JUDITH MOFFETT

THE BRADSHAW

Around the beginning of this decade, Judith Moffett won lots of acclaim with her
stories of the Hefn--gnomelike aliens who turned out to be anything but cute
when they began enforcing their directive for humans to live on Earth without
destroying it. The Hefn played a role in the novels The Ragged World and Time,
Like an Ever-Rolling Stream, and then Judy took some time off to put her
principles to practice: she spent a year tending gardens and raising ducks in a
Philadelphia suburb, and eventually wrote up the experience in Homestead Year.
She then moved to Salt Lake City, where she wrote this novella, and now she is
dividing her time between homes in Cincinnati and Philadelphia.

"The Bradshaw" marks her return to short fiction powerfully. While the aliens do
put in an appearance here, this story is primarily about one human coming to
terms with the abuse in her past, returning to that other country through means
only science fiction can afford. The results are sometimes harrowing and
disturbing (much like life can be), and ultimately they're truly rewarding.
Backward, turn backward, oh! time in your flight
Make me a child again, just for tonight.
"Rock Me to Sleep, Mother," popular Civil War song

1

MY MOTHER LEFT ME A bradshaw when she died, along with her house on the Scofield
College campus, together with all its contents, and my father's guaranteed
pension with six years left to run.

The bradshaw was a surprise, to put it mildly. Anything to do with alien
technology was so horrendously expensive for an average citizen, I figured she
had to have scrimped for nearly a decade to buy it, starting not too long after
I'd told her the truth about Dad, which was several years after he died in 2023.
Had he still been alive at the time, I knew she wouldn't have let a word of my
story slip past her defenses. As it was, she remained deeply vested in her own
version of their marriage, and after that one occasion she refused to talk about
it any more. The bradshaw was my first clue that, over time, she must have begun
to acknowledge there could have been something to what I'd said.

It wasn't like she didn't already know what Dad had done, or a lot of what he'd
done. But her own father had died when she was little. She'd always thought that
just having a daddy must be the most wonderful thing in the world, and took it
on faith that whatever Dad did to me was normal. He was my father, wasn't he?
For all she knew, any father might take an obsessive interest in his daughter's
extremely large breasts and talk about them constantly. Or assume a
spraddle-legged stance before his daughter and her girlfriend, both young
teenagers, to ask if they could tell whether he was wearing briefs or boxers
under his trousers. Or describe to this daughter, with terrific zest, the
circumstances {creek valley after school, big flat rock, older boys} under which
he'd been taught to masturbate.

After Dad's death I learned that his obsession with my breasts had been aired
even outside the family circle. "I think it's terrible the way Shelby talks
about Pam's boobs all the time, and I don't understand why Frances just laughs,"
a friend of my parents' told her daughter, who eventually told me. "And remember
those tight sweaters your more used to stuff you into?" Betsy added, recalling a
certain deep-pink lambswool number with short sleeves and a little round collar,
and a row of pearl buttons down the swollen front.

I remembered, all right. Why hadn't I refused to wear those sweaters, chosen for
and pressed upon me by More, Dad's former sweater girl? Considering how
violently I loathed my huge breasts, why oh why had the sweaters I went out and
bought for myself fit the same way? After years of therapy I sort of understood
the storm of conflicting feelings present in every member of a family like mine,
but thinking about it still made me queasy.

2

There hadn't been a graduating class at Scofield College, or a full-time
standing faculty, since 2098. But Scofield was popular with conference
organizers. Our group from the Bureau of Temporal Physics had chosen the campus
for good reason, but throughout the week we'd spent steaming up and down the
river between Scofield Landing and Hurt Hollow in the rain, the managers of
Landfill Plastics Inc. had been using the other half of our dorm, and three
other dorms were booked up and bustling too.

My house -- the one my mother left me -- was regularly used by the college as
conference lodging. During our conference, naturally, I stayed there myself, and
I'd invited my old friend and ex-lover Liam O'Hara to join me there for auld
lang sync. Liam and I had trained as BTP Apprentices together; he'd visited me
in this house when we were kids. After I lost the mathematical intuition that
had qualified me for an Apprenticeship, relations between us had become somewhat
erratic and conflicted. Inevitably, they'd worsened after the breakup; but he'd
accepted my invitation all the same, probably for the same reason I'd extended
it: nostalgia for a distant time we both preferred, in certain in ways, to the
present.

When the conference was over I went up to Liam's room, my parents' former
bedroom, on the morning we'd both planned to leave. I found him packing and
marveling at the framed pictures crammed on the top of my mother's big mahogany
dresser. "My God, look at us," he said. "When did she take that one?" The
picture was a holo of Liam and me in the spring of 2014, when for several weeks
we'd lived at Hurt Hollow with the alien Humphrey, our teacher at the Bureau.
The Hollow had been a working homestead then, not the museum it had since
become, and the goats, bees, and big organic garden had still been the basis of
somebody's livelihood. The entire set-up was a powerful, attractive model of the
sort of lifestyle the Hefn had been trying to encourage.

During our visit to Scofield the homesteader, a friend of mine since my earliest
childhood, had been bitten by a copperhead. Liam and I had been helping out
while he recovered, and Humphrey'd dropped in at Liam's suggestion to check the
place out. I had a treasured memory of Humphrey on the terrace at Hurt Hollow
one morning, in a chair that tried to make his legs bend the wrong way, pausing
in the rapid spooning of blackberries and yogurt into his mouth to ask, "Do you
clever children know, either of you, how to cook a 'cobbler'?" I could see his
spoon clutched in a hand like a tongs, two short hairy fingers opposing two
others, and the gray hair around his mouth, sticky with honey and stained with
berry juice. At that moment Humphrey had been one happy Hefn.

But not for long.

In the holo, Liam was standing on the same terrace with a brimming pail of
goat's milk in each hand, grinning at the camera-he was wearing shorts and a
fatty T- shirt and sneakers without socks, and looked as if he hadn't a care in
the world (not true). I had started ahead of him down the steep path to the
spring house. All you could see of me was a blur of light-colored clothing and
another of straight, broom, shoulder-length hair, but even so I had contrived to
look both furtive and embarrassed, an impression emphasized by Liam's own sunny,
open good looks.

The picture made me feel somewhere between weird and desolate. "That was that
time Morn and Dorothy What's-her-name stopped by the Hollow, right after
Humphrey came, I think. Listen, how long does it take to set up a bradshaw?"

Liam looked up sharply from this ambiguous image of our shared past. "A
bradshaw? I never handled one, I dunno -- couple of days? Why? Oh," he said
before I could answer. "The one your mother left you! Thinking of shooting it
while you're here in the neighborhood, are you?" He folded his arms and smirked
at me across the bed.

"Just tell me, how do I arrange to get one set up on short notice? I need to get
back, I probably shouldn't take more than a couple of extra days out here."

Before he could reply, his pocket phone dinged. I leaned against the wall while
he talked to Bureau Headquarters, glancing back and forth between the live Liam
and the holo of the Goatherd, considering how that handsome, cheerful-looking
kid had been transformed into the balding, restless, dissatisfied,
thirty-eight-year-old person in the BTP uniform, hunkered among tumbled sheets
on my parents' old four-poster, taking notes on a Landfill Plastics pad.

As the conversation wound down he glanced up and caught me at the
back-and-forthing. "Hold it a second, Johnny m do you know how to set up a
bradshaw on short notice?"

The little squeak of John Wong's voice came through while Liam looked at me.
"Pam Pruitt," he said, eyes on mine, "in southern Indiana. Or maybe northern
Kentucky?" I nodded. "She inherited one from her room, and she wants to get it
shot while she's out here-- she's here for the conference too."

Johnny's voice squeaked again. To my ear it had a surprised sound, and I
imagined him saying, "Pam's there? Why?" and felt my face get hot.

But actually he was asking something else. "As a matter of fact, I do," said
Liam, "Haven't used it, though, the weather's been terrible till today." He
listened. "Come on, somebody else must be in the neighborhood. Artie and Ray
were here till yesterday, aren't they still around? I've never done a bradshaw
in my life."

"Let me talk to him," I said.

"Pam wants to talk to you." Liam clicked on the room mike and aimed the phone at
me.

"Hi, Johnny."

"Hi." His tiny face on the screen grinned a tiny grin. "I never knew you owned a
bradshaw."

"Listen, I don't want Liam put in charge of this, if that's what you've been
leading up to."

"You haven't got a lot of choice if you want to shoot it now," he said. "Artie
and Ray are already in Canada on special assignment. And bradshaws are tricky,
we usually get a couple months' advance notice. What was this, some kind of
spur-of-the-moment decision?"

"Yeah. Scofield is where I'm from. I don't get back here very often, and I've
been busy as hell."

"The thing is, Liam's got a transceiver with him," Johnny said, a fact that was
certainly news to me. I darted a surprised, offended look at Liam, who shrugged.
"He's your only hope. We can spare him for a few more days, that's all, and I
wouldn't go that far for anybody but you. Humphrey wouldn't, I should say. If
you don't want him to shoot it, you'll have to wait and go through the usual
procedural web work."

While I hesitated, trying to assess pros and cons, Liam clicked off the mike and
clapped the phone to his ear. "Hey, before you start disposing of my weekend, I
need to get back, I've got plans and I'm beat. Pam can do this bradshaw some
other time...okay. Okay. I'll let you know. See ya tomorrow. Bye."

He folded the phone and slipped it back into the inside pocket of his uniform
jacket. "Don't look at me like that. There wasn't any reason to tell you."

He'd been hiding the transceiver in my own house. "Listen, for the last time, I
don't like you sneaking around sparing my feelings. The more you do that, the
more you rub it in that the rest of you consider me a tragic victim, and that's
not how I want to think of myself, so do me a favor, okay.: Cut it out."

"You're the boss." Liam reached under the bed and pulled out a transceiver in
its case, along with a family of dust bunnies; the housekeeping staff was
getting sloppy. He didn't look at me.

I'd lost my mathematical intuition when my father died. In Liam's view this was
a tragedy; it embarrassed him to remind me that his gift was still vital when
mine was not -- that he was a starter and I now only a bench warmer in the
world-saving game Humphrey had trained us both to play. My therapist, who'd once
been Liam's, hypothesized that my intuitive ability had developed so I'd have a
means of escaping an intolerable situation, and that when I hadn't needed it
anymore it had simply shut down. This "instrumentalist" view of things horrified
Liam, to whom the thought of losing intuition, and therefore attunement with the
time transceivers, felt like losing some essential power, eyesight, or sexual
potency.

Since I put a lot of energy into denying that it horrified me as well, and since
I was deathly serious about not wanting to think of myself as a Poor Thing, this
conference-- which I'd attended under protest, at Humphrey's insistence -- had
given me a wretched week.

We'd convened to brainstorm about ways of using the transceivers to address the
developing worldwide Baby-Ban crisis: where in civilized time had a human
population stabilized its numbers and sustained them? What were the means, the
incentives, the geophysical circumstances? Where could we look that we hadn't
looked already? Because the Hefn insisted that if the model wasn't somewhere in
our past, it wasn't going to be anywhere in our future.

All through the discussions, urgent and fascinating though they were, I'd been
acutely conscious every instant of my sidelined situation, and of the overpolite
attentiveness of my colleagues whenever I tossed out an idea that somebody else
would have to follow up on. The conferees, mostly Bureau techs, would have given
a lot to have me up and running again -- I'd been very good at my job while I
was doing it but under the circumstances they couldn't see, any better than I
could, why Humphrey had insisted that I attend. Even the Hefn Alfrey, who was
running the show in place of the hibernating Humphrey, obviously had no idea
what I was doing there. So Liam's pity was the last thing I wanted right now.

Were it not for my lost gift, of course, I also wouldn't now be in the position
of pleading with Johnny Wong to order some other tech to drop everything,
requisition a transceiver, and make his way overland to the Ohio River Valley to
do a job I could once have done for myself with one hand tied behind me. I
needn't have even considered allowing Liam to make the bradshaw for me, let
alone trying to persuade him to, let alone -- the ultimate humiliation --
exploiting his pity to get him to agree.

It was all too much. I still wasn't really sure I even wanted a bradshaw.

I opened my mouth to say so, but Liam beat me to the punch. "Okay, I'll do the
shoot, but that's all. I'm on that plane tonight whatever, I'm not crossing the
blinking continent by rail. You can keep the recording and have the virtual
program written after you get back to Salt Lake. Take it or leave it. That's my
best offer."

3

I WAS ELEVEN when the Hefn took control of the world, and fourteen when they
delivered me, temporarily, from my family difficulties.

Because the Earth was in such terrible ecological shape when the Hefn arrived,
their first priority was to reverse the process of destruction, get humans to
stop overbreeding and squandering their nonrenewable resources. It was to
accomplish this that they gave us the Directive, and punished those who wouldn't
abide the rules by removing their memories. They didn't want to annihilate us,
but they could have, and they used the veiled threat of total destruction, and
the applied threat of mindwipe, to get us to cooperate. Except, of course, .too
many of us wouldn't.

When the Hefn realized we weren't going to mend our ruinous ways and stop
destroying our planet just because they said so, then they did seriously
consider eliminating us. But some among them persuaded the rest to try a
different approach. A handful of mathematically gifted kids -- me included --
were recruited to be Apprentices, to go and live in Washington DC at the newly
created Bureau of Temporal Physics. There the Hefn Humphrey trained us to
operate the time transceivers that, by opening a window upon our past, might
reveal a moment or moments in human history when our relationship to our world
had been balanced and sustainable. Then humanity would have a useful model for
the right way to live upon the Earth, or so they reasoned.

Meanwhile -- and this was critical -- they imposed a worldwide moratorium on
fertility. Even some of the people who approved of their goals in general hated
the aliens because of the Baby Ban. I heard the Hefn called fascists and
dictators, and benevolent dictators, of course, is precisely what they were.
Humanity would eventually judge the Ban a means that could not justify its end,
and act accordingly.

But I liked it at the BTP. I liked my teacher, Humphrey, and what I was learning
to do, and I liked being fussed over by the media. I settled in and worked hard.
Absent my mother's pressuring and my father's intrusive scrutiny, I spent the
rest of my adolescence as an egghead in tent-like tee shirts and sweatshirts,
which, while they did not conceal the difficulty, had the virtue of failing to
emphasize it.

4

Beginning about the year 2025, in the fifteenth year of their presence on Earth,
the Hefn had gone into the bradshaw business in a small way by making their time
transceivers available to individuals for personal use. Somebody might give a
bradshaw as a gift for a really special occasion, or make one for herself to use
therapeutically. Those who'd tried therapy a la bradshaw mostly raved about the
results -- I'd seen a viddy documentary to that effect -- but not many people
had; apart from movie stars and business tyros, hardly anybody could afford the
things. Hefn time transceivers are very expensive to run. We Apprentices used
them so commonly that we seldom thought about the fortunes being spent on our
training. But the media always emphasized the staggering price tag, whenever yet
another glittering personality arrived at the decision to buy a bradshaw.

The Hefn didn't offer employee discounts; Morn couldn't have gone behind my back
to buy one from Humphrey for cheap.

A time transceiver is the rarest object on Earth. The process -- and the
expense-- began when one of these priceless artifacts was liberated from its
usual function and removed to the site where the event to be revisited had
occurred. Then somebody had to set coordinates, a Hefn or a BTP tech, because
nobody else knew how. Then they needed someone to record the event {if at all
possible, without being noticed), somebody to write the virtual program, and a
therapist to guide the client through the experience of running the bradshaw
after it was made. A Hefn might also be required, to wipe memories, if anybody
back in the past happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Committed to preventing abuses -- the potential for abuse, by child
pornographers and sadists and the like, was obvious -- the Hefn kept scrupulous
track of every completed program. Each had to be filed at a public VR parlor and
played only there. You could therefore never be sure, while running your
bradshaw, that a Hefn Observer wasn't looking in.

Transceivers had to open the time window upon the actual site of the event. A
person couldn't sit comfortably in Boston and look in on one of her father's
alcoholic rages in Topeka; she had to go to Topeka, to the actual house she'd
lived in at the time, if it was still there, or to whatever building or
abandoned freeway or rubble field presently occupied the space, and set up the
equipment there.

The traveling itself could be cumbersome enough. When King William V made a
bradshaw to replay a certain painful scene with his father, he'd had to sail the
royal yacht Britannia to New Zealand, with a time transceiver and assorted
technicians on board. The Hefn decided who got to fly in a plane, and a king's
desire to experience a virtual intervention in his own past was no reason, in
their view, to authorize a flight.

Until the moment my mother's will was read, the idea of my making a bradshaw had
literally never crossed my mind; and after I owned one -or a voucher that could
be exchanged for one -- I was conflicted about what to do with it. On the one
hand, conventional therapy had already helped me confront and deal with my
feelings about my father; on the other, despite the relief I'd derived from
that, I was still pretty much of a mess. Obviously there was more work to do;
but my several attempts to dig deeper had produced killer anxiety and no further
information, and left me sick of the whole struggle. Frankly, had I not felt
that the bradshaw represented a final communication from my mother -- a sign
that she'd taken my allegations seriously after all -- I might very well have
sold the thing.

Even if I'd been downright eager to make this bradshaw, I still needed to get
back to Scofield, Indiana, to record it, and ordinarily that wasn't easy.
Scofield College -- where my father had been Director of Libraries, where I'd
lived the first fourteen years of my life before the Hefn whisked me away to De
and safety -- was a long way from Salt Lake City, and my early life equally far
from my present posting as Hefn Emissary to The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, or so it usually seemed. I seldom went home even while my
mother was still alive. We were uneasy with each other, and overland
long-distance travel was exhausting and expensive enough without the stress of a
filial visit at the end.

Probably I would never have gotten around to making my bradshaw if Humphrey
hadn't decided the brainstorming session about the Baby Ban should be held at
Hurt Hollow, and that I had to be there. As it was, not once during that long
week -- not until the day of my own scheduled departure, when it was almost too
late -- did my unconscious relent, and let the idea occur to me that, since I
was here anyway, what about the bradshaw?

The thought threw me instantly into a state of urgency verging on panic. The
bradshaw! Why hadn't I recognized this trip as the golden opportunity it was,
and arranged to make the bradshaw while I was here? I couldn't imagine what was
wrong with me, to overlook something so obvious.

On second thought, yes I could. I'd overlooked the obvious so I wouldn't have to
decide whether to make the thing.

It was in this muddled state that I'd gone looking for Liam.

5

The house at Hurt Hollow had been my home for several years of young adulthood,
between the death of its previous owner, Jesse Kellum, and its transformation
into a museum. Liam stood just off the terrace, around the corner of the house
-- in almost the exact spot where his Goat Boy picture had been taken -- and
fussed with his instruments; I sat on the stone step, munching a sandwich,
looking around. Being committed to a definite course of action made me feel calm
and clear-minded, ready for whatever might be coming.

Liam and I had visited here together as teens at exactly this time of year,
mid-April. The trees were a lot bigger now but their leaves were the same bright
varieties of green as before, and were as full of noisy birds -birds whose songs
were intelligible to me, unlike those of the western species I'd not yet gotten
to know very well. Beyond the fence, the paleblue river spread out forever, as
it had through all the springs of my life, though the beach where Liam and I --
and Humphrey -- had gone swimming in 2014 had been scoured away completely.
"Thanks for coming back over here," I told him humbly. "The weather was so lousy
all week, I didn't really get a chance to take all this in, and we were too busy
anyway."

Liam looked up distractedly. "I'm too busy now. Don't talk to me for ten more
minutes."

"Sorry."

He was rushing, bound and determined to make that plane. He'd pressured me to
pick an event that had occurred back at the house in Scofield, or someplace on
the campus, or our canoe launching from Scofield Beach twenty-three Aprils ago
-- he'd actually witnessed that ghastliness himself -- but I'd held out for the
Hollow at the cost in time of a five-mile taxi ride and a ferry crossing, and
he'd grumpily given in.

I finished my sandwich and got up. "I guess I'll walk down to the dock. Yell
when you're ready."

All sixty-one acres of wooded river bluff had been fenced in long ago, while
Jesse was still alive, and today, thanks to our conference, the place was still
closed to visitors; we had it to ourselves. Descending the steep path from the
terrace to the gate, I thought again how different this country was from the
mountains and deserts of Utah, and how the Hollow was still and always the one
place on Earth that I belonged to, heart and soul, mind and strength-- the one
place that was absolutely mine, though the deed was registered now in the name
of the Hurt Hollow Trust, and I never came back anymore. I wouldn't have used
such language to a living soul, Liam least of all, but this -- cluster of
buildings, wooded hillside, stretch of river -- was my heart's home.

Unfortunately, Liam knew this anyway, without being told. In my opinion we knew
far too much about each other for the good of either.

I unlocked the gate and cut down toward the dock. The past winter's currents and
storm waves had undermined the bank to the point where the trustees were
considering moving the fence to higher ground, and I kept back from the edge.
The dinged-up metal buckled and boomed as I walked out to the end of the dock,
shrugging off the thought of sunblock, and sat down to watch the river roll
massively by while I got myself as centered as I could.

It wasn't recommended that a bradshaw be undertaken in a rush. The candidate was
supposed to ready herself with counseling and meditation before embarking upon
her personal time-travel adventure. Of course, I wouldn't be running the virtual
program for a while yet. But I was going to watch through the window while Liam
made the recording, and knew that whatever I saw was bound to jolt me and that I
should prepare myself as best I could.

Liam hadn't even tried to talk me out of watching. He knew it would be a waste
of time, and he didn't have time to waste. It was my lookout anyway.

"Ready!" he called finally; and when I'd mounted again to the terrace and joined
him, "Okay, what are we looking for?"

The transceiver had been erected on its tripod, a confection of molded black
metal and meshwork spread like a cobra's hood. For all my brave talk it hurt me
to see it there, see Liam's casual confidence as he moved around it adjusting
things, unthinkingly at home in a country where I'd once lived and been happy
and could never return to.

I looked away. "April 2013 --I don't know the exact date, you'll have to scroll.
Start in the middle of the month and work forward, scanning for Dad and me
coming out the front door. We were looking up into those trees over there, up
the hill. The time window'11 open behind us, I don't think we'll notice a
thing."

"Roger." Liam slipped his hands into indentations on the sides of the cobra's
hood, and almost at once the area directly in front of it began to shimmer and
then swirl, forming a pattern in the air.

I moved off the terrace and around the comer of the house, ready to flatten
myself against the wall to be out of the way when the window opened. I hadn't
seen a temporal field in formation for years, but I could still read patterns,
and followed as the field shaped itself around the early twenty-first century,
then 2013, then spring, then April.

Liam was concentrating, leaning into the transceiver's field with his eyes
closed, deepening his trance. When the pattern entered his mind and became
visual, he would free his hands to finger the little abacus-like device the Hefn
used to calculate coordinates. Then he would set the coordinates mentally, by
hurling each number into the pattern precisely where it needed to go.

There had never been a feeling quite like that absolute mastery, being so in
tune with the shimmer pattern that the numbers snapped into their places without
conscious effort, the way a lacrosse player snatches the ball from the air and
hurls it into the net. I would never feel that mastery again. Desolation seized
me, and again I looked away.

When I looked back, Liam had opened his eyes and stepped away from the
transceiver. The window had opened; the silent recorder was running.

Anyone on the other side, where it was 2013, would have needed a sharp eye to
spot the open window. It was April afternoon on both sides, and fine weather on
both, and Liam and I were watching from positions where we could look through
without being seen from the other side, if my father or my younger self did
happen to glance our way.

Voices murmured inside the house, a pot banged on a stove top. Presently I heard
what I'd been waiting for: a loud and piercingly sweet ripple of birdsong from a
tree on the hillside behind the house. I got a grip on myself in time not to
move or react when the screen door swung open with a squeak, and a girl came
down the steps followed by a man: Young Pam at almost-thirteen, and Dad at
thirty-six.

The bird's song had stopped my breath; the sight of these two figures, though
I'd been expecting them, stopped my heart. I could feel Liam's head turn to look
at me. I'd been just a little older than the girl in the window when he and I
had met in Washington to begin our studies with Humphrey.

Her father passed the field glasses to Young Pam, .who raised them to her eyes
and scanned the treetops. Almost at once she smiled; she'd spotted the singer, a
rose-breasted grosbeak, high in a tossing beech tree full of flowers. "Is the
female this pretty?" she asked, and at the word pretty a stab of pity and
loathing pierced me. That poor, homely kid with her potent binoculars! Her nose
was much too big for her face, and her hair hung limp and mousy to her
shoulders, but the thing that struck you was the huge mass of her breasts, like
a single enormous tumor thrusting forward beneath her red-and-blue flannel shirt
with the rolled-up sleeves.

How I'd loved that shirt -- the boyish plaid, and the belief that it blurred my
proportions! It hadn't of course; I could see now with terrible clarity how the
breast mass strained at the buttons and the fabric between them. Really, the
most that could be said for the shirt was, it wasn't a tight pink lambswool
sweater.

"No," said Pam's father, answering her question. In the round frame of the
window he stood there younger by a year or so --astonishing thought -- than I
was now myself. "The female's duller, like most of the other female finches.
Looks kind of like a great big song sparrow, but a duller brown."

Young Pam held the glasses tight on the vivid bird. From my hiding place he was
out of my line of sight, but I remembered perfectly how actively the grosbeak
had moved through the foliage, eating flowers and pausing ever so often to
proclaim his territory. He was so pretty! Black above and white below, with a
triangular bib the color of raspberry sorbet beneath his chin, and a powerful
finch's bill.

The rippling song poured forth again. Pam's father suddenly chuckled. "You know
something" he said, "you and that bird up there are a whole lot alike -- he's
got a big strong beak, and he's got a pretty pink breast!" He laughed again, an
innocent-sounding laugh, not cruel at all. "Never thought of that, did you! I
expect he likes both of his better'n you like either of yours, too."

Again I felt Liam swivel his head toward me, and this time I glanced back. His
face had filled with indignation; he understood, now, why I'd insisted on
choosing this incident.

Young Pam seemed to falter --

-- and precisely in that instant, the split second between the faltering and the
hesitant lowering of the binoculars, a strange thing happened. Before my eyes,
suspended in midair, flashed the image of a small book bound in red, with gilded
page-edges, gold lettering on the cover, and a strap and gold lock; and with it
came a whiff of feeling gone almost too quickly to register.

The image had vanished also. Pam lowered the glasses halfway and stood
stock-still. Then, without a word, without glancing at her father, she handed
him the binoculars and went quickly up the stairs into the house.

Shelby Pruitt stood looking after her, holding the field glasses awkwardly.
Unbalanced as I'd been by what I'd just seen and felt, it still astonished me --
I hadn't, of course, witnessed this part of the scene -- to see that my young
father's boyish, handsome face now wore a baffled, even a desolate look, a look
that plainly said I did it again, but I don't know what it was I did.

Presently he stirred, lifted the field glasses again to scan the treetops; and I
signaled Liam to close the window.

This he accomplished quickly and neatly. The lens that formed the window
spiraled out from the edge, went opaque, and disappeared. Liam shut down the
recorder, pulled the cartridge out, and flipped it to me; I fumbled it, squatted
to retrieve it B and couldn't stand up again. "Bastard," he spat, truly furious.
"That stupid bastard. That son of a bitch. I'm sorry I never blacked his eye for
him when I had the chance." He scrubbed his hands through his hair, watching me.
In a minute, when I hadn't responded or risen, he said, "So -- did you get what
all you needed?" And then, sharply, "Are you okay?."

As Liam said this, I sat down abruptly on the paving stones of the terrace,
clutching my temples; a headache had come on like a crack of lightning, making
my stomach heave.

He came and hunkered down beside me, saying again, '"Are you okay?" I shook my
head, truthfully; I felt ghastly. "No wonder. I'm pretty thrashed myself. God,
this bradshaw stuff is playing with fire, I had no idea! I think what we just
saw actually hit me harder than that realtime thing in the canoe, when he was
going on about your swimsuit being too small --"

He stood and reached for my hand as he spoke, to help me up. He should have
known better; he did know better. I batted him away and got up on my own,
putting our eyes on the same level. "Right after he said that about me being
like the grosbeak, did you see a little red book in the air?" "See what?"

"A red book. In the air," I repeated, already sure of the answer.

"In the air? No. What are you talking about? You mean -- you did?"

Somebody jabbed an ice pick in my right temple and wiggled it around.

"Liam --" I grabbed his arm so desperately that I dragged him off balance,
forcing him to take a step toward me "-- I'm really sorry, I really am, but this
wasn't it."

He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "What wasn't what?" "I made a mistake.
This wasn't the right time."

"Right time for what? The bradshaw?" And when I nodded, "What are you talking
about, it was a classic!" Then, realizing where I had to be leading he started
to get mad. "Hey, you don't get a second shot at a bradshaw, just because you
rush into it without thinking about it carefully enough beforehand." He'd yanked
his arm free.

"I would have made exactly the same mistake no matter how long I'd thought about
it beforehand. I didn't know this wasn't the right time till I saw this time."

"That's not the Bureau's fault, Pam! You had one bradshaw coming, you were
hell-bent on making it today, and you worked on me till I caved in and played
along. But that's it. That's all you get. You're gonna have to settle for this
one." He turned away and started to collapse the transceiver.

"I know all that," I said, trying to sound reasonable though I felt like hurling
myself on the ground and screaming, "but this one won't get me where I need to
go."

"Which is where?"

"I don't know. But now I know how to find out."

Exasperated, he turned to glower at me. "Something to do with the little red
book in the air, I suppose?"

"It was a diary," I said, and heard my voice wobble. "A kid's diary, that
old-fashioned type you were meant to keep in longhand. My diary. From when I was
in the sixth grade. I threw it away." Liam glanced at me again without replying;
I moved to stand beside him. "I've regretted it a million times, but I always
thought I knew why I did it, till now."

"And the reason was?" he prompted obligingly, without breaking the rhythm of his
work.

"I was reading this book, about a Navajo girl. She and her family lived in a
hogan, where space was tight, I guess, and her mother was talking about her one
day, and she said something like 'That one! She has more possessions!' and I
thought, 'I have too many possessions,' and started poking around my room to see
what I could throw away."

"You were one weird kid."

"I don't remember whether I got rid of anything else, but I grabbed this diary
that I'd gotten for Christmas and been writing in all year, and decided to pitch
it. And then I wasn't sure. I remember saying to Mom that I was going to throw
my diary away, and she said, 'Don't you think you might want to have it later
on?' and I said, 'No, it won't be interesting till I start having dates.'"

Liam emitted a guffaw, but kept working.

"She could have stopped me," I said sadly, remembering that day. "If she'd said,
'Oh, don't do that, you'll be really glad to have that diary someday,' I would
have kept it; At least, I'd've kept it that time...probably I'd're tossed it
later on anyhow, though, because I think -- I just realized this-- I think
throwing it away because of that Navajo-girl book is a cover story."

There was a brief silence while Liam finished compacting the transceiver into
its case. He looked at his watch. Then he walked across the terrace and
decorously sat down on one of the low chairs Orrin Hubbell, the original Hurt
Hollow homesteader, had built so long ago. "Okay. Enlighten me. Why do you think
you threw it away?"

This was the question it had only just occurred to me to ask myself, and I more
or less made up my answer as I went along. "Maybe there was something in it that
I needed to get rid of...something somebody didn't want me to tell anyone about.
Maybe the person threatened me -- I'd get sick and die if I told, or whatever.
And I don't think it was Dad," I said, feeling sure of this at least. "He did
what he did, and it was horrible, but I think -- I'm just now starting to think
-- that somebody else might've gotten to me first."

"In that same way, you mean?"

"I don't know. It could have been some other way, I guess. Maybe I saw something
I wasn't meant to see." As I spoke the words I knew they were untrue; I knew it
wasn't the residue of any "other way," different from Dad's, that lay festering
inside of me. Whatever the secret was, it was sexual and concerned me directly.

Liam pondered this, then said carefully, "But even if that's true, I still can't
see why you'd hallucinate the diary in the air right then. And I also don't see
what's wrong with the Navajo-girl explanation. Why couldn't you have just taken
a notion to throw your diary in the trash? People do throw stuff away, you know.
Why does it have to be some heavy repressed-memory thing?"

But, in my mind, a conviction was strengthening moment by moment. "No, think
about it. I'd pasted some stuff in the diary--a straw from an ice-cream soda
bought for me by a boy I liked, named Rick, a locket a different kid named Rick
gave me, that had his name engraved on it. You know, souvenirs. Well, before I
threw it away I carefully peeled the straw and the locket off the pages, to
keep. Why would I do that -- keep the trinkets and toss the diary? It doesn't
make sense! I was a kid who kept things -- I kept my fifth-grade diary, such as
it was, I kept a piece of paper with the signatures of all the kids in my
fourth-grade class on it, I've got diaries and journals from the age of fourteen
up to and including right now! Julie says mine is the most thoroughly documented
life she's ever dealt with in her entire career as a therapist!"

"Okay, okay, calm down." Liam made pushing-down motions with his hands. "What
became of all that souvenir stuff -- where is it now?"

"I've still got it! All of it!" He repeated the gesture, more broadly this time.
I sighed heavily and said "Okay. I'm calm."

"Good. Now. When you claim you've still got these mementos, do you mean you
could go straight to where they are and put your hand on them?"

"Absolutely. That stuff is all in Salt Lake. The straw and locket are pasted in
a scrapbook labeled 'Memorabilia,' which is on a shelf in my study."

"Hmm. What about the fifth-grade diary?"

"In a bookcase with all my other diaries and journals, above my desk. At the far
left of the row. They're all in chronological order."

"I'm sure they are." He made a sour face, then fired one last test question:
"What color is it?"

"The fifth-grade diary? Brown, dark brown. Smaller and skinnier than the others.
Flexible cover."

"Pam," said Liam, "Humphrey might okay shooting a second bradshaw, since the
virtual program for this one hasn't been written yet -- for you he might -- but
I'm getting on that plane."

"Humphrey's hibernating, we'd have to ask Alfrey," I said, but things had
stopped. We stared at each other. I was now supposed to back down, though both
of us knew that, in Liam's place, I would already have groaningly accepted that
the plane would be leaving without me. And suddenly this time I wasn't having
it; the stakes were just too high. "I can't stop you," I said, now very calm
indeed, "and I wouldn't exactly blame you, I know you've already disrupted your
plans as a favor to me. But. If you'll do this for me too...well. Let's just say
I'll never forget it."

Liam's expression gradually altered. Moving slowly, he got up from the chair, so
our eyes were again on the same level across the terrace. "Meaning that if I
don't do it, you'll never forget that, either." In my hyper-vigilant state, his
pupils seemed to shrink into sharp, hard pinholes. "And the next time I call you
up at midnight or the crack of dawn, to vent about my problems, you might not
answer the phone."

"I'd say that's probably a pretty shrewd guess." "So it's a crisis."

He wasn't asking, and I didn't reply. Both of us understood that nothing less
than the fundamental balance-- or working imbalance-- of our relationship was on
the line. If Liam went home to Eddie and his heavy weekend, and left me in this
particular lurch, I realized that not only would I never forget it, I wouldn't
be able to forgive him. And he had to decide now whether he wanted to deal with
that, because we both knew that at this point in our long, difficult friendship,
I had less to lose than he did.

6

A PERSON MAKES A BRADSHAW in order to revisit a traumatic event in her past as
her adult self, equipped with the knowledge and experience she'd lacked as a
child. The transceivers are windows, not doorways; you can't go through, and the
Hefn wouldn't allow it if you could. When something goes wrong, and people in
the past become aware of the time window, the Hefn wipe their memories; they
don't particularly like to do that, but they do do it without exception {almost}
if the need arises. They don't worry at all about changing the future, certain
as they are that "Time is One, and fixed" -- a maxim of our training as BTP
techs. That is: if it's going to happen, it already has happened, from the
foundation of the universe. Because Time is One, there are no alternate
realities.

Anyway, with or without the participants being aware of the window, with or
without mindwipe as a regrettable coda to the use of the transceiver, the
recording is made. Besides the visual dimension of the event, shadow memories
are also captured and recorded. The transceivers can't manipulate memory as well
as specialized Hefn memory-control equipment does, but they can get something;
how much varies with the individual and the context, and probably some other
factors that aren't yet' understood.

After that, the VR people use the recording to create a program in which the
adult can stride in virtually upon the scene he or she lived through as a child,
and intervene. He can beat his drunken, raving father to a pulp. He can slap his
mother six ways from Sunday. He can pick up the little boy he was, age six and a
half, sobbing and bleeding from the rectum, hold him in his arms and tell him,
"I know, I know all about how awful you feel, how scared you are, how much it
hurts, and I'm never going to let that bastard touch you again. It's all over
now. You don't ever, ever have to be scared o[ him anymore. I'll keep you safe.
From now on I'll be taking care of you."

The point is that while you can't make the promise good to the actual
six-and-a-half-year-old sufferer back in the past, you can make it good to the
six-and-a-half-year-old who still lives inside of the adult you, who's still
traumatized by the awful things done to him and still feels powerless to protect
himself.

A person needn't have been damaged nearly so brutally and globally, however, to
find a bradshaw beneficial. People tell themselves that, compared to some of
what they've heard about, the stuff their grandfather/ neighbor/brother did to
them is no big deal; but lesser abuse can also damage its victims much more
profoundly than seems reasonable, as I have cause to know.

The fellow who gave his name to these virtual interventions was a
late-twentieth-century self-help guru called John Bradshaw. All too often this
character, a Texan, came through to casual viewers of his very popular media
series as a cross between a sleazebag televangelist and a snake-oil salesman. A
lot of educated people dismissed him in his day, without troubling to figure out
what he was using this off-putting style to explain.

This was too bad. No original thinker himself, Bradshaw had an uncommon gift: he
could synthesize the ideas of major psychological theorists, without distorting
them, and communicate the practical side of these ideas to the sort of people
who might never, otherwise, have access to psychotherapy.

On TV, and in his workshops, he used to have his audiences do an exercise. They
were to choose a painful scene from their childhoods, one in which they had felt
particularly helpless, miserable, betrayed, and -Bradshaw's special buzzword-'
shamed. They were to close their eyes and picture this scene vividly. Then they
were to imagine walking in upon the scene as their adult selves, and doing
whatever was necessary to protect the helpless child they used to be.

It wasn't unusual for workshop participants to burst into violent weeping as
they followed their leader's instructions; and these interventions were "merely"
imaginary. The effect of using the Hefn transceivers to capture actual events,
making virtual interventions possible, was phenomenal. Without professional
guidance {and even with it) the experience could be overwhelming. A more
affordable bradshaw could certainly have become addictive to people who got off
on that kind of emotional kick.

The actual event captured when the bradshaw was made sometimes proved to be very
different from the way the event had been remembered. But nailing the exact
cause of misery usually mattered much less than assuring a miserable child that
she would never again be alone, defenseless and terrified, in the face of
torment.

7

On the morning following the scene with Liam, I woke when a voice spoke inside
my head. "Pinny's Hefn," said the voice.

I was used to waking up with the impression that someone had just spoken aloud,
typically a name or an innocuous word or phrase -- "Carrots," "That's the
target!" So in itself this was nothing remarkable.

This voice sounded no different; the difference was in what it said. In
retrospect it struck me as a kind of aural equivalent of the diary-in-the-air
hallucination.

Pinny's Hefn was the title of a "novel" I'd written the summer I turned
fourteen. The novel dealt with the doings of a peculiar girl -Pinny, short for
large-nosed Pinocchio -- who much resembled me, and a Hefn named Comfrey; I'd
been extremely taken with the only Hefn I'd met in the flesh -- my mentor-to-be,
Humphrey, at my Bureau interview -and modeled Comfrey upon him as best I could.
My novel was set, and mostly written, at Hurt Hollow. I hadn't paged through the
manuscript in years, though {naturally) I knew exactly where it was: in a blue
folder, in a cardboard box in a Salt Lake City storage closet, among the
Memorabilia (or possibly the Juvenilia}: 164 pages scribbled in longhand on
blue-lined paper with three holes punched down the side.

What I thought about after the voice startled me awake, while my mind was
clearing, was the looseleaf binder I'd kept those pages in while I was writing
and accumulating them. I could visualize it perfectly, that binder: a fatty old
thing even then, made of fake brown alligator skin, with a zipper around three
sides. I'd liked that zipper; it made the story feel secure. The binder had been
Dad's; he'd passed it on to me when I started working on Pinny's Hefn, at the
beginning of my last whole summer at home ....

No. He'd given it to me earlier, maybe a year before that, because I'd already
possessed it when I needed a folder to put certain secret papers into for
safekeeping. What secret papers? I could barely remember; and yet -like the
image of the red diary -- the thought of them carried a powerful emotional
charge.

Concentrate now, I told myself: what papers? Some news clippings about horses
and horse races -- I'd gone through a racehorse stage, during which I'd cut
things out of the paper. There was one particular Kentucky Derby when I knew who
all the horses and jockeys were and who was favored to win by how much. That had
been the fifth grade. I was ten. What in the world could have seemed so secret
about race horses and horse races? I'd always supposed, when I remembered this
at all, that I must have made a secret of it just to have a secret; but it
struck me now as peculiar.

What else? I lay perfectly still and cudgeled my wits, but all that came to mind
were some sheets of computer paper on which a code had been worked out by me and
a couple of guys named Charlie and Steve, my best friends since earliest
childhood, no offense to the two Ricks. We'd made up this code, with a symbol
for each letter of the alphabet, so we could write encrypted notes to each other
in school and leave them under the pedal of the drinking fountain out in the
hallway. We did that in Mr. Hopper's class...so that had been the sixth grade,
when we were eleven.

Lying there in bed, it drifted back to me. I'd kept those clippings and the code
key in the alligator-skin notebook, tucked into the pockets inside the flaps.
When I'd needed the notebook for Pinny's Hefn I'd transferred the other papers
to a big manila envelope, and kept the envelope in my bottom bureau drawer,
under the T-shirts. Then at the end of that summer, before leaving for
Washington to start my apprenticeship at the Bureau of Temporal Physics, I'd put
the completed novel in the blue folder and the clippings and code keys back in
the notebook, and put both into a larger box that I stashed up in the attic in
my parents' house in Scofield -- this house. My room was to be the guest room
while I was away; I didn't want people poking through my stuff.

I recall debating whether to keep the notebook at all; the prospect of the new
life before me had made me feel like making a clean break with the past, or
certain parts of it. But I did keep it, at some level perhaps remembering the
red diary and beginning to understand the mothhole its loss had gnawed in the
fabric of my life.

Later, when Liam and I had graduated from the BTP and were preparing to move out
to Bureau Headquarters, relocating that year in Santa Barbara, I made a farewell
trip home. On that visit I boxed up all my books and belongings, acting on a
vague wish to get them out of my parents' house and safely into my own keeping.
In the course of this packing I crawled up a ladder through the trap door that
was our access to the attic. Sitting up there cross-legged under a naked light
bulb, I went through all my stored cartons and divided everything into two
piles: take and chuck. I remembered lifting out the alligator binder and holding
it in my hands. I remembered dragging the zipper pull around the edge, with a
sound like heavy cloth ripping, and leafing through the yellowed paper scraps
within.

Several times over the years I'd winnowed down my stash of "possessions" in the
attic. Each time I'd considered throwing out the papers in that notebook, but
had always held back. This time I did it. The odd thing was that I knew, as I
sat there in the dust making the decision, that someday I'd be sorry.

This precedent suggested that even if my mother had persuaded me to save the red
diary when I appealed to her, another day it would probably have gone the way of
the brown binder.

What the Sam Hill was it about that year, my sixth-grade year, that I couldn't
afford to remember or keep any evidence of; The Hefn had returned that October}
but that wasn't it} I'd felt only intense interest, untinged with fear, when I
heard they'd come back to stay. I'd loved my teacher, my school, playing Tarzan
on the wooded bluff above the river with Steve and Charlie} had anyone asked, I
would readily have said that that year, my last of real childhood, was the
happiest of all.

Eleven years old. No period, not quite yet. No boobs yet to speak of, though I'd
received my first training bras already, two of them in soft cotton, a gift from
Grandma for my birthday just before the start of the new school year. Obviously,
Morn had been discussing my "development" with her mother-in-law. Not with me,
though; the first I knew that there were going to be bras in my immediate future
was when I opened the package, with both my parents looking on, and there they
were.

Could it be that I'd resented Grandma for forcing those bras upon me, and with
them the issue of the terrible changes about to possess my body? so much so that
afterward I never wanted to go over to her house when we went down to
Louisville; No, because I could remember sitting in a rocking chair in Granny's
front room one evening, engrossed in a Tarzan book, and Mom touching my shoulder
and saying, "Time to go to Grandma's now. You're sleeping over there tonight,
better get your pajamas and some clean underwear." I remembered clearly how, at
these words, my heart sank like a stone; and I couldn't have been more than
eight or nine at the time -- much younger than eleven.

Old enough, however, to understand that I wasn't to object or whine or say I
didn't want to sleep over, didn't want to go over there at all. I wasn't
supposed to say how I felt about things, unless the feelings were the sort More
wanted to know about, and I didn't have to be told she didn't want to know about
these. Or hear about them, rather, because she did know. She just didn't care.
She cared about what I did, not how I felt about it.

Feeling agitated, I rolled out of bed, pulled on my robe, and padded down the
hall. Liam's door was open, his bed stripped, his neatly repacked suitcase open
on the mattress pad. The time transceiver, in its case, stood on the floor by
the door. I trotted down the stairs and found my reluctant guest drinking hot
cider at the kitchen table. He was dressed for overland travel, not in uniform
but in a loose light tunic and trousers, and his scalp gleamed through his
neatly combed hair. "Hi," I said. "Are you speaking to me today?"

"No," he said. "There's a Louisville packet at two-sixteen from Scofield Beach,
and a train tonight that will get me to California Wednesday afternoon. I put my
sheets in the washer, which isn't working very well, by the way, you'd better
have it serviced. I've ordered a taxi for one-thirty. Eat something' and let's
get it over with."

His last hope for getting off the hook I'd hung him on had been dashed yesterday
when his request for permission to re-record my bradshaw had been instantly
approved by the Hefn Alfrey, already back in California and still acting for the
sleeping Humphrey. After that he'd had to choose for himself. I glanced up at
the clock: 8:35. "I can eat later. I'm ready now if you are."

"Fine." He scraped back his chair and pushed past me, taking the stairs two at a
time. I trailed him, thinking. Diary or alligator binder; If I couldn't have
both, which was more important;

Liam grabbed the transceiver as he passed the door and said over his shoulder,
without looking back, "Where do I set up;"

Both were important, but the diary mattered more. "In the doorway of my room, I
guess."

He snapped around. "Don't guess, all right; Decide and-tell me where."

"Oh, knock it off," I said mildly. "The doorway of my room, then, definitely."
He was very angry, but I didn't mind so much about that; what mattered was, he
was here, and that meant the two of us were fundamentally okay, or would be
again in time.

So, walking stiffly to be sure I understood how mad he was, Liam carried the
'transceiver down the hall and set it up in my doorway. From that position the
lens could take in the whole small room. Though furnished sparsely enough now,
it seemed crammed by contrast with the time we were about to revisit. My parents
hadn't figured that a child's room needed furniture; my room, painted pale blue,
had held a bed and a bureau, and nothing else: no desk, no chair, and --
astonishing in a librarian's household -- no bookshelves. Mom could never see
the point of kids owning books. Once you'd read a book, why keep it around, when
you could check books out of the library for free, then exchange those for
others? If I'd appealed to Dad, he would probably -- no, certainly -- have
intervened, but I don't think it ever occurred to me to ask for his help.

My few books had been arranged neatly on the floor, along the baseboard of one
wall, an arrangement I'd accepted without question; the first bookcase I ever
had the use of was the one in my room at the BTP, in Washington. There was a
ceiling light and a bedlight, but no lamp. I used to do my homework on the
dining-room table.

I couldn't remember where I'd kept the diary -- in the row of books on the
floor, in a bureau drawer, maybe under my bed? -- but I did remember sitting on
the bed to write in it. When the window opened, we would at the very least see
that.

To hide the transceiver was going to be impossible; unless she happened to be
very engrossed in her writing, the eleven-year-old kid I used to be would have
to be mindwiped, as Liam pointed out while setting up. The possibility didn't
worry me at all. Time is One. (Lost gift or no, I probably believed this Hefn
doctrine more deeply than Liam did.) If I'd been wiped in 2010 or 2011, that
experience had been part of my life ever since. If I hadn't, then it hadn't
been. Either way, nothing would change.

"Ready," he said finally. "Dates."

"Summer 2011." The sixth grade would be over and the diary account of it
completed. He was to scroll for prepubescent Pain sitting on her bed, reading or
writing in a book. Liam nodded once, slipped his hands into the dimples, and
began.

Our first problem was an embarrassment of riches. Prepubescent Pain read in bed
every night of her life; that was the point of the bedlight hooked over the
headboard. A bewildering jumble of girl, bed, and book, not images but ghostly
implications, replaced one another in the shimmer pattern. I couldn't look; the
visual mayhem hurt not just the eyes but the brain of an observer not attuned to
the transceiver. Even Liam, in perfect attunement, moaned a little with the
mental effort of searching a haystack for one particular type of golden stalk.

So I sensed rather than saw him arch back out of the field. I looked, and the
lens had dilated. A skinny, scabby, sun-tanned girl perched on the edge of the
bed, on the side near the window so her back was mostly toward the door, writing
in a red book with a pencil. She was dressed in yellow shorts and a plaid
halter. Her right foot in a blue canvas shoe was tucked beneath her, and her
long bare leg, bent double, stuck out over the foot of the bed like the hind leg
of a grasshopper. Limp brown hair fell forward, screening her face. It was
afternoon of a bright, breezy, hot-looking day; sunlight streamed in through the
open window and the curtains were blowing. The bed was made up with my favorite
of several old quilts made by Granny and her spinster sisters, a pattern of
silhouetted Dutch girls in bonnets and wooden shoes.

I looked upon this scene and felt -- heartache. Intense longing. Nostalgia that
without much pressure could approach hysteria: joy impossible ever to know
again, shimmering just beyond the lens in the sunny room. And something else, a
sinister potential, inescapable and dire but for the moment far away.

At the sight of myself -- of everything I'd been just then, just there, extreme
two ways at once -- my ears rang and the edges of my field of vision went black.
But Liam, watching me react, had started the recorder.

I leaned against the door jamb and lowered my head till the ringing stopped and
my vision cleared. When I looked again, the girl had closed the red book and
turned sideways on the bed. Her face and body in profile -fleshy nose that
nobody'd yet realized had once been broken and hadn't healed correctly, little
tethered breasts pointing beneath the halter -made my throat ache. She clicked
the diary's strap into its lock and held the book in both her hands, a moment of
utter privacy, before reaching under the bed to pull out a scuffed
navy-and-white saddle oxford, a school shoe. She shook something out-- a key
chain, that fell into her hand with a little clink. And I knew, abruptly, what
was on that key chain: a four-leaf clover embedded in plastic, and a tiny gold
key.

The girl pushed the key into the keyhole with two long fingers and turned it,
locking the diary. She dropped the key chain into the toe of the shoe and stuck
the shoe back under the bed. Then she started to stand up -- and I signaled Liam
to pull us out. I didn't need to see her hiding place, not at the cost of having
to wipe her. I had what I needed.

8

A MONTH LATER found me sitting, hunched forward, in a private cubicle of a VR
parlor in Salt Lake City, my bradshaw's virtual program disc in my lap. My
therapy session by videophone was almost over. My therapist, Julie Hightower,
was seated in a big upholstered chair in her Washington DC office-- actually a
room in her own house in Georgetown -- looking as calm and composed as I felt
anything but. We'd had four weeks now to prep for this, but my shock at seeing
the child I used to be, in that room full of extreme and contradictory feelings,
hadn't entirely faded, and we'd spent this session talking about the pros and
cons of proceeding vs. further preparation.

"I do think, if you want to run the program now, you'll handle it all right,"
Julie summed up thoughtfully, "but I think you should be careful, and be ready
to jump out and regroup if you start to feel the waters closing over your head.
Remember, you can always have another go tomorrow, or next month, or whenever."

One of the things I liked most about Julie was the judicious, respectful way she
talked to her patients. To me, anyway. She was Liam's therapist too -- he'd
referred me to her-- but we'd stopped exchanging notes about Julie years ago; I
had no idea how, or even whether, she talked to him these days. I grinned weakly
and said, "I'll remember."

I'd asked if she wanted to monitor, but Julie felt the value of the experience
-- especially this first time -- might be compromised if my concentration on it
were less than total. On the other hand, given the circumstances, extra contact
time was okay by Julie. "Call me if you need to," she urged.

"You don't have to twist my arm," I told her.

We confirmed the next week's appointment, said our goodbyes, and hung up. For
fear of charging away without it later, I took the time to disassemble and stow
the phone in my backpack. Then, before I could lose my nerve, I slipped the disc
out of its sleeve and fed it into the slot.

I didn't frequent VR parlors; unfamiliarity and terror made me clumsy, but the
boots, gloves, and helmet were designed to be user-friendly. Finally the light
on the console glowed green, and a speaker said, "When you are ready, initiate
the program by saying the word 'Begin.'"

Feeling as if I were about to be hurled from a plane at my own request, I did as
instructed--

9

--and was standing in the doorway of my room, the no-frills 2011 version, ten
feet from Prepubescent Pam in what appeared to be the living flesh.

Awkward with the gear, I took a couple of jerky steps into the room and sat down
heavily on the near side of the bed, opposit the girl absorbed in her diary. I
sat right on the Dutch girl quilt and felt its nubbly texture under my hand.

She looked up, startled, snapping the book shut and clicking the lock; and at
this first full-face view of her -- synthesized from her profile with the aid of
a couple of old holos -- I almost stopped the program.

But I didn't, I let it run. I let her scramble up, back away against the wall,
say her first alarmed words to me, which were, not surprisingly, "What're you
doing here? Who are you, anyway?"

They'd worked with Liam's earlier recording made at Hurt Hollow, tuning the
voice to be slightly younger. This kid sounded exactly like an eleven-year-old
who was a little bit scared. I was impressed. I was also utterly nonplused.

But, again, I stayed with it. I answered her question the way I'd planned to,
when and if she asked it: "I'm you. I'm the person You're going to be when you
grow up."

I'd been apprehensive about how she would react, but all she did was look
surprised and say "Oh." No real child would have settled for such an answer; by
accepting it, Little Pain identified herself as virtual, and let me recover some
sense of control.

But then she started giving me the once-over, and I saw her take in The size of
my chest, and her eyes widen in dismay. "Nunh-unh, I'm not gonna be that big, no
way! If I ever get as big as you I'm getting reduced!"

"I am getting reduced," I said-- and was astonished to realize I meant it, that
I couldn't in fact imagine why I'd tolerated the despised breasts for so long.
With plastic surgery booming worldwide, and an enormous aging clientele to bring
prices down, I might have done something long ago about myself. Why hadn't I?
(Why hadn't I refused to wear the goddam pink lambswool sweater?

And that was all it took, a blunt remark from the kid, to shatter a
twenty-five-year mindset? If running a bradshaw could do that to you in the
first five minutes...thoroughly unnerved, I stared at Little Pam as I might have
stared at a wizard.

She glared back, suspicious of me now. "I'm not waiting till I get as old as you
are. What are you doing here, anyway?" She sounded more accusing now than
scared.

I had the answer to that one ready too. "I came to see the diary."

Pam glanced down at the little book, still in her hand. "This?" I nodded. "What
for?"

"Because I can't remember what's in it, and I'm pretty sure I wrote something
important in there."

"But why do you need miner Can't you just look' up whatever it is yourself?"
"No," I said. "I haven't got it anymore."

Coloring, Pam clutched the little book against her flat stomach. "I'm keeping
this diary forever!" She shook her head so hard her straight brown hair whipped
about her face. "I don't believe you. You're lying. You're not me."

Getting into the question of why I didn't have the diary anymore was the last
thing I wanted. It was all going wrong. "Pause," I croaked desperately, and the
figure of Pam froze in place, indignant expression and all, between the bed and
the wall. I closed my eyes, realized I was sweating, thirsty, and exhausted,
that the back of my head was pounding, and that I was going to have to stop
pretty soon.

Arguing with the kid was no good, and I knew instinctively that to wrestle the
diary from her by force wouldn't work. She would have to show it to me of her
own free will, and for that to happen I had to convince her that I was who I
said I was. I took some deep breaths, telling myself to calm down. After a
minute I opened my eyes and said "Resume," and Pam came back to life, glowering
at me.

"Look." I leaned across the bed and placed my right hand flat, fingers splayed,
on the Dutch girl quilt. "Put your hand there, next to mine."

She did look, then looked at me, then back at my hand. Then, reluctantly, she
gave a kind of capitulating snort. "I don't have to. They're the same."

"Do it anyway, okay?"

Pam hesitated, but sat back down on her side of the bed, laid the diary on the
quilt, and spread out her left hand, long palm and spidery fingers, nails
tapering instead of wide and blunt the way she wished, beside my right one. The
turquoise thunderbird ring a house cleaner had stolen out of my closet, years
ago, was around her left little finger. Our two hands were nearly of a size,
though my skin was wrinkled and veiny and her nails were dirty.

"Convinced?"

"They're like a pair of gloves, only one's been worn a lot and one's practically
new." Little Pam withdrew the hand and hid her bony fingers in a fist. "Becky
said in church last week that having big hands is good, because you can climb
trees better. And I said, 'But yours aren't big for a woman. Mine are big for a
woman.'"

I'd forgotten that exchange till she reminded me. "Can't get hands reduced, hon,
not even in my time." I might have added that I had had a nose job; but Pam
would be thirteen before she realized there was anything wrong with her nose,
and besides, I could hardly claim credit. The rhinoplasty had been done over my
violent objections. Dad was the one who really hadn't liked my nose.

Now Pam flashed her eyes at me. "I'm giving you one more test, okay? If you can
recite 'Lone Dog' all the way through without making, any mistakes, I'll believe
you're me."

Smart move. I rattled off "Lone Dog," a poem from our sixth-grade reader,
without hesitation or error, and added, "Want me to quote 'Now Chil the Kite
brings home the night'?" It was a chapter heading from The Jungle Books -- the
very first Kipling poem I'd ever learned by heart.

"Never mind," she said, relaxed and grinning now, "you win. You said it exactly
like I do: 'Oh, mine is still the lone trail, the hard trail, the best?"

"I hung onto that, anyway." She nodded. "So how about it: can I see the diary?"

She looked down at it, shiny red, and up at me, and then she picked it up and
reached it over to me across the bed.

I could barely breathe. I held the little book, feeling her eyes on me, then
clumsily pushed up the button that released the lock and opened it to the
middle, June, 2011.

The diary had a lumpy feel because of the objects -- straw, locket, some folded
notes -- pasted into it. I flipped slowly backward, then forward. May, April.
July, August. All the pages were blank.

10

Julie was sympathetic, but not at all discouraged. "I guess we should have known
it wouldn't be that simple," she said, after we talked about how I'd felt when I
discovered the diary had no writing at all in it (crushed), and how I felt now
(wildly agitated). "Look at what you accomplished, though. You figured out a way
to establish your authenticity, and you won her trust. Not bad at all for a
first session. Also, I think it's significant that the diary wasn't locked."

It hadn't been locked yet when Liam started shooting, but I didn't go into that.
"Not literally it wasn't, but so what? I was locked out anyway." Despite Julie's
efforts, this still felt fairly shattering. "That kid, God, she really threw me.
I didn't expect her to be such a tough customer. I can't imagine myself, at her
age, standing up to a total stranger like that, scolding her for not having
gotten a breast reduction!"

Julie grinned. "That's not my impression." Professional ethics forbade her to
tell me that Liam had given her a different picture of me as a child, the jerk,
but I was pretty sure that's what she meant.

"so where do I go from here? Any ideas?" I felt fresh out of them myself. The
whole experience of the bradshaw, so far, had been one rude, exhausting shock
after another.

"It would probably be more useful if the ideas came from you," Julie predictably
said. "You destroyed the evidence t all of it, the diary and the papers in the
alligator binder. Undoubtedly you had an excellent reason at the time, but it
would seem that your unconscious will let you see what' you wrote in the diary
only after being reassured that it's safe to reveal the secret now. How to
reassure it is the challenge."

"I see that," I told her, "but isn't there more than one way to skin this cat?
What about trying hypnotherapy again? It's been, what, four years? Lots of water
under the bridge since then."

Julie frowned. "Hypnotherapy is certainly still an option, and, as you say, a
lot has happened since we tried it before, but I don't think I'd recommend it
right now. Your history of resistance isn't the only reason I say this; I've
also found that it's usually better to stick to one approach until you've given
that approach a fair chance to work. If you should decide at a later time to
abandon the bradshaw, temporarily or permanently, we can talk about this again,
but for now .... "

"I was considering abandoning it, actually."

"Well," said Julie, and I knew at once which side of that line she was about to
come down on, "of course that's your decision, but you've been given a rare
means of delving into your unconscious mind -- something many of my patients
would love to be able to make use of-- and I hope you won't throw that
opportunity away without giving it very careful consideration."

I said wryly, "I suppose you had no ulterior motive when you said you hoped I
wouldn't 'throw it away.'"

Julie grinned broadly. "Of course not."

She waited, looking expectant, while I cudgeled my wits, but my mind was as
blank as the pages of the diary had seemed. Finally I said, "Look, I know I was
no great shakes as a hypnotic subject, but I'm not sure I'm cut out to be that
much better as a bradshaw operator. Couldn't you at least suggest a strategy for
coming'up with some ideas?"

She chuckled. "Come on, Pain, you don't need me to tell you how to do that. I
wonder if, by trying to get me to tell you something you already know, you
aren't actually saying you feel a need for help and support."

Actually, of course, she didn't "wonder" this at all. And she was right, I did
know perfectly well what to do, really: keep track of my dreams, focus my
meditations, write down every single detail I could recall about that year.

It all added up to a lot of work, and I had plenty to do without any extras.
Baby Ban riots had recently torn through the capital cities of Malawi and
Burundi, and were now popping up all over South America. The Pope and the Head
of the U.N. had requested a joint audience with a Hefn delegation. While the
alien-human coalition, dedicated to saving both Earth and her people, continued
to work at a frantic pace on the population problem, a majority of the Hefn now
favored abandoning humanity entirely.

Alfrey and Godfrey, both overdue for the long sleep, were taking antihibernation
drugs, which made their hair fall out in patches. They desperately needed
Humphrey, but Humphrey would be sleeping for seven or eight more weeks at least,
and they didn't dare wake him prematurely --too dangerous. Under such
circumstances, even a bench warmer like myself was as busy as a one-armed
paperhanger, processing computer data generated by the techs running time
transceivers. It was almost impossible to have a personal life at all, let alone
a personal crisis or epiphany.

Julie was also right that I was asking for support; but till she said so I
hadn't realized it, and was embarrassed. Little Pain never asked anybody for
help. I glanced at the clock to see if the session weren't just about over.

"Of course," Julie went on when I didn't reply, "I have, and do, and will
continue to support you in every way I can. I do believe that you can use this
bradshaw to find out some things you need to know about your past, in order to
get on more constructively with your life. But whether or not you proceed with
this, or proceed with it now, is entirely up to you. It was pure coincidence
that the convention you attended was on your home turf. If you don't want to
work on the bradshaw just at present, that probably means you're not ready, and
that I was mistaken to think you were."

I shook my head. "No, no, you weren't mistaken. I am ready. And I'll do it, the
dream log and free-associative writing, the whole nine yards, but I still don't
want to, I wish I didn't have to -- you might have been mistaken about that much
anyway."

Julie smiled. "One day we must have a discussion about the meaning of the word
want. We're out of time for today, though, so I'll limit myself to reminding you
of one more thing you already know: that every word you put down in that little
book is still in your memory somewhere."

"I do know that. Thanks."

Julie stood up and smiled. "Good luck on your next trip through the time
portal."

11

THE NEXT WEEK was a blur of conference calls and computer modeling but I used
whatever odd scraps of time I could find to prepare myself for my next encounter
with the girl in the bare bedroom. To that end I got out the brown 2010 diary
and browsed through the entries for the summer before the beginning of sixth
grade:

July 31. Today l got my cast off my arm. The muscle is little, dr. Ogden said it
wont hurt too long. We star gazed tonite. Pam [I'd broken my arm falling out of
a tree]

August 1. Nothing happened today. Hank [Hank? Trying out boys' names...]

August 2. My arm is better I went swimming. We star gazed tonight. Sam

August 3. Last nite I slept downstairs I saw a viddy, It scared me. we went to
Madison to get a watermelon. Sam

August 4. Nothing happened today. Pam

August 5. today was boring nothing happened [not even token punctuation,
apparently]

August 6. Tonight I saw Dungeon of mutations. Hope I don't have nightmares, but
bet I will. I did calculus with Doug [Doug Emmi, my math tutor].

August 7. Dear Diary, today was boreing we had hamburgers for supper Harry

Apart from scaring myself with horror viddies, most of August did sound fairly
"boreing." I stargazed; Dad was teaching me to recognize the easy constellations
and locate bright stars like Arcturus and Vega. I went swimming at the quarry,
played Tarzan with Charlie and Steve {before the broken arm}, played "Mumbley
Peg" with Becky. Nothing the least bit remarkable there. I skipped ahead:

August 24. Today I packed for Louisville [I was going down to Granny's -- Granny
was my "good" grandmother, Mom's mother -- for a week's visit, to end with my
eleventh birthday on September 1]

August 26 Dear D today I had fun sewing and playing dolls with Granny. [A
dexterous child, I could stitch a neat seam from the age of five or six; and
while I didn't "play dolls" in the usual way-- a girly-girl thing to be despised
and scorned-- I loved making little pants and jackets for my two diminutive
plastic boy dolls with patient Granny, the only adult who ever played with me.
And now the diary reported again and again throughout the week: Today I had
fun.]

August 29. today I went to town with Granny & saw Churchill downs. I got books,
the son of Tarzan of Woof howe hob. Pamfrey [Woof Howe Hob was a book about the
stranded Hefn mummified in a Yorkshire peat bog. Obviously, two months before
their return, I was already interested in the Hefn, to the point of
appropriating their -frey suffix into my own name games. Nobody yet knew that
one of the Hefn actually was called Pomfrey.]

August 31. Dear D today More came. I missed her a lot. [Dad definitely came too.
Nothing about missing him.]

September 1. Today Is my birthday. I am eleven years old. I got a boomclox, a
tunic, a blue bedlamp [!], swimming goggles, and I blew out all the candies e)
wished for an elec. canoe. Pain [And in very faint pencil, along the margin of
the bound edge: MOM & DAD WOULDN'T SING HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME THEY MADE ME CRY
BUT THEY DIDN'T KNOW IT.]

Oh God. Now I remembered that birthday.

My parents' strange refusal to sing wasn't the worst of it. Granny had bought me
a boomclox we'd seen in a shop window on our ritual trip to town, unaware that
Morn had also planned to give me one. When we got home to Scofield More showed
me her boomclox -- which I instantly recognized as superior to Granny's in every
way, smaller, cuter, pricier-but told me she was taking it back to the store, I
couldn't have it; Granny's clunky boomclox was the one I had to keep. It
occurred to neither of us -certainly not to me-- that the redundant gift might
have been exchanged for something else.

I could visualize Mom's "present" in perfect detail. The "clock" part of it was
Swiss. Every hour on the hour a bugle blew and a little door flew open,
releasing three adorable clockwork thoroughbreds, each with a tiny,
crop-wielding jockey on its back. Horses and jockeys raced each other around a
semicircle to another door that closed behind them. The programing was
randomized; you never knew which horse would win. I was less besotted with the
Japanese "boombox" part, but no doubt its sound quality was excellent.

I pleaded and begged to keep that boomclox, but to no avail: back to the store
it went. Needless to say, my pleasure in Granny's gift was a casualty of all
this fuss.

The blank space in the list? My best guess: it was a place-holder for the
unmentionable bras from Grandma.

September 2. Mom sang to me late last nigh t, and dad sang to me this morning.
Now all I want is the boomclox more got for me. Pain I was starting to feel
sick. I shut the little book and put it away.

12

Homely, skinny Little Pam sat on the double bed covered with the Dutch girl
quilt, one long leg bent double, a foot tucked beneath her, scribbling in the
red diary with a yellow pencil. To the left of the door, on top of her bureau,
squatted the boomclox, displaying the time and date in violet numbers. A little
rack of CD's squatted beside it, but no music was playing. The room was full of
sunshine.

"Hi," I said, and sat down on the bed.

Pam looked up, then dropped her pencil and snapped the diary shut. "You came
back."

"Mm-hm. How are you? How do you feel?"

"Fine. Why'd you come back? What were you so upset about?"

"I couldn't read your diary. Sorry I rushed off like that. I want to try again,
but first I want to talk to you about your boomclox."

Pam's eyes turned toward it, then back to me. "What about it?"

"Granny gave you that last summer for your birthday." She nodded. "But Mom got
you one too, and she wouldn't let you keep it."

"No. She took it back."

"Why'd she do that?"

Pam shrugged. "Granny bought me that one 'cause I asked her to ...well, not
exactly asked her to. We were walking along and I saw it in the window and told
her I liked it, and she said did I want her to get it for my birthday and I said
yes. But Mom, see, she'd already gotten me one, and I couldn't have two
boomcloxes, so I had to keep this one."

"So you're saying it's kind of your fault that you couldn't have the one Mom got
for you."

"Well .... yeah. Because if I hadn't asked for that one, I could have kept the
cool one with the racehorses."

"Honey," I said, leaning toward her, "it wasn't your fault at all. Not at all.
It wasn't anybody's fault, but Mom was mad at Granny for messing up her plan and
she needed to blame somebody. And she couldn't punish Granny, so she punished
you."

"You mean -- by taking the nice boomclox back to the store?"

"I really mean, by showing .it to you at all. You were happy with Granny's till
you saw Mom's, right? There was no reason at all to show it to you if she meant
to take it back. She just did it to make you feel bad, to get even. It was mean,
and you hadn't done anything to deserve it. I want you to understand that. I
didn't understand it till I was a lot older than you are now, and I wish I had."

The girl stared at me, eyes filling with comprehension, then suddenly with shiny
tears. "It wasn't fair," she said wonderingly.

"No, it sure as heck wasn't fair. And I'll tell you something else: she won't
ever pull anything like that on you again, because I'm here now, and I won't let
her."

"You won't?"

"I won't. I promise."

Pam rubbed the back of her bare wrist under her nose, snuffling a little. Then,
without being asked, she handed the diary across the Dutch girls to me.

I held it prayerfully for a moment. Then I let it fall open and looked down.

13

"It was all in code," I reported to Julie, "that code Charlie and Steve and I
made up, so we could write secret notes to each other in school. I looked down
at the page -- dreading that it would be blank again -- and there were these
lines of spirals and stars and triangles and pitchforks, in pencil."

"Did you keep the diary in code?"

"No, no, in ordinary cursive English! I might've tried the code for a page or
two, but it would have been too slow for everyday, even if I'd memorized it,
which as far as I can recall I never did."

"Well, that's fascinating. That's really fascinating," said Julie. Plainly, she
meant it. The ways and means of bradshaws still hadn't been studied much -- too
few cases -- so this was all psychological terra semicognita. I could
practically see the preliminary outline for the article she was planning to
write coming together behind her eyes.

"So after I checked to make sure the whole diary was in code, I asked the kid if
she would let me borrow the code key."

"In the alligator notebook!"

"Right."

"And?"

"She said, 'I can't. It's out in the hall closet, and I have to stay in my
room.' And I realized that by setting up the transceiver in the doorway, we'd
trapped her in there. Nothing outside that one room was available to either of
us. Well, then I had a kind of desperate brainwave; I asked her if she could
call Charlie or Steve on her phone and ask them to bring a copy of the key over
and pitch it up to her through the window.

"Julie sat back in her chair. "I take it that didn't work."

"How'd you guess? She did call them up, but both their phones just rang and
rang. They weren't available. I don't know why not, actually; it seems to me
that she ought to have been able to reach outside the room in that way."

Julie nodded. "Maybe there are factors embedded in the whole bradshaw phenomenon
that keep you from proceeding in a way your own unconscious doesn't endorse. But
it's like the shadow-memory phenomenon; we don't yet know why a virtual person
can remember the things she remembers, but only those things, or why someone
running the virtual program -- like you -- can accomplish some things and not
others." She leaned forward, toward the camera. "So: how did you feel when
Charlie and Steve didn't answer their phones?"

"Defeated for this round, but not as discouraged as before. But I realized the
phone idea was a bust, so I shut the program down till I could hash things over
with you."

Julie smiled cheerfully. "Well! It's encouraging, isn't it? First you get blank
pages, then you get a code you once made up yourself. That feels like progress
to me."

"To me too. It feels like things are moving forward, and that when I work out
the right approach I'll get where I need to go."

Julie nodded. "I agree. Shall we start on the hashing-over, then? What was
different about this run? What did you do this time, that you didn't do the
first time?"

I could tell her that, all right. I'd done what Bradshaw himself had
recommended: in his own gooey phrase, I had "championed my inner child." I'd
told the kid that our mother had punished her for something that wasn't her
fault, and that showing her the pretty clock was mean.

I'd also promised her that I would never allow this to happen again. In life it
had happened many times over, and none of those meannesses could be undone.
Still, to this eleven-year-old version of myself, I had made a commitment of
protection. According to Bradshaw, this should do both of us good.

The funny thing was, I'd said what I'd said spontaneously. I hadn't been
thinking about "championing" exercises. Fresh from reading the earlier diary,
I'd glared at that charmless boomclox on the bureau and told the kid what I'd
needed to hear myself -- when I was Pam/Sam/Hank-but never had.

14

Dream Log, 5/17/3 7. I live in a duplex. There are bears next door. The Fire
Dept. comes to take them away, but the next day two cubs appear in the hallway
of the half where I live, and rush into my room. I shove them out, but now the
mother bear is in the hall. She sticks her paw in the doorway, tries to get in.
The hasp on the door is frail and she bends the plate with her paw; I have to
hold it shut and bend it back with my thumb so the bolt wi11 engage.

Several times I discover that the door's slightly open. When I close it she
attacks, but not when it's ajar. Once the mother bear actually comes into my
room, standing upright, and I escort her out. We both maintain our dignity
during this scene -- no unseemly panic or ferocity. I'm able to control her in
her presence, but when the door's between us she becomes savage.

There's an antique table phone in the hallway, white, on a tall stalk. I rush
out and grab it, run the cord under the door, slam the door. The bear attacks. I
call the Fire Dept. and they come right away. The bears are hiding. One of the
firemen wants me to sit beside him on a bed and read a book of stories for a
purpose now unclear, except that it had something to do 'with catching the
bears.

Dream Log, 5/17/37. I'm weeding the flower beds of some house I live in with
Mom, and accidentally break several tulip stalks. More yells angrily, but I
reply that it doesn't matter because we'll never sell this house or move out of
it. Will we? She acts furtive and moves away. I run after her, shouting,
screaming even, furious that she walked away like that without answering me. She
walks faster, then turns and brandishes a shiny black handgun. I wrestle it away
from her immediately -- no question that I can dominate her in this literal,
physical sense -- but I understand that she's sold the house, my home, right out
from under me.

I have to go to an orphanage nearby. I'm crying and carrying on, terribly upset.
We go past a gatehouse where Mom collects the money, big handfuls of bills. Then
suddenly she's lying face down in the long grass nearby, reduced to an
impression of her body and outstretched hands, fingers extended, nails long and
blood-red.

The orphanage is horrible beyond description. The next day l put my hand into
roy pocket and realize I still have roy keys. I decide to go spend one more
night in my house, but when I get there I see a light in the basement, and
opened, empty boxes in back: the newpeople have already moved in.

Every night for years before my father died -- but never since -- my dreaming
unconscious used to display a magnificent kaleidoscope of fractal patterns
undulating like manta wings, reds, blues, rich and various, impersonal and pure.
I took them completely for granted; they'd always happened and they always
would.

Those were the days.

15

"Hi," Liam said when I'd ordered the screen to come on. "Just dashing in the
door, were you?"

"Your powers of observation render me speechless," I told him dryly. I'd run in
from the back yard and was puffing and flushed; we were having another heat wave
in Salt Lake. I almost hadn't bothered to catch the phone, but now I was glad
I'd made the effort. Liam and I hadn't talked in six weeks -- not since Kentucky
and the bradshaw.

"What were you doing?"

"Feeding the robins, out back. At this moment, six fledgling robins call me
mother." For the past couple of summers I'd been hand-raising orphaned and/or
injured birds for the local aviary. It was interesting and fun, but this year I
was really much too busy to be doing it. Although the four healthy babies were
flying well, all six still expected to be fed several times a day. I'd push open
the screen door to the back yard and the quartet of good fliers would dive out
of the apricot tree, straight; for my head. Adolescent robins aren't little,
tiny birds; I couldn't wait for this stage to be over.

"Feeding them what?" Liam wondered. "Worms and bugs? No wonder you're out of
breath."

I shook my head. "Dry dog food softened in water. High protein content. Comes in
a bag."

"Oh. Well, I won't keep you, I know you're as swamped as we are here. I just
thought I'd check in to see how the bradshaw's going."

We exchanged looks. "Slowly," I said, "since you ask. It does seem to be going
someplace, but I don't know where yet."

"The second shot hit the bull's-eye?"

"I think so. Hit the target, anyway. I really appreciate your staying to shoot
it, by the way."

"Yeah." Liam regarded me thoughtfully. "You're welcome, I guess. Although to
describe Eddie as pissed about it would be a feeble representation of the
truth."

"Apologize to him for me. What about you -- does this call mean you've decided
to forgive me?"

"For making me admit that I can't afford to lose you out of my life? I'll
probably never forgive you for that. But Eddie being furious, the interminable
train trip I suffered through, etc., etc., that's all water under the bridge. I
called because I was interested."

And because you miss waking me up when something's on your mind, I thought but
didn't say. We both knew why he'd called. Things being what they were with Liam
and me, one of us had been bound to call the other eventually. "I haven't got
time right now to fill you in completely," I told him, "but in a nutshell, I
can't read the diary. The first time I tried, the pages were completely blank
except for the printed dates and lines. The second time the writing was all in
code."

"Code?"

"A code my friends and I made up to pass notes in school. Stars, triangles,
pitchforks. I don't have a clue which symbols stood for what letters anymore."

"Codes can be cracked. Bring in an expert."

I shook my head. "I thought about that, but I've got this hunch that if the
answer's going to be worth knowing, I have to discover it via the right process.
Anyway, Julie wouldn't approve."

Liam laughed. "Let me guess. She'd say,' You're the real expert, aren't you?
You'll figure it out yourself when you're ready.'"

I laughed with him -- Liam, a clever mimic, had nailed Julie exactly --before
adding, "She's probably right, that's the hell of it. Listen, sorry to cut you
off so fast but I was supposed to be back in my office five minutes ago."

As usually happened when I tried to hang up first, this triggered a perverse
refusal in him to end the conversation. "Okay, but just tell me, what about the
straw and the locket, were they in the diary?"

"They were there. Just no writing."

"I get it," he said eagerly. "Because you already knew they were in there and
what they looked like. What you can't see is what you can't remember."

"I guess so." I looked at my watch.

"She remembers. You two kids need to learn to work together."

"Liam--"

"Okay! So long! Call me if you get a breakthrough."

Dream Log, 6/10/37. I'm watching a preview of a viddy flick. A man with sharp
features is driving a car like the one we had before the Hefn came. There's a
passenger in the back seat, a woman. In his rearview mirror the driver sees the
woman pull up her dress, which is like a long T-shirt, and whammo: out falls a
perfectly beautiful set of male genitals. The driver sees this in the mirror;
"we" (viewers) see it directly.

I rent the flick to watch in bed and fast-forward through it, trying to find
that scene. Suddenly More climbs into the bed with me and lights a cigarette! I
scream at her to "Get out of my personal space!!! and force her out of the bed
physically; there's a violent tussle and she's upset and cries. She goes off. I
feel very bad and have an impulse to go after her, but fall asleep instead.

Dream Log 6/13/37. I'm awakened within the dream by the sound of a little girl
crying in her crib, in the laundry room next to my bedroom in this house. The
sink (actually full of orphaned Mallard ducklings in a cage at present) has
vanished, and the crib stands in its place. Both rooms are black as pitch, but I
get up, grope my way to the little girl, and put my arms around her. At the same
instant I become aware that Dad is sitting in a rocking chair where the washer
ought to be. He's facing the crib, and he's stone blind. He rocks in a gentle,
regular rhythm, a little smile on his face. (This doesn't sound terrifying, but
I woke up terrified.)

Later: another dream. I'm running the bradshaw. Little Pam and I are sitting
across from each other on the bed. Again I ask her to try to get the code key
for me. She activates her phone, which has turned into a modern wall-mounted
videophone, and places the call. At once a smiling Liam appears on the screen,
looking as he did at fifteen. When Pam explains that we need his help, he
reaches right through the screen and hands her a big iron key like a dungeon key
from some old horror show. "You kids need to work together," he says.

17

Julie frowned and rubbed the sides of her nose with her extended fingers. "Let's
go back to basics for a bit. We know your father was inappropriate with you, and
that your mother turned a blind eye. We know that his behavior made you so
anxious in early adolescence that you developed a dissociative disorder, though
you didn't realize his sexualizing of your relationship was the cause. You've
spent a lot of time connecting feelings to events and doing the necessary grief
work. What I'm wondering now is, where's all this anger at your mother 'coming
from?"

"The business about the boomclox?"

"That's a factor, of course, but I'm not convinced that that accounts for all of
it. There's a lot of fear in these dreams too. Could you be angry at her for
leaving you the bradshaw, and afraid of what you might learn?"

"If I could read the damn diary," I told her wearily, "maybe I'd know."

18

"Oh good! I was hoping you'd come back," said Little Pam. "I wanted to ask you
about something."

I sat down on the Dutch girl quilt. "Shoot."

"You know that time last spring when Steve and Charlie and I had a fight before
church, and I didn't want to sit with them so I sat with Ninnie?"

Ninnie was a family friend, older than my parents, who occupied the same front
pew every Sunday. Surprised that the program would let her bring up a subject I
hadn't introduced first, I said "Sure I do."

"And before the sermon started, Dad made me leave and come home with him?"

I nodded. "He was furious, and you had no idea why. You were walking along next
to him, trying not to cry. And finally he said, in this terribly angry voice,
'Why weren't you sitting with the boys? And you said -- "at this point Little
Pam chimed in, and we chanted together, "I don't want to talk about it."

"And then," Pam finished, "he said, 'I don't suppose you'll ever want to talk
things over with me.'"

She brought it all so near. "He sounded disgusted. You were totally bewildered.
The whole thing just seemed like some big craziness."

"Yeah. Then we got home and I ran inside and threw myself on Morn, bawling my
head oft. She said, 'What in the world is the matter?' But I couldn't talk, I
couldn't tell her. And anyway, I didn't know."

We sat silent for a bit. Finally I said, "So what's your question?"

Little Pam looked up at me soberly. "Well, you knew why Mom showed me the good
boomclox before she took it back. I thought you might know what Dad was so mad
about that time."

I got up, went around the foot of the bed, and sat down next to Pam. I put my
arms around her tense little body and pulled her against me. She didn't resist,
but neither did she respond. I didn't expect her to; Little Pam thought hugs
were mushy, or thought she ought to think so. "I did finally figure it out," I
told her. "He was mad because if you weren't going to sit with Steve and
Charlie, he wanted you to sit with him."

She pulled away open-mouthed, totally flummoxed. "With dim ?"

I knew, of course, that the idea of sitting with Dad had never crossed her mind.
Morn hadn't been in church that day for some reason; if she had been, maybe we
might have sat with her instead of with Ninnie. But Dad, by himself? It simply
never occurred to us. It would never have occurred to us in a million years.

"Now I've got one for you," I told her, releasing her from the circle of the
embrace. "What happened next? After Dad came in. I can't remember."

"Mom just told me to go on up and change my clothes. They were talking
downstairs. Then we had Sunday dinner."

So the episode had just been dropped. Morn had probably remonstrated with Dad
for dragging us out of church, but neither of them had talked with us about it
later, explained anything. We hadn't expected them to. They backed each other up
through silence, believing instinctively that if nothing were said, it would be
the same as if nothing had happened. I tended to think of Dad as the "problem,"
but it wasn't only Dad.

And suddenly I had a flash of insight about my recent dreams. I realized that
both our parents, in their very different ways, had been stupid and cruel about
plenty of things -- and that neither had protected us against the stupidities
and cruelties of the other.

Now I hugged Little Pam again, hard. "Dad wants to be closer to you, but he
doesn't know how to make it happen. Then he gets frustrated when he can tell you
don't enjoy being with him. But it's not your job to fix that, honey. He's the
dad, it's his job, only he doesn't know how to do his job -- and that's not his
fault, either, but it sure as shootin' isn't yours, and it was really, really
wrong of him to blame you and scare you like that."

Her arms clutched back at me, then let go. She wiped her nose on the back of her
hand, as before, and sniffed a couple of times. Our tears always mostly ran down
our nose, where they were less observable. I got up. "I have to go now, but I'll
be back."

19

"We're kind of getting to know each other," I reported to Julie. "Reminiscing
almost. It's nice. She's a pretty unattractive kid, actually, but we sure do
have a lot in common."

"And she needs you so badly, too,"

I nodded. "I'd like to shake John Bradshaw's hand. All that hokey, cloying
inner-child stuff? The hell of it is, he was right."

And a couple of sessions later.. "We're sitting on opposite aides of the bed,
chatting about her birthday-- in 2013 she's got a birthday coming up -- and she
hands me the diary, I let it fall open in the middle --not really paying that
much attention, for once -- and then I see there's writing on the page, a pencil
scribble, and my heart jumps into my throat. But then a second later I see what
it is and start howling with laughter, and the poor kid gets upset -- she thinks
I'm laughing at her, at something she wrote. I had to convince her that wasn't
it. Here, I keyed it out for you." I held the pad close to the screen so Julie
could see, and read aloud: "Kotar Tublat yud gom-lul kambo yang ta nala zor den.
Kotar b'wang Tublat om zan dano histah, ho yummas Kotar rand gree-ah ho gree-ah
histah unk lul." Julie's baffled expression made me laugh again. "You don't
recognize it? It's Ape English -- Tarzan talk? '

Julie leaned forward, squinting at the screen. "Tarzan talk? You mean, it's a
language?"

"But of course! My pal Steve and I learned a whole list of words of that was
supposed to be the language of the Great Apes, from the Tarzan books, and we'd
talk to each other in Ape while we'd be playing in the woods. It's a grammarless
language, you just string words together. My name was Kotar, ko plus tar--
Mighty White. Pretty braggy name for such a scrawny kid! Steve was Tublat-- it
means Broken Nose, but he just liked the sound of the word. Actually, I should
have been Tublat, I was the one whose nose had been broken. Not that I knew that
at the time."

"Pam, the suspense is killing me. What does this passage say?"

I laughed again, the Tarzan talk made me feel so happy. "Sorry to disappoint
you, after all the build-up, but not much. It basically just says we went to the
river bluff and swang on the rope swing and played sex games -- Steve used to
let me play with his penis and watch him pee, and I'd let him kiss me."

"You're dismissing sexual play as 'not much,' given your particular history?"

"What I mean is, nothing flew. I've always remembered going to the woods with
Steve after school, and the stuff we did."

Julie looked quizzical. "Which is the part that says `sex games?"

I held the pad up again. "I'm paraphrasing. Yumma was our word for `kiss' -- we
made it up, Burroughs doesn't supply one. The Great Apes probably didn't go in
for a lot of kissing. It says 'I held Steve's long skinbone snake, many kisses,
I didn't like that too much but I love it when his snake pees.' More or less.
'Pee' is `go water,' literally --unk lul."

"Did you write in the diary in Ape, or is this another involuntary translations"

"Hmm." I considered this. "Actually, something as purple as this passage I might
have written in Ape. In high school, when I wanted to record something
embarrassing or private, I'd switch into German."

"But was the rest of the diary in Ape?"

I shook my head: "The other pages were blank, it was just one entry on that one
page."

"Well! This is all extremely interesting," said Julie with great relish. "Your
unconscious is still protecting the diary's contents using a code from
childhood, but now it's a code you're able to read. More progress!"

"Yeah," I said. "I believe it is."

20

"How are the robins doing? Liam inquired. He'd called me twice more, very late
at night, waking me on both occasions; it was like old times. P-mail would have
been far less intrusive, but he didn't like p-mail; he liked exchanging live
comments with a face on-screen, even a grouchy, sleepy face.

That being so, it was clever of him to ask about the birds. "Wingy, Pesky, or
Gimpy?"

"These names you give them stun me with their originality. Gimpy would be..."

"The sick one -- the one the dog roughed up, that's got everything wrong with
her, leg, wing, eye, beak, and a bad cold. Ever hear a bird cough?"

"I didn't know they could."

"Me neither. Well, she'd been hobbling around for a week on one normal foot and
one fisted-up foot. Then yesterday, all of a sudden the bad foot opened up and
bingo: two sets of toes! And I know she has at least partial vision back in the
bad eye. So the news on Gimpy is cautiously good."

"I had no idea birds caught cold."

"Well, it's a flulike virus of some sort. I stick the dogfood in and sometimes
she spits it back out -- her beak hurts, she can't swallow big pieces -- and it
comes out slimy. Yesterday I saw her blow a bubble. And she's always scraping
her beak on things to clean it off. Then there's the cough, this little pathetic
hack hack"

"You're breaking my heart," said Liam. "Actually, you sort of are. She sounds
like a wreck."

"She looks like a feather duster that got caught in a fan. Nobody thought she
could possibly recover enough to be released, but after her foot unclubbed I
started to hope."

I hadn't mentioned the bradshaw. Finally Liam could stand it no longer and asked
how things were going.

"Still making slow progress," I told him. "If we get a breakthrough, you'll be
among the first to know."

"Mind if I stick my, ah, beak in a little?" And when I grinned and didn't say
no, "I don't mean to mess with whatever Julie's strategy is here, but I keep
wondering if she's suggested that you ask the kid to help you."

I frowned. "No, I don't think so. Not even implicitly. Julie's been bending over
backward not to make suggestions, even when I request them. She does
interpretive stuff, but she's maintained the position from the start that I'll
hit on the right approach myself when I'm ready."

"Oh."

I waited for him to go on, but he screwed his face into a skeptical mask and
just sat there. Finally I said, "Come on, say what you're thinking. How can she
help me out? The kid."

"See, Pam," said Liam, "it never occurs to you to ask for help. You didn't ask
me to help you, when you realized you'd picked the wrong event and needed me to
re-record your bradshaw. Instead you put our whole relationship on the line. You
forced me to help you." I blinked. "I shouldn't have had to ask. You should have
offered."

Liam shook his head impatiently. "Maybe so, but that's not my point. My point
is, you help people without thinking twice, but you don't expect people to help
you, you always think you have to do it by yourself. If help's offered, you
accept it, but you never ask."

I'd recognized this very trait in Little Pam, of course, and been uncovering its
roots in her family life. "Hunh. Okay, I accept that. But you kept repeating
that you weren't going to miss that plane nomatter what. Are you saying now that
all you wanted was for me to ask you nicely?"

"To tell you the truth," he admitted, "I'm not absolutely sure. Eddie was piling
on the pressure, I might've felt you were asking too much. I don't mean you
were," he added quickly, "but that's beside the point. What I would've decided
back then is about me; and the point I'm trying to make now, and want to stick
to, is about you not asking people for help."

"I did ask Julie," I reminded him.

"So you did. And she said you'd solve the puzzle by yourself when you were
ready. But aren't you forgetting something? This kid isn't some other person,
she is yourself! Julie's probably going nuts, wondering when you're finally
gonna figure that out."

21

Little Pam looked up from the diary and gave me a big smile. "Hi!"

"Hi yourself," I said. "How're you feeling?"

"Better. Lots better. I love it when you come here."

I sat down on "my" side of the bed. She held the diary out to me; but this time
I smiled and shook my head. "I guess we both know by now that I can't read it by
myself. So I've had an idea: how would you feel about reading it to me?"

She looked surprised, then uncertain. "Out loud?"

"Just the parts you don't mind reading out loud. You could skip anything you
didn't want me to hear."

"It's not...I mean, I don't mind you knowing things. I mean, you already do know
them. There's just some of it I don't like to say out loud."

Little Pam was almost morbidly hypersensitive to the power of words. "I know.
You could leave those parts out, though, that would be fine."

"We-e-e-e-l-l..."

She wrinkled her fleshy nose, still not sure. Pressuring this child was the very
last thing I wanted to do; I reflected that Liam was wrong and Julie right about
not pushing things in this direction quite so soon. "You don't have to read any
of it to me if you don't want to, honey," I reassured her.

But she surprised me. "No, I do want to. Really. It's just, you know,
embarrassing." She bent the covers back, ruffling the pages. "Where should I
start?"

In answer, I sang the mother's part from the end of Amahl and the Night
Visitors: "'Are you sure, sure, sure?'"

"'I'm sure!'" she sang back, tickled to be in on the joke.

"Well then, how about just starting at the beginning?"

Whereupon, to my inexpressible relief, Little Pam flipped to the front of the
red book and began: "January 1, 2011. We went to the candlelight service last
night and I stayed up till midnight. Today I worked on linear algebra. January
9.. Today I went to Doug's and we did linear algebra. I got all the problems
right. It looked like snow all day but it never 'snowed. January 3. Today it
snowed. I went sledding with Charlie on the scenic drive. There was a hefn on
the viddy tonight, his name is Pomfrey!! January 4..."

I listened to her flat voice speaking these flat facts. After a while I shifted
around and lay down on my back on the bed; and when Pam broke off inquiringly,
"I'm just getting comfortable," I explained. "Don't stop, you're doing great."

"February 9," she read. "Today I went to Hurt Hollow with Dad. We walked down
the hill. I got to feed the goats."

I laced my fingers together across my stomach, closed my eyes, and let this
voice possess me. Time passed, or was borne along on the all-but expressionless
murmur I floated within. Once I opened my eyes and glanced over to ask, "Are you
getting tired? We could do some more next time."

"Nunh-unh, I'm fine," Pain said, and went right on: "May 12. Today we came to
Louisville. May 13. I went to the store for Granny and we played Chinese
checkers. Aunt Maude isn't feeling too well. I came to Grandma's for supper. May
14. Today we came home. I slept with Granny the first night and I went to
Grandma's the second night. I fell off the couch in the middle of the night. I
found three four-leaf clovers and one six-leaf clover. May 15. Today I worked
.on fractals..."

-- but Pam had gone on without me. I lay in the dark by myself, breathing in the
hateful smell of Grandma's living room, knowing that if I opened my eyes a tall
shape would be stooping over the couch, but if I kept my eyes closed I wouldn't
have to acknowledge its presence.

22

"Who do you think it might be?" Julie asked quietly. I'd called her from the VR
parlor's public phone, whose cheap lens added ten years to her age (though the
late hour may have added one or two).

"I feel like all that's keeping me from dying of terror is that I still don't
know." Just thinking about it, I shook like an aspen leaf. "But it must have
been Edgar, Dad's stepfather, Edgar Cranfill. You remember I talked about him. A
really bad alcoholic. Arrested for exhibitionism one time. On our visits he'd
either be sleeping it off in the basement or sitting at Grandma's kitchen table,
all stubbly and reeking of whiskey, and I was supposed to act like I was glad to
see him."

My teeth chattered as I said this. Julie looked concerned. "Time for a break.*
You could take a couple of weeks off, get used to the idea of what you'll be
confronting-"

I shook my head. "No, I have to go right back in. The kid has no idea why I ran
away like that. One second I'm lying on the bed with my eyes closed and the next
I'm halfway out the door. She had this jolted look on her face-- I don't even
remember getting off the bed, I must have levitated! I have to get right back,
as soon as I calm down a little bit."

Julie nodded. "Sounds like you're getting the hang of the gear, anyhow. Listen
now: call me after you end the program tonight. Don't try to prove how tough you
are. I'm here, and I truly want to help, and I'm very concerned that you pace
yourself appropriately with this, okay?"

"Okay," I said shakily. "Thanks."

23

"Let's go back to the beginning of May, all right.?" I'd apologized for bolting,
and resettled myself on the bed. "I'd just like to go over that part again. We
can do the rest another time."

"Okay, but I'm really not tired, so if you want me to keep going..." She found
the place and began to read. "May 1. Charlie built a soap box racer and he gave
me a ride but he pushed me too fast and it turned over. Morn made me come in.
May 2..."

I waited tensely for the trip to Louisville, but knowing it was coming left me
too well defended. The replay was unrevealing.

Despite the kid's protestations that she wasn't tired, I stopped the bradshaw
when she'd read to the end of May; I was shuddering with fatigue myself. I put a
quick call through to Julie and was stowing the gear in the hall locker when the
pay phone beeped and blinked on, and Humphrey's dear hairy face peered
benevolently down upon me. "Hello, Pam Pruitt," he chirruped.

His was the very last face I expected to see there. "Humphrey! I thought you
were still hibernating! However did you find me?" I glanced up and down the
hallway, but at this late hour we had the place to ourselves.

"I was asleep," he said, "but someone woke me."

The Hefn stayed awake round the clock for half the year, then slept for several
months together, bedded down in their mother ship on the moon. Since only aliens
ever went there, this rude arousal might mean that Humphrey was in trouble again
for supporting us humans. "Why'd they do that? Will you be okay.?"

"I will be fine; I was to awaken in a few weeks' time in any event. And I had
left standing orders that if you should initiate your bradshaw during my long
sleep, and it should approach a climax, someone was to wake me. My dear, you
must not waver in your resolve. You must complete the bradshaw, as quickly as
you can."

It struck me then that Humphrey had eavesdropped on this evening's session. The
Hefn were within the terms of their sales agreement to do that at any time, but
I didn't like it that Humphrey hadn't given me advance notice, and found it
irritating to be urged not to quit, when I'd had no thought of quitting. I said,
rather resentfully, "Why `must' I complete it?"

"Because there is so much important work to be done, and you are so badly
needed."

"Humphrey," I said wearily, "You know I can't do the real work anymore, and what
the Sam Hill has the bradshaw got to do with it anyhow?"

"We shall see. Perhaps nothing." He twinkled at me. "Go home and sleep now, my
dear. I will stay in touch."

24

HE WASN'T GOING to tell me anything more, and I was too tired to think, so I did
as he instructed: I biked home and went to bed and to sleep.

In my dream I'm lying again on the Dutch girl quilt, afloat within the
uninflected sphere created by Little Pam's reading voice. I can't make out the
words, but behind my closed eyelids I see myself get up from Grandma's
living-room couch and wander into the kitchen. Dad is standing near the sink in
the dark. He's aware of me but takes no notice and doesn't stop what he's doing.
At first I don't understand what this is, but suddenly I realize his pants are
unfastened and he's masturbating with his right hand, intending to ejaculate
into the kitchen sink. In his left hand he's holding a metal bowl full of water
and crushed ice, swirling the contents of the bowl rhythmically in time to the
rhythm of his beating-off.

My reactions are two, and contradictory. I'm very turned on. And I'm frantic to
get out of there.

In my panic flight from my monstrous father I try desperately to wake up. I
labor and groan, try to pry my eyes open, struggle against sleep with all my
strength; but I'm weak as water. Despite everything I can do I'm still supine on
the bed, and Little Pam's voice is still droning on, when out of the fog of
words her voice says clearly: Take Two.

-- and I'm back on the couch in Grandma's house. It's the middle of the night,
and I'm lying on my back in the dark, on top of someone or something whose meaty
hands I'm holding. Terror has suffused me utterly. I get up and walk into the
bathroom, holding on with horror and loathing to the meaty hands. I'm just about
to look in the mirror over the basin to find out who they belong to -- shrinking
away in anticipation -when Take Three, says Little Pain, and then Take Four, and
each time the ghastly bradshaw of my dreaming starts the program at the same
place: me on the couch in Grandma's dark living room, in the middle of the
night.

Every "take" is different, but many of the same elements are incorporated into
each: a male masturbator, a basin or sink usually full of water, myself as a
very young child -- much younger than eleven -- in the role of
participant/observer, and the emotional conflict of arousal and extreme fear.

25

"We're getting close," Julie said the next morning, stating the obvious. "How do
you feel?"

"Terrible. Like horses have been kicking me all night."

"You don't look too chipper, I have to admit. Maybe you can catch a nap later.
Have you had dreams like these before?"

I massaged my aching temples with my fingers. "Yeah, a few. Never a batch on the
same night. There was the one about my cousin Will standing naked in front of a
bathroom basin full of water, while two `pornographic hands' -- that's how they
were styled in the dream-- came up out of the water to help him masturbate. And
the one about...well, about me sloshing Liam's penis around in the basin of a
hotel bathroom, while a strange man in a navy blue suit stood by with his
shriveled genitals exposed, saying `You can do anything you like with these.'
That's all I can remember, there might be others."

"Affect of that last one?"

"Mixed. I wanted nothing to do with the icky man and his icky organs, and told
him so, but still I touched his dick when he invited me to."

"Terror? Arousal?"

"Not that I recall. More like disagreeableness. Look, Julie..." She waited,
holding perfectly still. "Would you consider monitoring the next one? I'm
scared. Liam says I never ask for help. Well, I'm asking. I'm not sure I can do
this by myself."

She smiled and nodded, looking and sounding as positive as possible, to reassure
me. "You probably can, but why should you.? I'd say right now is an excellent
time to bring in flank support. Did Humphrey agree to monitor as well?"

"I didn't ask him to. He said he'd keep in touch, that's all. I tried to reach
him this morning in Santa Barbara but he didn't answer, and I'm not even sure
that's where he was calling from. Liam hadn't seen him --didn't even know he was
awake. Something seriously weird is going on."

"Well," said Julie briskly, "Humphrey and I may have different perspectives and
agendas, but we both agree that finishing your bradshaw is all-important. And
whether he's there or not, I will be, whenever you want me."

So the following evening Julie was standing by when I entered the room of my
childhood. That is, she was in VR hookup in Washington. She could monitor my
vital signs -- pulse rate, brain wave patterns, skin moisture -- through
transmitters built into the VR equipment; I'd connected myself up to them for
the first time for this session. She could see everything in two dimensions on a
lifesize screen: me and Little Pam, the bed with its handmade quilt, the bureau
and its hideous boomclox, the row of books along the baseboard, the window
streaming with sun. She could hear what both of us said, and if I were to
address her directly she could answer me through the transmitters in my helmet;
but, unless I did that, Little Pain would be unaware of the third party present
at our meeting.

Pam couldn't see me, either, till I passed through the doorway. I stood outside
for a minute first, readying myself, watching her write in the red book, trying
to discern outward signs that she'd repeatedly gone through some hideous
experience.

Even to me, her surface seemed perfectly blank. If there was trauma there -- and
surely there was -- it was very deeply buried. I tapped on the door frame and
stepped through smiling. "Hi, kidd.."

"Hi! Want me to finish the diary now?" She was all eagerness, relishing the
attention.

"That would be way cool." I flopped down on the bed and, deepening my voice,
sang Balthasar's question to Amahl, "'Are you ready?'"

"'Yes, I'm ready! '"

"'Let's go, then.'"

"June 1," she read promptly. "It was pretty today. I saw a yellow warbler and an
indigo bunting at the Point. June 2. More wants me to take dancing lessons and I
don't want to. I watched the Hefn program on the viddy. It was good. Dad got me
a book at the library about the Herin for my school report. June 3. I don't have
to. take dancing lessons, they cost money. Today Grandma came with Uncle Tommy.
June 4..."

-- and, without even an instant in which to signal Julie, I'm afloat upon the
surface of the light fiat voice --

-- and watch myself get up from Grandma's couch and wander through the dark
house to the bathroom. The door is partly closed. There's a light on inside, and
a radio playing lively music. I reach up for the doorknob and push the door open
wider.

Uncle Tommy is standing at the basin, running it full of water. He's back late
from the race track, he's been playing the horses. He jumps when he sees me
peering around the door -- I've startled him -- but then he smiles. "Hi, hon.
Wanna see somethin' nice.? C'mon in here, I'm gon' show you somethin' real
nice." Tommy is wearing his dark blue sailor uniform; he joined the Navy when he
was sixteen, not very long ago. I come closer, and now I see that the front of
his pants is unfastened and hanging down, and behind the square flap is a round
opening like a cave, and coming out of the cave is a thing like a big white
snake.

My eyes fill with the white snake, and two feelings seize me simultaneously. One
is intense sexual excitement and fascination. The other is guilt: I know I'll be
punished if anybody catches me in here. I know this from the sneaky way Tommy's
talking. He smells terrible when he talks.

"See it?" Uncle Tommy says, and I can't help myself, I come closer. I put up my
hands and hold onto the edge of the basin. There's a towel folded against the
basin's front edge, and the snake is lying on the towel. "See, now, this is my
peter. Ever see a peter like this before?" I shake my head. "Well, it's kinda
dirty so I'm washing it. Here, you can help. Let's just wet your hands and soap
'em up real good" -- he holds my hands under the faucet and rubs soap on the
palms-- "and then you can help wash my peter for me."

I put my slippery hands around the snake and Tommy says, "Oh, Jesus." Then he
says, "Just wash it off real good, just rub it up and down." I know I'm in
terrible danger, but the snake feels hard and smooth. I love the feel of it. I
love the silky skin of its pink head shaped like a blind frog's head, and the
long shaft like a smooth enormous finger gloved in kid.

I lean my elbows on the sink and dunk the snake in the warm water and trace the
lovely curve of its head with my soapy fingers; and then suddenly something
happens. Tommy grabs my hands in his big ones and squeezes them hard around his
peter, and stuff spurts out of the end, dirtying the water in the basin. He
squeezes my hands on the peter and moans. Is he crying? I don't like this part,
but Uncle Tommy's gasping like he's been running, he won't listen and he won't
let go of my hands. The sleeves of my pajamas are wet, I'm trying to pull away
and he won't let me go, and I start to get scared, and I start to cry. And then
the door swings wide open and it's barefoot Grandma in her nightgown with her
hair all mashed flat on one side, saying "Tommy Cranfill, what in tarnation are
you doin' to that child? Pammy, you git yourself back into bed right this
minute."

I can't, though. In the shock of being discovered, to my intense horror and
shame I've wet my pajamas.

26

Little Pam's voice came abruptly into focus. "July 4. Today is the Fourth of
July. We had a church picnic in Happy Valley. I climbed up the falls. Tonight
they had fireworks at Scofield Beach and we watched them from the Point. July 5
-- you're crying," she blurted, sounding scared out of her wits. She couldn't
stand to see people cry, even other kids. She'd never seen Mom cry in her whole
life.

I lifted my head from the pillow and smiled shakily to reassure her. "Yeah, I
am, a little. It's okay to cry if you're sad, you don't have to be afraid of it.
Nothing bad will happen."

"Are you sad? What about?"

"I can't explain right now, but don't worry, everything's okay. You're not
making me sad. Go ahead, keep on reading."

So she did, nervously at first, then relaxing as the diary reabsorbed her
attention. I lay there feeling the heavy rise and fall of my chest, listening
accepting what I heard; and finally "August 9.5," she read, "Today I packed for
Louisville. I'm going to Granny's tomorrow by myself on the packet. That's all!
That's what I was writing when you came in!" She slapped the book shut and
beamed at me.

I sat up groggily; I was exhausted. "You're going, to Louisville tomorrow?" She
nodded. "Will you stay at Grandma's part of the time?"

Pam's face slipped a fraction. "I don't know. If Morn wants me to."

I circled the bed, sat beside her and pulled her against me fiercely. "If you
stay at Grandma's, here's what I want you to remember. You don't have to do
anything if it makes you feel bad. Not even if a grownup tells you to, and not
even if you've done it before, and not even if Mom gets mad at you: if it makes
you feel bad, don't do it. Refuse. Say no." I leaned back and looked into her
face, brushing her stringy hair back from her face. "Listen to me. This is
important. You can say no."

She frowned, puzzled; she'd been conditioned all her life to believe that
children weren't to bother, inconvenience, or disobey adults. She'd never been
tauht to protect herself, and-- because Tommy's abuse, visit after visit, got
consistently repressed -- she had no idea why I was telling her these things in
such a serious way. She said as much. "I don't get it."

"Never mind. Just remember what I. said. Promise."

"Okay, I promise." And then, seemingly taking herself by surprise, she lunged
against me in an awkward hug.

I hugged her back, stood up carefully; I felt heavy as lead. "Time to go now.
Thanks very, very much for reading me your diary, honey, it's been a huge help.
Did you leave much out?"

"Only a little part, about a book I read."

"Was it Shane?" She ducked her head, cringing, but nodded. "I remember. I don't
blame you a bit. 'Bye now. Have a great time at Granny's." I tottered to the
doorway, smiled back at beaming Pam, and closed the program down. "Julie? Did
you get all that?

"I did indeed. My phone's set up; we can talk right now, as soon as you're out
of your gear."

27

Julie asked dutifully, "Are you okay?" but clearly she was dying to debrief me,
and when I nodded she cut straight to the chase. "When Pain Junior read the
entry for June 3, you slipped into deep trance. Pure alpha waves for eight
minutes, then back to normal. What happened?"

I told her. "I don't think it was a dream. I think it was a memory, triggered by
the reference to Grandma and Uncle Tommy."

"Do you know, in all this time you've never mentioned an uncle named Tommy."

Hadn't I? I reflected. "There didn't seem to be any reason to. He was Dad's
half-brother, 'the son of Grandma and Edgar the Souse. Much younger. A very
minor figure in my life, or so I thought. I had totally forgotten that Tommy
lived in Grandma's house during the years More used to make me sleep over there
on Saturday nights. He was between marriages and probably out of a job. But that
was later; in the memory -dream? --whatever, he was wearing Navy dress blues.
And I couldn't have been more than three, I had to reach up for the doorknob. By
the time I've been talking about, four-plus years later, he wasn't in the Navy
anymore."

Julie had her hot-on-the-trace look; her eyes were glittering. "As a child, how
did you feel about Uncle Tommy?"

I was almost too tired to think, but I tried. "Actually, I kind of liked him
when I was little-- he played with me some, and I always thought he was
good-looking. Though funnily enough, when I cleaned out the house after More
died I came across some old holos of him and was surprised at how...dissolute
and seedy he looked in them. Not handsome at all. Even in a portrait made when
he was about twelve there was something wrong, and I know when I was a kid I
thought he looked so cute in that picture. It fits, doesn't it? Julie--" I
leaned toward the screen. "What do you think? Memory or dream? It didn't seem
like a dream. No symbols, perfect narrative coherence --"

"Well, it wasn't REM sleep. As I said, according to the readings you weren't
asleep at all; it was a trance state, a very deep involuntary hypnotic trance.
Now, I know you're done in, and we'll stop soon, but I'd really like to hear
anything at all that you can remember about Uncle Tommy."

At once, to my surprise, a scene popped into mind. "Okay, here's something. One
time -- I was ten or eleven-- I wrote, 'Souls I want to save: Uncle Tommy' on
the fly leaf of my Bible. And I've always remembered I did that, because Mom
told him I'd written it. According to her, Tommy said he appreciated that and
he'd think about it real hard. She was pleased, she thought Tommy was pretty
much of a bum. She was pleased with me for wanting to save his soul." Thinking
about it, I got agitated. "I know exactly where I was sitting -- in the living
room, at the hallway end of the couch -- when Mom told me she'd done this,
beaming with approval. I pretended not to mind, but I was embarrassed and
stricken to realize she'd been snooping into my private stuff."

Julie shook her head, imagining our family. ,'Why do you suppose you wanted to
save his soul? That seems kind of unexpected."

A wave of exhaustion broke and sloshed around me; the volume of energy required
in heavy-duty therapy was a constantly renewed astonishment. In the midst of
this wave I sat and remembered how Little Pam had read out the facts of her
encoded life, in terse declarative sentences, skipping over the one place where
her feelings were so intense they'd forced her to try to put them into words.
But out of this assembling heap of dry little facts a static charge had built up
and built up until the bolt had struck and stunned me. Only me: Little Pam felt
nothing, as I'd felt nothing when I was Little Pam. Her feelings had been shoved
down into a place where they would fester in the dark for nearly thirty years,
because for thirty years there was nobody in her life who wanted to help her not
suffer so much, or so she believed without question.

I answered Julie as best I could. "I don't know why. Maybe I thought, if he was
saved, he'd leave me alone. There's something perverse about it, though, some
kind of `Love your enemy' thing. Tommy had an awful life, both Dad's brothers
did." I looked up, startled by a thought. "I just remembered, one of my aunts
told me Tommy's first wife was an abused child, she'd been raped by her
uncle...her uncle, by God!"

"Did Tommy rape your" Julie asked quietly.

"Nobody ever raped me. Actually, Tommy was a diabetic; he may have been impotent
as an older man. He had two wives but no children, that I know. But he must have
gone for me, every time I spent the night at Grandma's while he was living
there. Every time." I flashed on the menacing presence I had sensed leaning
above me on the couch, that first day Little Pam had read to me from her diary,
and gagged with claustrophobia, though what he might have done to me then I
couldn't begin to guess. "Except," I added, "maybe not during the fifth grade,
the year before this one. He might not have been living there that year."

Julie nodded alertly. "You kept the fifth-grade diary." "Right." "Is Uncle Tommy
still alive?"

"No, not for years. He died of something to do with the diabetes. He didn't take
care of himself at all."

My exhaustion was by now so extreme that Julie quelled her curiosity with a
visible act of will and pushed back her chair. "We can go over it some more
tomorrow. You need to get to bed. Just one last thing I'm not clear about," she
couldn't help adding. "Your uncle abused you sexually, that now seems clear. You
hated going to the place where he had access to you. Yet you speak of him
without anger, almost with compassion. The anger and fear are all directed at
your mother. Any thoughts about that?"

"What she did was worse," I replied at once; and for the first time in all my
years of off-again on-again therapy with Julie I broke down in her presence, or
at least her videopresence; I started to cry.

Julie had witnessed my exchange with Little Pam on the subject of crying, of
course; but that was the bradshaw. This was the two of us, therapist and
patient, and she tried not to appear to gloat as the tough nut cracked at long
last before her eyes.

As for me, I was past caring. "Tommy was an ignorant simp. He used me but he
didn't mean me any harm, he didn't know I'd be damaged, I'd lay odds he was
Granddaddy Edgar's sex toy as a kid-- maybe all those kids were, nobody in Dad's
family knew a boundary from a turnip. But Morn loved me, and I loved her. She
really loved me, and she betrayed me over and over and over. With Tommy the
stakes weren't that high, there was no true betrayal, but with Mom --"

I broke off, sobbing like a baby. "Take your time," said Julie, kindly if
avidly.

"Mom knew I didn't want to sleep over at Grandma's," I said when I could talk,
"but she made me go. She didn't care why I didn't want to, she only cared about
not offending Grandma by letting me stay both nights at Granny's house. We'd all
three get in the taxi and drive over there, and we'd have dinner, and then Morn
and Dad would get back in another taxi and go back to Granny's in the dark, and
leave me behind. And pick me up for church the next morning." By now I was
bawling again.

"And you don't blame your father for allowing this to happen."

I mopped my face with a handful of tissues and blew my nose. "Whew. No. Well,
yes -- but not in the same way. He didn't care whether I went over there or not.
Mom was the one who cared about preserving appearances--and, to be fair, about
not hurting Grandma's feelings."

"But your feelings didn't matter."

"No," I said, and in spite of everything I still felt surprise at this sign that
somebody-- Julie -- thought they did. "Dad didn't stop her, true, but if I'd
appealed to him...I just hit on this: if I'd pleaded with him. to stick up for
me, if I'd told him how much I didn't want to go, he might very well have
intervened with More."

"But you didn't."

"It never, ever occurred to me. Like it never occurred to me to sit with him in
church that time. On some level of my childhood, he just didn't exist."

28

The next morning I called in sick. Then I called Julie and put her off till
after the weekend. Felled like a tree by the bradshaw's revelations, I lay all
day on the living-room couch in my pajamas and bathrobe, the tattered Dutch girl
quilt tucked round me. I turned off the phone, kept the blinds closed, ignored
the mail, and generally treated the reaction I was having like a bad case of
flu, rousing myself only to feed the robins their disgusting lumps of dogfood.

I'd been napping, I guess, when the doorbell woke me. I glanced at the clock:
nearly midnight. Whoever was out there must be on urgent business, but I simply
didn't care. Another long brrrring! sounded, and another, while I lay in my
apathy, wishing the importunate caller away. Instead, brief silence was followed
by the scrabbling of a key in the lock; and, before I could bestir myself enough
to rise from my bed of misery and confront the intruder, a stumpy figure in a
hooded cloak had slipped inside and closed the door. "Hello, my dear, hello. No,
no, don't get up."

Hefn can see perfectly in the dark, but I can't; I sat up and reached above my
head to switch on a lamp. And there, of course, was Humphrey, his gray visage
bristling and peering out of the draped maroon folds of his cavernous hood. He
made a hilarious sight, but I wasn't in a laughing mood. "You look exactly like
one of Tolkien's dwarves in that getup. What brings you here at this hour? Or at
all, I might have asked, since as far as I knew he should have been in Santa
Barbara.

"I am traveling incognito." (This did make me grin in spite of everything.)
Throwing back the hood, he shrugged off his cloak and stepped over it to
straddle the Hefn chair I kept around the house for him. "Did I not say I would
stay in touch? And has your phone not been turned off all day? I was not
speaking idly, Pam Pruitt. There are things I must now tell you. Now.
Immediately."

I wouldn't have thought it possible, but the main thing Humphrey had to tell me
made me feel worse than I did already. It turns out that my mother hadn't
sacrificed and saved to buy me my bradshaw. The bradshaw represented no vote of
confidence from beyond the grave, because Mom hadn't given it to me at all. He
had.

"I always found it do you say hard to swallow that a mathematical gift like
yours, so powerful, so elegant, could be only a mere means of escaping a painful
situation. I did not believe that such a gift could simply be discarded, when
escape was no longer required," he explained, all unawares, while I clutched the
quilt tight around me, blindsided by this new grief. "When we began to market
the bradshaws, it came to my attention that a bradshaw, used effectively, could
restore power to people who had for various reasons of trauma lost their power.
And the more attention I paid, the more it seemed to me that some of these
people were not unlike you, and some of this lost power was not unlike your own.

"But I saw also difficulties. The frontal attack was not a way to success. Nor
could the customer be coerced. In every instance, the lost power returned
incidentally, a byproduct of a freely chosen confrontation with the source of
trauma. Unhappily I was forced to conclude that to press a bradshaw upon you and
urge you to use it, in a deliberate attempt to regain what you had lost, must
result in failure."

As far as I knew, this was more by a good deal than human psychologists had
figured out about bradshaws. While most of my mind remained stunned, some small
piece registered Humphrey's summary, aware of how much it would mean to Julie.

"I schemed therefore, I plotted. The Bureau needed you back. The work needed you
back. I needed you, most urgently." His wide flat eyes gleamed and his oddly
jointed arms made stabbing gestures in the air; I'd rarely seen him so excited
and never so thoroughly pleased with himself. "There were other reasons why I
could not openly, directly, as myself, make a bradshaw available to an employee
of the Bureau of Temporal Physics -- you understand? -- but when Frances Pruitt
became ill I saw an opportunity. I obtained a copy of her will, and I altered
it."

I felt a stab of hope. "Did Mom provide you with the copy of her will? 'Did she
know what you were up to?

"No no no, indeed not, my dear, she knew nothing. I never spoke with her of
this. But when she died, I acted. I substituted the altered will for the genuine
one, and supplied a voucher for the bradshaw. There was then nothing more to be
done, but to hope that you would use the bradshaw soon, 'and that using it would
restore your gift.,,

Humphrey crowed on about the excellent chance that remembering what Tommy did
had indeed unblocked my intuition, and how he would set about testing me to find
out. I sat hunched in the semidarkness, so angry I didn't trust myself to speak.
Telling him how I felt would have been pointless; the delicate crime he'd
perpetrated, by raising false hopes about my mother's faith in me, isn't the
sort of thing a Hefn understands. By his own lights he had done well; and I
think I realized even then that false hopes were part of what. had empowered me
to work past the obstacles and tolerate the terrors of running the bradshaw.

But if I refrained from remonstrating, still it was impossible to forgive
Humphrey, that evening, for his stupendous presumption. I refused to let him
test me then and there; and after he'd swirled the wizard's cloak around himself
and stumped upstairs, to work at my computer complex till morning, I had no
heart to put myself properly to bed. I fell on my side, pulled the quilt up
under my chin, and went back to sleep where I lay.

29

Two DAYS AFTER Humphrey's visit, Pope Miguel I and Klas-Goran Ormelius, Head of
the United Nations, met with Alfrey and Pomfrey at Thingvellir, the Hefn base in
Washington DC. Miguel declared that he could no longer in good conscience
counsel the Catholic countries to patience and restraint. Ormelius wasted no
time making threats he couldn't carry out; he simply told the aliens that U.N.
forces were inadequate to deal with widespread social chaos of the type we were
beginning to see, and pleaded with them to lift the Baby Ban, as the sole means
of avoiding a complete breakdown of international order.

The Hefn acknowledged the realities of the world situation by agreeing that on
New Year's. Day 2038, a little more than six months from that day, they would
either present humanity with a final plan for keeping its numbers within bounds
-- or return to the moon and the ship and depart, leaving Earth to her fate.

30

The next evening I called Liam to discuss the BTP's redefined situation. The
Hefn and their human collaborators now had just about half a year in which to
throw everything we had at discovering the workable population-control strategy
that had so far eluded us. The months ahead would be filled with very hard work.
We all understood that everything was at stake; we had to find some model in the
past with power to instruct and inspire the future, if human beings were to have
a future on Earth at all. No one at the Bureau of Temporal Physics was
despairing; the urgency of the situation only made them all the more determined.
That was how I felt myself. Probably it was how the scientists on the Manhattan
Project felt, and the ones at NASA before the first moon shot.

Deadline pressure had already had a terrifically energizing effect on Liam. My
call found him in top form, bursting with resolve and fresh ideas. He'd made
plans to leave in a few days for the Four Corners region, on the powerful hunch
that if we could discover exactly why the Anasazi people had abandoned the Mesa
Verde area and migrated south, that information might shed some useful light on
our own problem.

I'd vaguely assumed that all the really popular mysteries must have been cleared
up years ago. "You mean we still don't know what happened to the Anasazi? What
have the anthropologists been doing with themselves all these years?"

"Nobody ever went down there with a transceiver to find out. They've got about
fifteen different competing theories about what happened, and turns out they all
feel like it would be cheating not to figure it out from potsherds and
tree-rings."

I shook my head at this interesting example of human behavior. "I thought we
were supposed to call them Hivasu or something now. The Anasazi."

Liam grinned. "Hisatsinom. Not at present. What have you been doing with
yourself, all that time in Utah? Anasazi is the Navajo word for 'ancient
enemies,' but the Anasazi are ancestral to the modern Pueblos. It's political,
it goes back and forth. This week it's correct to say Anasazi. Did you just call
up to chat, or have you got something to report?"

So I told him about my "breakthrough." Even in the midst of his planning Liam
had enough surplus energy to find the story fascinating, and was quick to claim
credit for the part he'd played: "Didn't I tell you you and the kid should work
together?"

"You did. You were right, O Genius. Thank God you stayed and shot that second
bradshaw."

A look passed between us, establishing that Liam was by this time actually glad
he'd given in, but wasn't going to come right out and say so. Instead he said,
"You're better off knowing, then?"

"Yes, technically I'm sure I'm better off, and Julie thinks so too. I can't
honestly say I feel better yet, but I think I will eventually."

"Yeah, well, that's an article of faith with Julie. Ironic, isn't it? Your room
leaves you the bradshaw, and here it turns out that in a way the primary villain
of the story is your mom!"

"Ironic indeed." I thought how this result would have infuriated her, how
angrily she would have defended against it, and felt a wrench of grief like a
muscle cramp.

Liam, alert and sensitive today, said at once, "Funny how the personal life
always perks right along regardless, whether or not the world's going to hell."

"You've noticed that too, eh?"

"Have I ever." He paused. "So things are pretty good? Speaking personally."

"I'd say," I said carefully, "speaking personally, that things are better than
might be expected, but that all this will take some getting used to. How are
things in Santa Barbara? How's Eddie?"

"Eddie's okay. Listen, I should have told you first thing-- Humphrey showed up
here this morning."

"I know, I talked to him."

"He's calling a general meeting out here, did he tell you that?"

I nodded. "He wants me to come out. Are the dates on the calendar yet ?"

"Not the exact dates. Whenever Jeffrey and Godfrey come out of hibernation--
couple of weeks, something like that. We're supposed to be prepared to drop
everything when the word comes down. I'll be back from New Mexico by then,
processing my data like mad to get it ready in time to present."

"And I'll be up to traveling by then. Let me know if you want some help with the
data."

"Thanks, I might at that. What did you mean, 'up to traveling by then?'"

I felt a wicked smile spread across my face, the first in a long, long time.
"I've scheduled some elective surgery. Nothing to be concerned about, just
something I should have taken care of a long time ago. And don't ask," I said as
he opened his mouth to do so, "I want to surprise you." I didn't add that I
would also have a far more amazing, more wonderful surprise to spring --
purchased at a brutally high price, but none the less wonderful in the end for
that.

Liam, however, looked smug. "You're getting a cosmetic remake as a Hefn. I knew
it would come to this eventually." And when I only grinned, refusing to take the
bait -- and when he sensed I was about to break the connection -- he forestailed
me by saying quickly, "So, uh, how's avian life perking along in a world gripped
in crisis? How's Gimpy?"

I was being manipulated, but this time I didn't mind. "Gimpy, my lad, is the
greatest success in my entire career as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Rehabilitation
Permit sub-permittee. I told you her foot opened up and her eye was better?
Well, just in the past two days she started eating by herself -- and whole
pieces of dogfood, so her beak must have healed up."

"Ever figure out what was wrong with it?"

"Broken, I guess. Sprained? The upper and lower halves didn't meet right.
Anyway, that's not all. Her broken wing had healed too, she'd started flying a
little, but just low to the ground. Well, because of all the cats I'd been
making the other robins sleep in the apricot tree --"

"How do you make a bird sleep in a tree?"

"You grab it and throw it up in the air as hard as you can, right at dusk. It'll
come down in a tree and stay there. Anyway. Gimpy couldn't fly or perch, so
she'd been spending the night on the back of a folded lawn chair. Then yesterday
afternoon she went missing."

"And you went looking for a corpus delecti."

"I did. But I finally found her next door, way up in a big lilac bush. She
looked like she'd climbed up there using both wings and both feet, but she was
up higher than my head in the thing, and I figured if she could do that, maybe
she could perch on a tree limb. So last night I stuck her up in the apricot
tree, to see what would happen. And she held on! She spent the whole night up
there, and flew down out of it this morning when I went out to serve breakfast,
looking for all the world like a normal bird. Well, a normal bird who'd been
through a truly terrible experience." I laughed; I was extremely happy about
Gimpy's recovery. "And she gobble, d up her dog food, and I haven't seen her
since. I think maybe she's taken off. Two of the others have. She finally got
over her cold."

When I concluded my tale with an enormous yawn, Liam relented and said goodnight
and see you soon. I repeated my offer to help analyze Anasazi data if time were
tight, and hung up.

What I'd refrained from saying-- though he would know soon enough -- was that I
wouldn't be frittering away the next frenetic months in exile in Salt Lake City.
After flying out to Santa Barbara for Humphrey's meeting, I'd be staying for the
duration.

Still wiped out from the upheavals of the past few days, I told the phone not to
bother me till further notice and went straight to bed. No sooner had I burrowed
under the covers and doused the light than I was out cold; and almost that soon
the kaleidoscope of fractal dreams began to revolve, transmigrating one pattern
into the next, just as it had each night since the night of Humphrey's midnight
visit.

Pure fractals were all it showed me. I didn't dream about my relatives at all.

for Shayne Bell