Vala's anxious voice came from somewhere in the woods. "Come on!"

I found her at the head of the trail near the cliff. Through a broken wall of scrawny, wind-twisted trees I could just make out the two remaining pines, and the bright yellow gash that was the stump of the one that had fallen. The sharp scent of pine resin and sawdust hung in the air, and the smell of exhaust fumes from the chainsaw.

But there was no sign of Lonnie, obviously, or of anyone else.

"Look," said Vala in a hoarse whisper. She clutched me and pulled me towards her. Her touch was so cold it was like I'd been shot up with novocaine: my entire arm went numb. "There! The boat—"

She pointed down the steep trail, to the boulder-strewn beach where the dock thrust into the bay. At the end of the dock bobbed a small motorboat, a Boston Whaler. Further out, the hulking form of the Ice Queen rose above the gray water, sails furled.

She was at anchor. Several small forms moved across the deck. I squinted, trying to see if I recognized any of them, until a frigid spasm shot through my ribs as Vala nudged me, indicating the beach directly below.

"Is that him?" she hissed. "This man Tierney?"

I looked down. Winter loped across the beach towards the dock, jumping from one boulder to the next. On the shore, right next to the end of the dock, stood two men. One was tall, wearing an orange life vest and a blaze-orange watch cap and high rubber boots. The other was shorter, white-haired, slightly heavy-set, wearing sunglasses and a red-and-white windbreaker, striped like the Ice Queen's sails.

"That's him," I said.

Vala fixed her intense sky-blue gaze on me. "You're sure?"

"Yeah. I've seen his picture in the newspaper. And online."

She stood at the top of the trail and stared down at the beach. An angry voice rose from the rocks—Winter's—then another voice joined in, calmer, and a third, calm at first then laughing. I heard Winter curse, words I couldn't believe he knew. The third man, Tierney, laughed even harder.

I glanced at Vala, still staring at what was below us. One of her hands grasped the branch of a birch tree beside the path. She seemed to be thinking; almost she might have been daydreaming, she looked so peaceful, like somehow she'd forgotten where she was and what was happening. Finally she shook her head. Without looking back at me, she snapped the branch from the tree and dropped it, then started down the trail towards the beach.

I started after her, then hesitated.

The branch lay across the narrow path at my feet. Where Vala had touched them, the leaves had shriveled and faded, from yellow-green to the dull gray of lichen, and the white birch bark had blackened into tight charred-looking curls.

I tried to lift the branch. It was too heavy to move.

"It's my land now." Tom Tierney's voice echoed from the cliff. "So I suggest you get the hell off it!"

I looked down and saw Vala's small form at the bottom of the trail, hopping lightly from one boulder to the next as she headed for the dock. I scrambled down the path after her.

But I couldn't go as fast. For some reason, maybe because first Winter and then Vala had raced down it before me, rocks were tumbling down the narrow trail. Not big rocks, but enough of them that I had to pick my way carefully to keep from falling.

And not only that: in spots a white slick of frost covered the ground, so that my feet slipped and once I almost fell and cracked my head. I stopped for a minute, panting. As I tried to catch my breath I looked away from the beach, to where the cliff fell down into a deep crevice in the granite.

There, caught in the gigantic crack so that it looked as though it had grown up from the rocks, was the fallen pine. It tilted over the water, black in the shadow of the cliff, its great branches still green and strong-looking, the smell of pine sap overpowering the smell of the sea. In its uppermost branches something moved, then lifted from the tree and flew out above the bay: a bald eagle, still mottled brown and black with its young plumage.

I couldn't help it. I began to cry. Because no matter how strong and green the tree looked, I knew it was dead. Nothing would bring it back again, nothing could make it live. It had been there when no one lived here but the Passamaquoddy, it had seen sailors come from far across the sea, and tourists in boats from Paswegas Harbor, and maybe it had even seen the Ice Queen earlier that morning with her red-and-white-striped mainsail and Tom Tierney on the deck, watching as Lonnie Packard took a chainsaw to its great trunk and the tree finally fell, a crash that I hadn't heard.

But Vala had.

You stay with her, Justin, you understand me?

I took a deep breath and wiped my eyes, checked to make sure I could still see Vala on the rocks below, then continued my climb down. When I finally reached the bottom I still had to be careful—there were tidal pools everywhere between the granite boulders, some of them skimmed with ice and all of them greasy with kelp and sea lettuce. I hurried as fast as I could towards the dock.

"You don't own those trees." Winter's voice rang out so loudly that my ears hurt. "Those are the King's Pines—no man owns them."

"Well, I own this land," retorted Tierney. "And if that doesn't make me the goddamn king, I don't know what does."

I clambered over the last stretch of jagged rocks and ran up alongside Vala. Winter stood a few yards away from us, towering above Tom Tierney. The other man stood uneasily at the edge of the dock. I recognized him—Al Alford, who used to work as first mate on one of the daysailors in Paswegas Harbor. Now, I guessed, he worked for Tierney.

"King?" I heard Vala repeat under her breath. "Hann er klikkapor." She looked at me from the corner of her eyes. "He's nuts."

Maybe it was her saying that, or maybe it was me being pissed at myself for crying. But I took a step out towards Tierney and shouted at him.

"It's against the law to cut those trees! It's against the law to do any cutting here without a permit!"

Tierney turned to stare at me. For the first time he looked taken aback, maybe even embarrassed or ashamed. Not by what he'd done, I knew that; but because someone else—a kid—knew he'd done it.

"Who's this?" His voice took on that fake nice tone adults use when they're caught doing something, like smoke or drink or fight with their wives. "This your son, Winter?"

"No," I said.

"Yes," said Vala, and under her breath said the word she'd used when I first met her: feogar.

But Winter didn't say anything, and Tierney had already turned away from me.

"Against the law?" He pulled at the front of his red-and-white windbreaker, then shrugged. "I'll pay the fine. No one goes to jail for cutting down trees."

Tierney smiled then, as though he was thinking of a joke no one else would ever get, and added, "Not me, anyway."

He looked at Al Alford, and nodded. Al quickly turned and walked—ran, practically—to where the Boston Whaler rocked against the metal railing at the end of the dock. Tierney followed him, but slowly, pausing once to stare back up the hillside—not at the King's Pines but at the farmhouse, its windows glinting in the sun where they faced the cliff. Then he walked to where Alford waited by the little motorboat, his hand out to help Tierney climb inside.

I looked at Winter. His face had gone slack, except for his mouth: he looked as though he were biting down on something hard.

"He's going to cut the other ones, too," he said. He didn't sound disbelieving or sad or even angry; more like he was saying something everyone knew was true, like It'll snow soon or Tomorrow's Sunday. "He'll pay the twenty thousand dollar fine, just like he did down in Kennebunkport, he'll wait and do it in the middle of the night when I'm not here. And the trees will be gone."

"No he will not," said Vala. Her voice was nearly as calm as Winter's. There was a subdued roar as the motorboat's engine turned over, and the Boston Whaler shot away from the dock, towards the Ice Queen.

"No," Vala said again, and she stooped and picked up a rock. A small gray rock, just big enough to fit inside her fist, one side of it encrusted with barnacles. She straightened and stared at the ocean, her eyes no longer sky-blue but the pure deep gray of a stone that's been worn smooth by the sea, with no pupil in them; and shining like water in the sun.

"Skammastu peî, Tom Tierney. Farthu til fjandanns!" she cried, and threw the rock towards the water. "Farthu! Låttu peog hverfa!"

I watched it fly through the air, then fall, hitting the beach a long way from the waterline with a small thud. I started to look at Vala, then stopped.

From the water came a grinding sound, a deafening noise like thunder; only this was louder than a thunderclap and didn't last so long, just a fraction of a second. I turned and shaded my eyes, staring out to where the Boston Whaler arrowed towards Tierney's yacht. A sudden gust of wind stung my eyes with spray; I blinked, then blinked again in amazement.

A few feet from the motorboat a black spike of stone shadowed the water. Not a big rock—it might have been a dolphin's fin, or a shark's, but it wasn't moving.

And it hadn't been there just seconds before—it had never been there, I knew that. I heard a muffled shout, then the frantic whine of the motorboat's engine being revved too fast—and too late.

With a sickening crunch, the Boston Whaler ran onto the rock. Winter yelled in dismay as Alford's orange-clad figure was thrown into the water. For a second Tom Tierney remained upright, his arms flailing as he tried to grab at Alford. Then, as though a trapdoor was opened beneath him, he dropped through the bottom of the boat and disappeared.

Winter raced towards the water. I ran after him.

"Stay with Vala," Winter said, grabbing my arm. Alford's orange life vest gleamed from on top of the rock where he clung. On board the Ice Queen, someone yelled from a megaphone, and I could see another small craft, a little inflated Zodiac, dropped into the gray water. Winter shook my arm fiercely. "Justin! I said, stay with her—"

He looked back towards the beach. So did I. Vala was nowhere to be seen. Winter dropped my arm, but before he could say anything there was a motion among the rocks.

And there was Vala, coming into sight like gathering fog. Even from this distance I could see how her eyes glittered, blue-black like a winter sky; and I could tell she was smiling.

The crew of the Ice Queen rescued Alford quickly, long before the Coast Guard arrived. Winter and I stayed on the beach for several hours, while the search and rescue crews arrived and the Navy Falcons flew by overhead, in case Tierney came swimming to shore, or in case his body washed up.

But it never did. That spar of rock ripped a huge hole in the Boston Whaler, a bigger hole even than you'd think; but no one blamed Alford. All you had to do was take a look at the charts and see that there had never been a rock there, ever. Though it's there now, I can tell you that. I see it every day when I look out from the windows at Winter's house.

I never asked Vala about what happened. Winter had a grim expression when we finally went back to his place late that afternoon. Tom Tierney was a multi-millionaire, remember, and even I knew there would be an investigation and interviews and TV people. But everyone on board the Ice Queen had witnessed what happened, and so had Al Alford; and while they'd all seen Winter arguing with Tierney, there'd been no exchange of blows, not even any pushing, and no threats on Winter's part—Alford testified to that. The King's Pine was gone, but two remained; and a bunch of people from the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club and places like that immediately filed a lawsuit against Tierney's estate, to have all the property on the old Packard Farm turned into a nature preserve.

Which I thought was good, but it still won't bring the other tree back.

One day after school, a few weeks after the boat sank, I was helping to put the finishing touches on Winter's house. Just about everything in the house was done, except for the fireplace—there were still piles of rocks everywhere and plastic buckets full of mortar and flat stones for the hearth.

"Justin." Vala appeared behind me, so suddenly I jumped. "Will you come with me, please?"

I stood and nodded. She looked really pregnant now, and serious.

But happy, too. In the next room we could hear Winter working with a sander. Vala looked at me and smiled, put a finger to her lips then touched her finger to my chin. This time, it didn't ache with cold.

"Come," she said.

Outside it was cold and gray, the middle of October but already most of the leaves were gone, torn away by a storm a few nights earlier. We headed for the woods behind the house, past the quince bush, its branches stripped of leaves and all the hummingbirds long gone to warmer places. Vala wore her same bright blue rubber shoes and Winter's rolled-up jeans.

But even his big sweatshirt was too small now to cover her belly, so my mother had knit her a nice big sweater and given her a warm plaid coat that made Vala look even more like a kid, except for her eyes and that way she would look at me sometimes and smile, as though we both knew a secret. I followed her to where the path snaked down to the beach, and tried not to look over at the base of the cliff. The King's Pine had finally fallen and wedged between the crack in the huge rocks there, so that now seaweed was tangled in its dead branches, and all the rocks were covered with yellow pine needles.

"Winter has to go into town for a few hours," Vala said, as though answering a question. "I need you to help me with something."

We reached the bottom of the path and began picking our way across the rocks, until we reached the edge of the shore. A few gulls flew overhead, screaming, and the wind blew hard against my face and bare hands. I'd followed Vala outside without my coat. When I looked down, I saw that my fingers were bright red. But they didn't feel cold at all.

"Here," murmured Vala.

She walked, slowly, to where a gray rock protruded from the gravel beach. It was roughly the shape and size of an arm

Then I drew up beside Vala, and saw that it really was an arm—part of one, anyway, made of smooth gray stone, like marble only darker, but with no hand and broken just above the elbow. Vala stood and looked at it, her lips pursed; then stooped to pick it up.

"Will you carry this, please?" she said.

I didn't say anything, just held out my arms, as though she were going to fill them with firewood. When she set the stone arm down I flinched—not because it was heavy, though it was, but because it looked exactly like a real arm. I could even see where the veins had been, in the crook of the elbow, and the wrinkled skin where the arm had bent.

"Justin," Vala said. I looked up to see her blue-black eyes fixed on me. "Come on. It will get dark soon."

I followed her, as she walked slowly along the beach, like someone looking for sea glass or sand dollars. Every few feet she would stop and pick something up—a hand, a foot, a long piece of stone that was most of a leg—then turn and set them carefully into my arms. When I couldn't carry any more, she picked up one last small rock—a clenched fist—and made her way slowly back to the trail.

We made several more trips that day, and for several days after that; each time, we would return to the house and Vala would fit the stones into the unfinished fireplace, covering them with other rocks so that no one could see them; or if you did see one, you'd think maybe it was just part of a broken statue, or a rock that happened to look like a foot, or a shoulder-blade, or the cracked round back of a head.

I couldn't bring myself to ask Vala about it. But I remembered how the Boston Whaler had looked when the Coast Guard dragged it onshore, with a small ragged gash in its bow, and a much, much bigger hole in the bottom, as though something huge and heavy had crashed through it. Like a meteor, maybe. Or a really big rock, or like if someone had dropped a granite statue of a man into the boat.

Not that anyone had seen that happen. I told myself that maybe it really was a statue—maybe a statue had fallen off a ship, or been pushed off a cliff or something.

But then one day when we went down to the beach, the last day actually, Vala made me wade into the shallow water. She pointed at something just below the surface, something round and white, like a deflated soccer ball.

Only it wasn't a soccer ball. It was Tom Tierney's head: the front of it, anyway, the part Vala hadn't already found and built into the fireplace.

His face. I pulled it from the water and stared at it. A green scum of algae covered his eyes, which were wide and staring; his mouth was open and you could see where his tongue had been before it broke off, leaving a jagged edge in the hole that had been his screaming mouth.

"Loksins," said Vala. She took it from me, even though it was so heavy I could barely hold it. "At last . . .."

She turned and walked back up to the house.

That was three months ago. Winter's house is finished now, and Winter lives in it, along with Winter's wife. And their baby. The fireplace is done, and you can hardly see where there is a round broken stone at the very top, which if you squint and look at it in just the right light, like at night when the lights are out and only the fire is going, looks kind of like a face. Winter is happier than I've ever seen him, and my mom and I come over a lot, to see him and Vala and the baby, who is just a few weeks old now and so cute you wouldn't believe it, and tiny, so tiny I was afraid to hold her at first but Vala says not to worry, I may be like her big brother now but someday, when the baby grows up, she will be the one to always watch out for me. They named her Gerda, which means Protector; and for a baby she is incredibly strong.

The Sky is Large
and the Earth is Small

Chris Roberson

Chris Roberson (www.chrisroberson.net) has worked as a baker, taught middle-school history, was a product support engineer, and gave change at an arcade. An exciting new writer, his work is heavily influenced by the pulp adventure classics of the '40s and '50s. He has published six novels, including Set the Seas on Fire, Here, There & Everywhere, and Paragaea: A Planetary Romance. His first short story, "Lord Peter Midnight and the Goblin King," appeared in The Clockwork Reader Volume 1 in 2001. Short story "O One," part of the "Celestial Empire" alternate history sequence, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award and won the Sidewise Award in 2004. He is currently working on "Celestial Empire" novels The Dragon's Nine Sons and Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, and cross-time Arthurian science fantasy End of the Century.

The story that follows is part of Roberson's "Celestial Empire" sequence, one of the most interesting future histories currently being written.

Water-Dragon year, 28th year of the Kangxi emperor

Cao Wen stood south of the Eastern Peace Gate of the Forbidden City, facing the entrance to the Eastern Depot. It was an unassuming building, dwarfed by the grandeur of the buildings on the opposite side of the concourse—the Six Ministries, the Court of State Ceremonial, and the Directorate of Astronomy, where the imperial astronomers studied the heavens, watchful of any signs or portents which might auger good or ill for the emperor. Only the Office of Transmission was less grand than the Eastern Depot, its function largely eliminated when the emperor had instituted the palace memorial system, requiring that each of his ministers and deputies communicate their reports to him directly in their own hand, for his eyes only.

At the Eastern Depot's large, unadorned entrance, two guards stood at the ready, sabers sheathed at their sides, poleaxes in their hands. Cao displayed his signs of authority, which marked him as an authorized representative of the Ministry of War. One of the guards studied the papers closely, and then turned and motioned for Cao to accompany him, leaving the other at his post.

Following the guard into the main hall of the Eastern Depot, Cao's eyes lit upon a plaque, on which a motto was engraved in simply crafted characters: "Heart and Bowels of the Court."

"Please wait here," the guard said with an abbreviated bow, "while this one fetches a superior." Then, Cao's papers still in hand, the guard disappeared through one of the many arches leading from the main hall.

Cao waited in silence, as agents of the Eastern Depot came and went, all about the emperor's business. Most were clad in plain gray robes, and would not merit a second glance, were he to pass them on the street. Only a few wore the elaborate mantles which gave the emperor's secret police their name—the Embroidered Guard.

After a few long moments, the guard reappeared, with an older man following close behind. In his simple cotton robes, this older newcomer could have easily passed for a fishmonger or merchant in textiles, thin wisps of mustaches drooping over his thick lips, his eyes half-lidded as though he were just waking from a long slumber. His face, frame, and hands displayed the softened edges that suggested he was a eunuch, one who had traded in his manhood for a life of imperial service.

"Return to your post," the older man said to the guard, who replied only with a rigid nod.

"You are Cao Wen?" the older man says to him, without preamble.

Cao allowed that he was, and bowed lower than the man's appearance would suggest was required. In such a setting, appearances could be deceiving.

"I am Director Fei Ren of the Eastern Depot." The older man brandished the papers Cao had brought with him, which bore the chop of the Minister of War. "I understand you wish to speak with one of our guests?"

"Yes, O Honorable Director," Cao said, bowing again, and lower this time, "it is the wish of His Excellency the Minister of War that I should do so. It is believed that your . . . guest . . . has some intelligence that may be of use to the emperor, may-he-reign-ten-thousand-years."

"This individual has been temporarily housed with us for some considerable time," Director Fei answered. "Since before our emperor reached his age of majority. And not all that time spent in the Outside Depot, but some months and years in the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing, as well."

Cao suppressed a shudder. He had heard only whispered rumors about what went on in the private chambers of the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing, which the Embroidered Guard used to elicit confessions from the most recalcitrant suspects.

Director Fei continued. "Any intelligence this individual had to offer has been long since documented, I would venture to say. And had we been able to extract a confession from him on his many crimes, he would long ago have gone under the executioner's blade. I think you will find this one a spent fruit, all juices long since dried up, leaving nothing more than a desiccated husk of a man."

"You are obviously much wiser in such matters than I, Honorable Director," Cao said, with the appropriate tone of humility, "but such is my office to fulfill, and it would displease my master the Minister of War if I were to shirk my responsibility."

Director Fei shrugged. "Very well. It is your own time that you waste. Come along and I will have one of my agents escort you into the Outside Depot."

Director Fei waved over another man dressed in plain robes, this one nearer Cao's own age of twenty years.

"Agent Gu Xuesen will escort you, Cao Wen. Now you must excuse me, as more pressing matters demand my attention."

Cao bowed low, and Director Fei disappeared back into the shadows beyond the main hall.

"This way, sir," Gu said, inclining his head, and starting towards one of the larger arches.

Agent Gu led Cao through the winding labyrinth of passages within the Eastern Depot. The building was larger inside than its exterior would suggest, largely a function of the snaking passages and innumerous small chambers and rooms. Frequently passages opened onto open-air courtyards, and just as frequently onto sunless, dank chambers that had never seen the light of day. And as they went, Agent Gu provided the name and use of each chamber and room.

Cao was surprised to find so talkative a member of the Embroidered Guard, who were widely known as a circumspect, and some might even say taciturn, lot. When Agent Gu explained that he was only in his first years with the Embroidered Guard, and that he was required to complete his long years of training before being allowed to go beyond the walls of the Eastern Depot, his talkative manner became much more understandable. He clearly hungered for dialogue with someone nearer his own age, and while his training likely prohibited providing information when it was unnecessary, and when there is no advantage to be gained, his youthful hunger for distraction, in this instance at least, was getting the better of his discretion.

"And now, Cao Wen," Agent Gu was saying, "we pass into that section known as the Inside Depot. This is the place used to house the most dangerous and serious suspects brought in by the Embroidered Guard. It is the most closely guarded of all the sections of the Eastern Depot, and none who are not of the Embroidered Guard may enter unescorted."

They passed by a tall doorway, the door lacquered matte black, the frame painted a red the color of blood.

"And beyond this point," Gu said, pointing to the door, "rests the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing."

Cao flinched, despite himself. He had, of course, heard of the Bureau, though he labored not to call to mind the stories he had heard.

"Even through the reinforced walls and doors of the Bureau," Gu went on, "which have been designed to dampen sound, screams and hideous wailing can occasionally be heard."

They passed by the jet-and-scarlet doorway, turning a corner to a long corridor, and Cao tried to put the door and what lay beyond it out of his thoughts.

Continuing on, they came at last to a broad, open-air courtyard, surrounded on all sides by narrow doorways leading to small chambers. Men and women milled around in the bright morning sun, shuffling under the gaze of guards who perched atop towers positioned on the opposite sides of the courtyard, surmounted by banners on tall posts.

"This, finally, is the Outside Depot," Gu explained, "in which guests of the Embroidered Guard are temporarily housed. Some have confessed to minor crimes which merit no more severe punishment than imprisonment, while others await the decision of the emperor on their final sentencing. Some few have yet to confess, but have been deemed by the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing as not likely to confess at any point in the future. As no conviction can be achieved without a confession, these few are returned to the Outside Depot, assuming they are not violent enough to merit imprisonment in the Inside Depot, to wait."

"Wait for what?" Cao asked, casting his gaze across the dispirited faces before him.

"Some wait for a reprieve from the emperor, some wait for further evidence to come to light, while some just wait. For death to take them, one supposes."

Agent Gu pointed to an ancient man sitting at the center of the courtyard, his legs folded under him, his full attention on the passage across the ground of the shadows of the two towers.

"That is the man you seek," Agent Gu said. "That is Ling Xuan."

Cao Wen sat opposite the ancient man in the interview chamber. Agent Gu waited beyond the door of iron-clad hardwood, which Cao doubted any sound could penetrate, short of a full-bodied bellow.

Cao had a sheaf of papers in front of him, while the old man sat with his shoulders slumped, his hands folded in his lap and the slack-jawed smile of an imbecile on his wrinkled face.

"Ling Xuan?" Cao repeated. The old man's eyes rested on the simple wooden table between then, worn smooth by generations of hands. Cao could not help but wonder what other dialogues had played out across the table, over the long years since the Embroidered Guard was established in the days of the Yongle emperor, during the Bright Dynasty.

Still, though, the old man did not reply.

"Is that your name?"

The old man drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, blinked several times, and straightened up, all without lifting his eyes from the surface of the table. When he spoke, his voice was soft but with an underlying strength, like the sound of distant thunder.

"The swirls and curves of the wood from which this table is constructed call to mind the heavens and clouds picked out in golden thread on the longpao dragon robes I wore in the service of the Shunzhi emperor. Strange to think that they follow me, here, after all of these long years. Perhaps they seek to remind me of days past, when my circumstances were more auspicious."

The man had spoken slowly, but without any pause between words, a single, breathless oration.

Cao looked at the table, and saw nothing but meaningless swirls and knots. Was the old man mad, and his search already proven in vain?

"Need I remind you," Cao replied, his tone moderated but forceful, "that I come here on the authority of the Minister of War, who speaks with the voice of the Dragon Throne itself? Now, I ask again, is your name . . ."

"Yes," the old man said, not raising his eyes. "Ling Xuan is my name."

Cao nodded, sharply. "Good. And are you the same Ling Xuan who is listed here?"

Cao slid a piece of paper across the table, a copy he had recently made of the fragmentary inventory of the imperial archives of the Chongzhen emperor, one of the last of the Bright Dynasty, who ruled before the Manchu came down from the north and established the Clear Dynasty.

On the inventory was highlighted one item: A Narrative Of A Journey Into The East, To The Lands Which Lay Across The Ocean, With Particular Attention to the Mexica, by Ling Xuan, Provincial Graduate.

Ling looked at the paper for a long time, as though puzzling out a complex mathematical equation in his head. After a long moment he spoke, his voice the sound of distant thunder. "Such a long time ago." And then he fell silent once more.

After a lengthy silence, the old man nodded, slowly, and raised his eyes to meet Cao's.

"Yes," Ling said. "I am he."

"Good," Cao said impatiently. "Now, I am sorry to report that all that is known about your account is the title, as it was among those records lost in the transition of power from the Bright Dynasty to the Clear. My purpose for coming here to interview you is . . ."

"Such a long time ago, but I can remember it all, as though it were yesterday."

Cao paused, waiting to see if the old man would speak further after his interruption. When Ling remained silent, Cao nodded again and continued: "That is good, because—"

"When we are young," Ling said, the distant thunder growing somewhat closer, "the days crawl by. I remember summers of my youth which seemed to last for generations. But as we grow older, the months and years flit by like dragonflies, one after another in their dozens. But by the calendar, a day is still a day, is it not? Why is it, do you suppose, that the duration of a span of time should seem so different to us in one circumstance than another?"

Cao shuffled the papers before him, impatiently. "I'm sure that I don't know. Now, as I was saying . . ."

"I have begun to suspect that time is, in some sense I don't yet fully comprehend, subjective to the viewer. What a day signifies to me is quite different than what it signifies to you. How strange my day might seem, were I able to see it through your eyes."

"Ling Xuan, I insist that you listen to, and then answer, my questions."

"We shall see how our day looks tomorrow, shall we?" Ling Xuan rose slowly to his feet, crossed to the door, and rapped on the metal cladding with a gnarled knuckle. "Perhaps then we shall have more perspective on the subjectivity of time."

Cao jumped to his feet, raising his voice in objection. "Ling Xuan, I insist that you return to your seat and answer my questions!"

Agent Gu opened the door, in response to the knocking sound.

Ling smiled beatifically, looking back over his shoulder at Cao. "And if I insist to the sun that it stop in its courses, and remain unmoving in the heavens, do you suppose that it will?"

With that Ling Xuan turned and walked out of the chamber, nodding slightly to Agent Gu as he passed.

Cao raced to the door, his cheeks flushed with anger. "Agent Gu, bring him to heel!"

Agent Gu glanced after the back of the retreating prisoner.

"That old man survived more than a year in the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing," Gu answered, "and never confessed. What do you suppose that I could do that would make him talk?"

Gu walked out towards the courtyard, and Cao followed behind, his hands twisted into trembling fists at his sides.

Ling had walked out into the sunlit courtyard, and he glanced back at Cao as he sat, gracefully folding his legs under him.

"Tomorrow, don't forget," he called to Cao. "Perhaps that will be the day in which we find answers."

Back at the Ministry of War, across the concourse from the Eastern Depot, Cao Wen sat in his small cubicle, surveying the mounds of paper before him, hundreds of notes and maps and charts, the product of months' work.

"Cao?" an impatient voice called from behind him, startling him.

Cao turned, pulse racing, to find the imposing figure of the Deputy Minister of War standing behind him.

"Deputy Minister Wu," Cao said breathlessly, rising to his feet and bowing.

Wu waved him to return to his seat, an annoyed expression on his bread face. "Is it too much to hope that you have completed your survey of the archives, and your report on the Mexica is finally ready to present to the Minister?"

Cao blanched, and shook his head. "Your pardon, O Honorable Deputy Minister, but while my researches are very nearly complete, I still have one final resource to investigate before my survey is ready for review."

"I take it you refer to this prisoner of the Eastern Depot? Were you not scheduled to interview him today?"

"Yes," Cao answered reluctantly. "But our initial meeting was not entirely . . . productive. It is my intention to return to the Eastern Depot tomorrow to complete his interrogation."

"Was this Ling Xuan forthcoming with strategic details about the Mexica? The emperor is most desirous of a complete analysis of the possibilities for invasion of the Mexic isthmus, once our pacification of Fusang is complete, and the Minister of War is most eager to present the Ministry's findings on the matter."

"The urgency is well understood, Deputy Minister." Cao shifted uneasily on his bench. "But I believe this final interview will provide much needed detail for the survey, and greatly improve the emperor's understanding of the strategic possibilities."

"I suppose you are well aware of the fact that a survey well received by the Dragon Throne will do much to enhance the estimation of a scholar so far unable to pass the juren level examinations, and would greatly aid one's chances of advancement within the imperial bureaucracy."

Cao brightened, and sat straighter. "Most certainly, Deputy Minister."

"The converse, however, is also true," Wu said, his eyes narrowed, "and a report which displeases the Minister, to say nothing of displeasing the emperor, Son of Heaven, may-he-reign-ten-thousand-years, could do irreparable damage to a young bureaucrat's career prospects. Such a one might find himself assigned to the far provinces, inspecting grain yield and calculating annual tax levies for the rest of his life."

Cao swallowed hard. "It is understood, Deputy Minister."

The Deputy Minister nodded. "Good," he said, turning and walking briskly away. "See that it is not forgotten."

The next day, Cao Wen stood over Ling Xuan, who again sat in the middle of the concourse, his eyes on the shadows on the ground.

"Note the shadows of the two towers," Ling said without looking up, before Cao had announced himself. "The spires atop each function like the points atop an equatorial sundial. If one views the many doorways opening off the central courtyard as marking the hours, the shadows indicate the time of day, with the southern tower indicating the time in the summer months, when the sun is high in the sky, and the northern tower indicating the time in the winter, when the sun is lower."

Ling at last looked up at Cao.

"Tell me," the old man said, "do you suppose the architects of the Eastern Depot intended the shadows for this purpose, or is this merely an auspicious happenstance, the result of nothing more than divine providence?"

Cao Wen glanced over at Agent Gu, who stood beside him, but Gu only shrugged, helplessly.

"I intend to complete our interview this morning, Ling Xuan," Cao answered.

"Morning," Ling Xuan replied with a smile. "Afternoon. Evening and night. Shadows measure the hours by day, and drips of water by night. But if the towers were to be moved, what would become of the hours? In the days of the Southern Song dynasty, a great astronomer named Guo Shoujing constructed at Linfen in Shanxi province a grand observatory, an intricate mechanism of bronze, perfectly aligned with the heavens. Later, in the Bright Dynasty, it was moved to Southern Capital. Though the instruments which constituted the observatory were no less intricate or precise after the move, they were intended for another geographic location and, after being relocated, no longer aligned with the heavens. The observatory no longer measured the movements of the celestial. What had been an invaluable tool became merely statuary. How many of us, removed from our proper position, likewise lose our usefulness?"

Cao tapped his foot, and scowled. He was convinced there was still meat to be found in amongst the mad offal of the old man's ramblings, but he wasn't sure he had the patience to find it.

"You will accompany me to the interview chamber," Cao said, keeping his tone even, "where we can continue our conversation like civilized beings."

"As you wish," Ling said, smiling slightly, and rose to his feet on creaking joints.

"Before the establishment of the Clear Dynasty, before the Manchu rescued the Middle Kingdom from the corruption of the Bright Dynasty, you journeyed on one of the Treasure Fleet voyages to the far side of the world, traveling east to Khalifah, Mexica, and Fusang."

It was a statement, not a question, but Cao Wen paused momentarily, nevertheless, to give Ling Xuan the opportunity to reply.

"I was a young scholar then," Ling said, "not yet having passed my jinshi examinations and become a Presented Scholar. I traveled to the Northern Capital from my home in the south, to serve the Dragon Throne as best as I was able. My skills, apparently, were best served as chronicler aboard a Treasure Fleet dragon boat, and my skills with languages were likewise of some utility. The passage across the broad sea took long months, before landfall on the shores of Khalifah."

"I want to ask you about Mexica. The title of your account suggests that—"

"When I served the Shunzhi emperor, I once received a legation from Khalifah. But when the Shunzhi emperor went to take his place in the heavens, and the Kangxi emperor took the Dragon Throne, Han bureaucrats such as I quickly fell from favor. The Regent Aobai reversed as many of the policies of Shunzhi as he could, attempting to reassert Manchu domination, feeling that the emperor had permitted too many Han to enter positions of authority. There were insufficient numbers of qualified Manchu to replace all of the Han serving in the bureaucracy, so Aobai had to console himself by replacing all the Han already in post with candidates more easily cowed by his authority."

Cao sighed heavily. The old man rambled like a senile grandmother, but Cao had confirmed that he had indeed traveled among the Mexica, so he could well have the intelligence Cao needed to advance.

"To return to the subject of the Mexica . . ."

"I hated Aobai for years, you must understand." The old man shook his head, sadly. "He had taken from me my life and my livelihood. When he found me too highly respected in the Office of Transmission to eliminate without scandal, he had me arraigned on trumped-up charges of treason and remanded to the custody of the Embroidered Guard. Consider the irony, then, that eight years later, after Kangxi had reached his majority, the young emperor enlisted the aid of his uncle Songgotu in order to break free from the control of his regents, and had Aobai himself arrested on charges of usurping his authority. Aobai joined me here as a guest of the Embroidered Guard, and died soon after."

This was all ancient history, done and buried long before Cao was born. He shifted on the bench, impatient, and tried once more to regain control of the flow of conversation.

"Ling Xuan," Cao began, allowing the tone of his voice to raise slightly, "I must ask you to attend to my questions. I am on the urgent business of his supreme majesty, the Son of Heaven, and do not have time to waste in idle rambling."

"But the affairs of men turn in their courses just like the tracks of the stars in the heavens above," the old man continued, as though he hadn't heard a word Cao had said. "I understand that in the nations of Europa they have a conception of destiny as a wheel, like that of a mill, upon which men ride up and down. Too often those who ride the wheel up fail to recall that they will someday be borne downwards again. Thirty-four years after Songgotu helped his nephew Kangxi rid himself of the influence of the Regent Aobai, Kangxi had Songgotu himself jailed, in part for his complicity in the Heir Apparent's attempt to consolidate power. Songgotu joined us here, in the Outside Depot, for the briefest while, until Kangxi ordered him executed, without trial or confession."

Cao Wen remembered the scandal from his youth, hearing his father and uncles talking about the purge of Songgotu and his associates from the court.

"Ling Xuan . . ." Cao Wen began, but the old man went on before he could continue.

"The Heir Apparent himself, of course, is resident here now. Yinreng. We passed him in the courtyard, on our way into the interview chamber. A sad shell of a man he is, and perhaps not entirely sane. Of course, some say that the eldest prince Yinti employed Lamas to cast evil spells, the revelation of which resulted in Yinreng's earlier pardon and release from imprisonment, and reinstatement as heir and successor to Kangxi. But when he returned to his old ways on his release, the emperor finally had him removed from the line of succession, degraded in position, and placed here in perpetual confinement. Still, he seems harmless to me, and I believe that he may have developed some lasting affection for another of the men imprisoned here, but as his leanings were the nettle which originally set his father on the path of disowning him, I suppose that isn't to be unexpected."

Cao Wen raised his hand, attempting again to wrestle back control of the discussion, but the old man continued, unabated.

"There are those who say that some men lie with other men as a result of an accident of birth, while others say that it is a degradation which sets upon us as we grow, an illness and not a defect. But was the Heir Apparent fated to prefer the company of men to women in the bedchamber? Did the movement of the stars through the lunar mansions in the heavens dictate the life he would lead, up to and including his end here, imprisoned behind these high, cold walls ? Or did choices he made, through his life, in some sympathetic fashion affect the course of the stars through the heavens? We know that man's destiny is linked with the heavens, but there remains the question of causation. Which is effected and which effects?"

"Ling Xuan, if you please . . ." Cao said with a weary sigh. He found that he was almost willing to surrender in frustration, and simply complete his report with the information he already had to hand.

"During the Warring States period of antiquity, the philosopher Shih-shen tried to explain the non-uniform movement of the moon as the result of man's actions. He said that, when a wise prince occupies the throne, the moon follows the right way, and that when the prince is not wise and the ministers exercise power, the moon loses its way. But if we presume that the ancients knew more than we do in all such matters, where would that leave the spirit of invention? The ancients, as praiseworthy as they were, could not have constructed a marvel like the Forbidden City. Can we not, then, assume that in the generations since we have likewise constructed concepts which they also could not have attempted? I like to believe that the world grows as a person does, maturing with the slow turning of years, becoming ever more knowledgeable and developed. But many would hold that such thoughts are an affront to the luminous ancestors who proceeded us, and whose lofty heights it is not given to us to reach. I suppose my thoughts were poisoned by the clerics of the Mexica. There, they believe that this is just the most recent of a series of worlds, and that each world increases in complexity and elegance."

Cao Wen leaned forward, cautiously optimistic. Was his patience about to be rewarded?

But before he went on, the old man leaned back, and breathed a ragged sigh. "But perhaps these are discussions for another day. I find that my voice tires, and my thoughts run away from me. Perhaps we should continue our discussion tomorrow."

The old man rose, and went to knock on the metal-clad door.

As Agent Gu opened the door, Cao rocketed up off the bench, raising his hand to object.

"Tomorrow, then," Ling said, glancing over his shoulder as he shuffled down the passageway to the courtyard beyond.

Agent Gu just shrugged, as Cao's mouth worked, soundless and furious.

Back at the Ministry of War, Cao Wen looked over the paperwork he'd amassed. Spread before him were the notes he himself had taken by hand, long months before, which had led him to Ling Xuan in the first place.

Cao had been through everything in the imperial archives on the subject of the Mexica, but much of the early contact with the Mexica had occurred during the Bright Dynasty, and many of the records from those days had been lost when the Clear Dynasty took control. Worse, much of what remained was fragmentary at best. Cao had spent endless days combing through the archives, hungry for any mention of the Mexica, when he finally stumbled upon a simple inventory list of the archives from the reign of the Chongzhen emperor, the last of the Bright Dynasty. Among dozens of bureaucratic documents, in which no one had taken any interest in long years, was listed one item which caught Cao's eye, and sped the pace of his heart—a Ling Xuan's account of a Treasure Fleet voyage to Mexica.

In the weeks that followed, Cao searched unsuccessfully for the account, checking other archives and inventories, but quite by chance came across a communication from the eunuch director of the Embroidered Guard to the Office of Transmission, intended for the eyes of the Regent Aobai, listing all of the suspects temporarily housed in the Eastern Depot. The report dated from the early days of the reign of the Kangxi emperor, while the emperor had still been a child and the regency controlled the empire, before the introduction of the palace memorial. Cao very nearly returned the communication to its cubby hole without a second glance, and had he done so his researches would have been at an end. But instead he chanced to notice a name at the bottom of the communication, in amongst the hundreds of other names—Ling Xuan.

Cao had looked into the matter further, and found no burial record, nor record of any conviction, for a Ling Xuan. He had, however, discovered that Ling had once held a position of minor authority during the reign of the Shunzhi emperor.

Cao had petitioned the Deputy Minister of War for weeks to arrange the authorization to contact the Embroidered Guard in order to confirm that Ling Xuan was still imprisoned at the Eastern Depot, and once confirmation was received Cao labored another span of weeks to receive authorization to cross the concourse and interview the prisoner himself.

At the time, Cao Wen had considered it an almost unbelievable stroke of good fortune that he should chance to discover that the author of the missing account, so crucial to his survey of the Mexica, still lived. Now, having met and spent time with the old man, he was beginning to rethink that position.

Cao Wen stood over Ling Xuan, who sat in the middle of the courtyard.

"Why do you not move from that position, Ling Xuan?"

"But I am always moving, though I do not unfold my legs from beneath me." The old man looked up at Cao with shaded eyes, and smiled. "I move because the Earth moves, and with it I go. As Lo-hsia-Hung of the Western Han Dynasty said, 'The Earth moves constantly but people do not know it. They are as persons in a closed boat, and when it proceeds they do not perceive it.'"

"You speak a great deal of astronomy, and yet the records indicate that you served in the Office of Transmission. But the study of the heavens is forbidden to all but the imperial astronomers."

"When I was first brought to the Eastern Depot," Ling explained, a distant look in his eyes, "I was interred for some time in the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing. The days were long and full of pain, but the nights were largely my own. In my narrow, dank cell, I sat the long watches of the night, unable to see a patch of clear sky. However, there was a small hole cut high in the wall, for ventilation, and I learned that it opened onto the adjacent cell. In that cell was a dismissed minister, previously the head of the Directory of Astronomy. His name was Cui, high mountain. He had offended the Regent Aobai in the days after the death of the Shanzhi emperor."

Ling drew a ragged sigh, and averted his eyes before continuing.

"We helped one another survive through those weeks and months. I told the astronomer tales of my travels across the oceans, and he told me everything he had ever learned about the heavens."

Ling stood up on creaking joints, and faced Cao.

"One night, the cell next to mine was silent, and the night after that, another voice answered when I called through the vent. I never learned what became of my friend, but I remember every word he ever spoke to me."

With that, the old man turned and started towards the interview chamber, where Agent Gu stood by the open door.

"Come along," Ling called back over his shoulder to Cao, who lingered in the sunny yard. "You wanted to discuss the Mexica, did you not?"

Cao sat at the worn table, and pulled a leather tube from the folds of his robe. Removing a cap from the tube's end, he pulled out a rolled sheaf of paper and, setting the tube to one side, arranged the papers before him, meticulously. Ling Xuan looked on, dispassionately.

Finally, his notes arranged to his satisfaction, and with an inked brush in hand, Cao began to speak, impatiently. "I have already spent the better part of a year in my survey of the Mexica, Ling Xuan, and I would very much like to complete my report before another year begins."

"But which year, yes?" Ling asked, raising an eyebrow. "We in the Middle Kingdom know two. The twenty-four solar nodes of the farmer's calendar, and the twelve or thirteen lunar months of the lunisolar calendar. The Mexica had more than one calendar, too."

Cao sighed. He had little interest in a repeat of the previous days' performance, and yet here he was, about to assay the same role. "Ling Xuan—"

"The Mexica have a solar calendar, which like our own was made up of 365 days," the old man interrupted before Cao could continue. "Can you imagine it? Two cultures, so different and divided by history and geography, and yet we parcel out time in the same allotments. But unlike us, the Mexica divide their solar year into eighteen months of twenty days each, leaving aside five more, which they call 'empty days.' These are days of ill omen, when no work or ritual is to be performed."

"That's very interesting," Cao said, in a rush, "but to return to the subject at hand . . ."

"But like us, they are not satisfied with only one calendrical system," Ling continued, undaunted. "In addition to their solar year, they have a second calendar of 260 days, marked out by interlocking cycles of twenty-day signs and thirteen numbers. Again, reminiscent of our own system of element and animal, wouldn't you say?"

"I suppose so," Cao agreed, weakly.

"But the Mexica have another calendar, on a scale even grander than the other two. In the capital city of the Mexica, Place of the Stone Cactus, there is a massive circular stone, thicker than a child is tall and wider than the height of two men. This is a calendar too, of a sort, but while the other calendars measure the passage of days, months, and years, this massive calendar of stone is used to measure the passage of worlds themselves. As I told you, the Mexica believe that this is the fifth and most recent world created by the gods. They believe that this world was constructed only a few hundred years ago, in the year 13-Reed, and that its peoples and cultures were put in place, fully formed and with their histories already in place, as a test of the Mexica's faith."

"You traveled to the capital of the Mexica?" Cao asked, sitting forward, readying his brush over a blank sheet of paper.

"Yes," the old man answered, a faraway look in his eyes, "a party of us, along with the commander of the Treasure Fleet, traveled overland for long days and weeks before we reached the heart of the Mexic empire. Their city of Place of the Stone Cactus was as large and grand as the Northern Capital itself, hundreds of thousands of men and women toiling away in the service of their emperor."

Ling Xuan's eyes fluttered close for a brief moment, and he swayed, momentarily lost in thought.

"The Mexica know when this world will end," he went on. "It will come in the year of 4-Movement, when the world's calendar has run its course. But which cycle, yes? In Place of the Stone Cactus, I saw steam-powered automatons of riveted bronze, which symbolically represented the jaguars, hurricanes, fires, and rains which destroyed the previous worlds."

Cao Wen's brush raced down the page in precise movements, as he took careful notes. "Steam-powered, you say?"

Ling Xuan nodded. "Yes, and while the Mexica had never before seen a horse, they had steam-powered trolleys that could carry them back and forth across the breadth of their broad valley in a twinkling."

"What of their military capacity?" Cao asked, eagerly. "Were you given any glimpse of their level of armament?"

Ling Xuan blinked slowly. "I did, in fact, spend considerable time with an officer of their army, an Eagle Knight of the first rank. I was one of the few to have learned the rudiments of Nahuatl, the Mexica's tongue, and as such I was appointed to tour their city and report back what I'd learned, and Hummingbird Feather was to be my guide."

Ling Xuan dropped his gaze, and his eyes came to rest on the leather tube at the edge of the table, in which Cao Wen had brought his notes.

"This reminds me of something," the old man said, pointing at the tube.

"Something to do with the Mexica?"

The old man nodded, slowly, his eyes not leaving the tube. Then he shook his head, once, leaving Cao unsure whether the old man had meant to reply in the affirmative, in the negative, or if in fact he'd replied at all.

"I remember something my friend Cui told me. A metal tube capped on either end by ground glass lenses, used for far viewing. A Remote-Viewing Mirror, he called it. A tool employed by the Directorate of Astronomy. Have you heard of such a thing?"

Cao nodded, impatiently. "Yes, I believe I've seen them in operation. What of it?"

"I would very much like to see such a device for myself. My eyes are not as strong as they once were, and it would be a welcome sight to see the shapes upon the moon's surface. If you could arrange such a thing, I would be happy to tell you all I saw of the Mexica's armament and defenses."

Then the old man rose, rapped on the door, and disappeared from view, leaving Cao in the room with his notes, his brush, and his questions.

It took Cao Wen several days to receive authorization from the Deputy Minister of War to requisition the far-seeing device from the Directorate of Astronomy, several more days to locate the bureaucrat within the Directorate who was responsible for materiel and equipment, and an additional week of wheedling and cajoling to get the astronomer to recognize the authority of the Deputy Minister's order.

Cao tried on several occasions in the interval to renew his interview with Ling Xuan, but every attempt failed. Each time, the old man would look up at him, blink slowly, and ask whether Cao carried the far-seeing device. When he saw that Cao did not, Ling would turn his eyes back to the ground, watching the shadows in their slow course across the ground.

Finally, Cao managed to retrieve the device from the Directorate of Astronomy, and a short while later sat in the interview room, carefully removing the device from its protective sheath. He presented the object to Ling Xuan, with Agent Gu standing by as witness.

While Ling turned the device over in his hands, eyes glistening and mouth open in wonder, Cao read aloud from an official release document, signed with the chop of the Head Director of Astronomy, and countersigned by the Deputy Minister of War. "This far-seeing device, the Remote-Viewing Mirror, remains the property of the Directorate of Astronomy, as decreed by His Majesty the emperor, but by special order of the Deputy Minister of War, it is being loaned for a short time to one Ling Xuan, a temporary resident at the Outside Depot of the Embroidered Guard. Be it known that this Ling Xuan is not to allow the Remote-Viewing Mirror to pass into any hands other than his own, nor is he to reveal the details of its manufacture to any but those parties determined by imperial decree as worthy to hold such knowledge."

Cao paused, and glanced up from the document at the old man, whose eyes were fixed on the device in his hands.

"Ling Xuan, do you understand these terms?"

The old man simply held the device up for a closer inspection, marveling.

"Temporary Resident Ling," Agent Gu said, his tone martial, stepping forward incrementally and looming over the old man as menacingly as he was able. "Do you understand the terms as recited to you?"

Ling Xuan nodded, absently. "Yes, yes, of course."

"Thank you for bearing witness, Agent Gu." Cao nodded to Gu, and motioned him towards the door. "Now, with your permission, I would like at this point to continue my interview with Ling Xuan."

Agent Gu bowed, crossed the floor, and closed the door behind him as he left.

"Now," Cao said to the old man, his tone turning dark, "let us talk about the Mexica."

Ling Xuan held the Remote-Viewing Mirror lovingly and, without lifting his eyes from the device, began to speak.

"Hummingbird Feather, who I like to think became my friend in the weeks we stayed in Place of the Stone Cactus, explained to me the structure of the army of the Mexica. He was an Eagle Knight, and a Quauhyahcatl, or a Great Captain of the Mexic army, meaning that he had taken five foreign captives in combat. When the Treasure Fleet arrived, though, the Mexica had not gone to war against their neighbors in almost a generation. And so they fought, instead, the War of the Flowers.

"The army of the Mexica is organized into banners of twenty men each—and here, too, we hear echoes of our own culture, do we not? So like the banners of our Manchu masters, yes? In any case, twenty of such banners make up a battalion of four hundred men, and twenty of these an army of eight thousand. The best warriors were inducted into the orders of the Jaguar and the Eagle, and advancement was measured by how many captives one took while in battle. In times of peace, though, there were no captives to be had, and how then to measure one's worth?

"The Mexica challenge their neighbors to fight in a War of the Flowers. We were lucky enough to arrive in Place of the Stone Cactus during one of these ceremonial tournaments. The armies of the Mexica and those of their neighbors gather in the broad plains beyond the valley of the Stone Cactus, and meet in mock combat. Though the blows are not killing blows, and no blood is spilled on the plains, the stakes are no less high than in warfare. The combatants in the War of the Flowers take prisoners, capturing their defeated foes, and when each side decides that it has taken enough prisoners, the battle is ended. The side which has captured the most of its enemy is declared the winner, and the two armies return home with their spoils. The captives are executed or enslaved, depending on the moods of their captors.

"In this way, the army of the Mexica are able to keep their martial skills honed and ready, even when there is no enemy to be bested."

Cao scarcely looked up from his notes, his brush flying across the page.

"Yes, yes," Cao said, eagerly. "Now, how do the generals of the armies communicate their orders to the officers of the banners, and how do the banners' leaders communicate the orders on to their subordinates?"

Days passed, and Cao Wen returned again and again to the Outside Depot, filling page after page with notes on the Mexica, dictated by the old man. He'd originally hoped for one or two choice facts with which to spice his survey, and after long frustrated weeks, wrangling the incommunicative prisoner, he'd begun to doubt that he'd get even that much. Now, though, it seemed that flood gates had opened, and the old man was providing more detailed information than Cao had dreamed possible. Now, the thought of advancement within the ministry as reward for all his efforts, which he'd originally held as a slender hope, seemed a very achievable goal.

This morning, the old man was waiting for him in the interview room, the Remote-Viewing Mirror in his lap.

"I think we near the end of our cycle of interviews, Ling Xuan," Cao said, not bothering with pleasantries. He slid onto the bench across the table from the old man, and arranged his papers and brushes before him. "I need just one final bit of information, and my report will be complete. I'm not sure just what it is, yet, but I believe that you must have it within you. I want to hear more about the automation of the Mexica. From what you describe, it sounds as though their technological development has taken a different path than our own, but that they seem not far behind us."

Ling looked up, smiling.

"I was able to spend long hours last night, watching the skies through this remarkable device. Agent Gu was kind enough to allow me to remain in the courtyard all hours, and so I had a much fuller view of the heavens than I am allowed from my small window." The old man lifted the Remote-Viewing Mirror to his right eye and, squeezing his left eye shut, peered through the device at Cao, sitting across from him. Then he laughed, a soft, strong noise like distant peals of thunder, and continued. "I have been following the path of Fire Star across the heavens. In the last few months, it has risen in the early hours of the morning, rising earlier and earlier every day, tracking steadily eastward across the sky. Just a few week ago, it rose shortly after sunset, and the most remarkable thing occurred. Cui had told me about it, but until this occasion I had never had opportunity to see it for myself. Fire Star seemed to stop in the heavens, and then turned back, now moving westward across the skies. Now it rises at sunset, tracks westward across the sky, and sets by dawn. In another few weeks, if what Cui told me holds true, it will reverse course again, moving once more eastward across the sky, rising earlier and earlier until it once again rises at dawn and sets at dusk."

"Fascinating," Cao said, without feeling. "Now, to return to the Mexica . . ."

"There are shapes, shadows, and lines upon the surface of Fire Star, I have found. This most ingenious device allows me to see them with my own eye."

"The automatons of the Mexica, Ling Xuan," Cao repeated. "Now, you say that they are little more than parlor tricks, fixed in place and able to go through only route motions. But did the Mexica display the capacity to develop these trinkets into something more? A siege engine of sorts, perhaps?"

"Cui told me that the best astronomers of his time felt that these wandering stars were worlds such as our own. Tell me, do you suppose if that is so, it might not be peopled with beings such as ourselves?"

"Ling Xuan . . ." Cao began, rubbing the bridge of his nose, his tone menacing.

The old man, his eyes half-lidded, sways on his bench, like a tall tree blown by a high wind. "I'm tired, Cao Wen. Too many late nights and early mornings, too little sleep. Let us continue tomorrow, yes? I am sure I will be in better spirits then, and better able to hear your questions."

Ling stood, and knocked on the door.

"But . . ." Cao began, and then trailed off as the old man exited after Agent Gu swung open the door. Cao sighed, dramatically, and shrugged. He had waited this long. What harm could another day do? But if by then the end of the next day he did not have the answers he needed . . .?

Cao felt his patience was an at end. He gathered up his papers, and to the empty room he said, "Tomorrow, then."

The next day found Cao Wen and Ling Xuan back in their accustomed places.

Ling seemed more lucid and animated today, and didn't wait for Cao to initiate their discussion before returning to their perennial topic of conversation. "All of this talk of the Mexica has reminded me of something I've long since forgotten. A salient fact about the culture of the Mexica that I did not realize until years after my visit to their empire."

"What is it?" Cao asked, warily.

"It is one final fact which you must have for your survey. It is something about the culture of the Mexica which I have realized only later in life, which is the reason that the Dragon Throne will prevail, if it should go to war against them. But in exchange for this final bit of information, I request one last favor."

Cao glanced at the Remote-Viewing Mirror, clutched as always in the old man's gnarled hands. What would the old man want this time?

"I would go, just once more, beyond the walls of the Eastern Depot. From my vantage point within the Outside Depot, there is only so much of the night sky I can see, and there is so, so much more to behold."

Cao straightened, and folded his arms across his chest. "Absolutely not," he said, sharply. "Out of the question." Cao rubbed the bridge of his nose, and tried to compose an appropriate counter offer. "No. Instead, if you don't tell me what I want to know, you will be punished. Yes, and I will have the Remote-Viewing Mirror taken from you."

Ling shrugged, unmoved. "I have seen the heavens with my own eyes, from within my little box. If you take away my vision, I will still have my memories, but if I am unable to venture beyond these walls, my memories will be all I have, anyway. What have I to lose?"

Cao jumped to his feet, and began furiously to pace the floor.

"This is unseemly, Ling Xuan. This is unacceptable."

"And yet it is happening," Ling said, his expression serene.

Cao Wen stormed to the door, and pounded loudly with the heel of his fist.

Gu opened the door, his expression curious.

"Agent Gu, remove this prisoner from my sight immediately!" Cao Wen said imperiously.

Gu looked from Cao to Ling and back, shrugged, and took the old man by the elbow, leading him slowly from the chamber. "This way, old man."

Cao collapsed back onto his seat, glowering.

Cao Wen sat on the hard, unforgiving bench, waiting while bureaucrats shuffled back and forth across the polished floors of the Ministry of War, about the business of the empire.

Cao didn't have to test the old man's resolve. He knew that Ling meant what he said. If Ling said he wouldn't answer any further questions without receiving his boon, he wouldn't speak another word. Not another useful word, at least.

"Deputy Minister Wu will see you now, Cao Wen," said a steward, appearing at the open door.

Cao swallowed hard, rose to his feet, and crossed the floor.

"O Honorable Deputy Minister," Cao said, bowing low.

The imposing figure of Deputy Minister Wu was crowded into a spare, simply made chair on the far side of the room. There was a low table at his side, covered with rolled maps, bound sheaves of paper, and small notebooks. At his elbow stood his secretary, a weasel-faced man with ink-stained fingers who recorded everything said in the room in exhaustive detail.

"Cao Wen," the Deputy Minister said, a faint smile on his thick lips. "I harbor hopes that you come to deliver your survey of the Mexica."

"Not quite yet, this one is afraid to report," Cao Wen answered, his voice tremulous.

"Why am I not surprised?"

"My interrogation of the prisoner Ling Xuan these last weeks has been exceedingly productive," Cao continued. "I believe that, with one final addition, it will be complete and ready to present to the Minister of War."

"And then on to the Dragon Throne itself?" Wu asked, eyes narrowed.

Cao Wen swelled with pride, but his voice wavered nervously when he answered. "Yes, Deputy Minister. I believe it will not only summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the Mexic military, but the survey should further provide a sound justification for why the Middle Kingdom will inevitably defeat the Mexic militarily, should it come to open warfare."

"And what is this last addition, one wonders, and what is it that the Ministry of War will be asked to authorize in its pursuit?"

With as little detail and as briefly as possible, Cao explained that the old man who was his primary source for the report had requested one night beyond the walls of the Eastern Depot, in exchange for his final testimony.

"For what purpose?" Wu asked, when Cao had completed his summation. "Some conjugal business, perhaps? A fine meal, or an evening of drunken revelry?"

"No," Cao said simply. "Star-gazing."

Wu looked at Cao, disbelieving. "And in return for this small privilege, we will get the secret to defeating the Mexica?"

"Yes," Cao said.

The Deputy Minister steepled his fingers, and pursed his thick lips.

"Having paid quite a lot to get this far along in the game, Cao Wen, it seems a shame to withdraw when there is just one final wager to make. You will have your authorization. But return with this storied survey in hand, or don't bother returning at all."

Cao bowed, deeply, and scuttled away.

Three days later, approaching the middle watches of the night, Cao Wen arrived at the Eastern Depot, where he was met by Director Fei Ren.

"I am not happy with this development," Director Fei said, as though his expression was not explanation enough, "but the Deputy Minister of War has managed to get the approval of the emperor himself for this little excursion, so there isn't anything I can do about it."

Before Cao could reply, Agent Gu arrived, escorting Ling Xuan.

"Temporary Resident Ling Xuan," Director Fei said, turning to the old man. "Know that a great many bureaucrats have been put to a great deal of trouble on your behalf."

The old man just smiled, clutching the Remote-Viewing Mirror to his chest.

"You have until sunrise, old man," Director Fei said, and then turned his attentions to Agent Gu. "This is your first mission beyond the walls of the Eastern Depot, is it not, Gu?"

Agent Gu bowed, and stammered a reply in the affirmation.

"Such was my recollection." Fei looked from the old man to Gu, and scowled. "If Ling Xuan attempts to escape, know that you are free to take whatever means are necessary to insure that our temporary resident returns home to the Eastern Depot."

"Yes, sir, Director," Agent Gu said, punctuated by a further bow.

With that, Director Fei turned on his heel, and disappeared back into the labyrinth of the Eastern Depot.

"Let's get on with it," Cao said, impatiently.

With Cao on one side, and Agent Gu on the other, Ling Xuan passed through the archway and into the concourse beyond, walking out of the Eastern Depot for the first time in more than fifty years.

They threaded through the boulevards and avenues of the Northern Capital, lined on all sides with the offices of the Six Ministries and countless imperial directorates and bureaus. They came at least to a public square, far from the palace, surrounded by low buildings, inns and residences of the meaner sort. Lamplights glowed warmly from within them, but the sky overhead was dark and moonless, the stars glittering like gems against black silk.

Ling Xuan paused, and took a deep breath through his nostrils, looking up at the skies with his naked eye. "I have been imprisoned behind four walls for more than half of my life, but I have come to realize that my mind has been imprisoned even longer. The noble truths that Cui taught me through that little vent, while we were guests of the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing, were far grander and broader than anything I'd previously imagined. I have seen more of the world than many, read more than most, and yet even I had only the most tenuous grasp of reality."

Above them, the stars in the heavens seem to turn while they watched, and Cao found himself becoming dizzy, vertiginous.

"Do you know why my friend Cui was imprisoned in the Bureau of Suppression and Soothing?" the old man continued, glancing momentarily down from the stars to the two men at this side. "It was widely reported, so he said, that it was because he had provided readings of the heavens which were inauspicious for the regent's reign. In fact, that was not his crime. Cui challenged the accepted wisdom. He devoted his life to studying the heavens, and made a frightening discovery. Our world is not, as we have always believed, the center of the universe, with the sun, moon, and stars twirling around us. Through a careful study of the heavens, Cui came to realize that, in fact, our world was just one of many, all of which circled around the sun. What is more, he claimed that the stars themselves might be other suns, out in the distant heavens. Perhaps a small fraction of those other suns might have worlds of their own, and some small fraction of those might be peopled. We might not be the only beings in creation able to look upon ourselves and wonder." The old man paused, and smiled ruefully. "Of course, this offended the Regent Aobai, who was convinced Cui had concocted his theory only to insult the young Kangxi emperor."

Agent Gu shook his head in disbelief, when the old man fell silent. "The Earth circle around the sun? You might as well say that the Dragon Throne exists to serve me, and not the other way around."

"You might indeed." Ling smiled, his eyes twinkling.

Cao swayed on his feet. He felt unsteady, as though he stood on the edge of a precipice, about to fall into the abyss.

"Ling Xuan, you promised me one final fact about the Mexica," Cao said, uneasily.

"So I did," Ling said, nodding. "So I did. And I will tell you. It is this."

The old man leaned closer to Cao, and spoke softly, like thunder more distant than ever before, as though he were communicating some secret in confidence which he didn't want the stars above to overhear.

"The Mexica, as clever and bright and ferocious as they may be, are still blinded by their faith. The most learned among them honestly believes that the world is but a few hundred years old, and all evidence to the contrary is merely a test of their faith. We of the Middle Kingdom, I would argue, cling with as much tenacity to beliefs and superstitions no more grounded in reality than that, but with one notable difference. Ours is a culture that can produce a mind like Cui's, a mind which challenges received wisdom, which questions the foundations of knowledge itself. If we manage to produce only one like him in every dozen generations, we will still manage, in the fullness of time, to conquer the universe. Like the fraction of worlds of the fraction of stars in the great immensity of the heavens, that ensure that we are not alone, just one small spark of genius in the vast sea of complacency will mean that history does not stand still."

Ling Xuan turned, and headed back the way they had come.

"I am ready to return home to my cell now, thank you," the old man said, calling back to Cao and Gu over his shoulder. "I have seen all I needed to see."

The next morning, as Cao Wen struggled to work out how to conclude his report, he received a visitor to his cubicle in the Ministry of War. It was Agent Gu, dressed in simple gray robes.

"Gu? What are you doing here?"

"At the request of Director Fei, I come to tell you that Ling Xuan, temporary resident of the Outside Depot, died in the night. From all signs, it was not a suicide, nor is there any indication of foul play."

Cao blinked, a confused expression spread across his face.

"The old man died?"

"Yes," Gu replied. "Of extreme old age, or so I am given to understand."

"And yet he waited long enough to walk once more under the stars as a free man," Cao observed.

"Perhaps he felt that it was important enough to live for," Gu said, unsure, "and having done so, his work was done."

Cao sighed, and shrugged his shoulders.

"Strange timing, and no doubt, but he was old, and the elderly have a habit of dying." Cao regarded Gu's plain gray robes. "But here you are, beyond the walls of the Eastern Depot yourself, and so adorned that you could pass for a simple merchant in the streets."

"Yes," Agent Gu said, with a smile that commingled embarrassment and pride. "It is the opinion of Director Fei that I have completed my training, and will be of better use to the Dragon Throne beyond the walls, rather than within." Gu paused, and shifted uncomfortably. "Cao Wen, I must ask you. What are your thoughts about the things that Ling Xuan said to us in the night, about the sun and the Earth and the stars, about the Middle Kingdom and the Mexica and all?"

Cao Wen shrugged. "All I can say is that everything Ling reported to me these long weeks has been true, as far as I have been able to determine, the intelligence on the Mexica and the facts the old man learned from Astronomer Cui alike. But who am I to judge?"

Agent Gu nodded, absently, and with a final bow, departed, leaving Cao with his work.

There remained only a few more characters to brush onto the final page, and then Cao's detailed report on the astronomer Cui was complete. This appended to his report about the Mexica, Cao rolled up the papers and slid them into a leather tube. Then he rose to his feet, arranged his robes around him, and headed towards the office of the Deputy Minister to hand in his survey.

Orm the Beautiful

Elizabeth Bear

Hot newcomer Elizabeth Bear (www.elizabethbear.com) has made quite an impact on science fiction and fantasy in just a few short years. Her first short fiction appeared in 1996, and was quickly followed by eight novels and nearly fifty short stories. Her "Jenny Casey" trilogy won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. Her most recent book is collaborative fantasy novel A Companion to Wolves (written with Sarah Monette).

In the economical contemporary fantasy that follows Bear shows that even the oldest of the genre's icons can be made fresh and new again. Here a great dragon, the last of his kind, manages to surprise us with an act of grace.

Orm the Beautiful sang in his sleep, to his brothers and sisters, as the sea sings to itself. He would never die. But neither could he live much longer.

Dreaming on jewels, hearing their ancestor-song, he did not think that he would mind. The men were coming; Orm the Beautiful knew it with the wisdom of his bones. He thought he would not fight them. He thought he would close the mountain and let them scratch outside.

He would die there in the mother-cave, and so stay with the Chord. There was no one after him to take his place as warden, and Orm the Beautiful was old.

Because he was the last warden of the mother-cave, his hoard was enormous, chromatic in hue and harmony. There was jade and lapis—the bequests of Orm the Exquisite and Orm the Luminous, respectively—and chrysoprase and turquoise and the semiprecious feldspars. There were three cracked sections of an amethyst pipe as massive as a fallen tree, and Orm the Beautiful was careful never to breathe fire upon them; the stones would jaundice to smoke color in the heat.

He lay closest by the jagged heap of beryls—green as emerald, green as poison, green as grass—that were the mortal remains of his sister, Orm the Radiant. And just beyond her was the legacy of her mate, Orm the Magnificent, charcoal-and-silver labradorite overshot with an absinthe shimmer. The Magnificent's song, in death, was high and sweet, utterly at odds with the aged slithering hulk he had become before he changed.

Orm the Beautiful stretched his long neck among the glorious rubble of his kin and dozed to their songs. Soon he would be with them, returned to their harmony, their many-threaded round. Only his radiance illuminated them now. Only his eye remembered their sheen. And he too would lose the power to shine with more than reflected light before long, and all in the mother-cave would be dark and full of music.

He was pale, palest of his kin, blue-white as skimmed milk and just as translucent. The flash that ran across his scales when he crawled into the light, however, was spectral: green-electric and blue-actinic, and a vermilion so sharp it could burn an afterimage in a human eye.

It had been a long time since he climbed into the light. Perhaps he'd seal the cave now, to be ready.

Yes.

When he was done, he lay down among his treasures, his beloveds, under the mountain, and his thoughts were dragonish.

But when the men came they came not as single spies but in battalions, with dragons of their own. Iron dragons, yellow metal monsters that creaked and hissed as they gnawed the rocks. And they brought, with the dragons, channeled fire.

There was a thump, a tremble, and sifting dust followed. Cold winter air trickling down the shaft woke Orm the Beautiful from his chorale slumber.

He blinked lambent eyes, raising his head from the petrified, singing flank of Orm the Perspicacious. He heard the crunch of stone like the splintering of masticated bones and cocked his head, his ears and tendrils straining forward.

And all the Chord sang astonishment and alarm.

It had happened to others. Slain, captured, taken. Broken apart and carried off, their memories and their dreams lost forever, their songs stripped to exiled fragments to adorn a wrist, a throat, a crown. But it had always been that men could be turned back with stone.

And now they were here at the mother-cave, and undaunted to find it sealed.

This would not do. This threatened them all.

Orm the Beautiful burst from the mountain wreathed in white-yellow flames. The yellow steel dragon was not too much larger than he. It blocked the tunnel mouth; its toothed hand raked and lifted shattered stone. Orm the Beautiful struck it with his claws extended, his wings snapping wide as he cleared the destroyed entrance to the mother-cave.

The cold cut through scale to bone. When fire did not jet from flaring nostrils, his breath swirled mist and froze to rime. Snow lay blackened on the mountainside, rutted and filthy. His wings, far whiter, caught chill carmine sparks from the sun. Fragile steel squealed and rent under his claws.

There was a man in the cage inside the mechanical dragon. He made terrible unharmonious noises as he burned. Orm the Beautiful seized him and ate him quickly, out of pity, head jerking like a stork snatching down a frog.

His throat distended, squeezed, smoothed, contracted. There was no time to eat the contraption, and metal could not suffer in the flames. Orm the Beautiful tore it in half, claw and claw, and soared between the discarded pieces.

Other men screamed and ran. Their machines were potent, but no iron could sting him. Neither their bullets nor the hammer-headed drill on the second steel dragon gave him pause. He stalked them, pounced, gorged on the snap-shaken dead.

He pursued the living as they fled, and what he reached he slew.

When he slithered down the ruined tunnel to the others, they were singing, gathered, worried. He settled among their entwined song, added his notes to the chords, offered harmony. Orm the Beautiful was old; what he brought to the song was rich and layered, subtle and soft.

They will come again, sang Orm the Radiant.

They have found the mother-cave, and they have machines to unearth us, like a badger from its sett, sang Orm the Terrible from his column of black and lavender jade.

We are not safe here anymore, sang Orm the Luminous. We will be scattered and lost. The song will end, will end.

His verse almost silenced them all. Their harmony guttered like a fire when the wind slicks across it, and for a moment Orm the Beautiful felt the quiet like a wire around his throat. It was broken by the discord of voices, a rising dissonance like a tuning orchestra, the Chord all frightened and in argument.

But Orm the Courtly raised her voice, and all listened. She was old in life and old in death, and wise beyond both in her singing. Let the warden decide.

Another agreed, another, voice after voice scaling into harmony.

And Orm the Beautiful sat back on his haunches, his tail flicked across his toes, his belly aching, and tried to pretend he had any idea at all how to protect the Chord from being unearthed and carted to the four corners of the world.

"I'll think about it when I've digested," he said, and lay down on his side with a sigh.

Around him the Chord sang agreement. They had not forgotten in death the essentialities of life.

With the men and their machines came memory. Orm the Beautiful, belly distended with iron and flesh, nevertheless slept with one eye open. His opalescence lit the mother-cave in hollow violets and crawling greens. The Chord sang around him, thinking while he dreamed. The dead did not rest, or dream.

They only sang and remembered.

The Chord was in harmony when he awoke. They had listened to his song while he slept, and while he stretched—sleek again, and the best part of a yard longer—he heard theirs as well, and learned from them what they had learned from his dinner.

More men would follow. The miners Orm the Beautiful had dined on knew they would not go unavenged. There would be more men, men like ants, with their weapons and their implements. And Orm the Beautiful was strong.

But he was old, and he was only one. And someone, surely, would soon recall that though steel had no power to harm Orm the Beautiful's race, knapped flint or obsidian could slice his opal hide from opal bone.

The mother-cave was full of the corpses of dragons, a chain of song and memory stretching aeons. The Chord was rich in voices.

Orm the Beautiful had no way to move them all.

Orm the Numinous, who was eldest, was chosen to speak the evil news they all knew already. You must give us away, Orm the Beautiful.

Dragons are not specifically disallowed in the airspace over Washington, D.C., but it must be said that Orm the Beautiful's presence there was heartily discouraged. Nevertheless, he persevered, holding his flame and the lash of his wings, and succeeded in landing on the National Mall without destroying any of the attacking aircraft.

He touched down lightly in a clear space before the National Museum of Natural History, a helicopter hovering over his head and blowing his tendrils this way and that. There were men all over the grass and pavements. They scattered, screaming, nigh-irresistible prey. Orm the Beautiful's tail-tip twitched with frustrated instinct, and he was obliged to stand on three legs and elaborately clean his off-side fore talons for several moments before he regained enough self-possession to settle his wings and ignore the scurrying morsels.

It was unlikely that he would set a conducive tone with the museum's staff by eating a few as a prelude to conversation.

He stood quietly, inspecting his talons foot by foot and, incidentally, admiring the flashes of color that struck off his milk-pale hide in the glaring sun. When he had been still five minutes, he looked up to find a ring of men surrounding him, males and a few females, with bright metal in their hands and flashing on the chests of uniforms that were a black-blue dark as sodalite.

"Hello," Orm the Beautiful said, in the language of his dinner, raising his voice to be heard over the clatter of the helicopter. "My name is Orm the Beautiful. I should like to speak to the curator, please."

The helicopter withdrew to circle, and the curator eventually produced was a female man. Orm the Beautiful wondered if that was due to some half-remembered legend about his folk's preferences. Sopranos, in particular, had been popular among his kin in the days when they associated more freely with men.

She minced from the white-columned entry, down broad shallow steps between exhibits of petrified wood, and paused beyond the barricade of yellow tape and wooden sawhorses the blue-uniformed men had strung around Orm the Beautiful.

He had greatly enjoyed watching them evacuate the Mall.

The curator wore a dull suit and shoes that clicked, and her hair was twisted back on her neck. Little stones glinted in her earlobes: diamonds, cold and common and without song.

"I'm Katherine Samson," she said, and hesitantly extended her tiny soft hand, half-retracted it, then doggedly thrust it forward again. "You wished to speak to me?"

"I am Orm the Beautiful," Orm the Beautiful replied, and laid a cautious talon-tip against her palm. "I am here to beg your aid."

She squinted up and he realized that the sun was behind him. If its own brilliance didn't blind her pale man's eyes, surely the light shattering on his scales would do the deed. He spread his wings to shade her, and the ring of blue-clad men flinched back as one—as if they were a Chord, though Orm the Beautiful knew they were not.

The curator, however, stood her ground.

His blue-white wings were translucent, and there was a hole in the leather of the left one, an ancient scar. It cast a ragged bright patch on the curator's shoe, but the shade covered her face, and she lowered her eye-shading hand.

"Thank you," she said. And then, contemplating him, she pushed the sawhorses apart. One of the blue men reached for her, but before he caught her arm, the curator was through the gap and standing in Orm the Beautiful's shadow, her head craned back, her hair pulling free around her temples in soft wisps that reminded Orm the Beautiful of Orm the Radiant's tawny tendrils. "You need my help? Uh, sir?"

Carefully, he lowered himself to his elbows, keeping the wings high. The curator was close enough to touch him now, and when he tilted his head to see her plainly, he found her staring up at him with the tip of her tongue protruding. He flicked his tongue in answer, tasting her scent.

She was frightened. But far more curious.

"Let me explain," he said. And told her about the mother-cave, and the precious bones of his Chord, and the men who had come to steal them. He told her that they were dead, but they remembered, and if they were torn apart, carted off, their song and their memories would be shattered.

"It would be the end of my culture," he said, and then he told her he was dying.

As he was speaking, his head had dipped lower, until he was almost murmuring in her ear. At some point, she'd laid one hand on his skull behind the horns and leaned close, and she seemed startled now to realize that she was touching him. She drew her hand back slowly, and stood staring at the tips of her fingers. "What is that singing?"

She heard it, then, the wreath of music that hung on him, thin and thready though it was in the absence of his Chord. That was well. "It is I."

"Do all—all your people—does that always happen?"

"I have no people," he said. "But yes. Even in death we sing. It is why the Chord must be kept together."

"So when you said it's only you . . .."

"I am the last," said Orm the Beautiful.

She looked down, and he gave her time to think.

"It would be very expensive," she said, cautiously, rubbing her fingertips together as if they'd lost sensation. "We would have to move quickly, if poachers have already found your . . . mother-cave. And you're talking about a huge engineering problem, to move them without taking them apart. I don't know where the money would come from."

"If the expense were not at issue, would the museum accept the bequest?"

"Without a question." She touched his eye-ridge again, quickly, furtively. "Dragons," she said, and shook her head and breathed a laugh. "Dragons."

"Money is no object," he said. "Does your institution employ a solicitor?"

The document was two days in drafting. Orm the Beautiful spent the time fretting and fussed, though he kept his aspect as nearly serene as possible. Katherine—the curator—did not leave his side. Indeed, she brought him within the building—the tall doors and vast lobby could have accommodated a far larger dragon—and had a cot fetched so she could remain near. He could not stay in the lobby itself, because it was a point of man-pride that the museum was open every day, and free to all comers. But they cleared a small exhibit hall, and he stayed there in fair comfort, although silent and alone.

Outside, reporters and soldiers made camp, but within the halls of the Museum of Natural History, it was bright and still, except for the lonely shadow of Orm the Beautiful's song.

Already, he mourned his Chord. But if his sacrifice meant their salvation, it was a very small thing to give.

When the contracts were written, when the papers were signed, Katherine sat down on the edge of her cot and said, "The personal bequest," she began. "The one the Museum is meant to sell, to fund the retrieval of your Chord."

"Yes," Orm the Beautiful said.

"May I know what it is now, and where we may find it?"

"It is here before you," said Orm the Beautiful, and tore his heart from his breast with his claws.

He fell with a crash like a breaking bell, an avalanche of skim-milk-white opal threaded with azure and absinthe and vermilion flash. Chunks rolled against Katherine's legs, bruised her feet and ankles, broke some of her toes in her clicking shoes.

She was too stunned to feel pain. Through his solitary singing, Orm the Beautiful heard her refrain: "Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no."

Those who came to investigate the crash found Katherine Samson on her knees, hands raking the rubble. Salt water streaked opal powder white as bone dust down her cheeks. She kissed the broken rocks, and the blood on her fingertips was no brighter than the shocked veins of carnelian flash that shot through them.

Orm the Beautiful was broken up and sold, as he had arranged. The paperwork was quite unforgiving; dragons, it seems, may serve as their own attorneys with great dexterity.

The stones went for outrageous prices. When you wore them on your skin, you could hear the dragonsong. Institutions and the insanely wealthy fought over the relics. No price could ever be too high.

Katherine Samson was bequeathed a few chips for her own. She had them polished and drilled and threaded on a chain she wore about her throat, where her blood could warm them as they pressed upon her pulse. The mother-cave was located with the aid of Orm the Beautiful's maps and directions. Poachers were in the process of excavating it when the team from the Smithsonian arrived.

But the Museum had brought the National Guard. And the poachers were dealt with, though perhaps not with such finality as Orm the Beautiful might have wished.

Each and each, his Chord were brought back to the Museum.

Katherine, stumping on her walking cast, spent long hours in the exhibit hall. She hovered and guarded and warded, and stroked and petted and adjusted Orm the Beautiful's hoard like a nesting falcon turning her eggs. His song sustained her, his warm bones worn against her skin, his voice half-heard in her ear.

He was broken and scattered. He was not a part of his Chord. He was lost to them, as other dragons had been lost before, and as those others his song would eventually fail, and flicker, and go unremembered.

After a few months, she stopped weeping.

She also stopped eating, sleeping, dreaming.

Going home.

They came as stragglers, footsore and rain-draggled, noses peeled by the sun. They came alone, in party dresses, in business suits, in outrageously costly T-shirts and jeans. They came draped in opals and platinum, opals and gold. They came with the song of Orm the Beautiful warm against their skin.

They came to see the dragons, to hear their threaded music. When the Museum closed at night, they waited patiently by the steps until morning. They did not freeze. They did not starve.

Eventually, through the sheer wearing force of attrition, the passage of decades, the Museum accepted them. And there they worked, and lived, for all time.

And Orm the Beautiful?

He had been shattered. He died alone.

The Chord could not reclaim him. He was lost in the mortal warders, the warders who had been men.

But as he sang in their ears, so they recalled him, like a seashell remembers the sea.

The Constable of Abal

Kelly Link

Kelly Link (www.kellylink.net) published her first story, "Water Off a Black Dog's Back," in 1995 and attended the Clarion writers' workshop in the same year. A writer of subtle, challenging, sometimes whimsical fantasy, Link has published close to thirty stories which have won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, British SF, and Locus awards, and collected in 4 Stories, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic for Beginners. Link is also an accomplished editor, working on acclaimed small press 'zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and co-edits The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror with husband Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow. Her next book will be a collection of stories for young adults.

The story that follows, which first appeared in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's anthology The Coyote Road, is a typically enchanting Link tale of ghosts, family, and con artists.

They left Abal in a hurry, after Ozma's mother killed the constable. It was a shame, too, because business had been good. Ozma's mother had invitations almost every night to one party or another in the finest homes of Abal. Rich gentlemen admired Ozma's mother, Zilla, for her beauty and their wives were eager to have their fortunes told. Ozma, in her shiny, stiff, black-ribboned dress, was petted and given rolls and hot chocolate. The charms and trinkets on the ends of the ribbons that Ozma and her mother wore (little porcelain and brass ships, skulls, dolls, crowns and cups) were to attract the attention of the spirit world, but fashionable ladies in Abal had begun to wear them too. The plague had passed through Abal a few months before Ozma and her mother came. Death was fashionable.

Thanks to Ozma's mother, every wellborn lady of Abal strolled about town for a time in a cloud of ghosts—a cloud of ghosts that only Ozma and her mother could see. Zilla made a great deal of money, first selling the ribbons and charms and then instructing the buyer on the company she now kept. Some ghosts were more desirable than others of course, just as some addresses will always be more desirable, more sought after. But if you didn't like your ghosts, well then, Ozma's mother could banish the ones you had and sell you new charms, new ghosts. A rich woman could change ghosts just as easily as changing her dress and to greater fashionable effect.

Ozma was small for her age. Her voice was soft and her limbs were delicate as a doll's. She bound her breasts with a cloth. She didn't mind the hot chocolate, although she would have preferred wine. But wine might have made her sleepy or clumsy and it was hard enough carefully and quietly slipping in and out of bedrooms and dressing rooms and studies unnoticed when hundreds of ghost charms were dangling like fishing weights from your collar, your bodice, your seams, your hem. It was a surprise, really, that Ozma could move at all.

Zilla called her daughter Princess Monkey, but Ozma felt more like a beast of burden, a tricked-up pony which her mother had laden down with secrets and more secrets. Among Ozma's ghost charms were skeleton keys and tiny chisels. There was no magic about how Ozma got into and out of locked desks and boudoirs. And if she were seen, it was easy enough to explain what she was looking for. One of her ghosts, you see, was playing a little game. The observer saw only a small solemn girl chasing after her invisible friend.

Zilla was not greedy. She was a scrupulous blackmailer. She did not bleed her clients dry; she milked them. You could even say she did it out of kindness. What good is a secret without someone to know it? When one cannot afford a scandal, a blackmailer is an excellent bargain. Ozma and Zilla assembled the evidence of love affairs, ill-considered attachments, stillbirths, stolen inheritances, and murders. They were as vigilant as any biographer, solicitous as any confidante. Zilla fed gobbets of tragedy, romance, comedy to the ghosts who dangled so hungrily at the end of their ribbons. One has to feed a ghost something delicious, and there is only so much blood a grown woman and a smallish girl have to spare.

The constable had been full of blood: a young man, quite pretty to look at, ambitious, and in the pay of one Lady V____. Zilla had been careless or Lady V____ was cleverer than she looked. For certain, she was more clever than she was beautiful, Zilla said, in a rage. Zilla stabbed the constable in the neck with a demon needle. Blood sprayed out through the hollow needle like red ink. All of Ozma's ghosts began to tug at their ribbons in a terrible frenzy as if, Ozma thought, they were children and she were a maypole.

First the constable was a young man, full of promise and juice, and then he was a dead man in a puddle of his own blood, and then he was a ghost, small enough that Zilla could have clapped him between her two hands and burst him like a pastry bag, had he any real substance. He clutched at one of Zilla's ribbon charms as if it were a life rope. The look of surprise on his face was comical.

Ozma thought he made a handsome ghost. She winked at him, but then there was a great deal of work to do. There was the body to take care of, and Zilla's clothes and books and jewelry to be packed, and all of the exceedingly fragile ghost tackle to wrap up in cotton and rags.

Zilla was in a filthy temper. She kicked the body of the constable. She paced and drank while Ozma worked. She rolled out maps and rolled them back up again.

"Where are we going this time?" Ozma said.

"Home," Zilla said. She blew her nose on a map. Zilla had terrible allergies in summer. "We're going home."

On the seventh day of their journey, outlaws shot and killed Neren, Zilla's manservant, as he watered the horses from a stream. From inside the coach, Zilla drew her gun. She waited until the outlaws were within range and then she shot them both in the head. Zilla's aim was excellent.

By the time Ozma had the horses calmed down, Neren's ghost had drifted downstream, and she had no ribbons with which to collect trash like the outlaws anyway. Zilla had made her leave most of her ghosts and ribbons at home. Too many ghosts made travel difficult: they frightened horses and drew unwelcome attention. And besides, it was easy enough to embroider new ribbons and collect new ghosts when one arrived in a new place. Ozma had kept only three favorites: an angry old empress, a young boy whose ghost was convinced it was actually a kitten, and the constable. But neither the empress nor the little boy said much anymore. Nothing stirred them. And there was something more vivid about the constable, or perhaps it was just the memory of his surprised look and his bright, bright blood.

She's a monster, the constable said to Ozma. He was looking at Zilla with something like admiration. Ozma felt a twinge of jealousy, of possessive pride.

"She's killed a hundred men and women," Ozma told him. "She has a little list of their names in her book. We light candles for them in the temple."

I don't remember my name, the constable said. Did I perhaps introduce myself to you and your mother, before she killed me?

"It was something like Stamp or Anvil," Ozma said. "Or Cobble."

"Ozma," Zilla said. "Stop talking to that ghost. Come and help with Neren."

Ozma and Neren had not liked each other. Neren had liked to pinch and tease Ozma when Zilla wasn't looking. He'd put his hand on the flat place where her breasts were bound. Sometimes he picked her up by her hair to show how strong he was, how little and helpless Ozma was.

They wrapped Neren's body in a red sheet and wedged it between the branches of a tree, winding the sheet around and around the blankets. It was what you did for the dead when you were in a hurry. If it had been up to Ozma, they'd have left Neren for dogs to eat. She would have stayed to watch.

I'm hungry, said the constable's ghost. Ozma gave him a little bowl of blood and dirt, scraped from the ground where Neren had died.

After that, they traveled faster. The horses were afraid of Ozma's mother although she did not use the whips as often as Neren had.

Ozma sat in the carriage and played I Spy with the constable's ghost. I spy with my little eye, said the constable.

"A cloud," Ozma said. "A man in a field."

The view was monotonous. There were fields brown with blight and the air was foul with dust. There had been a disease of the wheat this year, as well as plague. There were no clouds. The man in the field was a broken stalk in a clearing, tied with small dirty flags, left as a piece of field magic. A field god to mark the place where someone had drawn the white stone.

Not a man, the constable said. A woman. A sad girl with brown hair. She looks a little like you.

"Is she pretty?" Ozma said.

Are you pretty? the constable said.

Ozma tossed her hair. "The ladies of Abal called me a pretty poppet," she said. "They said my hair was the color of honey."

Your mother is very beautiful, the constable said. Out on the coachman's seat, Zilla was singing a song about black birds pecking at someone's eyes and fingers. Zilla loved sad songs.

"I will be even more beautiful when I grow up," Ozma said. "Zilla says so."

How old are you? said the constable.

"Sixteen," Ozma said, although this was only a guess. She'd begun to bleed the year before. Zilla had not been pleased.

Why do you bind your breasts? said the constable.

When they traveled, Ozma dressed in boy's clothes and tied her hair back in a simple queue. But she still bound her breasts every day. "One day," she said, "Zilla will find a husband for me. A rich old man with an estate. Or a foolish young man with an inheritance. But until then, until I'm too tall, I'm more useful as a child. Zilla's Princess Monkey.

I'll never get any older, the constable said, mourning.

"I spy with my little eye," Ozma said.

A cloud, the constable said. A wheel of fire. The dead did not like to say the name of the sun.

"A little mouse," Ozma said. "It ran under the wheels of the carriage."

Where are we going? the constable said. He asked over and over again.

"Home," Ozma said.

Where is home? said the constable.

"I don't know," Ozma said.

Ozma's father was, according to Zilla, a prince of the Underworld, a diplomat from distant Torlal, a spy, a man with a knife in an alley in Benin. Neren had been a small man, and he'd had snapping black eyes like Ozma, but Neren had not been Ozma's father. If he'd been her father, she would have fished in the stream with a ribbon for his ghost.

They made camp in a field of white flowers. Ozma fed and watered the horses. She picked flowers with the idea that perhaps she could gather enough to make a bed of petals for Zilla. She had a small heap almost as high as her knee before she grew tired of picking them. Zilla made a fire and drank wine. She did not say anything about Neren or about home or about the white petals, but after the sun went down she taught Ozma easy conjure tricks: how to set fire dancing on the backs of the green beetles that ran about the camp; how to summon the little devils that lived in trees and shrubs and rocks.

Zilla and the rock devils talked for a while in a guttural, snappish language that Ozma could almost understand. Then Zilla leaned forward, caught up a devil by its tail, and snapped its long neck. The other devils ran away and Zilla chased after them, grinning. There was something wolfish about her: she dashed across the field on all fours, darting back and forth. She caught two more devils while Ozma and the ghosts sat and watched, and then came strolling back to the camp looking flushed and pink and pleased, the devils dangling from her hand. She sharpened sticks and cooked them over the campfire as if they had been quail. By the time they were ready to eat, she was quite drunk. She didn't offer to share the wine with Ozma.

The devils were full of little spiky bones. Zilla ate two. Ozma nibbled at a haunch, wishing she had real silverware, the kind they'd left behind in Abal. All she had was a tobacco knife. Her devil's gummy boiled eyes stared up at her reproachfully. She closed her own eyes and tore off its head. But there were still the little hands, the toes. It was like trying to eat a baby.

"Ozma," Zilla said. "Eat. I need you to stay healthy. Next time it will be your turn to conjure up supper."

Zilla slept in the carriage. Ozma lay with her head on the little pile of white petals and the constable and the empress and the kitten boy curled up in her hair.

All night long the green beetles scurried around the camp, carrying fire on their backs. It didn't seem to upset them, and it was very beautiful. Whenever Ozma woke in the night, the ground was alive with little moving green lights. That was the thing about magic. Sometimes it was beautiful and sometimes it seemed to Ozma that it was as wicked as the priests claimed. You could kill a man and you could lie and steal as Zilla had done, and if you lit enough candles at the temples, you could be forgiven. But someone who ate little devils and caught ghosts with ribbons and charms was a witch, and witches were damned. It had always seemed to Ozma that in all the world there was only Zilla for Ozma, only Ozma for Zilla. Perhaps home would be different.

Ozma thought that Zilla was looking for something. It was four days since Neren had died, and the horses were getting skinny. There was very little grazing. The streambeds were mostly dry. They abandoned the carriage and Zilla walked while Ozma rode one of the horses (the horses would not carry Zilla) and the other horse carried Zilla's maps and boxes. They went north and there were no villages, no towns where Zilla could tell fortunes or sell charms. There were only abandoned farms and woods that Zilla said were full of outlaws or worse.

There was no more wine. Zilla had finished it. They drank muddy water out of the same streams where they watered their horses.

At night Ozma pricked her finger and squeezed the blood into the dirt for her ghosts. In Abal, there had been servants to give the blood to the ghosts. You did not need much blood for one ghost, but in Abal they'd had many, many ghosts. It made Ozma feel a bit sick to see the empress's lips smeared with her blood, to see the kitten boy lapping at the clotted dirt. The constable ate daintily, as if he were still alive.

Ozma's legs ached at night, as if they were growing furiously. She forgot to bind her breasts. Zilla didn't seem to notice. At night, she walked out from the camp, leaving Ozma alone. Sometimes she did not come back until morning.

I spy with my little eye, the constable said.

"A horse's ass," Ozma said. "My mother's skirts, dragging in the dirt."

A young lady, the constable said. A young lady full of blood and vitality.

Ozma stared at him. The dead did not flirt with the living, but there was a glint in the constable's dead eye. The empress laughed silently.

Ahead of them, Zilla stopped. "There," she said. "Ahead of us, do you see?"

"Are we home?" Ozma said. "Have we come home?" The road behind them was empty and broken. Far ahead, she could see something that might be a small town. As they got closer, there were buildings, but the buildings were not resplendent. The roofs were not tiled with gold. There was no city wall, no orchards full of fruit, only brown fields and ricks of rotted hay.

"This is Brid," Zilla said. "There's something I need here. Come here, Ozma. Help me with the packhorse."

They pulled out Ozma's best dress, the green one with silver embroidery. But when Ozma tried to put on her dress, it would not fasten across her back. The shot-silk cuffs no longer came down over her wrists.

"Well," Zilla said. "My little girl is getting bigger."

"I didn't mean to!" Ozma said.

"No," Zilla said. "I suppose you didn't. It isn't your fault, Ozma. My magic can only do so much. Everyone gets older, no matter how much magic their mothers have. A young woman is trouble, though, and we have no time for trouble. Perhaps you should be a boy. I'll cut your hair."

Ozma backed away. She was proud of her hair.

"Come here, Ozma," Zilla said. She had a knife in her hand. "It will grow back, I promise."

Ozma waited with the horses and the ghosts outside the town. She was too proud to cry about her hair. Boys came and threw rocks at her and she glared at them until they ran away. They came and threw rocks again. She imagined conjuring fire and setting it on their backs and watching them scurry like the beetles. She was wicked to think such a thing. Zilla was probably at the temple lighting candles, but surely there weren't enough candles in the world to save them both. Ozma prayed that Zilla would save herself.

Why have we come here? the constable said.

"We need things," Ozma said. "Home is farther away than I thought it was. Zilla will bring back a new carriage and a new manservant and wine and food. She's probably gone to the mayor's house, to tell his fortune. He'll give her gold. She'll come back with gold and ribbons full of ghosts and we'll go to the mayor's house and eat roast beef on silver plates."

The town is full of people and the people are full of blood, the constable said. Why must we stay here outside?

"Wait, and Zilla will come back," Ozma said. There was a hot breeze and it blew against her neck. Cut hair pricked where it was caught between her shirt and her skin. She picked up the constable on his ribbon and held him cupped in her hands. "Am I still beautiful?" she said.

You have dirt on your face, the constable said.

The sun was high in the sky when Zilla came back. She was wearing a modest gray dress and a white kerchief covered her hair. There was a man with her. He paid no attention to Ozma. Instead he went over to the horses and ran his hands over them. He picked up their feet and rapped thoughtfully on their hooves.

"Come along," Zilla said to Ozma. "Help me with the bags. Leave the horses with this man."

"Where are we going?" Ozma said. "Did the mayor give you gold?"

"I took a position in service," Zilla said. "You are my son and your name is Eren. Your father is dead and we have come here from Nablos. We are respectable people. I'm to cook and keep house."

"I thought we were going home," Ozma said. "This isn't home."

"Leave your ghosts here," Zilla said. "Decent people like we are going to be have nothing to do with ghosts."

The man took the reins of the horses and led them away. Ozma took out her pocket knife and cut off her last three ribbons. In one of the saddlebags, there was a kite that a lady of Abal had given her. She tied the empress and the kitten boy to it by their ribbons, and then she threw the kite up so the wind caught it. The string ran through her hand and the two ghosts sailed away over the houses of Brid.

What are you doing? the constable said.

"Be quiet," Ozma said. She tied a knot in the third ribbon and stuck the constable in her pocket. Then she picked up a saddlebag and followed her mother into Brid.

Her mother walked along as if she had lived in Brid all her life. They stopped in a temple and Zilla bought a hundred candles. Ozma helped her light them all, while the priest dozed, stretched out on a prayer bench. Couldn't he tell how wicked they were? Ozma wondered. Only wicked, wicked people would need to light so many candles.

But Zilla, kneeling in front of the altar steps, lighting candle after candle, looked like a saint in her gray dress. The air was thick with incense. Zilla sneezed and the priest woke up with a snort. This would be a very dull game, Ozma thought. She wished that Zilla had charmed the constable instead of killing him. She had not been at all tired of their life in Abal.

Zilla led Ozma through a public square where women were drawing water from a well, and down a narrow street. The gutters smelled of human sewage. In Abal the finest houses had been outfitted with modern plumbing. There had been taps and running water and hot baths. And a public bath—even if Brid had such a thing, Ozma realized—would be out of the question, as long as she was a boy.

"Here," Zilla said. She went up to the door of a two-story stone house. It did not compare to the house they had lived in, in Abal. When Zilla knocked, a woman in a housemaid's cap opened the door. "You're to go around to the back," the woman said. "Don't you know anything?" Then she relented. "Come in quickly, quickly."

There was a vestibule and a front hall with a mosaic set in the floor. The blue and yellow tiles were set in a spiralling pattern and Ozma thought she saw dragons, but the mosaic was cracked and some of the tiles were missing. Light fell down through a vaulted sky light. There were statues standing in panelled niches in the wall, gods and goddesses looking as if they had been waiting for a long time for someone to bring their coats and hats. They looked dowdier than the gods in Abal did, less haughty, less high. There were ghosts everywhere, Ozma saw. Somehow it made her miss Abal less. At least Brid was like Abal in this one way.

She didn't care for the gods. When she thought of them at all, she imagined them catching people the way that Zilla caught ghosts, with charms and ribbons. Who would want to dangle along after one of these household gods, with their painted eyes and their chipped fingers?

"Come along, come along," said the housemaid. "My name's Jemma. I'm to show you your room and then I'll take you back down to the parlor. What's your name, boy?"

Zilla poked Ozma. "Oz—Ozen," Ozma said. "Ozen."

"That's a foreign name," Jemma said. She sounded disapproving. Ozma stared down. Jemma had thick ankles. Her shoes looked as if they pinched. As she hurried them along, little eddies of ghosts swirled around her skirts. Zilla sneezed.

Jemma led them through a door and then up and up a winding staircase. Ghosts drifted after them lazily. Zilla pretended they were not there and so Ozma did the same.

At the top of the stairs was a hall with a door on either side. Their room had a sloped roof, so there was barely room to stand up. There were two narrow beds, a chair, a basin on a small table, and a window with a pane missing.

"I see there's a fireplace," Zilla said. She sank down into the chair.

"Get up, get up," Jemma said. "Oh please, Miss Zilla, get up. I'm to show you down to the parlor and then I must get back to the kitchen to start dinner. It's a mercy that you've come. It's just been the two of us, me and my da. The house is filthy and I'm no cook."

"Go on," Zilla said. "I'll find the parlor. And then I'll come find you in the kitchen. We'll see what we can do for dinner."

"Yes, Miss Zilla," Jemma said, and made a little bob.

Ozma listened to Jemma thumping down the stairs again as if she were a whole herd of maids. Some of the ghosts went with her but most remained crowded around Zilla. Zilla sat in the chair, her eyes shut tightly.

"What are we doing here?" Ozma said. "How could there be anything in this place that we need? Who are we to be?"

Zilla did not open her eyes. "Good people," she said. "Respectable people."

The constable wriggled like a fish in Ozma's pocket. Good liars, he said quietly. Respectable murderers.

There was water in the basin so that Zilla and Ozma could wash their hands and faces. Zilla had a packet of secondhand clothing for Ozma, which Ozma laid out on the bed. Boy's clothing. It seemed terrible to her, not only that she should have to be a boy and wear boy's clothing, but that she should have to wear clothes bought from a store in Brid. In Abal and in the city before Abal, she'd had the most beautiful dresses and gloves and cloaks, and shoes made of the softest leather. It was one thing to dress as a boy on the road, when there was no one to admire her. She slipped the constable out of the pocket of her old clothes and into the pocket of her shirt.

"Stop sulking or I'll sell you to the priests." Zilla said. She was standing at the window, looking out at the street below. Ozma imagined Brid below them: dull, dull, dull.

Ozma waited just outside the door of the parlor. Really, the house was full of ghosts. Perhaps she and Zilla could start a business here in Brid and export fine ghosts to Abal. When Zilla said, "Come in, son," she stepped in.

"Close the door quickly!" said the ugly old man who stood beside Zilla. Perhaps he would fall in love with Zilla and beg her to marry him. Something flew past Ozma's ear: the room was full of songbirds. Now she could hear them as well. There were cages everywhere, hanging from the roof and from stands and all of the cage doors standing open. The birds were anxious. They flew around and around the room, settling on chairs and chandeliers. There was a nest on the mantelpiece and another inside the harpsichord. There were long streaks of bird shit on the furniture, on the floor, and on the old man's clothes. "They don't like your mother very much," he said.

This was not quite right, Ozma saw. It was the ghosts that followed Zilla and Ozma that the birds did not like.

"This is Lady Rosa Fralix," Zilla said.

So it was an ugly old woman. Ozma remembered to bow instead of curtsey.

"What is your name, child?" said Lady Fralix.

"Ozen," Ozma said.

"Ozen," Lady Fralix said. "What a handsome boy he is, Zilla."

Zilla sneezed sharply. "If it meets with your approval, Lady Fralix, dinner will be served in the small dining room at eight. Tomorrow Ozen and Jemma and I will begin to put your house in order. Shall we begin here?"

"If Ozen will agree to help me cage my friends," Lady Fralix said. "We can go over the schedule tomorrow morning after breakfast. I'm afraid there's been too much work for poor Jemma. There are one or two rooms, though, that I would prefer that you leave alone."

"Very well, madam," Zilla said in her most disinterested voice, and a ha! thought Ozma. There were birds perched on Lady Fralix's head and shoulders. They pulled at her thin white hair. No wonder she was nearly bald.

Zilla was a good if unimaginative cook. She prepared an urchin stew, a filet of sole, and because Jemma said Lady Fralix's teeth were not good, she made a bread pudding with fresh goat's milk and honey. Ozma helped her carry the dishes into the dining room, which was smaller and less elegant than the dining rooms of Abal where ladies in beautiful dresses had given Ozma morsels from their own plates. The dining room was without distinction. It was not particularly well appointed. And it was full of ghosts. Everywhere you stepped there were ghosts. The empty wine glasses and the silver tureen in the center of the table were full of them.

Zilla stayed to serve Lady Fralix. Ozma ate in the kitchen with Jemma and Jemma's da, a large man who ate plate after plate of stew and said nothing at all. Jemma said a great deal, but very little of it was interesting. Lady Rosa Fralix had never married as far as anyone knew. She was a scholar and a collector of holy relics and antiquities. She had traveled a great deal in her youth. She had no heir.

Ozma went up the stairs to bed. Zilla was acting as lady's maid to Lady Fralix, or rifling through secret drawers, or most likely of all, gone back to the temple to light candles again. Jemma had started a fire in the grate in the dark little bedroom. Ozma was grudgingly grateful. She used the chamber pot and then bathed as best she could in front of the fire with a sponge and water from the basin. She did all of this behind a screen so that she was hidden from the constable, although she hadn't been so modest while they were traveling.

The constable did not have much to say and Ozma did not feel much like talking, either. She thought of a thousand questions to ask Zilla, if only she were brave enough. When she woke in the night, there were strange cracking sounds and the fire in the grate was shooting out long green tongues of flame. Zilla was crouched before it, adding things to the blaze. She was burning her ghost tackle—the long needles and the black silk thread, the tubes and ointments and all of her notebooks. "Go back to sleep, Ozma," Zilla said, without turning around.

Ozma closed her eyes.

Zilla woke her in the morning. "What time is it?" Ozma said. A thin gray light was dribbling through the window.

"Five in the morning. Time to wake and dress and wash your face," Zilla said. "There's work to do."

Zilla made a porridge with raisins and dates while Ozma located a broom, a brush, a dustpan, and cloths. "First of all," Zilla said, "we'll get rid of the vermin."

She opened the front door and began to sweep ghosts out of the front hall, through the vestibule, down the front steps and into the street. They tumbled in front of her broom in white, astonished clouds. "What are you doing?" Ozma said.

"This is a respectable house," Zilla said. "And we are respectable people. An infestation of this kind is disgraceful."

"In Abal," Ozma said, "fashionable homes were full of ghosts. You made it the fashion. What is different about Brid? What are we doing here?"

"Sweeping," Zilla said, and handed Ozma a brush and a dustpan.

They went through the smaller dining room and the larger dining room and the breakfast room and two sitting rooms which seemed to Ozma pleasant at best. There were souvenirs of Lady Fralix's travels everywhere: seashells, souvenir paperweights, music boxes, and umbrella stands made from the legs of very strange animals. They all seethed with ghosts. There was a ballroom where the ghosts rinsed around their ankles in a misty, heatless boil. Ozma's fingers itched for her ribbons and her charms. "Why are there so many?" she said.

But Zilla shook her head. When the clocks began to strike eight o'clock, at last she stopped and said, "That will do for now. After Lady Fralix has dressed and I've brought her a tray, she wants your help in the front parlor to catch the birds."

But Lady Fralix caught the birds easily. They came and sat on her finger and she fed them crumbs of toast. Then she shut them in their cages. She didn't need Ozma at all. Ozma sat on the piano bench and watched. Her hands were red and blistered from sweeping ghosts.

"They need fresh water," Lady Fralix said finally. So Ozma carried little dishes of water back and forth from the kitchen to the parlor. Then she helped Lady Fralix drape the heavy velvet covers over the cages. "Why do you have so many birds?" she said.

"Why do you have a ghost in your pocket?" Lady Fralix said. "Does your mother know you kept him? She doesn't seem to care for ghosts."

"How do you know I have a ghost?" Ozma said. "Can you see ghosts too? Why is your house so full of ghosts? In Abal, we caught them for ladies to wear on their dresses, but the ladies only pretended that they could see their ghosts. It was fashionable."

"Let me take a look at yours," Lady Fralix said. Ozma took the constable out of her pocket. She did it reluctantly.

The constable bowed to Lady Fralix. My lady, he said.

"Oh, he's charming," said Lady Fralix. "I see why you couldn't give him up. Would you like me to keep him safe for you?"

"No!" Ozma said. She quickly put the constable back in her pocket. She said, "When I first saw you I thought you were an ugly old man."

Lady Fralix laughed. Her laugh was clear and lovely and warm. "And when I saw you, Ozen, I thought you were a beautiful young woman."

After lunch, which was rice and chicken seasoned with mint and almonds, Zilla gave Ozma a pail of soapy water and a pile of clean rags. She left her in the vestibule. Ozma washed the gods first. She hoped they were grateful, but they didn't seem to be. When she was finished, they had the same sort of look that Zilla wore when she was bamboozling someone: distant, charming, untrustworthy.

Ozma's back and arms ached. Twice she'd almost dropped the constable in the pail of water, thinking he was a clean rag.

Zilla appeared in the vestibule. She reached up and touched the robe of one of the gods, a woman with a wolf's head. She left her hand there for a moment and Ozma felt a terrible jealousy. Zilla rarely touched Ozma so gently.

"Be careful with the tiles," Zilla said. She did not look particularly dirty or tired, although she and Jemma had been beating birdshit out of the carpets and upholstery all afternoon.

Lady Fralix came and watched from the balcony while Ozma cleaned the mosaic. "Your mother says she will try to find tiles to replace the ones that have been broken," she said.

Ozma said nothing.

"The artist was a man from the continent of Gid," Lady Fralix said. "I met him when I was looking for a famous temple to the god Addaman. His congregation had dwindled and in a fit of temper Addaman drowned his congregation, priests, temple and all, in a storm which lasted for three years. There's a lake there now. I went swimming in it and found all kinds of things. I brought the mosaic artist back with me. I always meant to go back. The water was meant to cure heartsickness. Or maybe it was the pox. I have a vial of it somewhere, or maybe that was the vial that Jemma thought were my eyedrops. It's so important to label things legibly."

Ozma wrung dirty water out of a rag. "Your mother is very religious," Lady Fralix said. "She seems to know a great deal about the gods."

"She likes to light candles," Ozma said.

"For your father?" Lady Fralix said.

Ozma said nothing.

"If your ghost needs blood," Lady Fralix said, "you should go to the butcher's stall in the market. I'll tell your mother that I sent you to buy seeds for the birds."

There was nothing to do in Brid. There was no theater, no opera, no chocolate maker. Only temples and more temples. Zilla visited them all and lit hundreds of candles each day. She gave away the dresses which she had brought with her from Abal. She gave away all her jewels to beggars in the street. Zilla did not explain to Ozma about home or what she was planning or why they were masquerading in Brid as a devout, respectable housekeeper and her son. Zilla used only the most harmless of magics: to make the bread rise, to judge whether or not it was a good day to hang up the washing in the courtyard.

She made up simple potions for the other servants who worked in the houses on the street where Lady Fralix lived. She told fortunes. But she only told happy fortunes. The love potions were mostly honey and sugar dissolved in wine. Zilla didn't charge for them. Neighborhood servants sat around the kitchen table and gossiped. They told stories of how the mayor of Brid had been made a fool of, all for love; of accidental poisonings; who had supposedly stuffed their mattresses with bags of gold coins; which babies had been dropped on their heads by nursemaids who drank. Zilla did not seem to pay any attention.

"Lady Fralix is a good woman," Jemma said. "She was wild in her youth. She talked to the gods. She wasn't afraid of anything. Then she came to Brid to see the temples and she bought this house on a whim because, she said, she'd never been in a town that was so full of sleepy gods. She claims that it's restful. Well, I don't know about that. I've never lived anywhere else."

"There's something about Brid," Zilla said. She looked cross, as if the word Brid tasted bad. "Something that drew me to Brid, but I don't know what. I don't know that I'd call it peaceful. Ozen finds it dull, I'm afraid."

Ozma said, "I want to go home." But she said it quietly, so that Jemma wouldn't hear. Zilla looked away as if she hadn't heard either.

Ozma developed calluses on her hands. It was a good thing that there was nothing to do in Brid. She spent all her time mopping and dusting and carrying fire wood and beating upholstery. Zilla's nose was always pink from sneezing. The constable grew bored. This was not what I expected death to be like, he said.

"What is death like?" Ozma said. She always asked the ghosts this, but they never gave satisfactory answers.

How do I know? the constable said. I'm carried around all day in a young girl's pocket. I drink the stale blood of market cattle. I thought there would be clouds of glory, or beautiful lecherous devils with velvet bosoms, or a courtroom full of gods to judge me.

"It will be different when Zilla has done what she needs to do," Ozma said. "Then we'll go home. There will be clouds of glory, and my pockets will be lined with lavender and silk. Everyone will know Zilla and they'll bow to her when we drive by in our carriage. Mothers will frighten their children with stories about Zilla, and kings will come and beg her to give them kisses. But she will only love me."

You think your mother is a blackmailer and a thief and a murderer, the constable said. You admire her for what you think she is.

"I know she is!" Ozma said. "I know what she is!"

The constable said nothing. He only smirked. For several days they did not speak to each other, until Ozma relented and gave him her own blood to drink as a peace offering. It was only a drop or two, and she was almost flattered to think that he preferred it.

It was hard work keeping Lady Fralix's house free of ghosts. Ozma said so when she brought Lady Fralix's breakfast up one morning. Zilla and Jemma had gone to a temple where there was a god who, according to his priests, had recently opened his painted mouth and complained about the weather. This was supposed to be a miracle.

"Your mother wants me to let my birds go free," Lady Fralix said. "First the ghosts, now the birds. She says it's cruel to keep things trapped in cages."

This did not sound at all like Zilla. Ozma was beginning to grow tired of this new Zilla. It was one thing to pretend to be respectable; it was another entirely to be respectable.

Lady Fralix said, "It's considered holy in some places to release birds. People free them on holy days because it pleases the gods. Perhaps I should. Perhaps your mother is right to ask."

"Why do the ghosts come back again and again?" Ozma said. She was far more interested in ghosts than in birds. All birds did was eat and shit and make noise. "What do you want to wear today?"

"The pink dressing gown," Lady Fralix said. "If you let me keep your ghost in my pocket today, I'll give you one of my dresses. Any dress you like."

"Zilla would take it away and give it to the poor," Ozma said. Then: "How did you know I'm a girl?"

"I'm old but I'm not blind," Lady Fralix said. "I see all sorts of things. Ghosts and girls. Little lost things. You shouldn't keep dressing as a boy, my dear. Someone as shifty as you needs some truth now and then."

"I'll be a boy if I want to be a boy," Ozma said. She realized that she didn't really think of herself as Ozma anymore. She had become Ozen, who strutted and flirted with the maids fetching water, whose legs were longer, whose breasts did not need to be bound.

Be a girl, said the constable, muffled, from inside her pocket. Your hips are too bony as a boy. And I don't like how your voice is changing. You had a nicer singing voice before.

"Oh, be quiet," Ozma said. She was exasperated. "I've never heard so much nonsense in all my life!"

"You're an insolent child, but my offer stands," Lady Fralix said. "When you're ready to be a girl again. Now. Let's go down and do some work in my collection. I need someone with clever fingers. My old hands shake too much. Will you help me?"

"If you want me to," Ozma said, ungraciously. She helped Lady Fralix out of bed and into a dressing gown and then she combed what was left of Lady Fralix's hair. "How old are you?"

"Not as old as your mother," Lady Fralix said, and laughed at Ozma's look of disbelief.

There was no door to the room in which Lady Fralix kept her collection, but Ozma felt sure she had never noticed this room before. There were four or five ghosts brushing against the door that wasn't there. They stayed on the threshold as if tethered there. "What are they doing?" Ozma said.

"They want to go inside," Lady Fralix said. "But they're afraid. Something draws them. They want it and they don't know why. Poor little things."

The room was very strange. It was the size of a proper ballroom in Abal, only it was full of paintings on stands, altars, and tables piled high with reliquaries and holy books and icons. Along the far wall there were gods as large as wardrobes and little brass gods and gods of ivory and gold and jade gods and fat goddesses giving birth to other gods and goddesses. There were bells hanging from the ceiling with long silk ropes, bells resting on the floor so big that Ozma could have hidden under them, and there were robes stiff with embroidery, hung about with bells no bigger than a fingernail.

Where are we? said the constable.

Lady Fralix had stepped inside the room. She beckoned to Ozma. But when Ozma put her foot down on the wooden floor, the board beneath her foot gave a terrible shriek.

What is that noise? said the constable.

"The floor—" Ozma said.

"Oh," Lady Fralix said. "Your ghost. You had better tie him up outside. He won't want to come in here."

The constable trembled in Ozma's hand. He looked about wildly, ignoring her at first. She tied him to the leg of an occasional table in the hallway. Don't leave me here, the constable said. There's something in that room that I need. Bring it to me, boy.

"Boy!" Ozma said.

Please, boy, said the constable. Ozma, please. I beg you on my death.

Ozma ignored him. She stepped into the room again, and again, with each step, the floor shrieked and groaned and squeaked. Lady Fralix clapped her hands. "It's almost as good as going to see the orchestra in Oldun," she said. She walked in a quick odd pattern towards an altar carved in the shape of a winged fish.

"Why don't you make any sound when you walk?" Ozma said.

"I know where to place my feett," Lady Fralix said. "I keep my most precious relics here. All the things that belong to gods. There. Put your foot down there. There's a pattern to it. Let me teach you."

She showed Ozma how to navigate the room. It was a little like waltzing. "Isn't this fun?" Lady Fralix said. "An adept can play the floor like a musical instrument. It comes from a temple in Nal. There's an emerald somewhere, too. The eye of a god. From the same temple. Here, look at this."

There was a tree growing out of an old stone altar. The tree had almost split the altar in two. There was fruit on it and Lady Fralix bent a branch down. "Not ripe yet," she said. "I've been waiting almost twenty years and it's still not ripe."

"I suppose you want me to dust everything," Ozma said.

"Perhaps you could just help me go through the books," Lady Fralix said. "I left a novel in here last summer. I was only halfway through reading it. The beautiful gypsy had just been kidnapped by a lord disguised as a narwhal."

"Here it is," Ozma said, after they had hunted for a while in companionable silence. When she looked up, she felt strange, as if the room had begun to spin around her. The gods and their altars all seemed very bright and it seemed to her that the bells were tolling, although without any sound. Even Lady Fralix seemed to shimmer a little, as if she were moving and standing still at the same time.

"You're quite pale," Lady Fralix said. "I'd have thought you wouldn't be susceptible."

"To what?" Ozma said.

"To the gods," Lady Fralix said. "Some people have a hard time. It's a bit like being up in the mountains. Some people don't seem to notice."

"I don't care for gods," Ozma said. "They're nothing to me. I hate Brid. I hate this place. I hate the gods."

"Let's go and have some tea," Lady Fralix said. She did not sound in the least bit perturbed to hear that Ozma was a heretic.

In the hallway, the constable was tugging at his ribbon as if the room was full of blood.

"What is it?" Ozma said. "There's nothing in that room, just boring old gods."

I need it, the constable said. Be kind, be kind. Give me the thing I need.

"Don't be tiresome," Ozma said. Her head ached.

Before she could put him in her pocket, Lady Fralix took hold of Ozma's wrist. She picked up the constable by his ribbon.

"Very curious," Lady Fralix said. "He's so lively, such a darling. Not the usual sort of ghost. Do you know how he died?"

"He ate a bad piece of cheese," Ozma said. "Or maybe he fell off a cliff. I don't remember. Give him back."

"It's a good thing," Lady Fralix said, "that most people can't see or talk to ghosts. Watching them scurry around, it makes you dread the thought of death and yet what else is there to do when you die? Will some careless child carry me around in her pocket?"

Ozma shrugged. She was young. She wouldn't die for years and years. She tried not to think of the handsome young constable in her pocket, who had once thought much the same thing.

By the time Zilla and Jemma returned from the temple, Lady Fralix had made up her mind to let the birds go, as soon as possible.

"I only kept them because the house seemed so empty," she said. "Brid is too quiet. In the city of Tuk, the god houses are full of red and green birds who fly back and forth carrying holy messages."

Zilla and Jemma and Ozma carried cage after cage out onto the street. The birds fussed and chattered. Lady Fralix watched from her bedroom window. It was starting to rain.

Once the birds were free, they seemed more confused than liberated. They didn't burst into joyful songs or even fly away. Ozma had to shoo them out of their cages. They flew around the house and beat their wings against the windows. Lady Fralix closed her curtains. One bird flew against a window so hard that it broke its neck.

Ozma picked up its body. The beak was open.

"The poor little things," Jemma said. Jemma was terribly tenderhearted. She wiped rain off her face with her apron. There were feathers sticking out of her hair.

"Where do the ghosts of birds and animals go?" Ozma said quietly to Zilla. "Why don't we see them?"

Zilla looked at her. Her eyes glittered and her color was high. "I see them," she said. "I can see them plain as anything. It's good that you can't see them, Ozen. It's more respectable not to see any kind of ghosts."

"Lady Fralix knows I'm a girl," Ozma said. Jemma was chasing the birds away from the house, flapping her own arms and her sodden apron. The rain fell harder and harder but Zilla didn't seem to notice. "She said something about how I ought to be careful. I think that perhaps I'm becoming a boy. I think she may be right. I stand up when I piss now. I'm shaped differently. I have something down there that I didn't have before."

"Let me take a look at you," Zilla said. "Turn around. Yes, I see. Well, it has nothing to do with me. You must be doing it yourself somehow. How enterprising you've become. How inconvenient."

"Actually," Ozma said, "it's more convenient. I like standing up when I piss."

"It won't do," Zilla said. "It's not very respectable, that's for certain. We'll take care of it tonight."

I liked you better as a girl, the constable said. You were a nice girl. That girl would have given me what I wanted. She would have found what I needed in that room.

"I wasn't a nice girl!" Ozma said. She stood naked in the attic room. She wished she had a mirror. The thing between her legs was very strange. She didn't know how long it had been here.

Ever since we came to this house, the constable said. He was sitting in the corner of the grate on a little heap of ashes. He looked very gloomy. Ever since your mother told you to be a boy. Why do you always do what your mother tells you?

"I don't," Ozma said. "I kept you. I keep you secret. If she knew about you, she'd sweep you right out of the house."

Don't tell her then, the constable said. I want to stay with you, Ozma. I forgive you for letting her kill me.

"Be quiet," Ozma said. "Here she comes."

Zilla was carrying a small, folded pile of clothes. She stared at Ozma. "Get dressed," she said. "I've seen all that before. It doesn't particularly suit you, although it does explain why the housemaids next door have been mooning and swanning around in their best dresses."

"Because of me?" Ozma said. She began to pull her trousers back on.

"No, not those. Here. Lady Fralix has lent you a dress. I've made something up, although only a liar as good as I am could pull off such a ridiculous story. I fed Jemma some confection about how you've been dressing as a boy as penance. Because a young man had fallen in love with you and committed suicide. You're handsome enough as a boy," Zilla said. "But I don't know what you were thinking. I never cared much for that shape. It's too distracting. And people are always wanting to quarrel with you."

"You've been a man?" Ozma said. The dress felt very strange, very confining. The thing between her legs was still there. And she didn't like the way the petticoats rubbed against her legs. They scratched.

"Not for years and years," Zilla said. "Gods, I don't even know how long. It's one thing to dress as a man, Ozma, but you mustn't let yourself forget who you are."

"But I don't know who I am," Ozma said. "Why are we different from other people? Why do we see ghosts? Why did I change into a boy? You said we were going home, but Brid isn't home, I know it isn't. Where is our home? Why did we come here? Why are you acting so strangely?"

Zilla sighed. She snapped her finger and there was a little green flame resting on the back of her hand. She stroked it with her other hand, coaxing it until it grew larger. She sat down on one of the narrow beds and patted the space beside her. Ozma sat down. "There's something that I need to find," Zilla said. "Something in Brid. I can't go home without it. When Neren died—"

"Neren!" Ozma said. She didn't want to talk about Neren.

Zilla gave her a terrible look. "If those men had killed you instead of Neren," she said. Her voice trailed off. The green flame dwindled down to a spark and went out. "There was something that I was supposed to do for him. Something that I knew how to do once. Something I've forgotten."

"I don't understand," Ozma said. "We buried him in the tree. What else could we have done?"

"I don't know," Zilla said. "I go to the temples every day and I humble myself and I light enough candles to burn down a city, but the gods won't talk to me. I'm too wicked. I've done terrible things. I think I used to know how to talk to the gods. I need to talk to them again. I need to talk to them before I go home. I need them to tell me what I've forgotten."

"Before we go home," Ozma said. "You wouldn't leave me here, would you? You wouldn't. Tell me about home, oh please, tell me about home."

"I can't remember," Zilla said. She stood up. "I don't remember. Stop fussing at me, Ozma. Don't come downstairs again until you're a girl."

Ozma had terrible dreams. She dreamed that Lady Fralix's birds had come back home again and they were pecking at her head. Peck, peck, peck. Peck, peck. They were going to pull out all of her hair because she had been a terrible daughter. Neren had sent them. She was under one of Lady Fralix's bells in the darkness because she was hiding from the birds. The constable was kissing her under the bell. His mouth was full of dead birds.

Someone was shaking her. "Ozma," Zilla said. "Ozma, wake up. Ozma, tell me what you are dreaming about."

"The birds," Ozma said. "I'm in the room where Lady Fralix keeps her collection. I'm hiding from the birds."

"What room?" Zilla said. Her hand was still on Ozma's shoulder, but she was only a dark shape against darkness.

"The room full of bells and altars," Ozma said. "The room that the ghosts won't go in. She wanted me to find a book for her this afternoon. The floor is from a temple in Nal. You have to walk on it a certain way. It made me feel dizzy."

"Show me this room," Zilla said. "I'll fetch a new candle. You've burned this one down to the stub. Meet me downstairs."

Ozma got out of bed. She went and squatted over the chamber pot.

So you're a girl again, the constable said from behind the grate.

"Oh, be quiet," Ozma said. "It's none of your business."

It is my business, the constable said. You'll go and fetch the thing that your mother needs, but you won't help me. I thought you loved me.

"You?" Ozma said. "How could I love you? How could I love a ghost? How could I love something that I have to keep hidden in my pocket?"

She picked up the constable. "You're filthy," she said.

You're lovely, Ozma, the constable said. You're ripe as a peach. I've never wanted anything as much as I want just a drop of your blood, except there's something in that room that I want even more. If you bring it to me, I'll promise to be true to you. No one will ever have such a faithful lover.

"I don't want a lover," Ozma said. "I want to go home."

She put the constable in the pocket of her nightgown and went down the dark stairs in her bare feet. Her mother was in the vestibule where all the gods were waiting for dawn. The flame from the candle lit Zilla's face and made her look beautiful and wicked and pitiless. "Hurry, Ozma. Show me the room."

"It's just along here," Ozma said. It was as if they were back in Abal and nothing had changed. She felt like dancing.

"I don't understand," Zilla said. "How could it be here under my nose, all this time and I couldn't even see it?"

"See what?" Ozma said. "Look, here's the room." As before, there were ghosts underfoot, everywhere, even more than there had been before.

"Filthy things," Zilla said. She sneezed. "Why won't they leave me alone?" She didn't seem to see the room at all.

Ozma took the candle from Zilla and held it up so that they could both see the entrance to the room. "Here," she said. "Here, look. Here's the room I was telling you about."

Zilla was silent. Then she said, "It makes me feel ill. As if something terrible is calling my name over and over again. Perhaps it's a god. Perhaps a god is telling me not to go in."

"The room is full of gods!" Ozma said. "There are gods and gods and altars and relics and sacred stones and you can't go in there or else the floorboards will make so much noise that everyone in the house will wake up."

Bring me the thing I need! shouted the constable. I will kill you all if you don't bring me the thing I need!

"Ozma," Zilla said. She sounded like the old Zilla again, queenly and sly; used to being obeyed. "Who is that in your pocket? Who thinks that he is mightier than I?"

"It's only the constable of Abal," Ozma said. She took the constable out of her pocket and held him behind her back.

Let me go, the constable said. Let me go or I will bite you. Go fetch me the thing that I need and I will let you live.

"Give him to me," Zilla said.

"Will you keep him safe while I go in there?" Ozma said. "I know how to walk without making the floor sing. The ghosts won't go in there, but I could go in. What am I looking for?"

"I don't know," Zilla said. "I don't know, but you will know it when you see it. I promise. Bring me the thing that I'm looking for. Give me your ghost."

Don't give me to her, the constable said. I have a bad feeling about this. Besides, there's something in that room that I need. You'll be sorry if you help her and not me.

Zilla held out her hand. Ozma gave her the constable. "I'm sorry," Ozma said to the constable. Then she went into the room.

She was instantly dizzy. It was worse than before. She concentrated on the light falling from the candle, and the wax that dripped down onto her hand. She put each foot down with care. The ropes from stolen temple bells slithered across her shoulders like dead snakes. The altars and tables were absolutely heaped with things, and all of it was undoubtedly valuable, and it was far too dark. How in the world did Zilla expect her to come out again with the exact thing that was needed? Perhaps Ozma should just carry out as much as she could. There was a little wax god on the table nearest her. She held up the hem of her nightgown like an apron and dropped the god inside. There was a book covered in gold leaf. She picked it up. Too heavy. She put it back down again. She picked up a smaller book. She put it in her nightgown.

There was a little mortar and pestle for grinding incense. They didn't feel right. She put them down. Here was a table piled with boxes, and the boxes were full of eyes. Sapphire eyes and ruby eyes and pearls and onyx and emeralds. She didn't like how they looked at her.

As she searched, she began to feel as if something was pulling at her. She realized that it had been pulling at her all this time, and that she had been doing her best to ignore it, without even noticing. She began to walk towards the thing pulling at her, but even this was hard. The pattern she had to walk was complicated. She seemed to be moving away from the thing she needed, the closer she tried to get. She put more things in the scoop of her nightgown: a bundle of sticks tied with strips of silk; a little bottle with something sloshing inside of it; a carving of a fish. The heavier her nightgown grew, the easier it became to make her way towards the thing that was calling her. Her candle was much shorter than it had been. She wondered how long she'd been in the room. Surely not very long.

The thing that had been calling her was a goddess. She felt strangely annoyed by this, especially when she saw which goddess it was. It was the same wolf-headed goddess who stood in the vestibule. It seemed to be laughing wolfishly and silently at her, as if she, Ozma, was small and insignificant and silly. "I don't even know your name," Ozma said, feeling as if this proved something. The goddess said nothing.

There was a clay cup on the palm of the goddess's hands. She held it as if she were offering a drink to Ozma, but the cup was empty. Ozma took it. It was old and ugly and fragile. Surely it was the least precious thing in the entire room.

As she made her way back toward the hall, she began to smell something that was both sweet and astringent, a fragrance nothing like Brid. Brid smelled of cobblestones and horses and soap and candles. This fragrance was more agreeable than anything she had ever known. It reminded her of the perfumed oils that the fashionable ladies of Abal wore, the way their coiled, jeweled hair smelled when the ladies bent down like saplings over her and told her what a lovely child she was, how lovely she was. A drowsy, pearly light was beginning to come through the high windows. It settled on the glossy curves of the hanging bells and the sitting bells, like water. The two halves of the stone altar and the tree that had split them were in front of her.

All the leaves of that strange, stubborn tree were moving, as if in a wind. She wondered if it was a god moving through the room, but the room felt hushed and still as if she were utterly alone. Her head was clearer now. She bent down a branch and there was a fruit on it. It looked something like a plum. She picked it.

When she came out of the room, Zilla was pacing in the hallway. "You were in there for hours," Zilla said. "Do you have it? Let me have it."

The plum was in Ozma's pocket and she didn't take it out. She pulled the things from Lady Fralix's room out of the gathered hem of her nightgown and put them on the floor. Zilla knelt down. "Not this," she said, rifling through the book. "Not this either. This is nothing. This is less than nothing. A forgery. A cheap souvenir. Nothing. You've brought me trash and junk. A marble. A fish. A clay cup. What were you thinking, Ozma?"

"Where is the constable of Abal?" Ozma said. She picked up the clay cup and held it out to Zilla. "This is the thing you wanted, I know it is. You said I would know it. Give me the constable and I'll give you the cup."

"What have you got in your pocket?" Zilla said. "What are you keeping from me? What do I want with an old clay cup?"

"Tell me what you did with the constable," Ozma said, still holding out the empty cup.

"She swept him out the door with all the other ghosts," said Lady Fralix. She stood in the hallway, blinking and yawning. All her hair stood out from her head in tufts, like an owl. Her feet were bare, just like Ozma's feet. They were long and bony.

"You did what?" Ozma said. Zilla made a gesture. Nothing, the gesture said. The constable was nothing. A bit of trash.

"You shouldn't have left him with her," Lady Fralix said. "You should have known better."

"Give it to me," Zilla said. "Give me the thing in your pocket, Ozma, and we'll leave here. We'll go home. We'll be able to go home."

A terrible wave of grief came down on Ozma. It threatened to sweep her away forever, like the ghost of the constable of Abal. "You killed him. You murdered him! You're a murderer and I hate you!" she said.

There was something in her hand and she flung it at Zilla as hard as she could. Zilla caught the cup easily. She dashed it at the floor and it broke into dozens of pieces. The nothingness that had been in the cup spilled out and splashed up over Zilla's legs and skirts. The empty cup had not been empty after all, or, rather it had been full of emptiness. There seemed to be a great deal of it.

Ozma put her hands over her face. She couldn't bear to see the look of contempt on her mother's face.

"Oh, look!" Lady Fralix said. "Look what you've done, Ozma," she said again, gently. "Look how beautiful she is."

Ozma peeked through her fingers. Zilla's hair was loose around her shoulders. She was so beautiful that it was hard to look at her directly. She still wore her grey housekeeper's uniform, but the dress shone like cloth of silver where the emptiness, the nothing had soaked it. "Oh," Zilla said. And "oh" again.

Ozma's hands curled into fists. She stared at the floor. She was thinking of the constable. How he had promised to love her faithfully and forever. She saw him again, as he was dying in Zilla's parlor in Abal. How surprised he had looked. How his ghost had clung to Zilla's ribbon so he would not be swept away.

"Ozma," Zilla said. "Ozma, look at me." She sneezed and then sneezed again. "I have not been myself, but I am myself again. You did this, Ozma. You brought me the thing that I needed, Ozma, I have been asleep for all this time, and you have woken me! Ozma!" Her voice was bright and joyful.

Ozma did not look up. She began to cry instead. The hallway was as bright as if someone had lit a thousand candles, all burning with a cool and silver light. "Little Princess Monkey," Zilla said. "Ozma. Look at me, daughter."

Ozma would not. She felt Zilla's cool hand on her burning cheek. Someone sighed. There was a sound like a bell ringing, very far away. The cool silver light went out.

Lady Fralix said, "She's gone, you stubborn girl. And a good thing, too. I think the house might have come down on us if she'd stayed any longer."

"What? Where has she gone? Why didn't she take me with her?" Ozma said. "What did I do to her?" She wiped at her eyes.

Where Zilla had stood, there was only the broken clay cup. Lady Fralix bent over and picked up the pieces as if they were precious. She wrapped them in a handkerchief and put them in one of her pockets. Then she held out her hand to Ozma and helped her stand up.

"She's gone home," Lady Fralix said. "She's remembered who she is."

"Who was she? What do you mean, who she is? Why doesn't anyone ever explain anything to me?" Ozma said. She felt thick with rage and unhappiness and something like dread. "Am I too stupid to understand? Am I a stupid child?"

"Your mother is a goddess," Lady Fralix said. "I knew it as soon as she applied to be my housekeeper. I've had to put up with a great deal of tidying and dusting and mopping and spring-cleaning and I must say I'm glad to be done with it all. There's something that tests the nerves, knowing that there's a goddess beating your rugs and cooking your dinner and burning your dresses with an iron."

"Zilla isn't a goddess," Ozma said. She felt like throwing more things. Like stamping her foot until the floor gave way and the house fell down. "She's my mother."

"Yes," Lady Fralix said. "Your mother is a goddess."

"My mother is a liar and a thief and a murderer," Ozma said.

"Yes," Lady Fralix said. "She was all of those things and worse. Gods don't make very good people. They get bored too easily. And they're cruel when they're bored. The worse she behaved, the more she forgot herself. To think of a god of the dead scheming like a common quack and charlatan, leading ghosts around on strings, blackmailing silly rich women, teaching her daughter how to pick locks and cheat at cards."

"Zilla is a god of the dead?" Ozma said. She was shivering. The floor was cold. The morning air was colder, somehow, than the night had seemed. "That's ridiculous. Just because we can see ghosts. You can see ghosts too, and I can see ghosts. It doesn't mean anything. Zilla doesn't even like ghosts. She was never kind to them, even when we were in Abal."

"Of course she didn't like them," Lady Fralix said. "They reminded her of what she ought to be doing, except she couldn't remember what to do." She chafed Ozma's arms. "You're freezing, child. Let me get you a blanket and some slippers."

"I'm not a child," Ozma said.

"No," Lady Fralix said. "I see you're a young woman now. Very sensible. Here. Look what I have for you." She took something out of her pocket.

It was the constable. He said, Did you bring me what I need?

Ozma looked at Lady Fralix. "The fruit you picked from the tree," Lady Fralix said. "I see it ripened for you, not for me. Well, that means something. If you gave it to me, I would eat it. But I suppose you ought to give it to him."

"What does the fruit do?" Ozma said.

"It would make me young again," Lady Fralix said. "I would enjoy that, I think. It gives back life. I don't know that it would do much for one of the other ghosts, but your ghost is really only half a ghost. Yes, I think you ought to give it to him."

"Why?" Ozma said. "What will happen?"

"You've been giving him your blood to drink," Lady Fralix said. "Powerful stuff, your blood. The blood of a goddess runs in your veins. That's what makes your constable so charming, so unusual. So lively. You've kept him from drifting any further away from life. Give him the fruit."

Give me what I need, the constable said. Just one bite. Just one taste of that delicious thing.

Ozma took the ghost of the constable from Lady Fralix. She untied him from Zilla's ribbon. She gave him the fruit from the tree and then she set him down on the floor.

"Oh yes," Lady Fralix said wistfully. They watched the constable eat the fruit. Juice ran down his chin. "I was so looking forward to trying that fruit. I hope your constable appreciates it."

He did. He ate the fruit as if he were starving. Color came back into his face. He was taller than either Ozma or Lady Fralix and perhaps he wasn't as handsome as he had been, when he was a ghost. But otherwise, he was still the same constable whom Ozma had carried around in her pocket for months. He put his hand to his neck, as if he were remembering his death. And then he put his hand down again. It was strange, Ozma thought, that death could be undone so easily. As if death was only a cheat, another one of Zilla's tricks.

"Ozma," the constable said.

Ozma blushed. Her nightgown seemed very thin and she wondered if he could see through it. She crossed her arms over her breasts. It was odd to have breasts again. "What is your name?" she said.

"Cotter Lemp," said the constable. He looked amused, as if it were funny to think that Ozma had never known his name. "So this is Brid."

"This is the house of Lady Fralix," Ozma said. The constable bowed to Lady Fralix and Lady Fralix made a curtsey. But the constable kept his eyes on Ozma all the time, as if she were a felon, a known criminal who might suddenly bolt. Or as if she were something rare and precious that might suddenly vanish into thin air. Ozma thought of Zilla.

"I have no home," Ozma said. She didn't even know she had said it aloud.

"Ozma, child," Lady Fralix said. "This is your home now."

"But I don't like Brid," Ozma said.

"Then we'll travel," Lady Fralix said. "But Brid is our home. We will always come back to Brid. Everyone needs a home, Ozma, even you."

Cotter Lemp said, "We can go wherever you like, Ozma. If you find Brid too respectable, there are other towns."

"Will I see her again?" Ozma said.

And so, while the sun was rising over the roofs of the houses of the city of Brid, before Jemma had even come downstairs to stoke the kitchen stove and fetch the water to make her morning tea, Lady Fralix and the constable Cotter Lemp went with Ozma to the temple to see her mother.

THE END

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The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

Table of Contents

Introduction

Jonathan Strahan

The Merchant and the
Alchemist's Gate

Ted Chiang

The Last and Only, or
Mr. Moskowitz Becomes French

Peter S. Beagle

Trunk and Disorderly

Charles Stross

Glory

Greg Egan

Dead Horse Point

Daryl Gregory

The Dreaming Wind

Jeffrey Ford

The Coat of Stars

Holly Black

The Prophet of Flores

Ted Kosmatka

Wizard's Six

Alex Irvine

The Cambist and Lord Iron:
A Fairy Tale of Economics

Daniel Abraham

By Fools Like Me

Nancy Kress

Kiosk

Bruce Sterling

Singing of Mount Abora

Theodora Goss

The Witch's Headstone

Neil Gaiman

Last Contact

Stephen Baxter

Jesus Christ, Reanimator

Ken Macleod

Sorrel's Heart

Susan Palwick

Urdumheim

Michael Swanwick

Holiday

M. Rickert

The Valley of the Gardens

Tony Daniel

Winter's Wife

Elizabeth Hand

The Sky is Large
and the Earth is Small

Chris Roberson

Orm the Beautiful

Elizabeth Bear

The Constable of Abal

Kelly Link