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HUMAN HISTORY

Lucius Shepard

Stories, I'm told by old Hay (who's told enough of them to pass for an expert), must have a beginning and middle and end that taken altogether form a shape, a movement that pleases the mind of the listener. And so in order to give my chronicle of those weeks in Edgeville and the land beyond a proper shape, I must begin before the beginning, create a false beginning that will illuminate the events of later days. I'm not sure this is the most truthful way to go about things. Sometimes I think it would be best to jump right in, to leap backward and forward in chronology like an excited man telling his story for the first time; but: since I've never written anything down before, I guess I'll play it conservative and do as old Hay has advised.

This happened in the summer, then, when the apes and the tigers keep mostly to the high country, the snow peaks east of town, and strangers come from Windbroken, the next town north, and from even farther away, with goods for trade or maybe to settle, and it's more or less safe to ride out onto the flats. Edgeville, you see, is tucked into a horseshoe canyon of adobe-coloured stone, its sides smoothly dimpled as if by the pressure of enormous thumbs; the houses and shops—shingle-roofed and painted white for the most art—are set close together toward the rear of the canyon, thinning out toward the mouth, where barricades of razor wire and trenches and various concealed traps are laid. Beyond the canyon the flats begin, a hardpan waste that appears to stretch into infinity, into a line of darkness that never lifts from the horizon. Out there live the Bad. Men and the beasts, and on the other side … well, it's said by some that the other side doesn't exist.

I'd taken a little roan out onto the flats that morning to look for tiger bones, which I use for carving. I rode east toward the mountains, keeping close to the cliffs, and before I'd gone more than a couple of miles I began to hear a mechanical hooting. Curious, I followed the sound, and after another mile I caught sight of a red car with a bubble top parked at the base of a cliff. I'd seen a couple like it last time I was to market in Windbroken; some old boy had built them from plans he'd gotten from the Captains. They were the talk of the town, but I didn't see much point to them—only place level enough to drive them was on the flats. Whoever was inside the car wore a golden helmet that sparkled in the sun. As I drew closer, I realized that the driver was pressing the middle of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, and that was causing the hooting noise. He kept it up even after I had pulled the roan to a halt beside the car, acting as if he didn't notice me. I sat watching him for half a minute, and then shouted, "Hey!" He glanced at me, but continued beating on the steering wheel. The sound was wicked loud and made the roan skittish.

"Hey!" I shouted again. "You don't quit doin' that, you gonna bring down the apes."

That stopped him … for a moment. He turned to me and said, "You think I care 'bout apes? Shit!" Then he went back to beating on the wheel.

The helmet had a funny metal grille across the front that halfway hid his face; what I could see of it was pinched, pale, and squinty-eyed, and his body—he was wearing a red coverall that matched the car's aint—appeared to be starved-thin. "You may not care 'bout 'em," I said. "But you keep up with that nonsense, they gonna start droppin' rocks down on you. Apes like their peace and quiet."

He stopped making his racket and stared at me defiantly. "Ain't gonna happen," he said. "I'm a man of destiny. My future is a thing assured."

"Yeah?" I said with a laugh. "And how's that?"

He opped open the bubble top and clambered out. The roan backed off a few paces. "I'm gonna cross the flats," he said, puffing up his chest and swaggering in place: you might have thought he was ten feet tall instead of the puny piece of work he was.

"That right?" I said, gazin' west toward nothing, toward that empty land and dark horizon. "Got any last requests? Messages to your kinfolks?"

"I 'spect you heard that before," he said. "You probably get lots out here tryin' to make a crossin'."

"Nope, never met anybody else that much of a damn fool."

"Well, you never met nobody with a map, neither." He reached into the car, pulled out some bedraggled-looking papers and shook them at me, causing the roan to snort and prance sideways. He glanced from side to side as if expecting eavesdroppers and said, "This world ain't nothing like you think it is … not a'tall. I found these here maps up north, and believe you me, they're a revelation!"

"What you gonna do with the Bad Men? Hit 'em over the head with them apers?" I got the roan under control and slipped off him; I must have stood a head taller than the driver, even with his helmet.

"They'll never spot me. I'm goin' where they ain't got the balls to go."

There was no point in arguing with a lunatic, so I changed the subject. "You ain't gonna have a chance to hide out from the Bad Men, you don't quit hootin' at the apes. What for you doin' that, anyway?"

"Just gearin' up," he said. "Gettin' up my energy."

"Well, I'd do it out away from the cliff if I was you."

He glanced up at the clifftop. "I ain't never seen them apes. What're they like?"

"They got white fur and blue eyes … least most of 'em. 'Bout the size of a man, but skinnier. And 'bout as smart, too."

"Now I don't believe that," he said. "Not one lick."

"I didn't neither." I said. "But I know someone who went up amongst 'em, and after he come back, well, I believed it then."

He looked at me expectantly. I hadn't been meaning to get into it, but seeing that I had nothing pressing, I told him a little about Wall.

"The man was huge," I said. "I mean I never seen anybody close to that big. He musta stood close to seven feet … and he wasn't just tall. He was big all over. Chest like a barrel, thighs like a bull. Man, even his fingers were big. Bigger'n most men's dinguses, if you know what I'm talkin' 'bout."

The driver chuckled.

"One eculiar thing. He had this real soft voice. Almost like a woman's voice, just deeper. And that just accentuated his ugliness. Shit, I seen apes better lookin'! He had these big tufted eyebrows that met up with his hairline. Hair all over him. He come from one of them ruined cities up to the north. A hard place, the way he told it. Lotta Bad Men. Cannibalism. Stuff like that. But he wasn't no savage, he was all right. Didn't say much, though. I figger he liked the apes 'bout as good as he did us."

"He went and lived with 'em, did he?"

"Not 'lived'," I said. "Not exactly. Kinda hung around 'em, more like. He was helpin' us, y'see. The apes they steal our babies, and he thought he might be able to get 'em back."

"And did he?"

The roan grunted and nuzzled the driver's chest; he swatted its nose.

"He said we wouldn't want 'em back, the way they was. But he told us a lot 'bout how the apes live. Said they had this cave where they … " I broke off, trying to remember how Wall had described it. The wind blew lonely cold notes in the hollows of the cliff; the sky seemed the visual counterpart of that music: a high mackerel sky with a pale white sun. "They'd taken the skulls of the people they'd killed, busted 'em up and stuck 'em on the walls of this cave. Stuck 'em flat, y'know, like flattened skull faces all over the walls and ceiling. Painted 'em all over with weird designs. Our babies, our kids, were livin' in the cave, and the apes, they'd go into the cave and fuck 'em. Girls, boys. Didn't make no difference. They'd just do 'em."

"Damn," said the driver, sympathizing.

"Now don't that sound like they smart like men?" I said. "Don't it?"

"Guess it does at that," he said after a bit. "Damn."

"You don't wanna mess with them apes," I told him. "I was you, I'd be movin' my car."

"Well, I reckon I will," he said.

There was nothing more I could do for him. I mounted up, swinging the roan's head so he faced toward the dark end of everything.

"What you doin' out here?" asked the driver.

"Just huntin' for tiger bones," I said. "I carve shit from 'em."

"Huh," he said as if this were a great intelligence. Now that he saw I was making to leave, he didn't want to let me go. I could tell he was scared:

"You don't think I'm gonna make it, do ya?" he said.

I didn't want to hex him but I couldn't lie. "Not hardly. It's a long way to forever."

"You don't understand," he said. "I got maps, I got secret knowledge."

"Then maybe you'll be all right." I wheeled the roan around and waved to him. "Luck to you!"

"Don't need it!" he cried as I started away. "I got more heart than that horse of yours, I got … "

"Take it anyway!" I shouted, and spurred the roan westward.

How did it happen, this world? Our ancestors decided they didn't care to know, so they told the Captains to take that knowledge from them. Maybe I would have done the same if I was them, but sometimes I regretted their decision. What I did know happened was that one day the Captains came down from the orbital stations and waked the survivors of a great disaster, brought them forth from the caves where they were sleeping, and told them the truth about the world. The Captains offered our ancestors a choice. Said they could live up on the stations or on the earth. A bunch of our ancestors flew to the stations to take a look-see: it must have been pretty bad, because not a one wanted to emigrate. The Captains weren't surprised; they didn't think all that highly of themselves or of their life, and our ancestors got the notion that maybe the Captains felt responsible for what had happened to the world. But no matter whether or not they were responsible, the Captains were a big help. They asked our ancestors if they wanted to remember what had happened or if they wanted to forget; they had machines, they said, that could erase memory. Our ancestors apparently couldn't live with the idea of all that death behind them, maybe because it was too close to deal with easily, and so they chose to forget. And they also chose further to reject many of the old world's advantages, which is why we have rifles and horses and hydroponics and no more … except for our hobbies (like the man in the gold helmet with his bubble car) and the hospitals. The hospital in Edgeville was a long silver windowless building where we went to get injections and also where we talked to the Captains. We'd punch a black stud on a silver panel and their images would fade in on a screen. It was almost never the same Captain, but they looked a lot alike and they wouldn't say their names. Ask them, and they merely said, "I am the Captain of the Southern Watch." They have these lean pale faces and wet-looking urplish eyes, and they are every one skinny and nervous and not very tall. The apes and the tigers? My guess is that there were animals in the sleeping caves, too. Our ancestors could have had the Captains do away with them; but maybe it was decided that enemies were needed to keep us strong. I used to hate our ancestors for that, though I suppose I understood it. They wanted a challenging life, one that would make us hardy and self-sufficient, and they got that sure enough. Gazing out from the Edge into that rotten darkness at the end of the flats, you had the idea you were looking back into that gulf of time between now and the destruction of the old world, and you'd get sick inside with the feelings that arose. That alone was almost too much to bear. And on top of that the Bad Men burned our houses and stole our women. The apes defiled our children, and the tigers haunted us with their beauty … Could be that was the worst thing of all.

How did this world happen?

That's the whole of what I used to know about human history, and even now I don't know a whole lot more. It wasn't enough to make a clear icture, but for seven hundred years it was all the knowing most of us wanted.

I woke one morning to the smell of snow in the air. Snow meant danger. Snow meant apes and maybe tigers. The apes used the snow for cover to infiltrate the town, and sometimes it was all we could do to beat them off. I rolled over. Kiri was still asleep, her black hair fanned out over the pillow. Moonlight streamed through the window beside her, erasing the worry lines from her brow, the faint crow's-feet from around her eyes, and she looked eighteen again. Visible on her bared shoulder was the tattoo of a raven, the mark of a duellist. Her features were sharp, but so finely made their sharpness didn't lessen her beauty: like a hawk become a woman.

I was tempted to wake her, to love her. But if it was going to be a big snow, soon she'd be up in the high passes, sniping at the apes filtering down, and she'd be needing all the sleep she could get. So I eased out of bed and pulled on my flannel shirt and denims, my leather jacket, and I tiptoed into the front room. The door to Bradley's room was open, his bed empty, but I didn't worry much. Here in Edgeville we don't baby our kids. We let them run and learn the world their own way. What little worry I did feel was over the fact that Bradley had lately been running with Clay Fornoff. There wasn't much doubt in anybody's mind that Clay would wind up a Bad Man, and I just hoped Bradley would have better sense than to follow him the whole route.

I cracked the front door, took a lungful of chill air and stepped out. Our house was at the back of the canyon, and the moonlight was so strong that I could see the shapes of separate shingles on the hundreds of roofs packed together on the slope below. I could see the ruts in the dirt streets brimful of shadow, the fleeting shapes of dogs, blazes of moonlight reflected from a thousand windows, and at the centre of it all, the silver rectangle of the hospital. Leafless trees stood sentinel on the corners, and darkness looked to be welling through the mouth of the canyon from the flats. If I strained my eyes, I thought, I might see eight thousand souls shining in their little frame shacks.

I walked at a brisk pace down through the town. The shadows were sharp, dead-black, and the stars glittered like points of ice. My boots made husking noises on the frozen dirt, and my breath steamed, turning into ice chips on my beard. From the sty in back of Fornoff's store I could hear the muffled grunt of some pig having a dream.

Fornoff's was a lantern-lit barnlike place, with sacks of meal and garden tools stored up in the rafters, the walls ranged by shelves stocked with every kind of foodstuff, most of it dried or preserved. Brooms, bolts of cloth, small tools, and just about everything else were stacked in corners or heaped in bins, and in the back was a cold box where Fornoff kept his meat. A group of men and women were sitting on nail kegs around the pot-bellied stove, drinking coffee and talking in low voices; they glanced up and gave a wave when I entered. Dust adrift in the orange light glowed like pollen. The fat black stove snapped and crackled. I wrangled up another keg and joined them.

"Where's Kiri at?" asked Marvin Blank, a tall, lean man with a horsy face that struck a bargain between ugly and distinctive; he had a sticking laster on his chin to cover a shaving nick.

"Sleepin'," I told him, and he said that was fine, he'd pick her a mount and fetch her when it came time.

The others went back to their planning. They were Cane Reynolds, Dingy Grossman, Martha Alardyce, Hart Menckyn, and Fornoff. All in their early to mid-thirties, except for Fornoff, who was beer-bellied and vast and wrinkled, with a bushy grey beard bibbing his chest. Then Callie Dressier came in from the back with a tray of hot rolls. Callie was about twenty-five, twenty-six, with a feline cleverness to her features. She had a deep tan, blackberry eyes, chestnut hair to her shoulders, and a nice figure. You could see her nipples poking up her wool shirt, and her denims couldn't have been any tighter. She was a widow, just moved to town from Windbroken, and was helping out at the store. According to Fornoff's wife, the reason she'd moved was to kick up her heels. Windbroken is fairly strait-laced compared to Edgeville. Among the population of Windbroken we had the deserved reputation of not being too concerned over who was sleeping with whom … maybe because having to deal with the apes and the tigers gave us a less hidebound perspective on the importance of fidelity. Anyway, I was made both pleased and nervous by Callie's presence. Kiri didn't mind if I got it wet away from home once in a while, but I knew how she'd react if I ever got involved with anyone, and Callie was a temptation in that regard: she had in her both wildness and innocence, a mixture that has always troubled my heart. And so when old Fornoff announced that he was assigning me and Callie to guard the front of the store, I was of two minds about it. Not that the assignment didn't make sense. What with Callie being new, me not being much with a rifle, and the store being hard to get at, it was robably the best place for us. Callie smiled coyly and contrived to nudge my shoulder with her breast as she handed me a roll.

I'd been intending to go back and wake Kiri myself, but the snow began falling sooner than I'd expected. Marvin Blank heaved up from his keg, said he was going to fetch her and stumped out. The others followed suit, and so it was that at first light, with snow whirling around us, I found myself sitting hip-to-hip with Callie in the recessed doorway, blankets over our knees and rifles at the ready. The sky greyed, the snow came in big flakes like bits of ragged, dirty wool, and the wind sent it spinning in every direction, howling, shaping mournful words from the eaves and gutters. All I could see of the houses across the street were intimations of walls and dark roofpeaks. It was going to be a bad one, and I didn't try to avoid Callie when she nestled close, wanting all the creature comforts I could get.

We talked a little that first hour, mostly just things such as "You got enough blanket?" and "Want some more coffee?" Every so often we heard gunfire over the wind. Then, just when I was starting to think that nothing much was going to happen, I heard glass breaking from the side of the store. I came to my feet and told Callie to stay put.

"I'm comin' with you," she said, wide-eyed.

"No," I said. "Someone's got to watch the front. Stay here. I'll be back in a minute."

Out in the wind, my beard and eyebrows iced up at once. Visibility wasn't more than a few feet. I kept flat against the wall until I reached the corner, then jumped out, levelling my gun. Nothing but whirling snow met my eye. I eased along the wall, my heart pumping. Suddenly the wind spun the flakes in a kind of eddy, clearing an avenue of sight, and I spotted the ape. He was standing about a dozen feet away beside a broken window, his fur almost the same dirty white colour as the snow, and he was carrying a bone club. He was a scrawny specimen, old, his fur worn down to the nub in patches, and the black mask of his face as wrinkled as a prune. Yet in the centre of his face were set two young-looking blue eyes. It's hard to think of blue eyes being savage, but these were. They blinked rapidly, seeming to semaphore rage and shock and madness, and their force stunned me for a split second. Then he came at me, swinging the club, and I fired. The bullet reddened his chest and blew him backward into a drift. I went over to him, keeping the rifle trained. He lay spread-eagled, looking up at the toiling sky. Blood was bubbling from his chest, miring his fur, and for a moment his eyes fixed on me. One hand clenched, his chest heaved. Then the eyes jellied and went dead. Snowflakes fell down to cover them. Watching them whiten, I felt a touch of regret. Not for him personally, you understand, just the sort of generalized, winnowing sadness you feel when you see death happen.

I walked back to the front of the store, calling as I went to Callie so she wouldn't think me an ape and shoot. "What was it?" she said as I settled next to her.

"Ape," I said. "An old one. He probably wanted to die, that's why he was tryin' for the store. They know the odds are against them this deep into town."

"Why'd he do that?" she said, and from the depth of her perplexity, the innocence of her question, I realized that she was so young and vital, it could never be made clear to her how apes and people will just up and grow weary of the world.

"Beats me," I told her. "Just crazy, I guess."

While we kept watch, she told me some about Windbroken. I'd only visited the town twice and hadn't thought much of it. Prettier than our town, that's for sure. With nicer houses and picket fences and larger trees. But the people acted as if that prettiness made them superior: seems they don't have quite enough danger in their lives to keep them real. Callie didn't strike me that way, however, and I figured that she had found her rightful place in Edgeville.

She cuddled closer to me, and before long she slipped a hand under the blanket and rested it on my thigh, moving her fingers a bit, enough to get my dingus twitching. I told her to stop it, and she grinned. "What for?" she asked. "Don't you like it?"

"That ain't the point." I lifted her hand away. "I'm married."

"Oh, I heard 'bout how married you are from Miz Fornoff." She shifted away, acting huffy. "Says you 'bout as married as a tomcat."

"That ol' woman don't know nothin"!"

"Don't tell me that! She ain't the only one talks 'bout you." Her grin came back, sexy and mischievous. "Clare Alardyce, Martha's girl? You oughta hear what she says! And Laney Fellowes, and Andrea Simpkins—she told me 'bout the time you and her went out on the flats and … "

"Well, so what?" I said angrily. "It's no business of yours what I do!"

"Not yet."

"Not ever!"

"Why?" She asked this with the stubborn rectitude of a child denied a treat. "Don't ya think I'm pretty?"

I couldn't say she wasn't, so I got by with "You're all right."

"If I'm just all right," she said, pitching her voice Jiusky, "how come you try to see down my shirt every time you come in the store?"

I shrugged and stared off into the snow. "Just 'cause a man takes a peek, don't mean he's gonna buy the goods."

"You don't have to peek," she said.

The odd tremor in her voice made me turn to her. She had opened her coat and was unbuttoning her shirt, exposing the plump upper slopes of her breasts: they were as brown as the rest of her and looked full of juice. She slipped loose another button, and I could see one of her nipples, erect, the dark areola pebbled from the cold. I swear to God, I think my mouth started to water. She had the shirt mostly unbuttoned now, and she took my free hand and brought it over to cup one breast. I couldn't help giving it a squeeze, and when I did, she arched into the pressure, closed her eyes and let out a hiss of leasure. Next thing I knew, I was bending to her and putting my mouth where my hand had been, and she was saying my name over and over, saying it soft so I could just hear it above the wind and ushing my head down into a sweet warmth that smelled of harsh soap and vanilla water. And then she stiffened, froze right up, and was ushing me away, whispering my name with a different kind of urgency. "What's the matter?" I asked, and she nodded her head toward the street, her lips parted, eyes bugged. I looked around and forgot all about Callie Dressler's breasts.

Standing in the middle of the street was a tiger … and not just an ordinary tiger, if any of them can be said to be ordinary. He appeared to be more than twice the length of a man, and his head would have come at least to my shoulder. His fur was pure white, and his stripes were vaguely drawn the way some lines are in a delicate charcoal sketch. In the thick eddying snow he kept vanishing and reappearing as would a dream creature or the image of a beast surfacing in a magic mirror. But he was no dream. The wind brought his heavy scent to me, and for the time he stood there, I lived in terror that the wind would shift, that he would twitch his head toward us, burn me with those yellow eyes like sad crystals.

I had seen tigers prowling the slopes of the mountains at a distance, but never had I been so close to one, and it seemed that the vast weight of his life was diminishing mine, that if he were to stand there long enough I would be crushed and transformed into some distillate of being. I had no thought for my gun, for Callie, and barely any thought for my own safety. All my thoughts were as insubstantial and flighty as the flakes whirling about his massive head. He remained motionless for several seconds, testing the wind. His tail lashed, he made a small thunder in his throat, and then he sprang off along the street, disappearing into a tornado of snow that spun up from one of the drifts.

My chest ached, and I realized I had stopped breathing. I continued staring at the spot where the tiger had been. I turned to Callie, my mouth open. She lifted her eyes to mine, and a scratchy sound came from her throat. "I … " she said, and gave her head a shake.

"I know," I said. "God almighty damn!"

Her face seemed to have been made even more beautiful by the apparition of tiger, as if the keenness of the sight had carved away the last of her baby fat, hollowing her cheeks, bringing out the sensitivity and soulfulness of the woman she would become. In that moment she looked to have captured something of the tiger's beauty, and maybe she had, maybe we both had, because she was staring at me as intently as I at her, as if she were seeing a new element in my face. I don't remember wanting to kiss her, I just did. The kiss lasted a long, long time. Like the tiger, it was not ordinary. It was a kind of admission, that kiss, an ultimate acknowledgement, and it was far more of a threat to Kiri and me than had been my fumbling with Callie's breasts. It was an event that would be very hard to pull back from. We stood most of the remainder of the watch in silence, and we didn't get cosy again. We talked stiffly of inconsequential matters and were overly solicitous of one another's comfort. Both of us knew that what might have been a fling had gotten out of hand. We had a tiger between us, now.

It had been bad up in the passes, Kiri said. Charlie Hatton had been bitten in the neck, Mick Rattiger's skull had been crushed. Four men dead altogether. She stripped off her clothes and stood by the bedroom window, staring out at the moonstruck snow, her tawny skin drenched in whiteness. Duelling scars on her stomach and arms. Lean and small-breasted, with long fluid muscles running from thigh to buttock, and wings of black hair pulled back from her face: she posed a polar opposite to Callie's almost teenage beauty, her butterfat breasts and berry mouth. She slipped beneath the covers, lay on her back and took my hand. "How was it with you?" she asked.

I wanted to tell her about the tiger, but I didn't have the words yet, the words with which to tell her, anyway. My incapacity had only a little to do with Callie; I wanted to tell Kiri in a way that would open her to her own beauty. She'd never been a happy woman; too much of her was bound up by the disciplines of a duellist, by the bleakness of her youth in the northern ruins. She expected death, she believed in the lessons of pain, and she lived by a harsh code that I could never fully understand. I think she looked upon Brad and me as an aberration on her part, a sign that she had grown soft. "Shot an ape," I said. "That's 'bout it."

She made a dry, amused noise and closed her eyes.

"I saw Bradley," I said. "He did fine, but I think he's off with Clay again tonight."

"He'll be all right."

She turned on her side to face me and caressed my cheek, a sign that she wanted to make love. Directness was at odds with her nature: she lived by signs, hints, intimations. I kissed her mouth, the tiny crow tattoo on her shoulder. Pressing against me, her body felt supple, sinuous, all her muscles tensed as if for battle. There's always been a mean edge to our lovemaking, and that night was no exception. She seemed to be fighting me as I entered her, and she clawed my back so fiercely, I had to pin her wrists above her head, and when she cried out at the end, it sounded like a cry of victory, a celebration of triumph over her body's resistance to pleasure.

She went to sleep almost immediately afterward, and I sat on the edge of the bed, writing at the night table by the light of the moon. I was trying to write some words for Kiri, talking not about the tiger, but about how it had been that night with her. I had, you see, come to the realization of how much I loved her, how much I wanted to split open her hard shell and make her bloom at least for a season. Whatever I felt for Callie, I decided, was nothing by comparison, no matter if it was real.

But thinking all this made me restless and unhappy, and no words would come. So I dressed, grabbed a rifle and went for a walk, going knee-deep through the snowcrust, ploughing ahead, having no real destination in mind. The town was quiet, but there were maybe a dozen fires flickering atop the canyon walls, and from those fires came the howling of apes mourning their dead. They'd be coming back with the next storm. The rooftops were mantled with snow; snow ledged the windows and marbled the boughs of the leafless trees, and the sound of my breath seemed harsh and unnatural in all that white stillness. I turned a corner and came in sight of the hospital, its silver metal waits flashing and rippling with the moonlight. Seeing it, I realized that therein lay the only soul to whom I could speak my heart, the only one who was bound to listen and who would be sure to feel the current in my words. I walked to the door, put my hand flat against an inset silver rectangle, and after a second the door slid open with a hiss. I stepped into the anteroom. Soft light began to shine from the walls, and a whispery voice asked if I needed treatment.

"Just a little conversation," I said.

The room was about fifteen by fifteen, and a large screen occupied most of the rear wall, fronted by three chairs of silver metal and some sort of foam. I plopped into one and punched the black button. The screen brightened, dissolving to a shot of a solitary Captain. A woman. It's difficult to tell sometimes what sex they are, because they all wear the same purple robes, almost the exact dark shade as their eyes, and their hair is uniformly close-cropped, but I knew this one for a woman, because when the picture had come into focus, she had been turned a bit sideways and I could see that her robe was ushed out a tad in front. Her skin was the colour of the winter moon, and her cheeks were so hollowed that she looked toothless (yet she was pretty in an exotic way), and her eyes were too large for her face, a face that registered a gloomy, withdrawn quality during the entire time we talked.

"What's your name?" I asked; I always hoped one of them would just say to hell with it and come clean.

"I am the Captain of the Southern Watch." Her voice was so soft as to be toneless.

I studied her a moment, thinking where to begin, and for some reason I decided to tell her about the tiger. "Listen," I said. "I want your promise that you're not goin' to go off and hurt yourself after I'm done."

She appeared reluctant but said, "You have my word."

You had to get this out of them before you told them anything fraught with emotion, or else they were liable to kill themselves; at least that was what I'd heard all my life. Their guilt over what happened to the world was to blame … Or so I thought at the time. But sometimes I would think that we were to them like the tigers were to us: beautiful strong lives that wounded them by merely being.

"Ever see a tiger?" I asked.

"Pictures of them," she said.

"Naw, I mean up close … so close you could smell it." .

The idea seemed to trouble her: she blinked, her mouth thinned and she shook her head.

"I saw one that close this morning," I said. "Twenty, twenty-five feet away."

I went on to tell her of its heart-stopping beauty, its power, how I couldn't breathe on seeing it; I told her what had happened as a result between me and Callie. I could see my words were hurting her—her bony fingers curled into fists, and her face grew strained—but I couldn't stop. I wanted to hurt her, to make her feel as diminutive and worthless as the tiger had made me feel. I knew this wasn't fair. No matter if the Captains were responsible for the way things were, they weren't responsible for tigers; I was sure that either tigers or something like them must always have existed to help whomever was around to keep things in perspective.

By the time I finished, she was trembling, leaning away from me, as if my words had a physical value that was beating her back. She glanced from one side to the other, then—apparently finding no help for her condition—she turned back to me. "Is that all?" she said.

"Why do you talk to us?" I asked after a pause. "You obviously don't enjoy it."

"Enjoy?" The concept seemed to perplex her. "You are our lives."

"How can that be? We don't know your names, we never see you in the flesh."

"Do the important things of your life all lie close at hand?"

I thought about it. "Yeah."

She shrugged. "Then in this we are different from you."

I tipped my head, trying to see her in a new light, to read the world behind that pale mask. "But you want us close at hand, don't you?"

"Why do you think that?"

"Just a theory of mine."

She arched an eyebrow.

"Y'see," I said, "you got us livin' with a limited technology, but whenever somebody wants to know somethin' new, a hobby, you let 'em investigate whatever it is … less if s somethin' too big. I figure you're lettin' us work our way to you."

Her eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

"I've talked to a whole buncha you people in my time, and I get the idea you're ashamed of what you are, that you don't want us to see it … 'least not 'til we're strong enough to swallow whatever it is you're hidin'."

"Suppose that is the truth," she said. "How would you feel about us?"

"Probably not much different from now."

"And how is that?"

"Tell you the truth. I don't feel much 'bout you one way or the other. You're just faces and voices is all, and you don't have any real mystery to you like there is to stuff like God. You're like distant cousins who never come to visit, and who nobody misses at family reunions."

The hint of a smile lifted the corner of her mouth. I had the idea my answer had pleased her, though for no reason I could fathom.

"Well," I said, standing, picking up my rifle. "It's been fun."

"Goodbye, Robert Hillyard," she said.

That irritated me, her knowing my name and the reverse not being true. "Why the hell won't you tell us your names?" I asked her.

She almost smiled again. "And you claim we have no mystery," she said.

Days, I worked in the hydroponic shed, a long, low building of caulked boards and plastic foam two streets east of the hospital. The shed and its contents were my hobby, and I liked breathing its rich air, mixing chemicals, watering, strolling along the aisles and watching the green shoots that had pushed up. I would hum, make up songs and forget about everything else. Nights—at least for the next couple of weeks—I spent with Kiri. She had a duel coming up, and she was working herself up into that fierce calm in which she did her best fighting. It wasn't to be a duel to the death—she had stopped fighting those when Brad came along—but you could get hurt badly enough in a first-blood duel, and she was deadly serious. Kiri was one of the best there was. It had been years since she'd lost, but now, in her thirties, she had to work harder than ever to keep her edge. Sometimes there was just no being around her during her preparation. She would snap and snarl and dare you to say Boo. On several occasions I thought about dropping over to Fornoff's and seeing how Callie was doing; but I managed to resist the impulse. Kiri needed me, and I knew that pretty soon she would have to give up duelling, and then she'd need me even more to help her get through that time. So whenever it became necessary for her to have some solitude, I would take a rifle and climb up to the north wall of the canyon and see if I could pick off an ape or two. The north wall was higher than the south, where the apes tended to congregate, and was cut off from the ape encampments by a deep cut that we had mined with explosives and otherwise booby-trapped. Though it was a clear shot, you couldn't see the apes very well unless they started dancing around their fires; even then, the range was so extreme, you had to be lucky to score a hit. Funny thing was, they didn't seem to mind when you did; they just kept dancing.

One night Brad and I climbed up to the top of the north wall. He was a lanky kid of thirteen and favoured Kiri some, having her black hair and thin, hawkish face. We staked ourselves out behind a pile of loose rocks, rested our rifles across our knees and sat back to enjoy the night air. The weather had warmed a little; the sky was clear, and the stars were winking with such intensity they looked to be jumping from place to place. It was so quiet, the silence had a hum. There were fires on the south wall, but no apes in sight, and we got to talking about this and that. I could tell there was something weighing on his mind, but he couldn't seem to spit it out. Finally, though, he screwed up his courage and told me what was troubling him.

"Y'know Hazel Aldred?" he said.

"Big ol' girl?" I said. "Kinda pretty, but on the heavy side?"

"Yeah." He dug his heel into some loose gravel and set to carving out a trench.

"Well, what about her?"

"Nothin'," he said after a bit; he stared off toward the south wall.

I studied him and made a guess. "Don't tell me you been getting' rone and lowdown with ol' Hazel?"

"How'd you know?" He pushed hair back from his eyes and stared at me fiercely. "Who told you?"

"It don't take no genius to figure it out." I aimed at a distant fire and squeezed off an imaginary round. "So what about it?"

"Well … " More digging with his heel:

"Didn't go so hot … That it?"

He ducked his eyes and mumbled. "Uh-huh."

I waited for him to say more, and when he kept quiet, I said, "Am I gonna have to tell this story?"

Silence.

"Lookit, Bradley," I said. "I been gettin' my share for a long time now, and I'm here to tell you, it don't always work out so hot, no matter how many times you done it."

"That ain't what Clay says."

"Shit! Clay! You believe everything he tells you?"

"Naw, but … "

"You're goin' on like you do!"

On the south wall a solitary ape capered for a moment in front of a fire, looking like a spirit or a devil dancing inside the flame. To ease the pressure on Brad, I took aim and sent a round in the ape's direction.

"Dija get him?"

"Don't see him," I said. "But I think he just went to ground."

Wind sprayed grit into our faces.

"Anyway," I went on. "I can't tell you the times it's gone bad for me with the ladies. Mostly the limps, y'know. Too much drinkin", or just a case of nerves. That what happened to you?"

"Naw." Bradley trained his rifle on the south wall, but had no target; his mouth was set grim.

"Guess I can't think of but one other thing that coulda happened," I said. "Maybe you was a little too excited to begin with."

"Yeah," he said sharply.

"And how'd she take that?"

He worried his lower lip. "She told me to clean off her dress," he said finally. "And everybody laughed."

"Everybody?"

"Clay and the rest."

"Damn, Bradley," I said. "I ain't gonna tell you not to go down with a crowd. I mean it happens that way sometimes. But it sure is a lot nicer to do it with just you and whoever."

"I ain't never gonna do it again," he said sullenly.

"Now I doubt that."

"I ain't!" He fired a round into nowhere and pretended to watch it travel.

"Why you feel that way?"

"I dunno."

"Talk to me, boy."

"I just don't know what to do," he said in a rush. "I mean I seen it, I seen guys hop on and it's over real quick, and the girl she acts like ain't nothin' happened. So what's the damn point?"

He fired a couple of more rounds. Some apes were dancing around a fire near the canyon mouth, but he hadn't been aiming that way.

"Listen up, son," I said. "Like I said, I ain't gonna tell you not to do what you been doin'. But I am gonna give you some advice. You listenin'?"

"Yes, sir." He rested the rifle across his knees and met my eyes in that steady, sober way of his mother's.

"All right." I leaned my rifle against my shoulder. "You find yourself a girl who wants to be with you, just you and nobody watchin', and then you take her somewhere nice, maybe up to that storage shack near Hobson's by the rear wall. Got a coupla boards missin', and if you look out, you can see the waterfall."

"Yeah, I know."

"All right. If you start gettin' too excited, you try to think 'bout somethin' else. Think 'bout your mama's duel or somethin' that don't have nothin' to do with the subject at hand. And then, when the time comes and she wants you in her, you go in slow, don't just jab it home, y'know. And when you're there, when you're in all the way, don't go crazy all at once. Just move your hips the tiniest bit, so little you barely feel you're movin', and then pull out maybe an inch and hold there, and then sink back in and pin her, grind into her, like all you want is to be right where you are or maybe more so. And y'know what that'll do?"

He was all eyes. "Un-uh?"

"No matter what happens after that," I told him, "like as not, you'll have been the first one to treat that little girl like you wanted to be all through her. Most guys, y'see, once they get in the saddle they don't think about what the girl's hopin' to feel. You do what I say, chances are she's gonna think you 'bout the best thing to come along since berries and cream."

"You swear?"

"You're hearin' the voice of experience," I said. "So take it to heart."

He mulled it over. "Y'know Sara Lee Hinton?"

"Oh, yeah!" I said. "Now that's the kinda girl you wanna be dealin' with, not an ol' ploughhorse like Hazel." I mussed his hair. "But you ain't got a chance with Sara Lee."

"I do, too!" he said defiantly. "She told me so."

"Well, go to it then," I said. "And remember what I told you. You got it in mind?"

"Yeah," he said, and grinned. I gave him a shove. "Let's do some shootin'." Before long, the apes came out in force and took to dancing around their fires like black paper dolls brought to life. We fired round after round with no measurable result. Then as Brad fired, one of the apes did a dive and roll, and went out of sight. I'd seen that move many times; it was a part of their normal style of dancing. But I figured the boy could use another boost in confidence, and I gave him a hug and shouted, "Goddamn! I believe you got him!"

It was three nights later that Clay Fornoff turned Bad Man. Everyone had been expecting it since his trouble with Cindy Aldred, Hazel's big sister. Clay had been sweet-talking her, trying to persuade her to go out onto the flats with him … not that she needed much persuasion. Cindy's reputation was no better than her sister's. But even a girl like Cindy likes a little sweet talk, and she was playing hard to get when Clay lost his patience. He slapped her silly, dragged her into the bushes and had her rough and mean. The next day Cindy accused him, and he made no bones that he had done it. He could have suffered lenty, but Cindy must have been soft on him, or else he had something on her that stayed her anger. She asked for mercy, and so Clay was put on warning, which meant that we would all be watching him, that one more slip would buy him a one-way ticket onto the flats.

That night there was a full moon, a monstrous, golden round that looked to be hovering just out of reach, and whose light made the canyon walls glow like they were made of light themselves. I was ambling along with Brad past Fornoff's, which had closed down a couple of hours earlier, taking the air, talking, when I heard something crash inside the store. In the corral a few doors down, the horses were milling, ushing against the fence. I shoved Brad behind me and eased around the corner of the store, holding my rifle at the ready. A shadow sprinted from the rear of the store and crossed the street to the corral, then ducked down so as to hide in the shadows. I aimed, held my breath, but before I could fire, Brad knocked the barrel off-line.

"It's Clay," he whispered.

"How the hell you know?"

"I just can tell!"

"That makes it worse. Stealin' from his daddy's store." I brought the rifle up again, but Brad caught hold of it and begged me to hold back.

The shadow was duck-walking along beside the corral, and the horses, their eyes charged with moonlight, were moving in tight circles, bunched together, like eddies in a stream.

"Let go," I said to Brad. "I won't hurt him."

The shadow flattened against the wall of the dress shop next to the corral. I pushed Bradley back around the corner, aimed at the shadow and called out in a soft voice, "Don't you move now, Clay Fornoff!"

Clay didn't make a sound.

"Get out in the light where I can see you," I told him. "Or I'll kill you quick!"

After a second he did as I'd said. He was a muscular blond kid some five of six years older than Brad, and he was wearing a sheepskin coat that his daddy had bought him up in Windbroken. His mouth was full and etulant, his eyes set wide apart in a handsome face, and in his hands were a shotgun and several boxes of shells. The wind lifted his long hair, drifted it across his eyes.

"What you plannin' to do with all the firepower?" I asked, walking out into the middle of the street.

He gave no reply, but stared daggers at Brad.

"I 'spect you oughta throw down the gun," I said.

He heaved it toward me.

"Shells, too. Just drop 'em, don't throw 'em."

When he had done what I asked, I walked over and gave him a cold eye. "I turn you in," I said, "they'll have you walkin' west without boots or blankets. And if you stick around, I'm bound to turn you in."

He wasn't afraid, I give him credit; he just stared at me. "Lemme take a horse," he said.

I thought about that. If I were to tell old Fornoff what had happened, I figured he'd be glad to pay the price of the horse. "All right," I said. "Go ahead. And take the gun, too. Your daddy would want that. But I see you back here, I ain't gonna think twice 'bout how to handle it. Understand?" All he did by way of thanking me was to grunt. I kept him covered while he cut out a bay and saddled it. Brad hung back, acting like he was having no part of the matter, but saying nothing. I didn't blame him for not facing up to Clay, I would probably have done the same at his age.

Clay mounted up, pulled hard on the reins, causing the horse to rear. His head flew back, his hair whipping in the breeze, and the moon struck him full in the eyes, making it seem that wicked fires had suddenly been kindled there. For that split second I could feel how it would be to give up on the law, to turn Bad Man, to take a long ride west of anywhere and hope you come to something, and if you didn't … Well, for the length of the ride at least you lived as wild and strong and uncaring as a tiger. But Clay spoiled the moment by cursing Brad. He wheeled the bay around, then, and spanked it into a gallop west, and in a second he was gone, with only a few puffs of frozen dust settling on the street to show he'd ever been.

Brad's chin was trembling. God only knows what part of life he had just watched riding out of sight. I patted him on the shoulder, but most of my thoughts were arrowing toward the next morning. It wasn't going to be easy to tell old Fornoff that his son had gone to the Devil for a shotgun and a couple of boxes of shells.

The night before Kiri left for Windbroken and her duel, a couple of months after Clay Fornoff had gone Bad, I tried to talk to her about the future, about when she planned to quit fighting, but she wouldn't have any part of it, and instead of gentling her as I'd intended, I just made her mad. We went to bed strangers, and the next morning she gave me a cold peck on the cheek and a perfunctory wave, and stalked out the door. I can't say I was angry at her … more frustrated. Sooner or later, I knew, she was going to be in for a bad time, and that meant bad times for me as well. And perhaps it was my frustration with this sense of imminent trouble that led me to seek out trouble on my own.

That same afternoon I dropped into Fornoff's to buy some seed. Fornoff and his wife were off somewhere, and Callie was the only one on duty. There were a few other customers, and she couldn't leave the counter to go in the back where the seed was stored, so I told her to send it over to the hydroponics building when she had time. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the counter; her shirt belled, exposing the slopes of her breasts; every little move she made caused them to sway and signal that they were sweet and easy and free for the evening.

"What time you want 'em?" she asked.

"Any ol' time's fine," I said. "Whenever's convenient."

"Well, when do you need 'em?" She laid heavy emphasis on the word 'need".

"Ain't nothin' urgent," I said. "But I would like 'em by tomorrow."

"Oh, we can manage that," said Callie, straightening. "I don't get 'round to it 'fore evenin', I'll walk 'em over myself after work."

"Whatever," I said, pretending that I hadn't picked up on the none-too-subtle undertone of the conversation; even after I had left the store, I kept up the pretence and pushed the matter from mind.

The main hydroponics shed was set directly behind the hospital, a long, low building of tin and structural plastic, so low that if you were standing up by my house, the hospital and a low ridge would have blocked it from view, even though it enclosed nearly a dozen acres. Inside, there was corn and tomatoes and lettuce and at the rear, next to the office—a little room with tin walls and a couple of ictures, a desk and a cot where I slept whenever Kiri was away—I'd erected some trellises and was growing grapes. I enjoyed the peace of the place and liked to walk up and down the aisles, checking the nutrients in the tanks, squeezing the tomatoes, petting the corn, generally just feeling at home and master of it all. The greenness of the leaves coloured the air, creating a green shade under the ultraviolets, and the muted vibration of the generator created the rumour of a breeze that made all the plants whisper together. I spent a lot of time in the office reading, and that evening I was sitting at my desk with my feet up, reading a book called The Black Garden written by a man from Windbroken, a fantasy about the world that used to be. I'd read it before, more than once, as had most other readers in the town. Books were expensive to make, and there weren't many of them. Most pretended to be histories, recounting the innumerable slaughters and betrayals and horrors that supposedly comprised our past, but this one was a refreshing change, featuring a number of colour illustrations, several depicting a vast underground chamber floored with exotic plants and trees, threaded by canopied athways, and the strange dark area that lay beyond it, a lightless cavern choked with black bushes and rife with secret doors that opened into little golden rooms where the inhabitants of the place explored the limits of pleasure. Their idea of pleasure, according to the author, was kind of nasty, but still it beat all to hell the stories of massacres and mass torture that you usually ran across in books. Anyway, I was leafing through the pages, wondering if what the author had written bore any relation to the truth and marvelling once again at the detail of the illustrations, when Callie poked her head in through the office door.

"Well, ain't you cosy?" she said, and came on in. "I left the seed out front." She glanced around the room, her eyes lingering on the cot. "Got yourself a regular home away from home here, don'tcha?"

"S'pose I do." I closed the book, looked at her, then, feeling antsy, I got to my feet and said, "I gotta check on somethin'."

I went out into the shed, fiddled with some dials on the wall, tapped them as if that were meaningful. At this point I wasn't sure I had the will or the need to get horizontal with Callie, but then she came out of the office, went strolling along an aisle, asking questions about the tanks and the pipes, touching leaves, and watching her, seeing her pretty and innocent-looking in the green darkness of my garden, I realized I didn't have a choice, that while she had not been foremost on my mind lately, I'd been thinking about her under the surface so to speak, and whenever a gap cleared in the cloudiness of my daily concerns with Kiri and Brad, there Callie would be. She walked off a ways, then turned back, face solemn, a hand toying with the top button of her shirt. I knew she was waiting for me to say or do something. I felt awkward and unsure, like I was Brad's age once again. Callie leaned against one of the tanks and sighed; the sigh seemed to drain off some of the tension.

"You look worried," she said. "You worryin' 'bout me?"

I couldn't deny it. I said, "Yeah," and by that admission I knew we would likely get past the worry. Which worried me still more. "It's Kiri, too," I went on. "I don't know … I … "

"You're feelin' guilty," she said, and ducked her head. "So am I." She glanced up at me. "I don't know what's happenin'. First off, I just wanted some fun … That's all. And I wouldn't have felt guilty 'bout that. Then I got to wantin' more, and that made me feel bad. But the worse I feel"—she flushed and did a half-turn away from me—"worse I feel, the more I want you." She let out another sigh. "Maybe we shouldn't do nothin', maybe we should just go our own ways."

I intended to say, "Maybe so," but what came out was, "I don't know 'bout you, but I don't think I could do it."

"Oh, sure you could," she said, downcast. "We both could."

I knew she meant what she was saying, but there was also a challenge in those words, a dare for me to prove what I had said, to prove that what I felt had the power of compulsion. I went over and put my hands on her waist; I could feel a pulse all through her. She looked up, holding my eyes, and I couldn't do anything else but kiss her.

There's a lot of false in everything that people do, particularly when it comes to the dealings between men and women. There's games played, lies traded, and fantasies given undue weight. But if those things are combined and cooked by the passage of time in just the right way, then a moment will arrive when everything that's false can get true in a flash, when the truest love can be made out of all that artifice, and once the games and the lies have been tempered into something solid and real, the process keeps on going, and you discover what worlds have changed, which lives have been diminished, which ones raised to glory. We can't know in advance what we make when we go to making love. If we could, maybe there would be a whole lot less of it made. But chances are, knowing in advance wouldn't change a thing, because those moments are so strong they can overwhelm most kinds of knowledge. Even knowing all I do now, I doubt I could have resisted the forces that drew Callie and me together.

We went into my office, and we lay down on the cot, and seeing her naked, I recognized that her sleek brown body was at home here among the growing things, that this was the place for us, surrounded by corn and green leaves and tomatoes bursting with juice, whereas Kiri's place was in that sad, barren little cabin up on the slope, with the apes howling above and a view of emptiness out the bedroom window. I felt that what Callie and me had was something growing and fresh, and that what I had with Kiri was dry and brittle and almost gone, and though it hurt me to think that, it pleasured me to think it, too. I liked being with a woman who was gentle, who didn't force me to take what I wanted, one whose cries were soft and full of delight, not tormented and fierce. I liked the easy way she moved with me, the joyful greed with which she drew me in deep. I knew there were going to be trials ahead, but I wasn't ready to confront them. Kiri would be gone for ten days, and I wanted to relish each and every one.

There was a good deal of little girl in Callie. One minute she could be tender, all concern and care and thoughtfulness, and the next she might become petulant, stubborn, wilful. That girlish side only came into play in good ways at the beginning—in bed, mostly—and it plumped up my ego to be able to feel paternal toward her, giving me a distant perspective on her that was as loving in its own fashion as the intimate perspective we shared when we lay tangled and sweaty on the cot in my office. And, too, she brought out the boy in me, a art of my character that I'd had to keep under wraps for the duration of my marriage. Love with Callie was a kind of golden fun, serious and committed, untainted with desperation. It wouldn't always be just fun; I was aware of that, and I was sure we would have our ups and downs. Yet I thought at the core of what we were was that tiger, that emblem of beauty and power, something that could be whirled away in the snow, but would always return to buck us up no matter how painful or difficult the circumstance.

However, I had no idea of the difficulties that would arise when Kiri returned from Windbroken,

One afternoon I came into the house whistling, direct from Callie's arms, and found Brad sitting in a straight-backed chair by the closed door of the bedroom. His sombre, look cut through my cheerful mood, and I asked why he was so low.

"Mama's home," he said.

That knocked me back a step. I covered my reaction and said, "That ain't nothin' to be all down in the mouth about, is it?"

"She lost." He said this in almost a questioning tone, as if he couldn't quite believe it.

There was nothing cheerful I could say to that. "She all right?"

"Got a cut on her arm is all. But that ain't what's bad."

"She's grievin', is she?"

He nodded.

"Well," I said. "Maybe we can nudge her out of it."

"I don't know," he said.

I ran my hands along my thighs as if pushing myself into shape, needing the feel of that solidity, because everything I had been anticipating had been thrown out of kilter. It seemed I could feel the weight of Kiri's despair through the wood of the door. I gave Bradley a distracted pat on the head and went on in. Kiri was sitting on the edge of the bed, bathed in the sunset that came russet through the shade, giving the air the colour of old blood. Except for a bandage around her bicep, she was naked. She didn't move a muscle, eyes fixed on the floor. I sat beside her as close as I dared, hesitant to touch her; there had been times she'd been so lost in herself that she had lashed out at me when I startled her.

"Kiri," I said, and she shivered as if the sound had given her a chill.

Her face was drawn, cheeks hollowed, lips thinned. "I should have died," she said in a voice like ashes.

"We knew this time was coming."

She remained silent.

"Damn, Kiri," I said, feeling more guilt and self-recrimination than I had thought possible. "We'll get through this."

"I don't want that," she said, the words coming out slow and full of effort. "It's time."

"Bullshit! You ain't livin' up north no more."

Her skin was pebbled with the cold. I forced her to lie down and covered her with blankets. Then, knowing the sort of warming she most needed, I stripped and crawled in with her. I held her close and told her I didn't want to hear any more crap about it being her time, that here in Edgeville just because somebody lost a fight didn't mean they had to walk out into the Big Nothing and die. And I told her how Brad was relying on her, how we both were, feeling the bad place that the lie I'd been living made inside my chest. I doubt she heard me, or if she did, the words had no weight. Her head lolled to one side, and she stared at the wall, which grew redder and redder with the declining sun. I think she could have willed herself into dying right then, losing had made her so downhearted. I tried to love her, but she resisted that. I guess I was grateful not to have to lie in that way as well, and I just held onto her and talked until it got late, until I fell asleep talking, mumbling in her ear.

I had thought during the night that my attentions were doing Kiri some good, but if anything, her depression grew deeper. I spent day after day trying to persuade her of her worth, sparing time for little else, and achieved nothing. She would sit cross-legged by the window, staring out over the flats, and from time to time would give voice to savage-sounding chants. I feared for her. There was no way I could find to penetrate the hard shell of misery with which she had surrounded herself. Logic; pleading; anger. None of these tactics had the least effect. Her depression began to communicate to me. I felt heavy in my head, my thoughts were dulled and drooping, and I couldn't summon the energy for even the lightest work. Despite my concern for Kiri, I missed Callie—I needed her clean sweetness to counteract the despair that was poisoning me. I managed a couple of fleeting conversations with her during the second week after Kiri's return and told her I'd get out as soon as I could and asked her to take the late shift at the store, because it would be easier for me to get free after work. And finally one night after Kiri had taken to chanting, I slipped out the door and hurried down through the town to Fornoff's.

I stood outside in the cold, waiting until the last few customers and then old Fornoff had gone, leaving Callie to close up. Just as she was about to lock the door, I darted inside, giving her a start. She had her hair up and was wearing a blue dress with a small check, and she looked so damn good, with her plush hips flaring from that narrow waist, I wanted to fall down and drown inside her. I tried to give her a hug, but she. pushed me away. "Where the hell you been?" she said. "I been going crazy!"

"I told you," I said. "I had to … "

"I thought you was gonna tell her 'bout us?" she shrilled, moving deeper into the store.

"I'm gonna tell her!" I said,beginning to get angry. "But I can't right now. You know that."

She turned her back on me. "I don't mean nothin' to you. All that sweet talk was just … just talk."

"Goddammit!" I spun her around, catching her by the shoulders. "You think I been havin' a wonderful time this last week? I been livin' in hell up there! I wanna tell her, but I can't 'long as she's like she is now." It stung me to hear myself talking with such callousness about Kiri, but strong emotion was making me stupid. I gave Callie a shake. "You understand that, don'tcha?"

"No, I don't!" She pulled away and stalked off toward the storeroom. "Even if everything you say's true, I don't understand how anyone could be as peculiar as you say she is!"

"She ain't peculiar, she's just different!"

"Oh, well!" She shot me a scornful look. "I didn't know she was different. All I been hearin' 'til now is how she can't satisfy you no more."

"That don't mean she ain't good-hearted. And it don't mean she's peculiar. You know damn well I never said I didn't care 'bout her. I always said she was someone I respected, someone I loved. Not like I love you, I admit that. But it's love all the same. And if I have to kill her so we can get together, then it's sure as shit gonna kill whatever I feel for you." I came toward her. "You just don't understand 'bout Kiri."

"I don't wanna understand!"

"Where she comes from it's so bad, times get hard, they kill the weak ones for food, and when they feel they're worthless, they'll take a walk out into nowhere so they won't be a burden. I know it's hard to understand what that kinda life does to you. I didn't understand for a long while myself."

Her chin quivered, and she looked away. "I'm scared," she said after a second. "I seen this before up in Windbroken, this exact same thing. "Cept it was the woman who's married. But it was the same. The man she loved, not her husband, this boy … When she couldn't leave her husband 'cause he was took ill, he like to gone crazy." Tears leaked from her eyes. "Just like I been doin"."

I started for her, but she backed into the dimly lit storeroom, holding up a hand to fend me off. "You keep away from me," she said. "I don't need no more pain than I got right now."

"Callie," I said, feeling helpless.

"Naw, I mean it." She kept on backing, beginning to sob. "I'm sorry for what I said about her, I truly am. I do feel bad for her. But I just can't keep on bein' self-sacrificin', you hear? I just can't. If it's gonna be over, I want it to be over now."

It was funny how everything we said and did in that dusty old store, in that unsteady lantern light, with the pot-bellied stove snapping in the background, seemed both ultimately false, like a scene from a bad lay, and ultimately true at the same time. How it led us toward the one truth we were, how it commanded us to make every lying thing true. The things I said were things I couldn't keep from saying, even though some of them rang like tin to my ear.

"Damn, Callie," I said, moving after her into the storeroom. "You just gotta give it some time. I know it looks bad now, but believe me, it's gonna work out."

She fetched up against the wall next to a stack of bulging sacks of grain; the sacks were each stamped with fancy lettering and the icture of a rooster, and seemed to be leaking their faded colours up to stain the air the grainy brown of the burlap. A barrel full of shovels, blades up, to her right, and coils of rope on pegs above her. She let her head droop to one side as if she didn't want to see what would happen next,

"You believe me, don'tcha?" I said, coming up to her, losing the last of my reason in her smell of warmth and vanilla water, pulling her hips against mine. "I want to," she said. "God knows, I want to."

Her breasts felt like the places where my hands had been formed, her mouth stopped my thirst. Berry lips and black eyes and brown skin all full of juice. I didn't know her, but I felt she knew me, and sometimes it seems that's the most of love, believing that the other sees you clear. I hitched up her skirt, muffling her protests with my mouth, and wrangled down the scrap of a thing that covered her heat, and then I lifted her up a bit and pushed inside, pinning her against the rough boards. She was like honey melting over me. I tangled a hand in her hair, yanking back her head and baring her neck. I kissed her throat and loved the simple sounds she made. In the dimness her dazed expression looked saintly and her movements were frantic, her big rear end pounding the planking, one foot hooked behind my knee. "Oh, God! I love you, Bob," she said. "I love you so much." The shovel blades were quivering in the barrel, the coils of rope were jiggling; a trowel suspended from a nail started to clank in rhythm with us. It was a cluttered act, bone-rattling and messy. Our teeth clicked together in a kiss, and my palm picked up splinters as I groped for purchase on the wall. But it was pure and urgent and the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. Callie began saying "love" every time I plunged into her as if I were dredging love up from the place it had been hiding. And she said other things, too—gushes of breath that might have been words in a strange windy language, a language whose passion made me feel twice the man I was and goaded me to drive harder into her. Then she was pushing at me, saying "Oh, God," her tone suddenly gone desperate, her expression no longer dazed, but horrorstruck, saying, "Stop it … stop!" and staring past my shoulder.

"What is it?" I asked, trying to gentle her, but she shoved me hard and I slipped out of her. I turned, my cock waving stupidly in the air, and saw Kiri standing at the door in her black duelling clothes, her face stony with anger.

"Kiri," I said, trying to stuff myself back into my pants, feeling shame and fear and sorrow all at once.

She whirled on her heel and stalked toward the door.

"Kiri!" I stumbled after her, buttoning my pants. "Wait!"

I caught at her shoulder, spinning her half around, and before I could speak another word, she hit me three times, twice in the face, and the last—a blow delivered with the heel of her hand to the chest—taking my wind and sending me onto my back. Something black hovered over me as I lay curled on the floor, fighting to breathe, and when my vision cleared, I saw Kiri's dark face looming close.

"Can you hear me?" she asked in a voice empty as ashes.

I nodded.

"What I'm doing now," she said, "isn't because of this. It's because of who I am. You're not to blame yourself for what I do. Are you listening?"

Uncomprehending, I managed to gasp out, "Yes."

"Are you sure? What I'm going to do isn't because of you and … the girl," She made "the girl" sound like "the worm" or "the rat".

"Wha … " I gagged, choked.

"But I will not forgive what you've done," she said, and struck me in the jaw, sending white lights shooting back through my eyes and into my skull. When I regained consciousness, she was gone.

It took me most of that night to discover that Kiri had left Edgeville, that she'd taken one of Marvin Blank's horses and ridden out onto the flats. I knew she was gone for good. I would have ridden after her straightaway, but I didn't want to leave without telling Brad, and he was nowhere to be found. I decided I'd give him a couple of hours, and then I was going, no matter whether he had returned or not. I sat on the bed, with Callie beside me, and we waited, each minute like a glass prison that lasted too long to be measured except by its weight and its silence. Callie had put on her riding clothes, and I'd quit trying to persuade her to stay behind. Her arguments were sound: it was as much her fault as mine, we were in this together, and so forth. I didn't want to go alone, anyhow. That was the main reason I'd left off arguing with her. The honourable reason, the reason I kept telling myself was the most important one, and maybe the one that had the most chance of working out to be true, of being the kind of hopeful lie that breeds a passionate truth, was that I needed to be honest with Brad about Callie, about everything that had happened, because that was the only way that any good could come out of it for him, for Callie and me. Having her along was part of that honesty. To be considering all this at the time may appear self-absorbed, but I have always been a pragmatic soul, and though I cared about Kiri, I didn't expect to see her again; I knew that whenever she made a decision, she decided it to death, and by giving thought to Brad and Callie, I was hoping to salvage something of the mess I'd made. It might be that I didn't deserve anything good, but we were foolish eople, not evil, and our lives were hard enough without demanding erfection of either ourselves or one another. Living on the Edge, you learned to make the best of things and not waste too much time in recriminations, and you left the indulgence of self-pity to those who could afford the luxury of being assholes.

Brad came home about an hour after first light, dishevelled and sleepy-looking, his hair all stuck up in back. He stared at me, at my bruises, at Callie, and asked where his mama was.

"Lef s go find her," I said. "I'll tell you what happened on the way."

He backed away from me, his pale face tightening just like Kiri's might have. "Where's she gone?"

"Listen to me, son," I said. "There'll be time later for you to get all over my butt if you want. But right now findin' your mama's what's important. I waited for you 'cause I knew you'd want to help. So let's just go now."

Callie eased back behind me as if Brad were hurting her with his stare.

"She's rode out," he said. "That it?"

I said, "Yeah."

"What'd you do?"

"Bradley," I said. "Ten seconds more, and I'm gone."

He eered at Callie and me fiercely, trying to see the rotten thing we'd done. "Hell, I reckon I don't need no explanation," he said.

I could write volumes about the first days of our ride; nothing much happened during them, but their emptiness was so profound that emptiness itself became intricate and topical, and the bleakness of the land, the frozen hardpan with its patches of dead nettles and silverweed, the mesas rising in the distance like black arks, became a commentary on our own bleakness. The mountains faded into smoky blue phantoms on the horizon, the sky was alternately bleached and clouded grey. Now and then I'd glance at Callie on my left, Brad on my right. With their dark hair flying in the wind and their grave expressions, they might have been family, and yet they never spoke a word to the other, just maintained a remorseless concentration on the way ahead. By day we followed Kiri's sign, taking some hope from the fact that she wasn't trying to cover her tracks. Nights, we camped in the lee of boulders or a low hill, with wind ghosting from the dark side of forever, and our cooking fire the only light. Snow fell sometimes, and although most of it would melt by the time the sun was full up, what had collected in the hoofprints of the horses would last a while longer, and so in the mornings we would see a ghostly trail of white crescents leading back in the direction of home.

The first night out I let Brad vent his anger over what had happened, but it wasn't until the second night that I really talked with him about it. We were sitting watch together by the fire, our rifles beside us, and Callie was asleep beneath some blankets a few yards away, tucked between two boulders. Despite Kiri's parting gift of absolution, I took the blame for everything; but he told me that Kiri wouldn't have said what she had unless she'd meant it.

"She woulda gone ridin' sooner or later," he said. "She wanted you to know that. But that don't mean I forgive you."

"Whatever," I said. "But I 'spect you're liable to forgive me 'fore I forgive myself."

He just sniffed.

"I never told you I was perfect," I said. " 'Fact, ain't I always tellin' you how easy it is for men and women to screw each other up without meanin' harm to nobody? I thought you understood about all that."

"Understandin' ain't forgivin'."

"That's true enough," I said.

He shifted so that the firelight shined up one side of his face, leaving the other side in inky shadow, as if his grim expression were being eclipsed. His lips parted, and I thought he was going to say something else, but he snapped his mouth shut.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Nothin'," he said.

"Might as well spit it out."

"All right." He glared at Callie. "She shouldn't oughta be here. I mean if we find mama, she ain't gonna want to see her with us."

"That may be," I said. "But Callie's got her own needs, and she needs to be here." Brad made to speak, but I cut him off. "You know damn well if your mama don't wanna be found, we ain't gonna find her. We all hope we find her, and we're gonna try hard. But if we don't, then it's important for every one of us that we did try. You may not like Callie, but you can't deny her that."

He gave a reluctant nod, but looked to be struggling over something else.

"Don't hold back now," I said.

"I thought … " He turned away, probably to hide his face; there was a catch in his voice when he spoke again. "I don't understand why … Why you and mama had to … Why you … "

"I can't tell you why this happened. Shit, I never even could figure out how things got started 'tween me and your mama. The two of us together never seemed to make any damn sense. We loved each other but I think love was something that came from need, 'stead of the other way around."

Brad jerked his thumb toward Callie. "It make more sense with her?"

"It might have, bad as that may sound to you. But now … now, I don't know. This all mighta killed it. Maybe that's how it should be. Anyhow, that ain't nothin' we have to deal with this minute."

The wind made a shivery moan down through the rocks, and the flames whipped sideways. Brad lowered his eyes, scooped up a handful of dust, let it sift through his fingers. "Don't guess there's any more to be said."

I let his words hang.

"I keep thinkin' 'bout Mama out there," he said after a bit. "I keep seein' her like … like this little black dot in the middle of nowhere." He tossed dust into the fire. "Y'figure anything lives out here?"

"Just us, now." I spat into the fire, making the embers sizzle. "Maybe a tiger or two what wanders out to die."

"What 'bout Bad Men?"

"Why'd they want to be way out here? It's more likely they're livin" north of Edgeville up in the hills."

"Clay told me he'd met somebody lived out here."

"Well, Clay wasn't no big authority now, was he?"

"He wasn't no liar, either. He said this fella come in once in a while to buy shells. Never bought nothin' but shells. The fella told him he lived out on the flats with a buncha other men. He wouldn't say why. He told Clay if he wanted to learn why, he'd have to come lookin" for 'em."

"He's just havin' some fun with Clay."

"Clay didn't think so."

"Then he was a fool."

Brad gave me a sharp look, and I had the feeling he was seeing me new. "He ain't a fool just 'cause you say he is."

"Naw," I said. There's a hell of a lot more reason than that, and you know it."

He made a noise of displeasure and stared into the flames. I stared at them, too, fixing on the nest of embers, a hive of living orange jewels shifting bright to dark and back again as they were fanned by the wind. The glow from the fire carved a bright hollow between the two boulders where Callie was sleeping. I would have liked to have crawled under the blankets with her and taken whatever joy I could in the midst of that wasteland; but Kiri was too much on my mind. I wished I could have limited my vision of her to a black dot; instead, I pictured her hunkered down chanting in the darkness, making her mind get slower and slower, until it grew so slow she would just sit there and die.

I straightened and found Brad looking at me. He met my eyes, and after a long moment he slumped and let his head hang; from that exchange I knew we had been thinking pretty much the same thing. I put my hand on his arm; he tensed, but didn't shrug it off as he might have the night before. I saw how worn down and tired he was.

"Go and get some sleep," I told him.

He didn't argue, and before long he was curled up under his blankets, breathing deep and regular.

I lay back, too, but I wasn't sleepy. My mind was thrumming with the same vibration that underscored the silence, as if all the barriers between my thoughts and the dark emptiness had been destroyed, and I felt so alive that it seemed I was floating up a fraction of an inch off the ground and trembling all over. A few stars were showing as ale white points through thin clouds. I tried to make them into a constellation, but couldn't come up with a shape that would fit them; they might have been the stars of my life, scattered from their familiar pattern, and I realized that even if we could find Kiri, I was never going to be able to put them back the way they had been. Life for me had been a kind of accommodation with questions that I'd been too cowardly or just too damn stupid to ask, and that was why it had been blown apart so easily. If Kiri hadn't been the victim of the iece, I thought, having it blown apart might have been a good result.

I made an effort to see what lay ahead for us. The way things stood, however, there was no figuring it out, and my thoughts kept drifting back to Kiri. I stared off beyond the fire, letting my mind empty, listening to the wind scattering grit across the stones. At last I grew drowsy, and just before I woke Callie to stand her watch, I could have sworn I saw one of the tiny pale stars dart off eastward and then plummet toward the horizon; but I didn't think much about it at the time.

Five days out, and no sign of Kiri. Her trail had vanished like smoke in a mirror, and I did not know what to do. Five days' ride from Edgeville was considered an unofficial border between the known and unknown, and it was generally held that you would be risking everything by continuing past that limit. Nobody I'd ever met had taken up the challenge, except maybe for the man in the bubble car. We had enough supplies to keep going for a couple more days, yet I felt we'd be wasting our time by doing so and I decided to bring the matter up that night.

We camped in a little depression among head-high boulders about fifty yards from the base of a hill that showed like a lizard's back against the stars, and as we sat around the fire, I made my speech about returning.

After I had done, Callie said with some force, "I ain't goin' back 'til we find her."

Brad made a noise of disgust. "You got nothin' to say about it," he told her. "Wasn't for you, wouldn't none of this happened."

"Don't you be gettin' on me!" she snapped. "There's a lot about all this you ain't got the brains to understand."

"I'll say whatever the hell I want," he came back.

"Both of you shut up," I said.

The fire popped and crackled; Brad and Callie sat scowling at the flames.

"We're not gonna argue about this," I said. "Everybody knows what happened, and we all got reason for being here. We started together and we're gonna finish together. Understand?"

"I understand," said Callie, and Brad muttered under his breath.

"Say it now," I told him. "Or keep it to yourself."

He shook his head. "Nothin'."

"We'll go on a couple more days," I said after a pause. "If we ain't found her by then, there ain't gonna be no findin' her."

Brad's face worked, and once again he muttered something.

"What say?"

"Nothin'."

"Don't gimme that," I said. "Let's hear it. I don't want you issin' and moanin' any more. Let's get everything out in the open."

His cheekbones looked as if they were going to punch through the skin. "If you gave a damn about Mama, you wouldn't stop 'til we found her. But all you wanna do is to get back home and crawl in bed with your whore!" He jumped to his feet. "Whyn't you just do that? Go on home! I don't need you, I'll find her myself."

A hot pressure had been building in my chest, and now it exploded. I launched myself at Brad, driving him back against one of the boulders and barring my forearm under his jaw. "You little shit!" I said. "Talk to me like that again, I'll break your goddamn neck."

He looked terrified, his eyes tearing, but all hell was loose in me and I couldn't stop yelling at him. Callie tried to pull me off him, but I shoved her aside.

"I'm sick'n tired of you remindin' me every damn minute 'bout what it is I done," I said to Brad. "I know it to the goddamn bone, y'hear? I don't need no fuckin' reminders!"

Suddenly I had a glimpse of myself bullying a thirteen-year-old. My anger drained away, replaced by shame. I let Brad go and stepped back, shaking with adrenaline. I'm sorry," I said. But he was already sprinting off into the night and I doubt he heard me.

"He'll be back," said Callie from behind me. "It'll be all right."

I didn't want to hear that anything was all right, and I moved away from her; but she followed and pressed against my back, her arms linking around my waist. I didn't want tenderness, either; I pried her arms loose.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"What the hell you think?"

"I mean with us. I know you can't be lovin' to me with Bradley around. But it's more'n that."

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know."

I stepped away from the fire, moving off into the dark; the hardpan scrunched beneath my boot heels. The dark seemed to be pouring into my eyes. I felt that everything was hardening around me, locking me into a black mood, a black fate.

"You know what we need to do?" I said bitterly, not even looking at Callie. "We need to just keep on ridin' … more'n a couple of days, I mean. We should just keep ridin' and ridin' 'til that's the only thing we can do, 'til we're nothin' but bones and saddles."

I guess I figured she would object to that, promote some more optimistic viewpoint, but she said nothing, and when I looked back at her, I saw that she was sitting by the fire with her knees drawn up, holding her head in her hands.

I'd expected my mood would lift with the morning, but it did not, and the weather seconded my gloom, blowing up to near a gale, driving curtains of snow into our faces and obscuring us one from another. I rode with a scarf knotted about my face, my collar up, my eyebrows frosted. My thoughts revolved in a dismal cycle … less thoughts, really, than recognitions of a new thing inside me, or rather the breaking of some old thing and the new absence that had replaced it, solid and foreboding as the shadowy granite of the hills. Something had changed in me forever. I tried to deny it, to reason with myself, saying that a flash of temper and a moment's bitterness couldn't have roduced a marked effect. But then I thought that maybe the change had occurred days before, and that all my fit of temper had achieved was to clear away the last wreckage of my former self. I felt disconnected from Callie and Bradley. Emotionless and cold, colder than the snowy air. My whole life, I saw, was without coherence or structure. An aimless scattering of noises and heats and moments. Recognizing this, I felt to an extent liberated, and that puzzled me more. Maybe, I thought, this was how Bad Men really felt; maybe feeling this way was a stage in the making of a Bad Man. That notion neither cheered nor alarmed me. It had no colour, no tonality. Just another icy recognition. Whenever Bradley or Callie drifted close, I saw in their faces the same hard-bitten glumness, and whenever we made eye contact, there was no flash of hatred or love or warmth. I recalled what I'd said the night before about riding until we were nothing but bones and saddles, and I wondered now if that might not have been prophetic.

Toward mid-afternoon, the wind dropped off and the snow lightened. What I'd thought were snow peaks on the horizon proved to be clouds, but rocky brown hills burst from the hardpan, leaving a narrow channel between them along which we were passing. Though there was no sign of life other than patches of silverweed, though the landscape was leached and dead, I had a sense that we were moving into a less barren part of the flats. The sky brightened to a dirty white, the sun just erceptible, a tinny glare lowering in the west. I felt tense and expectant. Once I thought I spotted something moving along the crest of a hill. A tiger, maybe. I unsheathed my rifle and kept a closer watch, but no threat materialized.

That evening we camped in a small box canyon cut about a hundred yards back into the side of the hill. I did for the horses, while Bradley and Callie made a fire, and then, with full dark still half an hour off, not wanting any conversation, I went for a walk to the end of the canyon, passing between limestone walls barely wider than my armspan and rising thirty and forty feet overhead. A few thorny shrubs sprouted from the cliffs, and there was an inordinate amount of rubble underfoot as if the place had experienced a quake. In certain sections, the limestone was bubbled and several shades darker than the surrounding rock, a type of formation I'd never seen before. I poked around in the rubble, unearthing a spider or two, some twigs; then, just as I was about to head back to the campsite, I caught sight of something half-buried under some loose rock, something with a smooth, unnatural-looking surface. I kicked the rocks aside, picked it up. it was roughly rectangular in shape, about three inches long and two wide, and weighed only a couple of ounces; it was slightly curved, covered with dust, and one edge was bubbled and dark like the limestone. I brushed away the dust, and in the ashen dusk I made out that its colour was metallic gold. I turned it over. The inner surface was covered with padding.

It wasn't until a minute or so later, as I was digging through the rubble, looking for more pieces, that I put together the fragment in my hand with the golden helmet that the driver of the bubble car had worn. Even then I figured that I was leaping to a conclusion. But the next moment I uncovered something that substantiated my conclusion beyond a doubt. At frrst I thought it a root of some sort. A root with five withered, clawed projections. Then I realized it was a mummified hand. I straightened, suddenly anxious, suspicious of every skittering of wind, sickened by my discovery. At length I forced myself to start digging again. Before long I had uncovered most of a body. Shreds of bleached, pale red rags wrapping the desiccated flesh. Bigger fragments of the helmet. And most pertinently, a hole the size of my fist blown in the back of the skull; the edges of the bone frothed into a lace of tiny bubbles. Gingerly, I turned the body over. The neck snapped, the head broke away. I fought back the urge to puke and turned the head. Black slits of eyes sewn together by brittle eyebrows. It was the face of a thousand-year-old man. There was no exit wound in the front of the skull, which meant—as I'd assumed—that the wound could not have been made by a rifle, nor by any weapon with which I was familiar.

It's strange how I felt at that moment. I wasn't afraid, I was angry. Part of my anger was related to memories of that pitiful little man and his red car and his foolhardiness with the apes; but there was another part I didn't understand, a part that seemed to bear upon some vast injustice done me, one I could feel in my guts but couldn't name. I held onto the anger. It was the first strong thing I'd felt all day, and I needed it to sustain me. I could understand why apes danced, why tigers howled. I wanted to dance myself, to howl, to throw some violent shape or sound at the sky and kill whatever was responsible for my confusion.

I think my mind went blank for a while; at any rate, it seemed that a long time passed before I next had a coherent thought. I didn't know what to do. My instincts told me that we should head back to Edgeville, but when I tried to settle on that course, I had the sudden suspicion that Edgeville was more dangerous than the flats, that I was well out of there. I knew I had to tell Brad and Callie, of course. Nothing would be gained by hiding this from them. I just wasn't sure what it all meant, what anything meant. My picture of the world had changed. Everything that had seemed to make sense now seemed pitiful and pointless, thrown out of kilter by the last day's ride and my discovery of the body; I couldn't see anything in my past that had been done for a reason I could understand. I was sure of one thing, however, and though knowing it was not an occasion for joy, it gave me a measure of confidence to be sure of something. The flats were not empty. Something was living out there, something worse than Bad Men. And I knew we must be close to whatever it was. We might die if we were to stay, but I doubted now that it would be by starvation.

As I've said, I intended to tell Brad and Callie about the dead man, but I wasn't eager to do it. At the end of the canyon, the stone sloped up at a gentle incline, gentle enough so I could scramble up it, and after I had done this, I walked along the rim of the canyon wall until I could see the glow of our fire. I sat down, my feet dangling, and went with my thoughts, which were none of them of the happy variety. I still didn't know what course to follow, but the more I studied on it, the more I wanted to find out what had killed the man in the bubble car. It was a fool's mission. Yet I could not let go of the idea; my hold on it seemed unnaturally tenacious, as if it were something I'd waited all my life to pursue. At last I wore out on thinking and just sat there stargazing, watching a thin smoke rise from our fire.

I'm not sure when I first noticed that some of the stars were moving; I believe I registered the fact long before I began to be alarmed by it. There were three stars involved, and instead of falling or arcing across the sky, as would have been the case with meteors, they were darting in straight lines, hovering, then darting off again. What eventually alarmed me was that I realized they were coming closer, that they were following the line of the hills. And what put the fear of God into me was when one of them began to glow a pale green and from it a beam of emerald brilliance lanced down to touch the slopes and I heard a distant rumble. At that I jumped to my feet and raced along the main rim of the canyon, fear a cold knot in my groin, shouting to Brad and Callie, who peered up at me in confusion.

"Get the horses!" I yelled. "Bring 'em on up here! Now!"

They exchanged concerned glances.

"What's the matter?" Brad called out.

I looked out across the flats; the three stars were getting very close.

"Now!" I shouted. "Hurry, damn it! Trouble's comin"!"

That got them moving.

By the time they reached me with the horses, I could see that the three stars weren't shaped like stars at all, but like the spearpoints the apes used: curved cylinders with the blunt tip at one end, thirty or forty feet long, with a slightly convex underside. I couldn't make out any details, but I had no desire to stick around and observe. I swung onto my horse, reined it in, and said to Bradley and Callie, " 'Member that cave we spotted up top?"

"What are they?" asked Callie, staring at the three stars.

"We'll find out later," I said. "Come on! Head for the cave!"

It was a wild ride we had, plunging up the dark slope, wrth the horses sliding on gravel, nearly losing their footing, but at length we made it to the cave. The entrance was just wide enough for the horses, but it widened out inside and looked to extend pretty far back into the hill. We hobbled the horses deep in the cave, and then crept back to the entrance and lay flat. A couple of hundred feet below, those three glowing things were hovering over the canyon we had just vacated. It was an eerie thing to see, the way they drifted back and forth with an unsteady, vibrating motion, as if lighter than air and being trembled by an updraft. They were bigger than I'd judged, more like sixty feet long, and the white light appeared to be flowing across their surfaces—metal surfaces, I supposed—and was full of iridescent glimmers. The light was hard to look at close up; if made your eye want to slide off it. They made a high-pitched, quivering noise, something like a flute, but reedier. That sound wriggled into my spine and raised gooseflesh on my arms.

I was more frightened than I'd been in all my life. I shivered like a horse that has scented fire and stared with my eyes strained wide until I was poured so full of that strange glittering white light, all my thoughts were drowned. Then I yanked at Callie and Brad, and hauled them after me into the cave. We scuttled back deep into the darkness and sat down. The horses snorted and shifted about; their noises gave me comfort. Brad asked what we were going to do, and I said, what did he want to do? Throw rocks at the damn things? We'd just sit tight, I said, until our company had departed. I could barely see him, even though he was a couple of feet away, but talking to him stiffened my spine some. Yet with half my mind I was praying for the things outside just to go away and leave us be. I could still hear their weird fluting, and I saw a faint white glow from the cave mouth.

Callie asked again what I thought they were. I said I reckoned they must be some sort of machines.

"I can see that," she said, exasperated. "But who you figger's flyin' 'em?"

I hadn't really had time to think about that until then, but still, it struck me as particularly stupid on my part that I hadn't already come up with the answer to her question.

"The Captains," I said. "Has to be them. Couldn't nobody else make a machine like that."

"Why'd they be chasin' us?" Brad asked.

"We don't know they are," said Callie. "They could just be after doin' their own business."

"Then why'd we run?"

I realized I hadn't told them about the dead man, and I decided that now wasn't the time—it would be too much bad news all at once.

"We did right to run," I said. "Believe me, we did right."

" 'Sides," said Callie, "we don't know for absolute sure it's the Captains. I mean what your pa says makes good sense, but we don't know for sure."

We were silent for a bit and finally Brad said, "You think Mama run into them things?"

I gave a sigh that in the enclosed space of the cave seemed as loud as one of the horses blowing out its breath. "I was watchin' 'em for a long time 'fore I hollered," I said. "From the way they're patrollin' the hills, I figger that's possible."

There followed another silence, and then he said. "Maybe after they gone, maybe we should try trackin' 'em."

I was about to say that we'd be doing good just to get shut of them, when the cave mouth was filled with an emerald flash, and I was flung back head over heels, and the next thing I knew I was lying in pitch darkness with dirt and stone chips in my mouth, and my ears ringing. Some time later I felt Brad's hands on my chest, heard him say, "Dad?" Then I heard the horses whinnying, their hooves clattering as they tried to break free of their hobbles. I wanted to sit up but was too woozy.

"Callie," I said.

"She's gone to see if there's a way out."

"Wha … ." I broke off and spat dirt.

"The entrance is blocked. Must be a ton of rock come down over it."

"Shit!" I said, touching the back of my head; there was a lump coming. atches of shiny blackness swam before my eyes. "The horses awright?"

"Just scared."

"Yeah," I said. "Me too."

I sat up cautiously, groped for Brad, found his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I couldn't think; I was so numb that I only felt the first trickles of fear. It was as if the explosion was still taking place in my skull, a dark cloud of smoke and splintered rock boiling up and whirling away the last of my good sense.

Seconds later Callie's voice called from a distance, telling us to come ahead, she'd found something.

Still dizzy, I let Brad take the lead, going in a crouch deeper into the hill, and after a minute I saw stars and a ragged oval of blue-dark sky.

Callie's voice came again, issuing from beyond the opening. "See it?"

"Almost there!" I told her.

The opening was set about six feet up in the wall, not too high and easily wide enough for a man to pass through, but no horse was ever going to leave the cave that way. Without the horses, I thought, we might as well have died in the explosion. However, when I pulled myself out into the chill air beside Callie and saw what she had found, I forgot all about our plight.

On this side of the hill, too, the hardpan flowed off toward the horizon. But there was one distinct difference. Below us, its rim no more than a few hundred yards from the base of the hill, lay a large crater, roughly circular and perhaps a mile in diameter, like a bowl brimful of golden light. Light so brilliant it obscured all but the deepest cuts and bulges in the crater's rock walls. It resembled a glowing golden sore on a cracked, stretched-tight hide. The three flying machines were flitting back and forth above it with the agitation of mites swarming above a dead squirrel, and as we watched they descended into the crater, vanishing beneath the rim. After they had gone out of view, none of us moved or said a thing. I can't speak for Brad or Callie, but for my part, though I'd already had my basic notion of how the world worked shaken considerably, the sight of the crater completely shattered all my old conceptions. Maybe it was simply the size of the thing that affected me … The size and the upward pour of light. Maybe all the little wrong bits that had come before had had the irritating effect of putting a few sand grains in my boots, and now this, this immense wrongness, had scraped the skin off my soles and left me unable to walk or do anything other than reckon with shock and bewilderment. Even a half-hour earlier, I might—if asked—have given a fair approximation of where I stood. With my son and my lover, six days out on the Flats from Edgeville, I would have said. In the heart of the wasteland where once the old world flourished, countless centuries after the disaster that ended it. I would have thought this a fine answer, and I would have been certain of my place and purpose. Now I felt I was in the company of strangers, in the midst of a great darkness with light below, a barren place of unrelieved abstraction that offered no clue as to its nature. Perhaps the depth of my reaction seems unreasonable. After all, we had long supposed that the Captains must have flying machines, and though I had never seen one, I shouldn't have been so thoroughly disconcerted by the sight. And I had seen craters before, albeit never one this big. But it was as if all the tidy structures of my life had been abolished, all rules of logic broken, and I could not come up with a new picture of the world that would fit inside my head. I realize now that this breakdown had been a long time coming, that what had provoked it had been working on me for days; but at the time it seemed sudden, catastrophic, totally disorienting.

It was Callie who broke the silence, saying we had to go down to the crater, we had no other choice. I am not clear how I responded; I recall saying something about the horses, about how even if we went down, we'd have to come back and shoot them, we couldn't leave them to die of thirst. There was a little more conversation, but I cannot recall it. Eventually we began picking our way down the slope, glancing up now and again to see that the crater had swelled and grown brighter, a vast golden pit into which we were preparing to descend.

We were, I'd estimate, about fifty feet from the base of the hill when a woman's voice hailed us from the darkness and ordered us to drop our rifles. I was so bewildered and startled, I obeyed without hesitation. I guess it seemed right given the circumstance that voices should issue from the dark and command us. I heard footsteps crunching nearby, caught sight of shadowy figures moving toward us through the rocks. Lots of them. Maybe thirty, maybe more. They assembled about us, some gaining detail against the nimbus of light shining up from the crater behind them, yet most of them remaining shadows, looking evil as crows in their slouch hats and long coats.

"Just who are you people?" asked another voice, this one a man's, deeper than the woman's, but softer and oddly familiar.

We gave our names, said we were from Edgeville.

"Bob Hillyard," said the voice musingly. "I'll be damned."

"That's his boy with him," said someone else. "And that girl there works for ol' Fornoff."

"Just who in creation are you?" I asked, not wanting to let on how intimidated I was. I knew we had fallen in with Bad Men. I should have felt more afraid than I did, but I was still so confused, so daunted by the overall situation, the threat these men presented did not seem of moment.

"You know some of us," said still another voice. "Leastways, I bet you know me."

A match flared, caught on a twist of something in one of the figure's hands, and as he moved nearer, holding a torch so that it shone up onto his face, making ghoulish shadows under the eyes, I saw it was Clay Fornoff. Heavier; chin covered with pale stubble; wearier-looking. But still with that petulant sneer stamped onto his face.

"Wasn't for this man here, I'd never have taken the ride," he said.

"Spect you owe him one, don'tcha, Clay?" said somebody.

"You know I didn't have no choice," I told him.

"Don't matter," he said. "Turns out you did me a favour. But you didn't have that in mind, didja now? You was just runnin' me off to die."

A huge shadow moved up beside Clay and nudged him aside.

"You got a score to settle," he said to Clay in that soft voice, "deal with it later." He moved full into the light of the torch, and I saw what I'd begun to suspect seconds before: it was Wall. A monstrous slab of a man with owl-tufted brows, a shaggy greying beard, thick lips and a bulging forehead, his face as expressionless as an idol's. A waterfall of dark hair spilled from under his hat to his shoulders.

"Goddamn, Bob," he said to me. "Man shoots as poorly as you got no business this far out on the flats."

I'd always admired Wall, and that his most salient memory of me was my oor shooting eye made me feel stupid and childlike. Kind of like being dressed down by your boyhood hero.

"Ain't like I wanna be here," I said. "Just had somethin' needed doin'."

Wall studied Callie and Brad, who were gawping at him, apparently overwhelmed by the sight of this enormous man.

"Feelin' confused, are ye?" he said with mild good humour, as if he were talking to children. "Seem like even simple things like right and left ain't what they used to be?"

That struck me as odd, that he would offer such an accurate analysis of my mental condition and do it so casually, as if how I felt was something usual, something any fool could have predicted.

"What the hell you know about it?" I asked him.

"Hits ever'body the same," he said. "The conditionin' starts breakin' down 'bout five days out. Time a man gets this far, he's usually got more questions in him than answers. Y'see"—he coughed, spat up a hocker and aimed it off to his right—"it ain't only doctorin' you get at the hospitals. The Captains condition you to be happy with your lot. It's sorta like hypnotizin' ye. Takes a mighty strong reason for a man to break down the conditionin'. Seems powerful emotion's 'bout the only cure." He cocked his head, gave me a searching look. "What brings ye here?"

"My wife Kiri," I said, still trying to absorb what he had told us. "She lost a duel and come out here to die."

"Kiri," said Wall. "I remember her. She was a good fighter."

Bradley piped up. "We figger she's down in that hole."

Wall's eyes flicked toward him. "She might be at that."

From the cautious flatness of his tone, I had the impression that if Kiri was down in the crater, it wasn't likely we were going to see her again.

"I don't get it," I said, and began talking fast to blot out the ictures I was conjuring of Kiri's fate. "What the hell's goin' on? What're the Captains doin' by givin' us this here conditionin'? How come … "

"Slow down there, man," Wall said, and put a hand on my shoulder; I was shocked into silence by the weight and solidity of it. "I ain't got time just now to be givin' a history lesson. Truth is, I don't know if I got much to teach ye, anyway. Far as we can prove, things're 'bout the way the Captains say they was. Though I got a suspicion that the folks who survived the bad time wasn't given a choice 'bout how they wanted to live, they was just put where the Captains wanted 'em and conditioned to accept it. But there's a coupla things different for certain sure. One is, they ain't our friends, they just playin' with us, tormentin' us. Hell, might be they could kill us all in a flash, they had a mind. But even if that's so, it'd ruin their game. So our job is to be dangerous for 'em, kill a few here and there, give 'em trouble. They enjoy that kinda trouble. Our aim is to get strong without 'em realizin' it, so the day'll come when we're strong enough to finish 'em. And that day ain't far off. But you got time to learn all 'bout that. What you need to unnerstan' is"—he spat again—"you're Bad Men now. You may not unnerstan' it this minute, but ye can't go back now your conditionin's broke. Ain't nothin' for ye back there. Your life is here now, and you gotta make the best of it. That means you're with us in ever'thing we do. We make a raid for supplies on Edgeville, you're part of it. There ain't no middle ground."

"If things is like you say," Callie asked, "whyn't you just tell it to the people back in Edgeville or Windbroken … Or wherever?"

"Someday maybe we will. But the way things is now, buncha Bad Men waltz into town and start goin' on 'bout how the Captains is enemies of mankind … Shit! How do you think that'd set? Think they'd believe us? Naw, you gotta ride out way past gone onto the flats 'fore you can hear the truth when it's told ye. But after you take that ride, you don't need to hear it more'n once." He sucked on a tooth, making a smacking noise. "Anyways, there's plenty of Bad Men ain't been brought into the fold. That's somepin' we need to take care of first, 'fore we go bringin' the word to Edgeville."

We stood there wrapped in the weighty stuff of all he had said. The desolation his words implied had slotted into a ready-made place inside my brain—it seemed something I had always known. But the fact that I was now a Bad Man, that was almost impossible to believe. The longer I had to digest what Wall had told us, the less like a Bad Man I felt. I had the sense we were stranded at the bottom of an empty well, and far above, invisible against the black circle of sky, strange, cruel faces were peering down at us, deciding which ones to luck up and gut. I felt more abandoned than afraid: I could not have felt more so had I woken up to find myself naked and alone in the middle of nowhere. If it had been left to me I would have sat down there on a rock and stayed sitting until I had gotten a better handle on how things were, but Bradley grabbed my arm and said, "We gotta go down there. We gotta find Mama."

"Not tonight, boy," Wall said. "You try goin' down there tonight, you'd last 'bout as long as spit on a griddle. We'll be goin' down tomorrow night. We'll have a look 'round for her."

"I'm goin' with you," said Bradley.

"Listen, little man," Wall told him; despite its softness, his voice was so resonant, it might have issued from a cave. "You do what you told from now on. This ain't no fine time we're havin' here. This is desperate business. I admire you stickin' by your mama, I swear I do. And maybe we can help her. But ain't nobody gettin' in the way of what's gotta be done tomorrow night, so you might as well get used to it."

Bradley stood his ground but said nothing. After a second Clay Fornoff handed his torch to another man and came up beside Brad and slung an arm around his shoulder. "C'mon, kid," he said. "We'll getcha somethin' to eat."

I didn't much like Clay taking him under his wing, but I knew Brad didn't want to be with me, so I let them go off into the darkness without a squawk.

Wall moved a couple of steps closer; despite the cold, I smelled his gamey odour. Beneath those owlish brows, his eyes were aglow with fierce red light from the torch. Generally I've found that people you haven't seen in a while shrink some from the image you hold of them in your mind. But not Wall. With that golden glare streaming up from the crater behind him, he still looked more monument than man. "Where'd you stake your horses at?" he asked.

I told him.

"Shitfire!" He slapped his hand against his thigh. Then he spoke to another man, instructing him to take a party up to the cave and see what could be done. When he turned back to me he let out a chuckle; he was missing a front tooth, and the gap was about the same size as the first joint of my thumb. "Perk up there, Bob," he said. "You look like you 'spectin' the devil to fly down your chimney. Believe me, you a damn sight better off 'n you was 'fore you run into us."

I had no doubt this was the truth, but it didn't much gladden me to hear it.

"This your woman?" Wall asked me, jerking a thumb toward Callie.

Callie's eyes met mine, then ducked away, locking on the ground. I got something more than fear from that exchange, but I was too weary to want to understand what.

"Yeah," she said, beating me to it by a hair.

"We'll fix ya up with some blankets directly." Wall heaved a sigh and stared off toward the crater. "I'm mighty glad to see you out here, Bob. We been needin' more people to work in the gardens."

"Gardens?" I said dully.

"That's right. As I recall you had yourself some fine-looking tomatoes back in Edgeville."

"You growin' things out here?" I asked. "Where?"

"Somebody'll fill you in 'bout all that. Maybe in the mornin'." Wall took off his hat and did some reshaping of the brim, then jammed it back on. "Meantime you get some food in ye and try to sleep. Gonna be a big night tomorrow. Big night for ever'body in the whole damn world."

After we had been fed on jerky and dried fruit, Callie and I settled down in a nest made by three boulders a ways apart from the others. We spread a couple of blankets and pulled the rest up to our chins, sitting with our backs against one of the boulders, our hips and legs touching. Once I glanced over at her. Light from the crater outlined her profile and showed something of her grave expression. I had the idea she felt my eyes on her, but she gave no sign of noticing, so I tried to do as Wall suggested and sleep. Sleep would not come, however. I couldn't stop wondering what we had fallen into. Seeing so many Bad Men this far out, Wall's talk of gardens, the fact they lanned a raid or something like against the Captains—all that spoke to a complexity of life out here on the flats that I couldn't fathom. And (thought, too, about what Wall had told us about "conditioning". Strange as the idea seemed, it made sense. How else could you explain why people would be so stupid and docile as to swallow such swill as we had about our ancestors choosing a itiful, hard-scrabble existence over a life of ease?

There was no use in studying on any of this, I realized; sooner or later I'd learn whatever there was to learn. But my mind kept on worrying at this or that item, and I knew I wasn't going to get any sleep.

Then Callie said, "I thought it had all gone, y'know. I thought all the bad times had wiped it away. But that ain't so. Everything's still there."

Her face was turned toward me, too shadowed to read.

When she had spoken I hadn't understood what she meant, but now I knew she had been talking about the two of us.

"I guess I wanna hear how it is with you," she said.

"I ain't been thinkin' about it," I told her. "I ain't had the time."

"Well, you got the time right now."

I didn't feel much like exercising my brain, but when I tried to think how I felt, it all came clear with hardly an effort. It was as if I were looking down a tunnel that ran through time from the crater to Edgeville, and I saw Kiri riding the flats alone, I saw the hurt on Brad's face, I saw myself, and I saw Callie with rime on her hat brim and a stony expression, and then those images faded, and what I was looking at, it seemed, wasn't memory but truth, not the truth I believed, because that was just like everything else in my life, a kind of accommodation. No, this truth I was seeing was the truth behind that, the underpinnings of my existence, and I realized that the things I'd thought I felt for Callie were only things I'd wanted to feel, things I'd talked myself into feeling, but that was the way the brain worked, you bought into something and more often than not it came true without your noticing, and so, while I hadn't loved Callie—not like I thought I had, anyhow—sometime between all the trouble with Kiri and the end of our ride I had come to love her exactly like that, and I was always going to be ahead of myself in that fashion, I was always going to be wanting and hoping for and believing in things because they were what I thought I should want or hope for or believe … except now, because some trick of conditioning the Captains had played on me had worn off, and right this minute, maybe for the first time ever, I had caught up with myself and could see exactly what I had become and what I believed in and what I loved. And there was Brad. And there was Callie. Beneath the flirty, pretty package, she was strong and flawed and sweet and needy, just like us all. But strong was most important. Strong was what I hadn't known about her. The strength it had taken for her, a girl from Windbroken who would dread the flats worse by far than any Edger, who had grown up fat and sassy in a softer world. The strength she'd had to summon to ride out into that world of less-than-death, and the reasons she had done it, for honour, for love of me and for the thing she didn't understand that made strength possible.

And Kiri was there, too, but different. Like a picture hung in an old cobwebby room both of us had vacated years ago. Whatever lie we had believed into truth had been dead a long time, and Kiri had done what she had because of how she was, not because of how I was or how she was to me. Recognizing that didn't make me feel any better, but at least all that old fire and smoke didn't prevent me from seeing what was of consequence now. I had known all this for months, but I felt stupid for not having been able to accept any of it before, and I couldn't think of what to say, and all I managed was to repeat what Callie had said, telling her that everything was still there for me, too.

She moved into me a bit, and I put an arm around her, and then she let her head rest on my shoulder, and we sat that way for a few minutes—we were both, I suspect, feeling a little awkward, a little new to one another. Callie stretched herself and snuggled into me. Despite everything, despite fear and hard riding and all that had happened, having her there under my blanket gave me some confidence.

"You all right?" I asked her.

She said, "Just fine," then let out a dusty laugh.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"I was goin' to say I wished we was home, but then I thought twice about it. Edgeville don't seem like home no more."

"Just a little of it would be all right," I said. "Maybe a wood stove and some kindling."

She made a noise of agreement and then fell silent. Big cold stars were dancing in the faraway black wild of the sky, so bright they looked to be shifting around like the ships the Captains flew, but I saw no fearful thing in them, only their glitter and the great identities they sketched in fire, the lady on the throne, the old hunter with his gemmy belt. What was it like, I wondered, to live among them, to be small and secretive with purple eyes. To be daunted by life and lay with men and women as if they were dolls full of blood. Wall would probably understand them, I thought. For all his homespun ways, I had the notion he was as different from me as any Captain.

"And a bed," Callie said out of the blue.

"Huh?"

"I was thinkin' a bed would be nice, too."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Yeah, that'd be good." Then thinking she might have been hinting at something, I added, "I gotta tell ya, I ain't feelin' much like doin' anything tonight."

She icked herself up, gave me a look and laughed. "I swear you must think you're the greatest damn thing since vanilla ice cream. I'm so wore down, I doubt I could sit up straight let alone"—she sniffed—"do anything."

"I was only saying it in case you were … "

"Just shut up, Bob!"

She settled back down next to me. I couldn't tell for certain, but I didn't believe she was really angry. After a couple of minutes she laid her head on my shoulder again, and a few seconds after that she took my hand beneath the blankets and put it up under her shirt. The warmth of her breast seemed to spread from my palm all through me, and its softness nearly caused me to faint. The feeling that held in my mind then had just a shade of lustfulness; most of what I felt was tender, trusted, loved. A feeling like that couldn't last for too long, not in that place, not at that moment, but for the time it did, it made the golden light spilling upward from the crater a fine pface to rest my eyes, and pulled the starry void close around me like a good blanket, and spoke to me of something I could catch on my tongue and cradle in my hand and crush against my skin, but that I could have never put a name to.

Mornings, Kiri told me once, were lies. It was only the nights that were true. She meant a sad, desolate thing by this, she meant that the brightness of things is illusion, and the blackness of them is where the truth would fit if we had courage enough to admit it. Yet when I thought of those words now, they meant something completely opposite, because the virtues she applied to night and morning had been all switched around for me.

At any rate, in the grey, blustery morning following that brilliant night, with big flakes falling from the sky, Wall sent his second-in-command, a man named Coley, to fill us in. Coley was a tense sort, a little yappy dog to Wall's big placid one, scrawny and worried-looking, with a grizzled beard and sunken cheeks and a startling bit of colour to his outfit, a bright red ribbon for a hat band. Though his anxious manner unnerved me—he was always fidgeting, glancing around as if concerned he might be caught at something—I related to him a damn sight better than I did Wall, mostly because Coley did not seem so all-fired sure of himself.

He told us they'd been planning this raid for years, and that the urpose of it was to steal a flying machine. A few years back one of the machines had crashed out on the flats; they had captured the sole survivor, whom they called Junior, and forced him to supply information about all manner of things; he was to be the pilot of the stolen machine once Wall's people succeeded in breaking into it. roblem was, the minute they started messing with it, there was a chance that an alarm would be sounded, and we might have to fight off the Captains for as long as it took to finish the job. Maybe an hour, maybe more. There were, according to Coley, nearly five hundred men and women scattered about in the rocks, laying low, and he wasn't sure that many would be enough to keep the Captains off, though Wall was of the opinion that our casualties would be light. Coley did not agree.

"It ain't the Captains worry me," he said. "It's who they got doin' their fightin' for 'em. Chances are there'll be apes. Might even be some of our own people. They got ways of makin' a man do things against his will."

"What I don't get," Brad said, "is how you make this here Captain do what you want. Every time I talk to 'em, I get the feelin' things don't go how they like 'em, they're liable to keel over and die."

"That ain't quite the way of it," Coley told him. They just don't think they can die is all. 'Cordin' to Junior, they make copies of themselves. Clones, he calls 'em. One dies, there's another waitin' to take his place who's got the same memories, same everything." He shook his head in wonderment. "Damnedest thing I ever heard of. Anyhow, they got these collars. Metal collars that fit back of the neck and the head. I don't know how it works. But slap one on somebody, and they get downright suggestible. We picked some up from the crash, and we used one on Junior."

We all three nodded and said, "Huh" or something similar, as if we understood, but I doubt Brad or Callie understood Coley any better than I did.

A shout came from a man downslope, and Coley turned to it; but the shout must have been directed at someone else. The crater walls looked ashen, and the whole thing seemed more fearsome now than it had with light streaming up from it. Under the clouded sky the hardpan was a dirty yellow, like old bones.

"What is this place?" I asked. "What the hell are they doin' down there?"

"The Captains call it the Garden," Coley said. "Sometimes they use it for fightin'. Junior says they're all divided into clans up on the stations, and this here's where they settle clan disputes. Other times they use it for parties, and thaf s probably what's goin' on now. If it was a fight there'd be more ships. They like to watch fightin'." He worked up a good spit and let it fly. "That's how come they treasure us so much. They enjoy the way we fight."

I let that sink in for a few seconds, thinking about Kiri fitted with a collar. A break appeared in the clouds, and Coley peered up into the sky, looking more worried than over. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, "I'm just hopin' the weather holds. We usually don't ut so many people at risk. Then if the Captains drop a net, we don't get hurt so bad." He let out a long unsteady breath. " 'Course even if the weather does clear, chances are they ain't lookin' this way. They're pretty careless as regards security, and they ain't very well armed. Not like you might expect, anyway. They didn't have many personal weapons up in the orbitals, and we don't believe they've collected any weapons from the shelters. Why would they bother? They don't think we can hurt them. All they've got are their ships, which are armed with mining lasers. And even if they did collect weapons from the shelters, they probably wouldn't know how to use 'em. They used to be technical, but they've forgotten most of what they know. Eventually I figger their ships'll break down, and they'll be stranded up there."

Callie asked what he meant by "shelters", and he told us that they were underground places where people had slept away the centuries, waiting for the Captains to wake them once things on the surface were back to something approaching normal. It was in those places that the Bad Men lived. Places fortified now against attack from the sky. But it was clear to me that neither Coley's faith in those fortifications nor in the raid was absolute. Though I didn't know him, I had the impression that his anxiety was abnormal, at least in its intensity, and when I tried to talk with him about Wall, I detected disapproval.

"He's brought people together," he said. "He's done a lot of good things." But I could tell his heart wasn't in the words.

Sleet began coming down, just spits of it, but enough so I could hear it hissing against the rocks.

"What's all this about?" I asked Coley; I gestured at the crater. "All this business here. I know you said it was to get a ship. But why bother if … "

"It's about killin," said Wall's voice behind me; he was leaning up against a boulder, looking down at us in that glum, challenging way of his; his long hair lifted in the wind. " 'bout them killin" us all these years," he went on. "And now us evenin' things up a touch. 'bout finding some new thing that'll let us kill even more of 'em."

"I realize that," I said. "But why not let well enough alone? Accordin' to what Coley says, we leave 'em be, sooner or later they ain't gonna be a problem."

"Is that what Mister Coley says?" Wall pinned him with a cold glare, but Coley didn't flinch from it; he made a gruff noise in his throat and turned back to me. "Y'see Coley's out here with us, don't ye? Don't that tell ye somethin"? He may believe what he told ye, but he ain't countin' on it to be true. He'd be crazy to count on it. S'pose they got more weapons than he figgers? Even if they don't, who knows what's in their minds? They might up and decide they're tired of games and kill us all. Nosir! Killin's the only way to deal with 'em."

"Ain't you worried they gonna strike back at you?" Callie asked him.

"Let 'em try! They might pick off a few of us when we're out on the flats, but we're dug in too deep for them to do any real damage."

"That's what you believe," I said. "But then you'd be crazy to count on it bein' true, wouldn't you?"

He tried the same stare on me that he'd tried on Coley, but for some reason I wasn't cowed by either it or his faulty logic. Coley, I noticed, seemed pleased by what I'd said.

"S'pose they got more weapons than what you figger?" I went on. "S'pose they got some'll dig you outta your holes? They might decide to kill us all. Who knows what they got in their minds?"

Wall gave a laugh. "You a clever talker, Bob, I'll hand you that. But ain't no point you goin' on like this. It's all been talked through and decided."

"How 'bout everyone back on the Edge?" Callie asked. "And Windbroken? And everywhere else? You talked it through with them, have you?"

"They ain't involved with us. Anyhow, the Captains got no reason to go hurtin' them for somethin' we done."

"No reason you know of, maybe," Callie said.

"Well," said Wall after a bit, looking off into the distance, "this is a real nice chat we're havin', but like I told ye, it comes a little late in the game. We'll be going down into the Garden at dusk." He cut his eyes toward me. "You come along with me if you want, Bob, and have a look for Kiri. But keep in mind she's not the main reason you're goin' to be there. Keepin' the Captains back from the ship is. That clear?"

Brad started to speak, but Wall cut him short.

"The boy and the woman can stay with the ship. We can use another coupla rifles case any of 'em break through."

I thought Brad was going to say something, but he just lowered his head; I guess he was wise enough to realize that Wall couldn't be swayed by argument.

"Keep your chin up," Wall told him. "Time'll come soon enough for ye to do some real killin'."

The three of us spent the remainder of the afternoon huddled among the rocks. We talked some, more than we had recently at any rate, but it was for the most part anxious talk designed to stop us from fretting over what lay ahead, and never touched on the things we needed to talk about. Snow fell steadily, capping the boulders in white, and as the sky darkened, golden light began to stream up from the crater once again. Then, as dusk began to accumulate, I caught sight of Coley and a couple of others leading a diminutive pale figure down the slope. It was a Captain, all right, but like none I'd seen before. Dressed in rags; emaciated; scarred. As they drew near, I got to my feet—we all did—fascinated by the proximity of this creature whom I had previously thought of in almost godlike terms. There was nothing godlike about him now. His nose was broken, squashed nearly flat, and his scalp was crisscrossed by ridged scars; one of his eyes was covered by a patch, and his other had a listless cast. The only qualities he retained similar to those curious entities I had spoken to in Edgeville were his pallor and his size. About his neck and cupping the back of his skull was a metal apparatus worked with intricate designs resembling those I'd seen on antique silver; its richness was incongruous in contrast to his sorry state. I had expected I might feel hatred on seeing him, or something allied, but I felt nothing apart from a dry curiosity; yet after he had passed I realized that my hands were shaking and my legs weak, as if strong emotion had occupied me without my knowing and left only these symptoms, and I stood there, as did Brad and Callie, watching until the Captain—Junior—had been reduced by distance to a tiny shadow crossing the hardpan toward the crater.

It was not long afterward that Wall came to collect me. Callie and Brad went off with a big, broad-beamed woman who reminded me some of Hazel Aldred, and Wall led me over to a group of men and women who were sitting and squatting at the edge of the hardpan, and gave me over to the care of a woman named Maddy, who fitted me out with a hunting knife and a pistol and an ammunition belt. She was on the stringy side, was Maddy, with dirty blonde hair tied back in a onytail; but she had a pretty face made interesting and more than a little sexy by the lines left by hard weather and hard living, and she had a directness and good humour that put me somewhat at ease.

"I know a red-blooded sort like you's all bucked up and rarin' to go," she said, flashing a quick grin, "but you keep it holstered till I give you the word, y'hear?"

"I'll do my level best," I told her.

"We'll be goin' down soon," she said. "If there's an attack and things get confused, stick with me and chances are you'll be fine. We believe there's gonna be some of our own people down there. They'll be collared, and like as not they'll be comin' after us. If you gotta kill 'em, nobody's goin' to blame you for it. But if you can, aim at their legs. Maybe we can save one or two."

I nodded, looked out between boulders across the hardpan. A handful of Bad Men were visible as silhouettes at the rim of the crater, black stick figures blurred against the pour of golden light; I couldn't make out what they were doing. The thought of descending into that infernal light turned my nerves a notch higher; I couldn't have worked up a spit even if the price of spit had suddenly gone sky-high.

"Ain't no point my tellin' you not to be afraid," Maddy said. "I 'spect we're all afraid. But once we get down to business, you'll be all right."

"You sure 'bout that?" I said, trying to make it sound light; but I heard a quaver in my voice.

"You come all this way from the Edge, I guess I ain't worried 'bout you seizin' up on me."

"How bout Wall? You reckon he's afraid?"

She made a non-committal noise and glanced down at her hands; with her head lowered, a wisp of hair dangling down over her forehead, her expression contemplative, the crater light glowing on her face, eroding some of the lines there, I could see the girl she once had been.

"Probably not," she said. "He likes this kind of thing."

There was disapproval in her voice. This was the second time I'd detected a less than favourable feeling toward Wall, and I was about to see if I could learn where it came from, when Clay Fornoff hunkered down beside us.

"He all set?" he asked Maddy.

She said, "Yes." Then, following a pause, she asked how much longer before we started.

"Any minute now," Fornoff said.

I didn't really have anything to say, but I thought talking might ease my anxiety, and I asked him what sort of opposition we'd be facing aside from people wearing collars.

"What's the matter, Bob?" He made a sneering noise of my name. "Fraid you gonna wet yourself?"

"I was just makin' conversation."

"You wanna be friends, is that it?"

"I don't much care about that one way or another," I said.

His face tightened. "Just shut the hell up! I don't wanna hear another damn word from ya."

"Sure thing. I understand. I s'pose you don't want to hear nothin' 'bout your folks either, do ya?"

He let a a few beats go by then said, "How they doin'?" But he kept his eyes trained on the crater.

I told him about his folks, his father's rheumatism, about the store and some of his old friends. When I had done he gave no sign that he had been in any way affected by the news from home. Maddy rolled her eyes and shot me an afflicted smile, as if to suggest that I wasn't the only one who considered Fornoff a pain in the ass. I'd been coming around 180 degrees in my attitude towards Bad Men, thinking of them more as heroes, rebels, and so forth; but now I told myself that some Bad Men were likely every bit as rotten as what I'd once supposed. Or maybe it was just that I was part of a time with which Fornoff would never be able to reach an accommodation; he would never be able to see me without recalling the night when he had gone Bad, and thus he would always react to me with loathing that might have better been directed at himself.

Not long afterward I heard a shout, and before I could prepare myself, I was jogging alongside Maddy and Fornoff toward the crater, watching the chute of golden light jolt sideways with every step; a couple of minutes later I found myself in the company of several hundred others descending the crater wall on ropes. The three ships rested at the bottom of the crater on a smooth plastic floor, from beneath which arose the golden light. We paused beside one of them as Wall, with the help of two other men, worked feverishly at the smallest of the mining lasers that protruded from the prow. I saw that it was a modular unit that could be snapped into place. Once they had removed it, Wall shrugged out of his coat and lashed the unit to his right arm with a complex arrangement of leather straps; the way it fitted, his fingers could reach a panel of studs set into the bottom, and I realized it must have been designed to be portable. Wall pressed a stud and a beam of ruby light scored a deep gouge in the rock face. On seeing this he laughed uproariously, and swung the thing, which must have weighed 70 or 80 pounds, in a celebratory circle above his head.

Beyond the ships, at the bottom of a gently declining ramp, lay the entrance to a vast circular chamber—I guessed it to be about a half-mile across—floored with exotic vegetation, some of the plants having striped stalks and huge rubbery leaves, unlike anything I'd ever seen; the domed ceiling was aglow with ultraviolet panels, the same sort of light I used to grow my peas and beans and tomatoes back in Edgeville, and the foliage was so dense that the four narrow paths leading away into it were entirely overgrown. Mists curled above the treetops, rising in wraithlike coils to the top of the ceiling, lending the space a primitive aspect like some long-ago jungle, daunting in its silence and strangeness.

And yet the place was familiar.

I couldn't quite figure why at first; then I recalled that Wall had said the Captains called the crater the Garden, and I thought of the book I'd read and reread back in the hydroponics building, The Black Garden, and the illustrations it contained—this chamber was either the model for one of those illustrations or the exact copy of the model. Confused and frightened already, I can't begin to tell you the alarm this caused me. Added to everything that I previously had not understood but had managed to arrange in a makeshift frame of reference, this last incomprehensible thing, with its disturbing echoes of decadence, now succeeded in toppling that shaky structure, and I felt as unsteady in my knowledge of what was as I had during our ride from Edgeville. I had an urge to tell someone about my sudden recognition, but then I realized that thanks to Junior, they must know far more than I did about the Garden, and of course damn near everybody knew about the book. But none of these rationalizations served to calm me, and I got to thinking what it meant that the Captains would give us these clues about their existence, what it said about their natures.

Approximately a hundred of us headed down each of the avenues, moving quietly, but at a good pace. Maddy, Clay Fornoff, and I were attached to a party led by Wall. Once beneath the canopy we were immersed in a green twilight; sweetish scents reminiscent of decay, but spicier, issued from the foliage and a humming sound rose from the polished stones beneath our feet—that sound, apart from the soft fall of our footsteps—was the only break in the silence. No rustlings or slitherings, no leaves sliding together. Every now and then we came to a section of the path where the stones had been replaced by a sheet of transparent panelling through which we could see down into a black space picked out here and there by golden lights, and once again I was reminded of The Black Garden, of what the book had related about a region of black foliage and secret rooms. Once we walked beneath a crystalline bubble .the size of a small room suspended in the branches, furnished with cushions, and with a broad smear of what appeared to be dried blood marring its interior surface. Far too much blood to be the sign of anything other than a death. The sight harrowed me, and Maddy, after a quick glance at the bubble, fixed her eyes on the path and did not lift them again until it was well behind us.

No more than fifty yards after we had passed beneath the bubble, we encountered the first of two side paths—the second lay barely another twenty-five yards farther along—and at each of these junctions we left a quarter of our number, who hid among the ferns that lined the way. I expected to be left with them, but I imagine Wall wanted to give me the best possible chance of locating Kiri, and though uneasy with the fact that I was moving deeper and deeper into this oppressive place, I was at the same time grateful for the opportunity. After about fifteen minutes we reached the far side of the chamber, a place where the path planed away into a well-lit tunnel that led downward at a precipitous angle. We proceeded along it until we came to another chamber, smaller than the first yet still quite large, perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, its walls covered with white shiny tiles, each bearing a red hieroglyph, and dominated by a grotesque fountain ringed by benches and banks of tree ferns, whose centrepiece, the life-sized statue of a naked crouching woman with her mouth stretched open in anguish, bled red water from a dozen gashes carved in the greyish-white stone of her flesh. The statue was so real-looking, I could have sworn it was an actual person who had been magicked into stone. Vines with serrated leaves climbed the walls and intertwined across the white tray of ultraviolet light that occupied the ceiling, casting spindly shadows.

On first glance I'd assumed the chamber to be untouched by age, but then I began to notice worn edges on the benches, corners missing from tiles, a chipped knuckle on the statue, and other such imperfections. The idea that the place was old made it seem even more horrid, speaking to a tradition of the perverse, and the longer I looked at the statue, the more certain I became that it had been rendered from life; there was too much detail to the face and the body, details such as scars and lines and the like, to make me think otherwise. I imagined the woman posing for some pallid little monster, growing weaker and weaker from her wounds, yet forced by some terrifying resence, some binding torment, to maintain her pose, and the anger that I had not been able to feel on seeing Junior now surfaced in me and swept away my fear. I grew cold and resolved, and I imagined myself joyfully blowing holes in the pulpy bodies of the Captains.

We crossed the chamber, progressing with more caution than before. Judging by the way Wall turned this way and that, searching for a means of egress—none was apparent—I had the notion that the existence of the chamber came as a surprise to him, that Junior must not have informed him of it. Unnerved by what this might mean, whether it was that the collars were not totally controlling and Junior had lied, or else that he had been so stupefied he had forgotten to mention the place, I put my hand on my pistol and turned to Maddy to see what her reaction might be to this turn of events; but as I did, a section of the wall opposite us slid back to reveal a wedge of darkness beyond, a void that the next moment was choked with emaciated men and women wearing metal collars like the one Junior had worn, dozens of them, all armed with knives and clubs, driven forward by white-furred apes that differed from the Edgeville apes by virtue of their barbaric clothing—leather harnesses and genital ouches. The most horrifying thing about their approach was that they—the men and women, not the apes—made no sound as they came; they might have been corpses reanimated by a spell.

I glanced back to the tunnel and saw that it was blocked with an equally savage-looking force; then the attackers were on us, chopping and slashing. There was no hope of aiming discriminately as Maddy had suggested. Everything became a chaos of gunshots and screams and snarling mouths, and we would have all died if it hadn't been for Wall. He swung his laser in sweeping arcs, cutting a swath in the ranks of our adversaries, and headed straight for the opening on the far side of the chamber and the darkness beyond it.

It was a matter of sheer luck that I was standing close to Wall when he made his charge. During the first thirty seconds of the attack I had emptied my pistol; I'm sure I hit something with every shot—it would have been nearly impossible not to do so—yet I have no clear memory of what I hit. Faces, ape and human, reeled into view, visible for split seconds between other faces, between bodies, and blood was everywhere, streaking flesh, matting fur, spraying into the air. I simply poked the barrel of my pistol forward and fired until the hammer clicked. Then as I went to reload, a club glanced off the oint of my left shoulder, momentarily numbing my hand, and I dropped the pistol. Even with the ape stink thickening the air, I could smell my own fear, a yellow, sour reek, and while I didn't have the time to indulge that fear, I felt it weakening me, felt it urging me to flee. And I might have if I had seen a safe harbour. I drew my knife and slashed at an ape's hand that was grabbing for me, going off-balance and falling backward into Wall. He shoved me away, and inadvertently I went in a staggering run toward the opening from which the apes and their collared army had emerged, so that in effect I wound up guarding his flank, though it was Maddy, beside me, who did the lion's share of the guarding. She had managed to reload, and in the brief time it took to cross the remaining distance she shot four apes and two collared men, while Wall burned down countless others, the laser severing limbs and torsos.

When we reached the darkness beyond the doorway, Wall turned back, continuing to fire into the melee, and shouted to us to search for a switch, a button, something that would close off the chamber. As I followed his order, my hands trembling, fumbling, groping at the wall, I saw that seven or eight of our group were pinned against the fountain, and before the wall slid shut to obscure my view, sealing us into the dark, I saw three fall, each killed by collared men and women. Many lay dead already, and many others, wounded, were trying to crawl away; but the apes were on them before they could get far, slicing with long-bladed knives at their necks. It appeared that the red water from the fountain had been splashed and puddled everywhere, and that the open-mouthed woman at the centre of the fountain was screaming in a dozen voices, lamenting the carnage taking place around her.

The instant the chamber vanished from sight, isolating us in the dark, Wall demanded to know who had found the control, and when a woman's voice answered, he had her lead him to it and burned it with the laser so that the door could not be opened again. He then asked us to speak our names so that he could determine how many had survived. Sixteen names were sounded. Clay Fornoff's was not among them. I tried to remember if I had seen him fall, but could not. The darkness seemed to deepen with this recognition. I could see nothing; even though I knew that the door to the chamber was within arm's reach, I felt as if I were standing at the centre of a limitless void. It seemed strange that only now, now that I could not see it, did I have a powerful apprehension of the size of the place.

"All right," Wall said. "We're in the shit, and we can't just stand around. Only way we're going to get home is to find one of the little bastards and make him show us a safe passage. We know they're in here somewhere. So let's go find 'em."

He said this with such relish, such apparent delight, as if what had occurred was exactly what he'd been hoping for, that—dismayed and frightened as I was—I found it kind of off-putting. Maybe his words affected others the same, because he didn't get much of a response.

"Do you wanna die?" he asked us. "Or is it just you're scared of the dark? Well, I can fix that!"

I felt him push past me, saw the ruby stalk of the laser swing out into the blackness. In an instant several fires sprouted in the dark. Bushes turned to torches by the laser, their light revealing an uneven terrain of moss or fungus or maybe even some sort of black grass, like a rug thrown over a roomful of lumpy furniture. Bushes and hollows and low rises. Here and there, barely visible in the flickering light, thin seams of gold were laid in against the black ground, and once again recalling The Black Garden, I realized that these likely signalled the location of doorways into secret rooms. There were no signs of walls or a ceiling. Even with the light, we had no way to judge the actual size of the place; but the fires gave us heart, and without further discussion, we headed for the nearest of those gold seams. When we reached it Wall burned down the door and we poured inside. By chance more than by dint of courage, I was beside him as we entered, and I had a clear view of the opulent interior. A cavelike space of irregular dimensions, considerably higher than it was long or wide, with a terraced floor and slanted ceiling, a golden grotto draped in crimson silks, stalks of crystal sprouting from the floor and a miniature waterfall splashing down upon boulders that looked to be pure gold. Silk cushions were strewn everywhere. An aquarium was set into the wall, teeming with brightly coloured fish as different from the drab brown trout and bottom feeders with which I was familiar as gems from common rocks; the ornament of the aquarium through which the fish swam was a human spine and rib cage.

But what held my attention was the presence of three Captains lying on the cushions: two men and a woman, their pale, naked, hairless bodies almost childlike in appearance. There were also three collared women, who had apparently been sexually engaged with the Captains, and showed bruises and other marks of ill use, and a collared man who was obviously dead; his chest and limbs were deeply gashed, and he was lying arms akimbo by a wall, as if he had been tossed aside. When we entered, one of the Captains, the larger of the two men, put a knife to the throat of a collared woman; the other two reached for what I assumed to be weapons—short metal tubes resting on the floor at arm's reach; yet their movements were languid, casual, as if they were not really afraid of us. Or perhaps they were drugged. Whatever the case, they were overwhelmed before they could pick up the tubes and dragged from the room. The Captain holding the knife looked at me—directly at me, I'm sure of it—and smiling, slashed the woman's throat. She began to thrash about, clutching at the wound, and the Captain pushed her off to the side. He was still smiling. At me. The daft little shit was amused by my reaction. His androgynous features twisted with amusement. Something gave way inside me, some elemental restraint—I felt it as tangibly as I might have felt the parting of my tissues from a knife stroke—and I rushed at him, ignoring Wall's order to hold back. The Captain kind of waved the knife at me, but again he did not seem overly concerned with any threat I might pose. Even after I kicked the knife aside and yanked him to his feet, even after I grabbed him by the throat and shoved him back against the wall, he continued to regard me with that mild, dissipated smile and those wet purplish eyes that gave no hint of what might lie behind, as empty as the eyes of a fish. I had the notion that I was doing exactly as he expected, and that my redictable behaviour was something that reinforced his feelings of superiority.

"Let him go," said Wall from behind me.

"In a minute," I said, tightening my grip on the Captain's throat. I was still full of loathing, but it was a colder emotion now, albeit no less manageable. I fixed my gaze on those inhuman eyes, wanting to learn if anything would surface in them at the end, and I plunged my knife hilt-deep into the top of his skull. His mouth popped open, the eyes bulged, and thick blood flowed down over his head like syrup over a scoop of vanilla. Spasms shook him, and a stream of his piss wetted my legs. Then it was over, and I let him fall. It looked for all the world as though his head had grown a bone handle. In some part of me that had been obscured by anger, I could feel a trivial current of revulsion, but most of what I felt at first was satisfaction, though not long afterward I began to shake with the aftershocks of my violent act.

I turned to Wall, who stood regarding me with a thoughtful expression. "You got two of 'em," I said. "Two's enough."

Behind him, they were trying to remove the collars from the surviving women. Neither was doing well; blood was leaking from their ears.

"There's more," Wall said. "You gonna kill 'em all?"

The question did not seem in the least rhetorical, and I did not take it as such.

"Long as we're here," I said.

But I did no further killing that night. The vengeful, outraged spirit that had moved me gradually eroded as we passed through the Black Garden, led by the two collared Captains, our path lit by burning shrubs and doorways into golden light left open to reveal scenes of luxury and carnage, like a score of tiny stages mounted on the dark upon whose boards the same terrible play had been performed, and I only watched the others do the bloody work. The violence I'd committed had worked a change in me, or else had exposed some central weakness, and I grew disinterested in the outcome of our expedition. Maddy had to urge me along, or else I might have just stood there and waited for my end, displaying no more concern for my fate than the Captain that I'd killed; and I wondered if the fact that they had done so much violence was at the heart of their dismissive attitude toward life and death—but I don't believe that. To imbue them with human qualities would be assuming too much. They were no more human than the apes, and the apes, despite what I'd said long before to the man in the bubble car, which had been something I'd said mostly to impress him, were in no way human.

Apes came at us now and again as we went, singly sometimes and sometimes in small groups, flying at us from dark crannies, their knives flashing with reflected fire, and they succeeded in killing three of our people; but they were disorganized, without slaves to support them, and this gave us hope that the other three parties had done well, that the battle, if not yet finished, was on the verge of being won. We killed them all, and we also killed every Captain whom we came across.

Wall was in his element. He burned and burned, and when the laser gave out or broke or whatever it is that lasers do when they go wrong, he killed with his hands, in several instances literally tearing the heads off scrawny white necks. There was a joyful flair in the way he went about it, and I was not the only one who noticed this; I saw others staring at him with a confused mixture of awe and distaste as he carried out the business of slaughter. It was not that the Captains deserved any less, nor was it that vengeance was inappropriate to the moment. No, it was instead that Wall did not appear to be carrying out a vengeful process. Watching him was like watching a farmer scything wheat—here was a man engaged in his roper work and enjoying it immensely. The minor wounds he accumulated, the red stains that flowered on his rough shirt, his arms and face, gave him the look of an embattled hero, but the sort of hero, perhaps, whom we—who were ourselves the pitiful result of laws that heroes had written thousands of years before—no longer cared to exalt; and we moved ever more slowly in his wake, letting him run ahead of us, separating ourselves from him, as if this would lessen our complicity and devalue our support.

Still, we made no move to keep him from his pleasure. The things we found inside those golden rooms, the flayed bodies, bits of men and women used for ornament or more perverted purposes yet, the collared dead, the few that survived, shaking and delirious, all this legislated against our reining Wall in, and we might have let him go on forever had there been a sufficient number of Captains and if there had been nothing else to capture our attention. But then there came two explosions, distant, the one following hard upon the other, and a ragged cheer went up.

"We got it!" Maddy said; she sounded happy yet bewildered, as if she couldn't quite accept some great good news, and when I asked what the explosions signified, she said, "The ship. They must have blown up the other two. They weren't supposed to do that until we had the ship."

"You mean they flew it away and all?" I said.

"I think so!" She gave my hand a squeeze. In the garish orange light of the burning, she looked like she was about to hop up and down from excitement. "I can't be sure 'til we see for ourselves, but I think so."

Wall was prevailed upon to break off his hunt, so we could determine what had happened, and with the two collared Captains still in the lead, we began to make our way back toward the crater.

But Wall was not yet finished with death.

As we came out from yet another hidden door into the chamber where we had been ambushed, we spotted an ape squatting by one of its fallen companions, rocking back and forth on its heels in an attitude that seemed to signal grief, though—again—I can't say for certain what the thing was doing there. Just as likely it had gone crazy over something I could never understand. Someone fired at it, and with a fierce scream, it scuttled off into the tunnel that angled up toward the crater.

Wall sprinted after it.

A handful of people, Maddy included, followed him at a good clip, but the rest of us, governed by a weary unanimity, kept plodding along, stepping between the bodies, friend and foe, that lay everywhere. I'd seen so much dying that night, you would have thought that the scene in the chamber would not have affected me, but it took me by storm. That red fountain and the woman of stone and the bloody hieroglyphs figuring the tiles, and now the bodies, more than a hundred of them, I reckoned, scattered about under benches, in the ferns, their pallor and the brightness of their blood accentuated by the glaring light—it was such a unity of awful place and terrible event, it struck deep, and I knew it would hurt me forever, like a work of art whose lines and colours match up perfectly with some circuit in your brain or some heretofore unmapped country in your soul, all the graceless attitudes of the dead's arms and legs and the humped bodies like archipelagoes in the sea of red.

I found Clay Fornoff lying under the lip of the fountain, his chest ierced innumerable times, eyes open, blond hair slick with blood. Something, an ape probably, had chewed away part of his cheek. Tears started from my eyes—I don't know why. Maybe because I couldn't disassociate Clay from Bradley, or maybe it was just death working its old sentimental trick on me, or maybe I'd hoped to reconcile with Clay and now that hope was gone I felt the loss. I don't know. It was no matter any more, whatever the reason. Feeling as tired as I'd ever been, I kneeled beside him and collected his personals, his gun, a silver ring of Windbroken design, a leather wallet, and a whistle whittled out of some hard yellowish wood. I intended to give them to his folks if I ever saw them again, but I ended up keeping the whistle. I'd never figured Clay to be one for making whistles, and I suppose I wanted to keep that fact about him in mind.

I couldn't think of anything much to say over him, so I just bowed my head and let whatever I was feeling run out of me. I recall thinking I was glad I hadn't seen him die, and then wishing I had, and then wondering whether he had been brave or a fool or both. Then there was nothing left but silence. I closed his eyes and walked on up the tunnel.

Wall had caught up with the ape—or the ape had let him catch it—at the end of the tunnel, right where the canopy of foliage began, and he was fighting it hand to hand when I straggled up, while the remainder of those who had survived the ambush and the Garden stood in a semi-circle and watched. Without much enthusiasm, I thought. Their faces slack and exhausted-looking.

Wall had killed apes with his bare hands before; he was one of the few men alive strong enough to accomplish this, and under different circumstances it might have been incredible to see, like a scene out of a storybook, this giant locked up hard with a six-foot white-furred ape in a leather harness. But as things stood, realizing that this was just more of Wall's … I'm not sure what to call it, because it was more than him showing off. His folly, I guess. His making certain that the world stayed as violent and disgraceful as he needed it to be. Anyway, recognizing this, the sight of the two of them rolling about, tearing and biting, screaming, grunting, it did not seem vital or heroic to me, merely sad and depressing. To tell the truth, despite everything that had happened, I had a fleeting moment during which I found myself rooting for the ape; at least, I thought, it had displayed something akin to human emotion back in the chamber.

There came a point when, still grappling, they came to their feet and reeled off along the canopied pathway; mired in that green dimness they seemed even more creatures out of legend, the ape's small head with its bared fangs pressed close to the great shaggy bulk of Wall's head. Like insane lovers. Wall's arms locked behind the ape's back, his muscles bunched like coiled snakes, and the ape clawing at Wall's neck. Then Wall heaved with all his might, at the same time twisting his upper body, a wrestler's quick move, lifting the ape and slinging him up and out higher than his head, its limbs flailing, to fetch up hard against a tree trunk. The ape was hurt bad. It came up into a crouch, but fell onto its side and made a mewling sound; it clawed frantically at its own back, as if trying to reach some unreachable wound. Finally it got to its feet, but it was an unsteady, feeble movement, like that of an old man who's mislaid his cane. It snarled at Wall, a grating noise that reminded me of a crotchety generator starting up. I could tell it wanted to charge him, that its ferocity was unimpaired, but it was out of juice, and so was waiting for Wall to come to it. And Wall would have done just that if Maddy, who was standing about ten feet away from me, hadn't taken her pistol and shot the ape twice in the chest.

Wall stared incredulously at the ape for a second, his chest heaving, watching it twitch and bleed among the ferns lining the path; then he spun about, and asked Maddy what the fuck she'd had in mind.

"We got better to do than watch you prove what a man you are." She looked drawn and on edge, and her pistol was still in hand, trained a little to the left of Wall.

"Who the hell put ye in charge?" he said.

"You want to argue 'bout it," she said, "we'll argue later. Right now we got to get movin'."

"Goddamn it!" Wall took a step toward her. With his hair falling wild about his shoulders and his coarse features stamped with sullen anger, he looked every inch an ogre, and he towered over Maddy. "I'm sick right down to the bone of your bullshit. There ain't a single damn thing we done, you ain't stood in the way of." He started toward her again, and Maddy let the pistol swing a few degrees to the right. Wall stopped his advance.

"You don't care who you kill, do you?" she said. "Can't be the ape, might as well be one of us."

Wall ut his hands on his hips and glared at her. "Co on and shoot, if that's your pleasure."

"Nothin' 'bout this here is my pleasure," she said. "You know that. Just leave it alone, Wall. You've had your victory, you've got your ship. Let's go home."

"You hear this?" Wall said to the others, none of whom had changed their listless expressions and attitudes. "I mean have you been listenin' to her?"

"They're too damn tired to listen," Maddy told him. "Death and killin' makes people tired. That's somethin' you ain't figured out yet."

Wall kept staring at her for a few beats, then let out a forceful breath. "All right," he said. "All right for now. But we're gonna settle this later."

And with that he strode off along the path, ripping away a big rubbery leaf that hung down in his face with a furious gesture; he quickly rounded a turn and went out of sight, like he didn't much care if any of us were to follow.

"Son of a bitch ain't gonna be happy till he gets every one of us dead," Maddy said, holstering her pistol; the lines around her mouth were etched sharp, and she looked years older than she had earlier in the evening. But then maybe we all did.

It wasn't my place to say anything, I suppose, but since Wall had been art of Edgeville for a time, I felt an old loyalty to him.

"He mighta got carried away some," I said. "But you can't deny he's done us all a world of good down there today."

Maddy dropped a little thong over the hammer of her pistol to keep it from bouncing out of the holster; she gave me a sharp look.

"You don't know nothin' 'bout Wall like you think you do," she told me in a weary tone. "But you stick around, you gonna find out way more'n you can stand."

When at last we reached the surface and took shelter among the rocks, we discovered that only about hundred and thirty of us had survived the Garden. Brad and Callie were fine, as were most of those who had stayed with the flying machines; there had been scant fighting in the crater. But of the nearly four hundred who had gone deep into the Garden, fewer than seventy had returned, along with a handful of men and women who'd been saved from the collars, and five Captains. Wall wanted to ride out immediately, to return to wherever it was they'd set out from; but Coley, Maddy, and others told him, Fine, go ahead, but we're going to wait a while and see if anyone else comes out. More than three hundred dead had shaken people's faith in Wall—that was a sight more than what you would call "light casualties", and resentment against him appeared to be running high, even though we'd managed to steal the flying machine. I had thought the argument between him and Maddy was personal, but it was now obvious that olitics was involved.

After heated discussion, it was decided that Wall would take a group on ahead, and the rest of us would follow within the hour. But then they got to arguing about how many were to go with Wall and how many were to stay, and whether or not all the prisoners, who were sitting against boulders at the edge of the hardpan, should go with Wall's arty. It was hard to credit that people who had so recently fought together could now be all snarled up in these petty matters, and after a few minutes of hanging about the fringes of the argument, I gave up on them and went off and sat with Brad and Callie higher up among the boulders.

From the way everything looked, with that golden light still streaming up from the crater, and the moonstruck hardpan running flat and fissured to the mountains on the horizon, and cold stars glinting through thin scudding clouds, it appeared that nothing much could have happened down below the world; I would have expected some sign of what had transpired, coloured smokes curling up, strange flickering radiances, a steam of dead souls rising from the deep, and there should have been scents of rot and corruption on the wind, not merely the cool, dry smell of desolation; but all was as peaceful and empty as before, and for some reason this lack of evidence that anything had occurred afflicted me and I began to remember the things I had witnessed and the things I had done. As each of them passed before my mind's eye, a new weight settled in my chest, making a pressure that hurt my heart and caused the flow of my thoughts to stick and swell in my head as if something had damned them up. Brad asked me about Kiri, about Clay, and all I could do was shake my head and say I'd tell him later. Of course he must have known Clay was done for, seeing I had the man's possessions. But I didn't realize this at the time, because all my mind was turned inside.

I have no idea how much time had passed, but Wall, Maddy and the rest were still arguing down on the edge of the hardpan when the last survivors crawled up over the rim of the crater and came toward us at a sluggish pace, black and tiny and featureless against the golden light, like sick ants wandering away from a poisoned hole. They were strung out over about a dozen yards or so. Twenty, twenty-five of them. And as they drew near, the group who'd been arguing broke up and some went out to meet them. A couple looked to be wounded and were being supported by their companions. Brad got to his feet and moved a little way downslope, staring out at them. I was so worn out, I couldn't think what might have caught his interest, and even when he started out across the hardpan all I said to Callie was, "Where the hell's he goin'?" But Callie, too, had gotten to her feet by then and was peering hard in the direction of the stragglers.

"Damn," she said. "I think … " She broke off and moved closer to the edge of the hardpan. I saw her Adam's apple working. "Bob, it's her," she said.

I stood and had a look for myself and saw a lean, dark woman stepping toward us; she was too far away for me to make out her features, but her quick stride and stiff posture, things I'd always taken for telltales of Kiri's rage, were thoroughly familiar.

What was passing through my mind as I walked out onto the hardpan toward Kiri was almost every emotion I've ever had, up to love and down to fear and all their lesser permutations. I'd like to believe that the main thing I felt was relief and happiness, and I'm pretty sure that's the case, but I know that it was mixed in with a sizeable ortion of worry about what would happen to all of us now. I had already given up on Kiri, you see; I had buried her and the past along with her, and it wasn't easy to recalibrate my heart and mind to her presence.

She had one of the Bad Men's coats draped over her shoulders and was naked underneath it; she hardly seemed to see Brad, who was hanging on her when I came up; her eyes were fixed on some point beyond us both, and though her gaze wavered and cut toward me, the only other sign of acknowledgement she gave was to tousle Brad's hair absently and say something in a croaky voice that might have been my name, but might also have been an involuntary noise. An old bruise was going yellow on one of her cheekbones, and when the wind feathered her hair, I saw the marks on her neck made by a collar; but otherwise she seemed fine, albeit distant … Though as it turned out, I mistook single-mindedness for abstraction.

As we reached the group of Bad Men waiting at the bottom of the slope, Kiri gave me a hard shove, sending me staggering, and although I hadn't felt her hand on my sheath, I saw my knife in her hand. Quick as a witch, before anybody could move, she was in among the Bad Men and had grabbed one of the seated Captains and dragged him upslope behind a boulder. Some made to go after her, but Wall blocked their way and said, "I were you, I wouldn't try to stop her."

Coley—I recognized him by the red ribbon on his hat—said something by way of disagreement, but there was not much point in arguing about this particular trouble. A high-pitched scream issued from back of the boulder; it faltered, but then kept on going higher and higher, lasting an unreasonable length of time. It broke off suddenly, as if the voice had been permanently stilled; but soon it started up again. And so it went for a goodly while. Starting and stopping, growing weaker but no less agonized. It was plain Kiri had found a way of engaging the Captain's interest in the matter of life and death.

When at last she stood up from behind the boulder, she was wild-eyed, covered with blood, her face so strained it appeared her cheekbones might punch through the skin; I caught sight of Brad standing off to the side near Callie. He looked like he was about to cry, and I understood that he must understand what I had known for a while—that though we had found Kiri, she would never find us again. Whether it had been the lost duel or her troubles with me or everything since or a combination of all those things, she was gone into a distance where we could never travel, into the world that had bred her, a world whose laws would never again permit the enfeebling consolations of home and hearth.

We all watched her, standing in ragged ranks like a congregation stunned and disoriented by some terrible revelation from the pulpit, waiting for her to give some sign of what she might do next, but she remained motionless—she might have been a machine that had been switched off. The silence was so deep, I could hear the wind skittering gravel across the hardpan, and I had the notion that the night was hardening around us, sealing us inside the moment—it felt more like resolution than anything that had happened down in the crater. Like a violent signature in the corner of a painting of blood and degradation and loss. Finally Wall moved up beside her. He outweighed her by a couple of hundred pounds, but even so he was extremely cautious in his approach. He was talking to her, but I couldn't make out the words; from the sound of the fragments I was able to distinguish, however, I figured he was speaking in a northern tongue, one they shared. After a bit he took the knife from her hand and wiped it clean on his coat.

"Well then," he said to us, without a trace of sarcasm and maybe with just a touch of regret. "I guess we can go now."

In the end it happened that Wall was proved both right and wrong. As he'd predicted, the Captains weren't able to root us out of the deep laces where we hid, but they came damn close and many lives were lost. Eventually that time passed, and things returned to normal … at least as normal as normal gets out here in the Big Nothing. We live in a strange subterranean labyrinth beneath a black mesa, a lace of tunnels and storage chambers containing all manner of marvels, and machines whose purpose we may never determine, where once our ancestors slept and dreamed of a sweet untroubled world that would be born upon their waking. Bradley attends school, and though the subjects he studies are far removed from the rudimentary ones he studied back on the Edge, he remains nonetheless a schoolboy. I grow vegetables and fruits and wheat and such on the subsurface farms; Callie helps to administer stocks of food and weapons and so forth; Kiri trains our people in combat. So it would seem that very little has changed for us, but of course almost everything has.

When I finished the main body of this story, I showed it to Callie and after she had read it she asked why I'd called it "Human History", because it dealt with such a brief period of time and ignored what we had learned of the world of our ancestors. And that's the truth, it does ignore all that. I've seen the paintings our ancestors created, I've read their books and listened to their music, I've experienced no end of their lofty thoughts and glorious expressions, and I admire them for the most part. But they don't counterbalance the mass slaughters, the barbarities, the unending tortures and torments, the vile-nesses, the sicknesses, the tribal idiocies, the trillion rapes and humiliations that comprise the history of that world up until its mysterious ending (I doubt we'll ever learn what happened, unless the Captains decide to tell us). What the Captains did to us in the Black Garden pales by comparison to the nature of those ancient atrocities, even if you figure in seven hundred years of evil duplicity. And at any rate, to my mind the Captains are relics of that old world, and soon they'll be gone, relegated to that distant past. As will, I believe, men and women such as Wall and Kiri. And there we'll be, the whole human race freed from that tired old history, maybe not completely, but with a chance of doing something new, if we've got the heart to take it.

Back when I was living in Edgeville, I never thought much about God or religion. The Captains, I suppose, took the place of Cod, and having Cod available to talk with any hour of the day or night caused me to think less than perhaps I should have about the system of life. But maybe that was a blessing in disguise, because when I look back at all the trouble caused by religion in the old world, I have to think that I'm better off the way I am. Once I found an ageworn Bible, and in the front was a picture of the God known as Jehovah, an old man with fierce eyes and cruel lips and a beard and tufted eyebrows. He looked a lot like Wall, and sometimes when I go outside and glance up into the stormy sky—the skies out here are rarely clear—I imagine I see that angry old bearded Jehovah face come boiling out of the snow clouds, and I wonder if Wall wasn't standing in for him, if he wasn't the kind of leader man once made in the image of their god—strong, blustery, bloody-minded men who knew only one way of achieving their goals. We need Wall and Kiri now, we need their violent hearts, their death-driven need to dominate; but it's clear—at least so it seems—that there'll soon come a time when we don't need them any longer, and maybe that's all we can hope for, that we'll learn to choose our leaders differently, that we won't end up apes or Captains.

Old Hay forgot to tell me how to wind down a story, and I'm sure I'm going about it all wrong, trying to explain what I mean by "Human History", and how limiting the definition of that term to a eriod of a few weeks of happiness and a betrayal and a ride out onto the flats and a battle still seems to incorporate all the essentials of the process, as well as to voice some faint hope that we can change. But it's my story, the only one I've got worth telling, so I'll just go ahead and do my worst and hope that having it finish wrong or awkwardly will suit the ungainly nature of the tale, its half-formed resolution, and the frayed endings and uncompleted gestures that make up most of the substance of our lives.

In the days and weeks that followed the battle, Callie and I drifted apart. This was chiefly due to Kiri's presence—we could not feel easy with her around, even though she did not display the least interest in either one of us. I had an affair with Maddy, more of a healing than a passion. No hearts were broken, no souls transformed, but it was a fine place to be for the time it lasted. Even in the midst of it I half hoped that Callie and I might get back together but after Maddy and I went our separate ways, Callie remained aloof from me and I could not find it in myself to go to her. As had happened that night when Kiri had caught us at it in the store, I came to have a sense that the love we'd made back then had been childish, that the people we'd been were characters, part of a dramatis personae, our desire a consummate fakery, emblematic of a need to be the centre of attention of those around us, like actors in a pleasurable yet somehow despicable farce. And so we continued to deny what now seems inevitable.

I won't try to make any great dramatic presentation of how we did get back together, because it wasn't dramatic in the least. One night she walked into the little room I'd made for myself on one of the farms to sleep in when I didn't want to return to my regular quarters, and after some dodging around and a bit of inconsequential talk, we became lovers again. But the grave tenderness we expressed, touching each other carefully, treasuringly, like a blind man would touch the face of a statue, it was a far cry from the way it had been back in Edgeville, from our sweaty, joyful, self-deluding first time, and I recognized that whatever good had existed in our beginning had grown and flourished, and that's the wonder of it, that's the amazing thing, that despite the betrayals and failures and all the confused rinciples that contend in us, seed will sprout in this barren soil we call the human spirit and sometimes grow into something straight and green and true. As I lay with Callie that night, maybe it was wrong of me, but I couldn't feel sorry for anything that had happened, for any of us, not even for Kiri in the black wish of her sleep shaping herself into an arrow that one day would find an enemy's heart. It occurred to me that we were all becoming what we needed to be, what our beginnings had charged us to become: Kiri a death; Brad a man; Callie and I ordinary lovers, something we might once have taken for granted, but that now we both understood was more than we'd ever had the right to hope that we could come to be. It was a pure and powerful feeling to tear away the shreds and tatters of our old compulsions, and steep ourselves in the peace that we gave to one another, and know who we were and why, that Bad Men were mostly only good men gone over the edge to freedom, and that the past was just about done with dying, and the future was at hand.