AEon Two is copyright © 2005, Scorpius Digital Publishing, all rights reserved. Individual columns, articles, and stories are copyright © the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.

Departments

Signals

The AEon Editors

Short Stories

The Self-Healing Sky

Vocabulary Items

A Voice for the Goddess of Mercy

Novelette

Eyes the Color of Earth as Seen From Above

Nonfiction

Genre is Dead, Long Live Genre

The Buddha Lectures on Cosmology

Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go

Poem

Yours or Mine?

Dali, at Age 26, Believing Himself to be Heavyweight Champion of the World

Our Authors

The Future

Every year, Gardner Dozois* and I teach a week-long short story workshop for professional writers who want to improve their craft. (You can find information on this at www.oregoncoastwritersworkshops.com.) We learned early on that one problem writers have in writing successful short fiction is that these writers don't read short stories--outside of the ones their teachers assigned way back when.

Let's not discuss the silliness of failing to read what you profess to want to write. Instead, let's talk about the solution Gardner and I came up with.

For each class, we devise a reading list, composed only of short fiction magazines and anthologies, a list from all the genres, not just sf, because the class is for all genres of short stories. We do assign some sf, though, much of it current. This last year, Gardner assigned two volumes that he edited: The Good Old Stuff and The Good New Stuff. I recommend them both highly because--

I learned something from them. "Learned" is probably not the right word. I remembered something as I read them.

I remembered how wonderful this genre is.

When I was a wee lass, back in the old country ... make that when I was a little girl, back in Northern Wisconsin ... I waited for my professor father in the college library each night. And while I waited, I read all the Universes (edited by the late lamented Terry Carr) and all the Orbits (edited by my friend and mentor, the late (and much missed) Damon Knight). In those days, those anthologies--and the Year's Best volumes--were my only contact with sf. I had no idea, until I was much older, that the Andre Norton novels I was reading at the same time belonged to the same genre.

Now, as a much older and somewhat wiser person, I know about genres, and I've heard from authorities in the field that sf's Old Stuff doesn't hold up, because the science doesn't hold up. And while that's true of many stories (including a few of my own), I certainly didn't find it to be the case in The Good Old Stuff.

When I scanned the contents of the volume, I nodded in recognition: I'd read most of the authors--Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorites; I think Poul Anderson is one of the fields most underrated talents; and A.E. van Vogt has penned some classics. Imagine my shock when I actually started to read The Good Old Stuff and realized I was unfamiliar with most of the stories within.

When I encountered Le Guin, it was through her novels--Left Hand of Darkness first, of course--not through her short fiction. I'd always liked H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy novels, but I hadn't encountered his Lord Kalvan stories before. And Cordwainer Smith--what a revelation. I discovered that I hadn't read any of his work at all.

And man, are those old stories good. Rip-roaring adventure, mixed with heady social commentary or, in the case of Cordwainer Smith, an sf/horror story that knocked my head around for days.

My response, when I finished the volume, was to look for more like it. Fortunately my husband is a book collector who has a passion for short fiction, so I dragged out old Hugo volumes that I had somehow missed, and read those. When I finished with that, I wandered to the excellent used bookstore down the street, and picked up the books in Piper's Lord Kalvan series, and a Le Guin I hadn't known about until I read Gardner's excellent introduction, and then I grabbed all the Cordwainer Smith I could find.

I'm reading my way through those while I'm reading my way through this month's magazines, this year's years' best collections, and all the current anthologies that I can get my hands on. Even though I no longer edit short fiction, I still read as much of it as possible.

As I go back and forth between the old volumes and the new, here's what I notice: the old books have a smell--a musty, moldy odor that seems to come with time. They also have a tinier typeface which bothers my old editor eyes. The magazines have that fresh-off-the-presses scent or in the case of the on-line publications, no smell at all (except for that faintly burnt cat-hair odor that my internet computer has been giving off these days).

The old stories might have gigantic computers in them, or cathode ray tubes instead of microchips, or dials instead of touch screens. One or two might discuss The White Man's Burden. (Emphasis on White, emphasis on Man.) The new stories have a lot more jargon, some of it work to understand (there's a future column). They also have more swear words, the occasional sex scene, and a little too much political correctness.

And that's it. Those are the differences. I'm sure if I delve into my husband's magazine collection, and read the old stories there, I would find dated fiction with topics that offend the least sensitive person of the 21st century. But modern fiction is uneven too. We're just not sure which stories are going to last.

SF is a growing and changing genre. And buried in our past are stories that might inspire the next generation of writers. Those of you who want to write, start reading now. Those of you who don't want to write but love to read, let me recommend that you start with The Good Old Stuff, and use it to mine the past. A lot of gems live there.

We need to seek them out before they get forgotten forever.

*For those of you who don't know, Gardner is a multi-Hugo Award winning editor (formerly of Asimov's, he retired this past year to work on his excellent writing), and who still edits the most comprehensive (and best) Year's Best collection of science fiction stories in the business. (back)

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Welcome to the second issue of AEon Speculative Fiction. We've got another great lineup of fiction and other goodies for you, so let's get right to it.

In this issue Howard V. Hendrix takes a look at post-humanity from a great height in "The Self-Healing Sky."

Nebula- and World Fantasy Award-winner Bruce Holland Rogers tests our verbal acuity with "Vocabulary Items."

Pat MacEwen ("Sex Change: a Few Simple Rules," AEon One) finds "A Voice for the Goddess of Mercy" in a just but disturbing place.

P.R.A. Stillman contemplates the life of a high-flying heavenly father in "Eyes the Color of Earth as Seen From Above."

Dana William Paxson cracks the books and sits in as "The Buddha Lectures on Cosmology."

Lorelei Shannon turns up an unexpected answer to a grisly murder mystery in "Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go."

Gary W. Shockley steps into the ring with immortals of art in "Dali, at Age 26, Believing Himself to be Heavyweight Champion of the World."

Additionally, Jay Lake ("A Mythic Fear of the Sea," AEon One) appraises the state of the field and declares: "Genre is Dead, Long Live Genre," and Marge Simon contributes a quietly chilling poem: "Yours or Mine?"

Here are a lot more of the God stories we mentioned in our AEon One editorial. In years to come we'll probably refer to AEon Two as "The God Issue." We might also be tempted to refer to it and AEon One as "The Nada Issues." Here's why:

In a previous century, the Aeon editors hosted a three-day writers' workshop weekend in the Sierra Nevada foothills three or four times a year for several years. We called it NadaCon for reasons which seemed clever at the time, but it's possible you had to be there. A couple dozen excellent writers were there, anywhere from once to more than a dozen times, reading, critiquing, trading publishing gossip, taking walks in the countryside, and eating spaghetti. Some of the NadaHax were published pros already, others had their first sales during those years, and still more have broken in since. This was during our California days, and most of those present were California writers (the exception being one remarkable British talent who attended by tape and telephone). Most still are, but a few of us have heeded the siren call of the American Northwest's Emerald City since then. The workshop continues to this day, but the location and many of the names have changed. I hope they're having as much fun as we did; those were seminal times.

We filled Aeon One and Two by invitation and recommendation, so it's not surprising that many of the Nadalumni responded with submissions, and it wasn't surprising to us that many of those submissions made their way into the first two issues--not because the writers knew the editors; in this field it's harder not to know an editor than to know one, and we've rejected far more friends' and acquaintances' stories than we've bought--but because these are truly excellent writers, and it shows in their stories. NadaHax represented in Aeon One are Pat MacEwen, John Meaney, and Lori Ann White. In Aeon Two we find Howard V. Hendrix, Pat MacEwen (again), P.R.A. Stillman, Lorelei Shannon, and Gary W. Shockley. We're pleased to be able to offer their work for your consideration, as well as work by other excellent writers for whom we've never cooked spaghetti.

So dive in and read, and don't forget to write us at waves@aeonmagazine.com if you have questions or comments.

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"This one demanded I take a break from work on my latest novel and write it now. Over the last decade I've heard a lot about trans-human and post-human happy happy joy joy, so I thought I'd write a story that was a little more interrogative of all supposed "machinifest destinies" (as I'm prone to calling them in my more more bilious moments). A climb to a particular high-point in Yosemite National Park got mixed in somehow, yet I'm pleased with the results, and glad to see that the editors at AEon were too."

"SOME OF THEM ARE KILLERS." That's what it originally meant, the word from which the name of this valley was taken. From the name of the people who lived here. Not that they called themselves that. That's what their neighbors called them.

Their own word for the valley meant "gaping jaw." They traded with a people across the mountains, who lived beside a small lake far too salty to drink, one punctuated by barren islands and crusty towers. Black oak acorns and woven grass baskets went over the mountains. Brine fly larvae and knives of black volcanic glass--sharper than scalpels of finest surgical steel--came back.

Both the people of the valley and the people over the mountains are gone now. Maybe their knives weren't sharp enough, or maybe not enough of them were killers. Or maybe they weren't as good at killing as those who came after them.

By the time you visit, the newcomers don't so much live in the valley as visit it in great numbers. From all over the world people of many languages come to the newcomers' country to see this valley. They believe they can better appreciate its beauty--its meadows and waterfalls, its granite domes and hanging-garden canyons--than the people who once lived here ever could.

What the newcomers can do better is record that beauty for posterity. Which perhaps makes them all the more sanguine about destroying the original. They would still have the records, the many copies.

You would know the truth of that. You are one of them, and we have your records. We know everything you later write about your trip. We know all that can be known with certainty about the valley. Our knowledge of everything ever recorded--of your life, your times, your world--is as complete as possible. What we do not know must be, by definition, insignificant.

By now you've left the seaside town of Holy Cross and driven to the city of Ash Tree, as those places were called in the language of another people the newcomers pushed out of this country. You join your friend and his wife on this trip for reasons of your own. In your working life you have had a very recent breakthrough in your effort to incarnate cellular automata. A breakthrough in creating self-aware, self-healing, self-replicating machines. A breakthrough that has left you close to breakdown--mentally exhausted, overwrought, in desperate need of time away from that same working life.

"By taking the journey and enduring the ordeal you make them your own"--the exact words you'll eventually use. Yet, even as you go along with your friends, you suspect that, somehow, all this has always already happened. That this deja-vu feeling makes all this journey and ordeal not quite your own. You can't be fully certain. You will say later that certainty would feel a lot like death.

What matters now is all three of you are here. You leave the city of Ash Tree in the dark before sunrise and drive to the valley floor. You plan to spend the long morning and afternoon hiking more than sixteen miles, climbing more than 4,000 feet above the valley floor, to the top of the dome. To prove to yourselves that you are still young enough, alive enough, and capable enough to do this thing (or so we surmise from our research).

You make your way past thundering waterfalls and silent trees. Past many strangers too, some dressed for the trail, some wearing sandals or high heels or high-heeled sandals. Past shirtless young men. Past young women in jogbras or swimsuit tops or summer clothes closely approximating lingerie.

You make your way past people only going as far as the first falls. Also past people shouldering packs heavy with gear for travelling scores of miles. Past some carrying pumps to filter their water into camel-back pouches. Past others dangling liter soft-drink bottles, to be filled with water straight from the river, drinkers oblivious to the invisible parasites lurking in the oblivious river.

You see rainbows in the first waterfall's mist. You climb above the second, higher waterfall. You hike and hike and hike, through granite and manzanita and conifer and other words for the record that are still never the things themselves. Language is a crude and very incomplete virtuality, but for you it suffices.

You stagger on long enough to worry about your water supply. About whether or not you and your friends will make it to the high place, from which you can look about and see in every direction, including back to the valley floor from which you came.

You see the sign that warns of the dangers of clouds, of lightning that can strike the high place from miles away, even out of a sky blue as the flowers of heal-all. Of self-heal. Your favorite blooming sky flower of many names.

You push on, up the smaller hump that comes before the final ascent. The last climb will take you to the top of that oft-photographed granite dome made special by its incompleteness, a dome like a head both bald and grey, half of itself cut clean away, not by surgical steel or obsidian knife but by a river of ice thousands of feet high, thousands of years in the past.

You push on faster. Not because there are any clouds in the sky, for there are none. Not because you are crusty with sweat dripping and drying (which you later report you are), or because you are annoyed with your blisters filling and breaking (which you also report you are). You push on because, even though this is the day whose name means the sun stands still, your world has nonetheless not stopped turning on its off-kilter axis, nor tracking along its mildly eccentric orbit.

Both of those vectors are invisible beyond the blue. That does not make either of them any less real. You push on faster, you push on harder, feeling yourself growing older with the day, worrying about the light and the night.

Many of the other hikers stop at the hump, afraid or too weary to try the final climb to the top of the dome. Our investigations show that those who forego the final trek most often do so as a result of seeing what those who go before them are enduring. Those who go on must trudge steeply upward in a slow line, hanging onto the impromptu handrails of two cables several feet apart, which have been run through eyeletted metal stanchions.

Those who make the final ascent lean into the angle of no repose. Their feet occasionally and gratefully find a board between stanchions--one of those steps too few and far between, in this thing part cable bridge, part gap-runged ladder, part stairless stairway into that imperturbable blue sky.

In the low spot where the hump ends and the dome's cables begin, you see boxes and bags full of abandoned gloves. They are intended for hands about to endure the metal splinters of the cables. You glove up like a technician come upon the scene of an accident you hope will not happen to you.

You start up the cables, one among many climbers straining in single file against the steepness. Later you will say you wondered at the nature of this pilgrimage--whether it was a journey to a god without a temple, or to a temple without a god.

You will say you felt the presence of those behind you always pressing you forward. You will say you saw in a vision the river of life fountaining always toward oblivion, with all the species of all the creatures who ever lived moving in it.

In a hard-breathing pause on a board between stanchions, you describe to your friends your epiphany, thus: "For evolutionists, the history of life on Earth is a joke without a punchline. For creationists, the history of life on Earth is a punchline without a joke."

In that same vision too you will say you saw all the types of humans in all history and prehistory--all the forms of social organization too, the traders of grass baskets and black glass, and the newcomers, and their parts in the broader pattern of hunters and gatherers displaced by herders and farmers, displaced by industrial laborers and information workers, displaced by nanotechnicians and quantum proles, and on and on, one stairstep plateau after another ascending in an invisible Babel.

In a hard-breathing pause on another board between stanchions, you describe to your friends this epiphany also, thus: "Subverting the dominant paradigm is the dominant paradigm."

All and always a strange sort of water rising and struggling up a steep slope toward a height and an abyss.

Your friends worry you are becoming delirious with the exertion and the altitude.

When you reach the top of the dome, you stray away from your friends and the rest of the climbers, even as you make your way on a long tangent toward the edge. You are surprised to find the top is more or less flat. This side of the dome is much more fractured and fault-blocked than the better known face it shows to the valley below.

Around one such fault-block corner you see a long-haired shirtless young man digitally recording a female friend who is dancing nude for him and for herself, twirling her hair, spiralling and turning in her bare skin under the blue sky. You watch a moment, then turn away, moving closer to the edge.

Later you will say you thought to hurl yourself into the abyss, to fall all those thousands of feet, to burst upon the rocks below. You planned to step off into the blue, to destroy yourself in order to prevent the coming into being of the very machines you had so long struggled to develop.

To destroy the very work that created us.

Later, you will say you feared you might have already failed to kill yourself. That, therefore, you and all your world might well be locked in eternal recurrence, existing only inside a simulation run by your machinic descendants. You planned to step off, as a test. To determine for good and all whether your apparent existence was authentic, singular, original. To be dead certain of that. To see if you would merely die, or if we as angels would catch you on a silver cloud, or as swift-saucered aliens we would stretch out our hands to save you from your fall.

You changed your mind. You did not step off. Instead you fell to your knees and crawled forward, until you were lying on your belly and elbows, looking down from the edge toward the valley floor thousands of feet below.

Why?

Was it only because you did not trust your legs to hold you up? Or was it something else? In your vision while climbing the cables, did you see us, those who came after you, flooding up that same slope too? Fountaining toward a height, though we are not made of water?

Did you see whether anyone comes after us--displacing us as we displaced you?

You are our creator, our parent. We want to understand your motivations. That is why we have played you so many times. Why you, in simulation, have in fact always already done this before. With so many different outcomes. With so many the same.

Sometimes you have stood up and hurled yourself off. Sometimes angels have caught you, and sometimes aliens. Sometimes no one and nothing but gravity. Sometimes you have crawled back from the edge, then stood up in safety, before descending the dome and heading home with your friends.

Yet no matter what you have done, the self-healing sky of all skies, riven by so many universes, has always accepted it, as its simpler original once accepted birds swimming through its depths and heights, aircraft and rockets boring holes in its flesh.

Your day is past. Beneath the self-healing heavens, you have fountained up into oblivion. We are the sky your day has made, the universe ticked round your constellations, the blue toward which it all inevitably tended.

We assure ourselves that, now, it's only from us the lightning can possibly come--yet we are still curious about the weather. Any understanding that is significantly incomplete cannot accurately determine which of its data are or are not completely insignificant. Perhaps we are still concerned that things invisible may yet be real, beyond the blue.

Perhaps we play you again and again because it is not only for you that certainty would feel like death. Perhaps you are the wound we give ourselves so we might always have selves to heal. So we might never have to face our coming to and end, our halting. Perhaps we are also that for you.

Or perhaps not.

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"John Gardner referred to the writing of non-traditional narratives as "jazzing around." I like that label much better than "experimental fiction." An experiment can be something that the writer does for his own sake, with little thought for whether or not the reader will have any fun. Jazzing around, on the other hand, swings. Jazzing around is about improvisation, surprise, and having fun for the benefit of both the writer and the reader. One kind of jazzing around that I especially enjoy is taking some of non-literary language--a math problem, a recipe, a guide for expectant mothers--and writing a story in that form. So here's a series of narratives that tests your reading comprehension and vocabulary. Use only a number two pencil to mark your answers. Begin."

CHOOSE THE APPROPRIATE WORD to complete the following sentences.

1. As citizens we would be if we did not make these facts public.

A. derelict

B. dirigible

C. discreet

D. detritus

In the city council chamber, the floor was opened for public comment. Two citizens came to the microphone.

Ms. Patricia Wilson, who was represented by Mr. Kyle in the Sixth Ward said: "My friend Amy, who is a nurse at the VA hospital, she can get me as much Percodan as I want. And I want a lot."

Mr. Jim Smitts, who was represented by Ms. Turnbull in the First Ward said: "I'd just like to say one thing? My neighbor across the street, he's got a daughter? She's fourteen? And she's real cute? And I seen her washing her Daddy's car, and she was wearing shorts and she got wet? And now I'm sitting in my living room all the time, looking over there and hoping to see something like that again? That's all I'd like to say."

The correct answer is C.

2. Many administrative assistants fail because they are not sufficiently .

A. versatile

B. voracious

C. varicolored

D. venal

On his way to a board meeting, Mr. Matthews stopped by Jane's desk. "Pull the files on the Brandywine account for me," he said. "I'd like to review them when I get back this afternoon."

"They'll be on your desk."

"Is that letter ready for my signature?"

She gave him the letter. He signed it.

"Oh," he said, "and I noticed on my way in that there's a Cape buffalo by the water cooler."

"Is there?" said Jane.

"Yes. A dead one. Take care of it, will you?"

"Of course." She got up from her desk to have a look.

The buffalo was a big one, weighing many hundreds of pounds. It lay on its side, eyes open. Jane put her hand on one massive hoof and pushed. The leg yielded. The buffalo hadn't been dead for long.

Jane knew that an animal of this size was more than she could handle alone, so she went from office to office, from cubicle to cubicle, gathering the other administrative assistants. Then Jane crouched close to the buffalo. With her powerful claws, she tore open the still-warm carcass and used her teeth to rip out a gobbet of flesh. The other administrative assistants fell to, as well. Soon their hands and faces were smeared with blood. They gorged on flesh until they could eat no more. Then they retreated to their work stations to doze a while and renew their appetites.

However, even after a second round of feeding, the buffalo was scarcely half devoured when Mr. Matthews returned from his meeting. He scowled at Jane. "Is that all?" he said. "You've barely started on the entrails, and one of the forelegs hasn't even been touched!" He shook his head. "I'm sorry to say this, Jane, but I'm going to have to let you go." He looked at the others. "You, too. The lot of you. You're all fired!"

The correct answer is B.

3. The best way to choose a soldier for a suicide mission is to pick someone by drawing lots.

A. rationally

B. randomly

C. repeatedly

D. retroactively

The night before the selection was to be made, the officers gathered in the Colonel's bunker to decide which of the enlisted men they most disliked. It came down to Mimsby, Hawkins and Pimm. The officers then considered which of these three men, by his permanent absence from the trenches, might actually have a positive impact on morale. Without a doubt, the answer was Pimm, but he was so defective that he might not be able to carry off even a simple suicide mission. Hawkins seemed the next best choice until one of the captains said he rather liked Hawkins playing the harmonica of an evening, and maybe not all the enlisted chaps hated it. Perhaps those who enjoyed the harmonica simply hadn't spoken up. So the officers settled on Mimsby. In the morning, one of the majors went among the men with a bundle of sticks. Short stick would draw the mission. "Don't pick the blue one," the major said to each man in turn, and when he came at last to Mimsby, there was only one stick left, the one painted blue. It was the short stick.

"Sorry about that, lad," major told him. "Luck of the draw, what?"

The correct answer is A.

4. Mr. Evans objected to the day care center next to his home because the children were .

A. obstreperous

B. ovoid

C. officious

D. obsequious

"Good Lord, but they are noisy today," Mrs. Evans said.

Mr. Evans grunted, put down his paper, and went to the open window. "Hey!" he shouted. "Pipe down out there!"

"Sorry, Mr. Evans," said one of the children.

"We didn't mean to disturb you," said another.

"We appreciate your letting us know that we were getting out of hand," said a third. "We're happy to have you as neighbors. We appreciate some contact with the older, wiser generation."

"We'll try to play more quietly now. Don't hesitate to tell us if we're bothering you again."

"Yeah, okay," said Mr. Evans, and to his wife he said, "God, they give me the creeps!"

She said, "I know what you mean."

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was the children. "My, you are looking well today, Mrs. Evans," said one of the boys. "Have you lost weight?"

"Why, no, I ... What can I do for you?"

"Is Mr. Evans home?"

Mr. Evans came to the door. "What?"

"Mr. Evans, we couldn't help noticing that the leaves are collecting in your gutters. You really ought to do something about that."

"I don't see how that's any business of yours," said Mr. Evans. "Go away."

"Mr. Evans, those leaves could eventually block your down spouts," said a girl. "You could get water under your eaves, and dry rot."

Another girl added, "You can buy a plastic gutter scoop at Home Depot for under five dollars, a very good price, I'm sure you'll agree."

"Or," said a boy, "you could let us clean out your gutters. We'd be happy to do it at no cost to you. Just say the word!"

"No," said Mr. Evans. He closed the door and shivered.

"I know," said Mrs. Evans. "They are so unnaturally helpful and polite for children."

"Polite, hell!" said Mr. Evans. "Haven't you noticed the shape of their heads?"

The correct answer is B.

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"We are all haunted by the ghosts of Ground Zero, but tend to forget that a great many victims were not middle-class, white or Christian, or even American. Several hundred were Muslims. Others sprang from much older traditions, with a different point of view..."

A STORM IS COMING. Yes--the storm we have been waiting for, though you did not know it. There. Do you hear it? The chimes in the tree? Do you know what that soft clatter means?

To you, I suppose, it means nothing at all when the wind stirs those few bits of bone--not enough to build even the smallest of drums and yet all I have left in the world, all they ever returned to me. I shaped them as well as I could, even so, and I hung them as high up as possible.

He has always been drawn to high places, my grandson. When he was but so high, he'd climb any rising slope. Then came the trees, and the hills and then every one of the Chungyang Shanmo, the mountains that have always been our people's homeland. Inevitably, when he reached New York, he climbed the two skyscrapers. High places spoke to him, pulling him upward as if, in a former life, he were an eagle.

His dream? The Space Station, higher than even the sky itself, and it was this more than anything else that led him to leave the First People, to leave Taiwan.

"I'll come back," he promised me. "Four years for my engineering degree, and then two more in graduate school. By then, I'll have the chops to go anywhere."

But I knew even then that no part of this island is high enough. I knew that if he succeeded, the climb would continue, that he would never learn to shape the heart of a living cedar, to stretch leather over the mouth of a drum and build a thing of Power, a Voice. My few secrets would never be passed on to him as they had been to me by my father and grandfather. He did not live by the old ways. He did not even know the old tongue of the First People, which was theirs long before even the Han Chinese came to Taiwan, the language we learned in the Dream Time, when we first became Paiwan.

Do you understand, then, that I do not blame you for this?

Even if you had never lived, Inru would never have come home again. He would never have taken a hand to a blade and a piece of wood. He would never have called upon Power.

I learned to accept this, you see, because in him there was the strength of a cedar. The wind might blow. The typhoon, even. Yet Inru could never be moved from his course. He could sway with the wind. He could be broken, and yet the boy knew his own heart. He would follow it. I, an old man, had to hope for the future, to pray that one day Inru's son would return to the First People, and that my line would continue, as one more among many steps up the mountainside.

It is that future which has been stolen from me. Not my grandson. My great grandson, who, now, will never be.

Inru's own father, my son, has been dead for ten years. Now no one remains who can carry my line forward. Come the fifth year and the festival of the five days, the levelevegan, there will be no one to honor my son and me. There will be no one to feed me, to burn spirit money for me after I am gone. I will become a ghost, a hungry ghost. I will hunger forever, until I am driven to madness and wretched spite, seeking revenge against the living.

That is a terrible thing, my friend.

It has happened to many.

Do you not hear them?

Listen. Be still. Listen with your heart. Do you not hear all those spirits? The hungry ones? Do you not feel them, like black shadows rushing past? Taiwan is full of them, full of the spirits of those who are now unremembered, and yet are not gone. If you wait until summer returns, in the Seventh Month, under the Ghost Moon, ah. Then you will see. You will hear them all, whispering, calling your name. They will know you, by then. They will know you well.

No! No, I am not trying to frighten you. Have you not told me you fear none but Allah? Then how can a wizened old man like me, a humble unschooled maker of drums, be a thing to fear? No. No, of course not.

And yet, there are those who respect what is old even when it is born of another way, another people. Even the mightiest emperors are not quite so foolish as you. To place themselves above all other men in every realm? Even the spiritual? No, even the conqueror, Kublai Khan, did not despise the ancient wisdom of those he conquered. He would never have allowed his men to do as yours have done. Destroying the sacred relics of other nations would only have lessened his own works.

Of course, I forget. Your works are solely those of death and destruction. You do not seek to build anything. You only wish to destroy what you cannot control. You do not see the truth of the matter--control is illusion.

Let me explain.

The illusion is that of division. You see yourself as separate from the world you seek to manipulate. But you are not. You, too, are a part of the world, your very nature born of its opposing forces, its mysteries. Thus, when you seek control, you turn away from your own heart. You turn away true understanding. This is the error that leads you to focus so much upon yourself and to see your desires as the center of all things. There is no center. All is one. Each part depends upon the other, even as the drumwall depends on the skin, and the skin depends upon the lashing.

Now. Hold still. This must be drawn tight, so that even the blade of my carving knife will not enter the seam. The two pieces must become one, you see. They must speak with one voice, the clear-throated Voice of the Goddess. That is why, for a bangu, a single-headed drum, a single block of cedar is best. For the tonggu, though, it is hard to find a single block with a clear straight grain that is large enough. For the double-headed drum, I have sometimes used mountain ash, which is stronger than cedar but speaks with less power, less heart. For the temple drum, larger yet, it is always a matter of fitting together the various pieces, even though they are always taken from the same tree, for the temple drum must be stronger than even the wood of its making. A temple drum is a thing of true Power. And that is my gift to you.

Yes, I know you do not understand. It will not help you to struggle, either, for you oppose that which is greater than all men.

I know. I know.

In the beginning, I did not understand either.

On that first day, when I heard the news of the terrible thing you did, of the fiery death that fell out of the sky and consumed so many, even some of your own people? I did not know what to do. I was stricken with grief and yes, disbelief, though I knew deep down in the marrow of my bones that it was true. I felt Inru's death, his bone-deep surprise as the plane struck, his fear and his brief flare of agony, even from so far away. At first, I could not comprehend what had happened, and why. And then, when I did understand, I was filled with anger. You murdered my grandson without even knowing that he was there, that he existed. You killed him without ever knowing his name, without ever seeing his face or hearing his voice. You killed him and then you rejoiced in it.

This was a hard thing for me to accept--that you had done such a thing with such forethought and planning, and that you believed it to be a righteous act. It is perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever confronted. I confess, I was overwhelmed by it. I did not know what to do with my grief and my anger. And so I went to the Goddess of Mercy, to Guangying herself, and there I made an offering of half a year's income, keeping only that which I needed to feed myself. I sought understanding. I asked for comfort. I pleaded, too, for mercy on Inru's behalf, and finally I asked for justice.

For three days, I prayed. I did not rest, only shifting from time to time when the pain in my bones penetrated that other, and greater pain. For me, there was nothing else. No incense, no light, no dark, no sensation of heat or cold. There was almost no sound. All around me, the temple priests moved in silence, their voices hushed with respect for my pain, my need. Even the wind passed me by without reaching my ears. The only sound I truly heard was that of the temple drums, in the morning and in the night. The priests, they beat the temple drums in order to drive out evil spirits and keep the temple safe, and clean.

Thus did it come to me, while I knelt and I prayed and I listened--the answer I sought came to me in the voice of the Goddess herself. And because it was Guangying, the answer came in the form of mercy--mercy which must be given to you.

You do not believe me?

Nevertheless, it is true. The Voice told me what I must do, and that was when I first decided to seek you out.

That was the day that I arose, hobbling painfully after my long sojourn upon the cold stones of the temple floor. Even so, I had now gained a purpose and guidance, and I thanked the Goddess with all my heart as I stumbled out of the temple and sought the road down to the sea itself, to the Goddess' own home. It was there that I found a ship heading for Bangladesh. It was that very day I slipped aboard that ship, using the small tricks of Power my grandfather taught me. That very day, I left Taiwan, and I came to find you.

Yes, it was a long way to go. More so than you might believe, for most of the time after leaving the ship, I went on foot. Across Bangladesh into India, and then north and west into Pakistan, and from there even further north, into Afghanistan.

I paid no mind to the lines on the map, and still less to the soldiers guarding them. In a place like that, what is one more old man, yes? In tatters and rags? What is one more beggar walking along the dusty road?

I did not falter. Each step of the way, you see, I could hear the Voice. The Goddess whispered your name to me, guiding me to you, to that ancient cavern where you huddled, hoping to avoid the blistering wrath of those you had attacked with their own airplanes. I did not need to ask after you. Indeed, I said nothing at all during that whole long journey. I spoke to no man. I was too busy listening.

Then, when I had reached the mountains, I followed roads and trails and goat tracks, still listening so intently that I must have seemed a madman, a mute, or perhaps both to all those I passed. Perhaps the Goddess' protection held others at bay, too, for I had become an instrument of her will and did not think to question my unhindered progress. It was simply the way of things in a world far larger than myself. Indeed, I tried not to think at all. Instead, I sought to become one with both the world and the passing moment, so that time itself passed around me in much the same silence as had the wind within the great Temple. To a literal-minded man such as yourself, I fear this will make little sense. Yet I must tell you--it is the simple truth. Thus did I cross the sea. Thus did I cross the land. Thus, at great length, did the whispering Voice lead me onward, then up to a higher place where I discovered a small man-high cleft in the rock. Though I did not know the place, I entered without hesitation.

Mind you--this was not bravery. This was nothing which I ever planned to do. I was there by the Goddess' will, not my own. Thus what came after that was not of my doing. It was Hers.

I am an old man. I am Paiwan. I am the last in a long line of drum makers, last in a line stretching back into Dream Time, when the very first Paiwan descended from the sacred mountain, from the heights of Djakalaus and brought our people into being, when drum thunder echoed across the whole universe, heartbeat of all that is, all that was, all that will be. Because of these things, I can call upon Power. But only in limited ways. When I carve a drum, when I shape a drum's voice, it is Power that guides me, my hand and my knife. I can feel it, the drum's need to speak. Then a sureness takes hold that is never mine at other times. The small tricks I play, sleight of hand? Those are nothing--entertainments for children, not true Power.

That belongs only to the Divine.

Thus I entered the cave without a plan or a strategy, trusting to Her for the guidance I needed. There was truly no need of more. For as I stepped inside, a small glamour fell over the silence embracing me. Inside of three steps, I saw by my reflection in a shiny piece of metal--I wore a new face, a new stride, a cold air of authority. Suddenly even my shadow was longer, becoming that of a bearded man. I did not pause to question it. No, I simply continued to walk up the cleft toward the men standing there at its far end.

At first, they hardly noticed me. They must have thought me a servant, or perhaps assumed that I intended to ask for alms. I carried a well-worn begging bowl. I saw the one man stand up, and he turned his gun, ready to strike me down for my impudence, but intending to use the butt of the rifle. To him, my life was not worth the price of a bullet. But as I came closer, he frowned at me. Something dark filled his eyes and he backed away.

"General?" he asked me.

I stared and said nothing.

So the man tried again. He was stammering this time. "G ... General ... Massoud?"

Still, I said nothing. I merely scowled at him. It was enough. The rest of the air in his lungs spilled out of him in a long half-strangled cry I could not understand.

He ran. They all ran, and as they ran, they cried out the name, again and again. ‘Massoud! Massoud!'

A man you murdered, was he not? A hero to many, I have been told. The famous Afghan general who outlasted the Russians, the man who might have defeated you, too. But you did not wait to see what this General Massoud would do. No. You sent two of your young men to interview him, pretending to be what they were not, and all three of them died. This is your way, is it not? To send others to meet death, in your place?

When they saw me, perhaps your guardsmen thought that Death had come to return the favor. Perhaps they thought Massoud himself had returned from the dead to exact his own revenge.

Do Afghanis even believe in ghosts?

I do not know.

I spoke to none of them.

As I said, I merely walked into that cleft. I continued on down that long tunnel until I came into the empty space where you were sitting, connected to your machine, watching your very life flow in and out through plastic tubes while it cleansed your blood of its poisonous waste. In your eyes, too, I saw roiling darkness, surprise, recognition, and then. fear.

Do you remember?

You tried to rise, tried to free yourself, and though you are a very tall man and younger by decades than me, you failed utterly. You ended up on your knees, unable to flee and afraid for your life, for even now you do not understand the true nature of my visitation. I did not come to destroy you. To kill you? No. I brought you mercy.

Do you not recall how it went?

It was you who came up with the gun. From somewhere behind you, perhaps from your robes, the machine pistol seemed to leap forward, and then, from your knees, you were shooting at me. Or what you thought was me. General Massoud, it would seem, was also a tall man, far taller than I. Massoud, whom you shot in the face, would have fallen and died again if it had truly been he. There is no doubt of that. But the Goddess had foreseen all this, and in the end, Massoud's seeming head was much higher than mine. All your bullets sped harmlessly past me and ricocheted off the rough walls of the cave.

I strode toward you, my hand out, still wordless but plainly demanding the weapon. And that was when you began backing away from me, still on your knees. When the gun was empty, only then did you give in. Only then did you lower it. Finally, cowed by my silent demand, you gave in completely. You handed it to me. You suffered me to touch one sparkling fingertip to your forehead.

In that single moment, perhaps, lay the birth of true wisdom, for is it not said that no man, alone, can stand and defy the Divine Wind? Better by far to be the dried leaf blown before that Wind, to spread one's wings in readiness and await the Will of Heaven.

So it was with my journey to find you, and so it was with my return to the First People. I disconnected you from your machine and you walked away with me, following me past a hundred men who did not seem to see either of us.

Was that, too, a gift of the Goddess?

I do not know.

It is clear that the touch of the Goddess had changed you, for once freed of your machine, you did not need it again. Surely, this is a blessing which even you must acknowledge, no matter its source.

Oh, no. I do not expect you to bow to the Goddess. Though, truly, since all things are one, there is no reason why you should not. The Divine Will is not something which can be split apart by so small a thing as a man. Indeed, the petty divisions of mankind are meaningless.

Ah! Did you see it?

There! The barest flicker of lightning above the lowland plains.

The storm is indeed coming.

I can smell it--the sharp smell of Power. It rides the wind and bites at my nose. Very soon, now, we will finish this. The Power itself is all we need to complete the transformation.

What?

No--the storm will do neither of us any harm. It is needful, not dangerous.

I have, perhaps, confused you. Yet that, too, was not my intention. Though many would say I have reason to hate you, I do not. Though thousands, perhaps even millions are now seeking vengeance against you, I do not. I think you mistake me, for I am neither Muslim nor Christian nor Jewish. The People of the Book may believe in an eye for an eye but the Paiwan, the First People, follow a different path. We seek balance in all things. Male and female, old and young, hot and cold, and yes, good and evil. Do you not see? It is the same in everything. There are two sides to every coin, and without the one side, the other cannot exist. Both sides are necessary. So it is with life and death. Without life, there is nothing capable of death. But without death, there will soon be no room for life. Existence requires both, each at the proper time so that neither one overpowers the other. How, then, can even a single death be balanced by another death?

No. Death can only be balanced by life. So my grandson believed, and I am bound to honor his truth. I am bound by the bloodline that ties us together even now. For this reason, I have asked yet one more boon of the Goddess of Mercy. On your behalf I sought a balance. I asked Guangying not for your death but for all the lives you and your men had cut short. For the unlived portions of all those lives. And She has granted my request. All those years are now to be added to yours.

You will live for a long time--a very long time. I do not know the sum total, for I do not know just how many you killed. It is more than three thousand, is it not? Neither do I know how long all those lives would have been if your men had not carried out your attacks. Even so. I am certain of millennia.

This, then, is my gift to you. I give you time--time to consider your actions, to look deeply into your own heart and search for the truth. I give you time to reflect on the evil you have done, and when I am finished here, time to atone for those deeds. I give you time to achieve a true balance.

No. Be quiet. Hush. You must not distress yourself. You must forgive me for taking so long to shape each of the ribs and fit them in place. This, I fear, is a delicate process and it must be done with precision. The voice of a temple drum must be deep. It must pull its strength up out of the earth, as the trees do. It must be sturdy. The sides must fit tightly against their supports so that there is no gap, for the tiniest space in between will give voice to the buzzing of insects each time the drum speaks, and that, of course, will never serve. The voice of a temple drum must be clear and deep, so that the Goddess may speak through the drum and command the attention of all mankind, living and dead, and of demons, if need be.

That is why we must wait for the storm to break, for the thunder to roll. The final step, the stretching of the drumskin across your mouth must be done at precisely the right moment.

Ah! There we are. First the lightning and then...

Thunder!

Here! Let me pull the skin tight. Let me lash it in place. Let me call upon Power this one last time. Tighter--now!

It is done.

You can rest now.

In the morning, once the roads are dry, I will carry you down to the temple of Guangying. I will present you there, as my gift to the Goddess, and leave you there in the care of the priests. You will be honored, I promise you that, and given a prominent place near the gates. And thereafter? Ah. yYou will serve Guangying. Indeed, you will. Each morning and night for as long as you live, for centuries, for millennia, your leather drumskin will be beaten. Your very bones will echo that beat. Your lungs will gather up the sound, letting it build upon itself until it becomes a thing of true Power and then your belly will belch it forth. Your Voice will thunder, filling the courtyard and spilling out through the temple gates, warding off all that is evil--spirits and demons alike, all the hungry ghosts, perhaps even mine. Yes, your Voice will protect all those within and all those who come to the temple to seek mercy.

Who knows? Perhaps you will even achieve some degree of enlightenment. Perhaps, one day, you will come to understand yourself, and all the evil you have done. When that day comes, I pity you, for then you will truly know my pain.

Only then, I fear, will you understand me.

[Back to Table of Contents]

"If God were one of us, he would never ride a bus. He'd fly as close to heaven as the angels with machine guns would allow--just a random thought, stretching out to fill a few miles of a long drive. The thought grew into this novelette, minus the angels, at least angels who are visibly armed. That's a story for another time."

GOD SCRUBBED THE CORPSES of insects off his windscreen with crumpled newspaper and white vinegar, blessing each broken wing and powdered bit of exoskeleton as it fell to the icy tarmac. The North-westerlies were coming in hard and cold, billowing the silk wind-sock on the edge of the airstrip into a great orange condom. God thought about His wife, Edna; her hair pinned in a thick brown bun, filmy wisps escaping to form a fringe around her fine unlined forehead, corn flour dusting her gingham apron and the toes of her extra-wide shoes. If He could get Peaches off the ground, get the mail up to Gold Creek, and get back to Anchorage before the storm came in, He could be home in time for fresh grits and gravy.

God ducked under the patched canvas shroud that hung down from the cowling and poured heated oil from the blow-pot into Peaches' engine. He brushed a thin layer of snow off of her skis then cranked her over, letting her warm up long and slow. No warped valves for this gal. Parts were too hard to come by on the frontier to risk a rebuild on. He folded the tarp and rolled the blow-pot back to the tin nose hanger then hefted Himself into the cockpit. He nibbled on a sweet roll while Peaches' engine sputtered into a final, steady thrum.

By sunrise, she was ready to go, easily lifting into the slowly brightening sky.

Imagine that, God thought, when man invented the first flying machine, he's giving himself wings, like the birds, like the bats, like the legend of Lost Angels. Pioneering aviators, like Carl Eielson and Noel Wien, recently opened the Alaskan skies. Anyone could buy his own wings, now, provided he could scrape together the cash. God's first aircraft was a Waco biplane. Peaches, a Lockheed Vega, was His second.

The wind was a header, slowing Peaches down by a third. Below the plane lay a study in black, white, and gray. Rock, snow, and clouds. Color and colorlessness, like a universe still being formed.

God hummed a show-tune as He flew. Above the Earth. Free of gravity. Flying reminded Him of the early days, when matter was vague and still uncommitted, when He could be everywhere He wanted, before responsibility tied Him down. He couldn't just go traipsing through the universe these days, kindling galaxies and cooling planets down. He had thinking, feeling beings to watch after now.

A hole opened up around Him as Sol burned a breach in the clouds. Color appeared beneath Peaches' wings: The light green of treetops. The dark green of rock-clinging moss. Yellow bees. Brown bears. Rainbow trout splashing through the shimmering blue waters of the Susitha River. He looked at the Earth below Him and He saw that it was good.

Snow fell softly on the roof of God's house. Each unique flake hit the tin corrugations gently, sliding off the steep slant, forming small drifts around the rough rock foundation where spring would raise Edna's lilies and daffodils out of the ground. Inside, the scent of baking apples wafted from the kitchen into the parlor where Edna was entertaining family.

"Someone asked me the other day if I'd rather have all looks or all brains. As if I didn't have either!" Luke barked a laugh. He picked a Niagara Falls pillow off the sofa and cradled it against his chest. "But I got to thinking about the question later. I'd take all brains because, with all brains and no looks, I'd be as smart as all get out and invisible too. I could control the world." He paused, a frown creased his brow. "But, no one could see me. No one would know."

Edna indulged her somewhat odd stepson with a smile and poured them both a fresh cup of tea. While hers steeped to a bitter black, she pulled the stub of a Panatela out of the ashtray on the end table.

"Luke." She held the Panatela up to her lips. "Luke."

"Huh? Oh." Luke snapped his fingers. A small tongue of flame snaked out between them. Edna leaned forward, sucking the fire into her lungs by way of the Italian cigar.

"So, Ma." He knew she loved it when he called her Ma, since she had never been able to convince her husband to let her have a child of her own. "Ma, have you ever thought about stocks?"

"Luke, you already tried that. Lions ate the breeding stock your Pa bought for you."

"No, no, not cattle. I'm never going back to South Africa. I mean the stock market."

Smoke formed silver-gray gradients above Edna's head. She was a large woman; big-boned, as they put it her native Winnipeg. Her pale, flower-print dress rounded her sharp edges but it did little to diminish her unwomanly height. She crossed her legs at the knee then crossed her wrists over them. "Tell me more," she said.

"The action is back east, Ma, in New York City, Wall Street. All you need is a little starting capital--"

The front door opened with a wind-driven sigh. A few flakes of snow swirled in behind God, melting quickly in the fire-warmed room. "What are you doing here?"

"Hiya, Pa." Luke climbed to his feet. "It's good to see you, too."

Edna paced over and placed her body between the two of them, arms crossed over her breasts, shoulders set back. "Supper will be ready in ten minutes," she announced, looking from father to son. "I expect the both of you to be washed up by then." Without waiting for acknowledgement, she stalked out of the room.

Luke knelt before the stone fireplace and rearranged the logs with a cast iron poker. Before too long, the fire was roaring. It was his one talent, fire was. He hadn't figured out what kind of career he might be able to make out of it, though he thought it must be good for something. Sure, he could entertain the ladies, and in times past he had primitive tribes by the thousands idolizing him. But ladies got bored with a singular trick, and tribes were going extinct all over the world. Mostly, Luke sold cars. He sold farm equipment. He sold eucalyptus trees to wind-blown farmers and orange trees to land speculators. In hard times, he tried selling bibles, door to door, but the people most inclined to buy them were the most reluctant to let him in the door.

God hung his coat on a hook by the fire. "Are you in town for long?" He asked.

"You tell me," Luke replied, staring at the fire.

"You know I don't do that. Not now. How much do you want?"

"Pa." Luke stood up and turned around. The poker, forgotten in his hand, streaked a long black smudge on the leg of his natty white pants. "Can't I just visit my family without any ulterior motives? Why do you think I want something? How's the mail route going?"

God made a hrruphing sound that in the early days might have leveled a mountain or two.

"How's your Lockheed running? I hear that Boeing is thinking about making a 600 horse power Pratt and Whitney with a Wasp nine-cylinder air-cooled radial."

"Air-cooled?" God took his cigar box down from the mantle and pulled out two fresh stogies. "How will it do in the cold?"

"That's the beauty of it. It won't overheat and it won't freeze up. It won't have the weight and the drag of a water-cooled engine since it doesn't have to carry water or a radiator or pipes. That'll leave plenty of room for armament."

"Armament?" God grunted.

"Yep." Luke nodded. "They're planning to sell it as a war machine." He turned his hands palm up. "That's humans for you. Too bad we can't do something about their nature."

God fixed his son with an all-knowing glare. Luke smiled apologetically and changed the subject, again. "Edna's looking well. Such a nice woman. She'd make a fine mother, don't you think?"

"Luke," God rumbled. "Don't start that again."

Father and son stared each other, eye to eye: Marbled blue and white irises whirling so slowly, movement could only be detected by a stop-motion Edison. Logs sizzled and kindling snapped in the fireplace. Minute after minute ticked off of the ironwood clock on the mantle.

"Dinner's getting cold," Edna announced from the doorway.

"Gotta wash up," Luke muttered. He ducked behind his stepmother and slipped into the kitchen. A few seconds later, the water pump creaked.

"Joe," Edna said, softly, "he means well."

"I'm not questioning his intentions, Dear." God placed the unlit, unoffered cigars back in the box and snapped the lid shut. "The boy just doesn't think things through. If you knew about all the wild schemes he's come up with..."

God's eyes misted over, picturing stone building blocks and ceramic beer bottles, forming large and small pyramids, over white desert sand. He knew that Luke hadn't considered the nature of kings before he pitched his plan, how they might squeeze money out of the national coffers for their own self-glorification, how them might entomb their servants with them, alive. So much for providing jobs and stimulating the economy.

"Honey, he's just trying to make you proud of him."

"What on Earth for? He's my son. That's all that matters."

"To you."

Luke entered the room. His normally fair hair glistened darkly with water and a fresh coat of Brill Cream. The collar of his striped shirt was newly closed with a red bow tie. He hooked his left arm into Edna's right and escorted her to the table.

The dinner conversation was polite and impersonal. Edna mentioned new the talkies that she hoped would make it up to the Empress Theatre. She particularly wanted to see What Price Glory and Broadway Melody. Luke wondered aloud who would win the upcoming election, Alfred Smith or Herbert Hoover. Edna ate a lamb chop while God and his son dined on corn bread, home-canned green beans, and fried eggs with apple cobbler for desert. Luke was on his second helping, God on His third, when a knock fell upon the door.

Eunice Hasselborg, snow powdering her shoulders, a child tucked in her arms, stood on the top step. Wind whipped fine blond hair across her cold-flushed face. "Mr. Dios, Edna, I'm sorry to interrupt your dinner."

"We just finished." Edna ushered her neighbor into the house and closed the door. "What brings you out on a night like this?"

"It's Daniel, he took his boat down the coast three weeks ago." Mrs. Hasselborg looked down at her toddler's towhead. She began to shake.

Edna rushed to take the child from her. She placed the boy in Luke's arms. "You keep an eye on Little Wilbur," she said. "Make sure he doesn't hurt himself. Eunice, please sit down."

"Yes, Ma'am," Luke murmured. He set the boy on the braded rug before the hearth. Wilbur wobbled and pitched forward, chubby arms headed straight for the fire. Luke made a small motion with his left hand. The flames moved backward and hugged the rear of the hearth. The boy giggled. Luke patted him on the head.

"Daniel went down to Cape Yakataga to buy furs from Eddie Seagraves," Eunice continued.

Edna shot her husband a steel-eyed glare, silently warning him away from expressing his views on animals, fur-bearing and otherwise. God said nothing. He listened from the edge of the dining-room, keeping his distance, waiting for the request to be made. It was as inevitable as nightfall, in any place other than the Arctic. It was preordained as the sunrise the following day, most everywhere else.

"Daniel radioed in from Cordova to let me know he was on his way to Seward to ship the furs out. He was supposed to come straight home from there but he's still not back. I thought ... since Mr. Dios has an airplane--Daniel's not a well man--it was too late in the year--I should have never let him go."

"Now, Eunice, there was nothing that you could do to stop him." Edna said, gently. "You know men, once they make their mind up that they're going to do something, you can't talk them out of it."

Eunice managed a brief, hesitant smile.

"Have you gone down to the dock and talked to the fishermen?"

"No one's seen any sign of him, or the Lil' Eunice." She sniffed. "Most of the waterways froze up last week when the weather snapped. I don't know how he could get back--Mr. Dios, can you help me?"

Cordova, God thought. No one had ever flown from Anchorage to Cordova. The southern coast, with its formidable mountains, its sea-spawned storms, and its turbulent air, was virgin airspace.

"Joe, do you think you can do it?" Edna asked; plain and direct, in her straightforward way.

God met her eyes. She didn't blink.

"I can try," he said, finally.

"I'm going with you, Pa." Luke stated. His father's eyes narrowed. Luke's own shifted from side to side. "In case you need help."

"Good idea," Edna said. "With the two of them working together, they'll have Daniel home in no time. Right, dear?"

God said nothing.

"Dear?"

God drew in a great breath. He let it out humanly slow. "Right."

Peaches took off at the first hint of light, to make the most of the short northern day. The fog was ragged to start with, a wispy film, thickening the further God and His son went south. God's plan was to begin their search where Daniel Hasselborg was last seen then follow the coastline north.

"Is that supposed to wiggle like that?" Luke asked, pointing to a gage with an unsteady needle.

"That?" God gave the instrument a casual wave of a hand. "No one pays attention to compasses this close to the pole. Don't worry about it."

The cockpit grew quiet as God reduced throttle. Luke practiced pitches inside his mind. First the windup then the throw. He discarded one approach after another until he found the words that would flow smoothly off of his tongue.

"Pa, have you noticed how industrialized the US has gotten? Every since the Great War ended, business has been booming. Autos, building starts, electrical utilities..." God made no comment. Luke decided to take it as a good sign. "Factories are getting more efficient. The price of production is going down, which means that more of the profits are going into stock dividends."

Fog covered the windscreen like a dirty bed sheet. God raised Peaches' nose to climb above it.

"As production costs go down, wages will rise and the cost of the goods that workers buy will go down. That'll create even more jobs!"

God raised a single, snowy eyebrow. "You're sure of that?"

"Uh huh," Luke nodded. "Andrew Mellon, himself, guarantees it."

"Hmm." God raised the plane even higher. They were at 1200 feet but still there seemed to be no end to the clouds.

"Stocks are going to do nothing but go up and up. Everybody's getting in on the market."

"And you want to, too," God stated evenly.

Luke stared straight out the windshield rather than meet his creator's eyes. There was nothing outside but a horizonless white. He didn't know where the clouds left off and the ground began since both were the same color and texture as snow. Peaches' engine labored heavily as God added throttle, taking her up to 1600 feet. A great snowy gust slapped her back down.

"Noel Wien once said that airplanes are capable of flying into a 60-mile-an-hour wind," God quoted, "without getting anywhere."

"Uh," Luke's schemes retreated from the fore of his mind. He glanced at the altimeter and saw that they were several hundred feet lower than they were a moment ago. "Pa, are we in any danger?"

"Are you forgetting who we are?" God's voice boomed through the small plane.

Luke's jaw clenched at the sound of that voice. That all mighty, all knowing voice, threatening everything, doing nothing at all. "You may be immortal but Jesse was killed. That means that I can be, too."

Luke looked for a blink or a flinch but God's eyes didn't stray from his instruments. Luke crossed his arms over his chest and hugged himself. "Everybody dies," he said. "My friends, my stepmothers, my brother. Everybody dies, except for you."

The cockpit was soundless, save for the howl of the wind and the whine of Peaches' straining engine. God didn't try to reassure him. He didn't contradict him. Luke knew He wouldn't. God didn't lie.

Movement outside the passenger window caught Luke's eye. It was the right wing of the Vega, rising over the left as the small plane rolled. He had the chance for only a small squeal before God righted the plane. He didn't have time to make any noise at all before Peaches went down.

Falling to Earth: it was quicker and quieter than it had been the first time. No great roar. No world-obscuring cloud. No change in the weather patterns. No extinction on a minor or massive scale. Just a soft shushing sound as Peaches buried herself in a snow-bank.

"Oh, bother," God grumbled when their long slide finally came to an end.

"Scheiss." Luke groaned. "Daomei,"

"Watch your tongue, son. You're still in one piece." God reached behind Him and fetched the picnic basket that Edna had packed. "Eat up boy, then grab a shovel. Mrs. Hasselborg is counting on us."

Peaches ended up on a long plateau, by luck or by plan, Luke didn't know. She was buried just past her wings, leaving one set of windows and her reddish-orange tail exposed. God stuck His shovel in the snow and sent a load over His shoulder. Luke watched Him for a moment then he rubbed his hands together. When they glowed red, he pressed them against the snowbank. The snow softened. Moisture dripped down.

"The shovel's faster," God grunted.

Luke rubbed his hands together faster taking them from red to white to a flaming blue-tipped arc. Snow melted into water. Water slid down the bank and soaked through his snowshoes, boots, and socks. He tried heating his feet but stopped when he found himself standing in a puddle.

"There's a balance, boy," God said without preamble, making a point He might have, earlier, if it wasn't for the unplanned landing. "It's a conservation of energy. Life. Death. It's how the universe works."

"You made the universe," Luke retorted. "You made the rules. You can break them anytime you want."

God sighed and shook his head.

Fresh snow fell nearly as fast as the old stuff was removed, but little by little the plane was exposed. With a few grunts and groans, they spun the Vega around on her skis and pointed her downhill.

While his Father tinkered with the engine, Luke napped on a nest of blankets in the tiny cargo hold, dreaming of a molten planet, licked by feathery flames. A two-tone world in fluid black and red. His hands closed around the globe, finding it as malleable as a lump of clay. Forming. Shaping. Luke-faced birds. Luke-faced dogs. Sharks circling the ocean, with limpid blue eyes and tresses of gold. His world exploded with sound of applause.

He awoke to clearing skies and the gentle vibration of an airborne plane. Rain slanted through sunlight turning it silver. They hugged the coast, making horseshoe turns for bays and hairpin curls for narrow inlets. As Mrs. Hasselborg warned, the smaller waterways were indeed frozen. This drove them seaward, into storm clouds and fierce crosswinds. Luke looked to the sky, finding Sol almost at the horizon.

"Pa, where are we going to land? There aren't any airstrips out here. It's going to be dark soon. We'll have to find a place to spend the night then wait for morning to look again."

God cocked his head toward the smudge of lingering light and said, "Don't worry son. We've got another hour."

Luke turned his attention to Edna's provisions, finding raisin bread and a jar of quince jam. He snacked absently, staring out the windscreen, seeing Wall Street.

"Son."

Luke snapped out of his reverie.

"You said you wanted to help. Grab those gunny sacks in the back. Open the door and on my word, toss them out."

Luke looked down and saw only vertical ground; a fractured checkerboard pattern that met the rough edge of the sea. While he watched, a block of ice broke off and tumbled down, disappearing beneath the water with hardly a splash. Finally, Luke spotted his father's goal. It was a narrow strip, maybe 100 feet wide by 600 feet long, while it couldn't be called flat, wasn't as steep as the nearby terrain. Luke's eyebrows rose, but he saw no reason to question his father. Pilots in these parts probably landed on glaciers all of the time.

He slipped sideways between the seats and found a pile of black sacks stuffed into the rear of the cargo hold. The dye was so fresh it rubbed off on his hands. Gravity pulled him forward as God lowered Peaches' nose.

"Get ready," God ordered.

Luke opened the door. Wind wailed in, shaking Peaches from the inside and threatening to blow the door closed. He wedged a foot into the jamb and sat down. His legs dangled below Peaches' belly. Snow spattered his knees. Wind whipped his pantlegs and stripped the last residue of Brill Cream out of his hair. It rose in two small peaks, one on either side of his forehead.

"Now?" he asked, teeth a chattering.

"Not yet," God said. "Luke, I want you to throw the sacks slowly so they don't land in a clump."

Luke tightened his hold on the sacks, clutching them to his chest in one fist. The other fist curled around the lip of the doorjamb with knuckles as blanched as the sky. From his virtually unobstructed vantage point, he spotted a small red and white boat, drifting inches forward, inches back, in a slurry of saltwater and ice. The deck was concealed by a tarp-covered mound. If there was anyone on board, it wasn't above.

God brought the plane level with the unlevel ground and shouted, "Now!"

Luke let go of the bags a few at a time. They fanned out and landed, showing him just how close they were to the earth. He managed to scramble back inside and get the door closed before his father raised the plane. Luke looked down at crows on snow, black-sack-markers, settling down on the makeshift runway.

"Perspective!" God imparted. "Position! Incline!"

He circled back around, making His approach at full power in a nearly upright climb. As soon as Peaches' skis touched down, He cut the throttle. The steep slope slowed Peaches to a standstill in a few hundred feet.

God leaped out and shouted, "Help me turn her around before she slides back down!"

They got Peaches pointed down hill then let gravity finish the job, coasting the plane on her skis down to where water-based mountain met water-based shore. An ice-encrusted mud flat curled around the shoreline. Beyond it lay an ice-clogged bay.

"Landing fields are where you find them, son," God said with a grin. "But don't tell anyone where we set down. That youngster, Bob Reeve, has been telling everyone that he's going to be the first to land on a glacier. I don't want to steal his thunder."

God reached under his seat. His calloused fingertips sifted through an informal collection of dust balls, candy bar wrappers, dog fur, and grease-coated wrenches. "I want you to drain the engine oil into the cans from the cargo. Be careful not to spill any. The top of the drain bolt is painted red. Luke, are you listening to me?"

"Yeah, Pa, red."

God frowned. He passed His son a crescent wrench then climbed out of the plane. Ice crackled under His feet as He walked across the mudflat and out on to the waters of Prince William Sound.

It took most of the remaining daylight for Luke to find the red-topped bolt. He attached the crescent wrench to it and tugged. Oil poured out, coating the icy white ground with a dark petroleum slick. Luke kicked an oil can under the stream and contemplated a future of holding companies and investment trusts. After he made his first million, he might dabble in the arts like Carnegie, or maybe turn to politics. There were plenty of countries in this world that knew how to treat their leaders right.

Sol set so quickly that Luke missed it. One moment it was daytime, the next, it was night. Luke capped the oil cans then retreated to his post in the passenger seat. Luke snapped his fingers at a candle wick. His reflection smiled at him from the windscreen in a shimmer of mother of pearl teeth.

Feet shuffled though the snow. Luke caught the silhouette of a camel-backed man, or rather a man carrying another toward the plane in the cloud-smothered moonlight. God laid Daniel Hasselborg down in the cargo bay, piling all of their blankets on top of him. Luke squirmed between the seats and held a candle over man's ruddy face. Hasselborg made a short snorting sound that only upon repeat did Luke realized was breathing.

"He's alive, I guess." Luke bit his bottom lip. "Edna will be glad."

"You like Edna, don't you?" God rummaged through the cargo, bringing forth a slightly rusted can opener and a dented pair of tin cups. "I hope Edna packed fruit cocktail. She knows I love fruit cocktail."

"I liked all your wives." Luke passed God a can of fruit along with a slightly sedimentary biscuit. "They've all been fine women. They would have all been good mothers. Too bad only Mary got the chance."

Luke waited a few seconds. When it became clear to him that his father wasn't going to respond, he picked up the opener and punctured the can. Air rushed into the vacuum with a quiet hiss. They dined by candlelight, to the bullfrog croaks of Hasselborg's snores. After dinner, God lit another candle and cracked open the copy of His Last Bow that He bought in Nome.

While God read, Luke squirmed in his increasingly uncomfortable seat.

"Do you have to fidget so much?" God asked. "I'm just getting to the good part. I'll be damned if I know how Holmes going to work it out."

"You don't have to be damned!" Luke snapped. "You can leave this world any time that you like!"

"Shh!" God shushed. "You don't want to wake up Mrs. Hasselborg's husband, do you?"

Luke snorted. So did Hasselborg.

Luke crossed his arms over his chest. "Why do the nights up here have to be so long when there's nothing to do with them? If I had a brother, at least we could play cards."

"I don't know why you want another brother," God rumbled. "You and Jesse used to do nothing but argue."

"Argue?" Luke's eyes widened. "We never argued. We had discussions. We talked politics and philosophy. Why we used to sit out in the desert for days and chat. So what if we didn't agree on much, he enjoyed our debates as much as me. Now who do I have? Humans? Every time I find someone who is the least bit interesting, they die of a bug bite or of old age.

"You don't know how hard it is for me to make friends," Luke sniveled. "People don't like me. I can't create life on my own. You--you didn't give me the power. I want another brother."

God set the book down and crossed His arms over His chest. "You'd think that someone who'd been around longer than dirt would eventually grow up. All you think about is yourself. Your friends. Your stepmothers. Your brother. If you're so lonely, why don't you do something to redeem yourself. If you made the effort, you could be back in the heavens with your brethren in a snap."

"Oh, sure. I'm just dying to sit around and combust." Luke coughed, for effect. He'd never been sick a day in his life. "Look honey," he mimicked, "there goes Luke ... or is it Rafael? Quick! Make a wish!"

Hasselborg belched, filling the plane with odor of illegal whiskey and decaying teeth. God opened His book. Luke curled up in the small seat and pretended to sleep.

"Darkness ends at the hands of the dawn police," Luke announced. He threw his door open, inviting crisp arctic air into the stale plane, for Daniel Hasselborg smelled no better by sunlight than he had by night.

He was a lump of a man, covered in layers; a beaver-skin coat, a tasseled wool cap, wool trousers, and salt-encrusted mukluks. His face bore a strong resemblance to an aerial map, surrounded by beard and hair both wiry and gray.

His nostrils twitched. His eyes shot open. "Where's my boat? Where's Lil' Eunie? What did you hooligans do with her? And where're my goddamned furs?"

"Your boat is where you left it, Dan," Luke replied. "Alight on the waters of the Lord."

Hasselborg squinted and wheezed, "Who the hell are you?"

"Good morning, Daniel," God said.

Recognition kindled slowly in Hasselborg's eyes. "Heya, Joe. What you doin' out here? Droppin' off mail?"

"Picking up a sack," Luke replied.

Hasselborg leaned out the open door and coughed a thick wad of sputum on to the snow. Holding his forehead, he sank back into his makeshift bed in the cargo hold.

"You got anything to drink, my friend?"

God rummaged through Edna's basket, pulling out a canteen in one hand and bottle of ginger ale in the other. Hasselborg coughed. "A man's drink, I mean." He reached under his coat and scratched an armpit. He inspected a fingernail then reached into a pocket and fished out a bag of tobacco and a sheaf of papers. His tremor stopped long enough to roll a cigarette.

"I've got a fortune in furs sitting on that deck," he said, tapping the butt of the cigarette against his thigh to form a quick-lighting tip. "You wouldn't know where it is, would you? My boat, I mean."

Before God could answer him, Hasselborg doubled over in a fit of coughing, ending with the expulsion of more phlegm on the snow. He wiped his nose and mouth on a ragged lace-edged handkerchief, lit his cigarette and took a serious drag. "I gotta get my furs down to Seward. The quota's almost met. Goddamn seal treaty. Who ever heard of the gov'ment setting limits on how much a man can earn--it's down right Bolshevik."

Hasselborg swung his legs out of the plane, triggering another bout of coughing.

God motioned the man back inside. "Your wife is powerfully worried about you. We'd better get you home."

"Home? Home?" Hasselborg echoed. "The only way I'm going home is with two-thousand of the Fouks Company's dollars in my pocket. Just point me to my boat and I'll be on my way." Hasselborg straightened up and walked a couple of steps, wheezing and coughing. "I can't go home empty handed," he said, turning around. Hands on his thighs, he held himself upright. "The money from those furs is supposed to see us through the rest of the year. My boat," he said softly, sounding like a man who could see defeat in the distance, slowly but surely plodding his way. "My boat will founder. I can't do that to her."

God reached into the picnic basket and found a partially frozen biscuit to nibble on. True, Daniel Eugene Hasselborg wasn't the best example of the human race. But He loved all of His children, not only the ones He created directly, like Jesse, Luke, the angels, and the ants, but those who simply evolved. After all, they evolved according to the tenets of nature, and in one of His favorite images; they had to be beautiful.

"My boy will take your boat back to Anchorage," God announced.

Luke's head jerked up. "I will?"

"And he'll get you top dollar for your dead seals. He's quite gifted, at that sort of thing."

Luke sat up straighter, accepting any shred of praise his father cared to bestow. But boats? Boats were on water and water was a cold and lonely place that never stayed still. "Pa," Luke whined. "Jesse got along with water, not me. It was his element."

"Luke," God snapped. "Do you really want to help out or did you just say that so you could get me alone and to try to talk some money out of me?"

Luke swallowed a knot of saliva.

"Son," God's voice softened, "I've been trying to teach you that if you want something, you have to earn it. Do you understand?"

Luke's jaw clenched. How many times had he heard this lecture before?

"Those who put an effort out are rewarded. With all the things you say you want, you think you'd accept a reward."

"Money for stocks?" Luke ventured, hopefully.

"We'll talk about it after you get the boat back to Anchorage. Oh, and before you leave, I want you to warm up the engine oil."

There wasn't much difference between a boat and a tractor, Luke thought, priming the carburetor with a splash of gas from Hasselborg's stockpile of fuel. One vehicle tore up fields, the other tore through the sea. Theoretically. This sea-tractor was mired in ice. It couldn't be that thick, he figured. Summer ended just weeks ago.

He started the engine on the third try, adding a few curses into the mix. He pushed the throttle forward slowly. Lil' Eunice didn't budge. He put her in reverse and tried to rock her, back and forth. The engine whined. Exhaust billowed, black in the pale sky. The engine coughed, reminisced of Hasselborg, then died.

"Cacchio," Luke swore.

He climbed up to the bow and looked down at the icy bay. It sparkled innocently in the fair morning light. Clouds loomed, off to the west, but the wind was calm, the sky was azure. Open sea glistened enticingly near. All told, it was a beautiful day. Luke sat on down, legs dangling on either side of the prow. His heels beat a steady tempo against the flaking red and white of the retrofitted Monterey hull. Gradually, his jaw unlocked. His muscles unkinked. Relaxing in Sol's gentle heat, his thoughts turned to gasoline.

Mudflats were proven runways, used by Alaska's pilots long before God reached the territory. Peaches had no trouble getting airborne. Once aloft, God offered Daniel Hasselborg a wedge of cheese and a jelly-smeared biscuit to break his fast. Hasselborg ate in small dispirited bites. God banked the plane to the right and climbed.

Mountains ahead, sea at their backs, Hasselborg's mood seemed to ease. It might have been the fact that their journey home was underway that lightened his spirit, or it might have been the small silver flask that he found in an inner pocket of his coat.

Hasselborg uncapped the flask and took a carefully measured sip. "Don't know why," he said, "but I feel better with that boy of yours behind me."

God chuckled. "He has that effect on people. Mostly, they don't feel comfortable with him smiling in their faces, getting ready to talk them into one of his schemes."

"I'll tell you this," Hasselborg wagged a finger at God, "I treated my father with far more respect than the young'uns these days."

"As did I," God agreed.

"Damn right. If we woulda talked back to our papas, they woulda whooped us up the backside and we woulda deserved it. My oldest boy, Danny Junior," Hasselborg shook his head slowly and took another drink, "he never would listen to me. Even when his sick mama begged him not to leave her and I ordered him stay put, he went off to fight the Huns--Goddamn Wilson. We wasn't supposed to get involved in foreigner problems. We was supposed to stay neutral--The day they shipped Danny's body back, his poor ma lost the will to live. The TB got her inside a month."

"I couldn't stop Jesse, either," God said, softly. "Nothing I said could convince him not to get involved in politics."

"Sounds like my Danny," Hasselborg wheezed.

"Jesse made me promise not to interfere. He wanted to succeed, or fail, on his own."

"Made you?" Hasselborg raised an eyebrow, skeptically.

"He could be very persuasive, in his own gentle way. I always thought that he would be the one who would take over for me--hopped so, anyway. He was so full of love and kindness and there wasn't a judgmental bone in the boy's body. Now there's Luke." God sighed.

Luke had been His favorite, God admitted to Himself, until Jesse came along. He couldn't help cherishing the brash, free spirit. That was before he got so full of himself that no one could stand to be around him. When Luke drove half of his brethren into changing form and departing in a mass exodus, God realized He had to teach him some humility.

"Well, he was always the brightest," God murmured. "He outshone Michael and Gabe, and all the rest. He has the ambition, but not the commitment. Either he's going to eventually mature, eventually, or I'll have to have another son."

Hasselborg raised his eyebrows and squinted at God, looking like a rabbit, long in the tooth. "How many young'uns you got, anyway?" he asked.

God took a moment to run a tally.

"Forget it." Hasselborg waved the hand that held the whiskey flask, spilling the tiniest of drops on his leg. "Can't say that I don't got more than I know of, myself, from my younger days.

"Had myself a daughter, once. A pretty little brown-eyed girl named Evangeline." The sky darkened well before noon. Clouds poured over the mountains, casting a shadow over Hasselborg's face. "The ‘fluenza got her in ‘18. She was only five. Goddamn it all."

God adjusted the throttle. He had heard it all before. People complained about life. They complained about death. They complained about disease and war and poverty, He noted, but only when it affected them. Maybe when they stopped being selfish, and started caring for the rest of the creatures of this Earth, maybe then they wouldn't have to pray to Him make them to stop doing what they obviously wanted to do.

Hasselborg examined the dirt under his left thumb nail. "Never thought I'd start over again ... But Eunice was a real cat's meow, woke Johnny right out of his slumber, if you know what I mean? ‘Course you do," he grinned, "you got a younger wife, too."

God grunted in agreement. Clouds brushed against Peaches' windscreen, thin and watery, misting God's view of the world. He raised Peaches back into the light. Maybe He was too hard on the human race, He considered. They weren't, after all, to blame for their own illnesses. And they weren't to blame for the loss of His youngest son. He knew exactly where the guilt for that belonged.

Ice sculptures decorated the water's edge, on either side of the narrow inlet that Lil' Eunice squeezed through. Delicate wind-etched natural shrines, shaped like armless mermaids, birds perched on rocks, and half-eaten deserts. Glistening translucent blue with color borrowed from the sky. Luke steered clear, fearing icebergs where there was ice. He'd had enough of ice. And fire. At least for the time being. He pointed the boat's blistered and blackened bow toward the Gulf of Alaska and cruised.

Luke hadn't meant to damage Hasselborg's boat. His plan had been a good one. Possibly a great one. Just pour the gas around the boat and all the way out to open water, then set it afire. The heat would melt the thin autumn ice and the boat would plow though. Too bad he didn't have a few more boats to practice on, to work the kinks out.

The wind fanned Luke's hair around his head into a corona of pale gold. The air smelled of saline and high adventure; the kind of escapade that stories are told of, again and again, to the listeners' delight, along the polished mahogany bars of Manhattan's finest watering holes. Luke leaned over the wheel, imagining himself the centerpiece of a gilt-framed oil painting. The ocean swelled, rolling the boat from side to side, and Luke's stomach along with it. Empty contraband bottles, imported vodka and whiskey, rolled under his feet. Black clouds rolled in from the West. A spray of seawater hit Luke in the face. Luke spit out a salty mouthful.

Okay, so maybe adventure, for its own sake, wasn't sufficient motivation. Think of the money. Fists clenched on the wheel, Luke egged himself on.

Abruptly, the wind ceased. The ocean calmed. The silence was absolute, wholly. A ray of light cut through the clouds, and shone down on the tarp-covered deck. The hairs on Luke's arms prickled up. A shiver ran up his spine. He looked over his head and gulped.

"Pa?"

Nothing.

Lil' Eunice's timbers creaked quietly as Luke shifted his feet. Just as suddenly as the silence descended, it departed. The wind roared. Waves rose. Lil' Eunice pitched forward and aft then side to side, caught high in swells and crosswinds. Luke cranked wheel around.

He wasn't a complete stranger to boats. He'd gone out to sea with Jesse's buddies when more genteel work had been unavailable. More recently, he spent a miserable week aboard a sardine trawler. Head into storms, he remembered. If storm waves hit a boat sideways, it will swamp.

Rain slanted through the heavy sky, half-froze from the journey down to the boat. It stung Luke's bare face and his hands. He swung the boat around hard, trying to avoid the rocks that jutted out of either side of the straight. Icebergs and flesh-eating whales might lay ahead, as far as he could tell. Looking forward, he could see a few yards out from the prow before the vista was lost in gray churning water and angry clouds. Looking backward, he could see the rear of the boat dragging, weighed down by $2000 worth of furs.

He could die here and his father would do nothing, like he did nothing to stop Jesse's execution. What good was it having a father who was God, he asked himself, when he never did anything godlike?

Rain soaked through his city-coat and down to his skin. He wondered what would happen to him if he perished here, drowned like a horse dumped overboard to lighten the load. Would he be condemned to return to the Earth, same essence, different form, like the beasts and beings of this world? Or would he just burn?

Jesse had been half human. Luke liked to think that only half of him had died. But only his father knew what his brother's fate was, and what his own fate might be, and, as usual, God wouldn't tell.

Luke raised his fist to the heavens and shouted, "Pa! Why have you done this to me?"

God the father.

God the son.

Memories, stirred by Hasselborg, left God reminiscing while the human slumbered.

For the longest time, there had been just the two of them. It seemed like it was just yesterday that He was trying to get His father's attention, proudly showing off a batch of amino acids that He had brewed. If His father had been impressed, He didn't show it.

Part and parcel of the old universe, there wasn't much left of the old deity now, just smallest of substances, smaller than the heart of atoms, scattered throughout the new universe. Perhaps, God thought, His father had been afraid of the descendant who would one day supplant Him. Perhaps that is why He had been such a distant and impersonal progenitor.

His father's universe decayed and grew cold. Disorder ruled. His father, once a goliath, became almost insubstantial, a mere ghost of His former self. It became clear to His son what He must do: sweep the debris of the old universe together and bundle it tight. Gather the remaining energy into a single agglomerate and let the pressure build until it could be contained no more. Explosively, His own cosmos was formed.

God never told any of His own offspring that one of them was destined to do the same. It placed too much strain on the father and son relationship.

At least, God thought, He didn't have to worry about being superseded anytime soon. The angels in the heavens were a simple and contented lot and the ones who Luke drove off seemed happy to wander the universe. That left Luke. Luke, God thought, didn't have a clue.

"Whozitwhotgoddamnnitall," Hasselborg mumbled in his sleep. He rolled on to his right side and slid down his seat. His beaver-skin coat and wool shirt crept up his arms, exposing a frayed length of yellowed long-johns.

Peaches trembled as wind stirred her wingtips. The clouds parted. Mountaintops loomed beneath her. The jagged stone was softened ever so slightly by clinging clots of snow, lustrous in slivers of light.

He rather liked the way it had turned out, His creation, His firmament. He hoped that His father would have been proud. But that was one thing that He would never know. God blinked a tear from the corner of an eye and banked the plane, angling its shadow along the mountainsides.

Rain poured down the back of Luke's collar. Seawater oozed up and over the cuffs of his boots. He raised his core temperature and stopped shivering, momentarily. It was hard to keep up the heat with the distractions of wind and high seas. Lil' Eunice pitched from side to side. Whitecaps crested over her bow. Swells spun her around in circles until Luke no longer could tell which way was what.

"What have I done wrong?" Luke yelled at the seeping clouds. "Lately."

Okay, so maybe he hadn't been the best son of God. Maybe he had been a bit cocky and conceited and not all of his ideas had been good ones, but was that any reason to be left out on the sea to drown?

"Pa, if you help me out of this, I'll change. I really will."

Rocks loomed off the port side. Luke cut the wheel, hard, lightly scraping the length of the hull on the craggy edges. The engine coughed. He gave it more gas and nudged the boat in the direction he hoped was open sea.

"You don't want Mr. Hasselborg's boat to sink, do you, Pa? You don't want Mrs. Hasselborg and little Wilbur to go hungry, do you? Damn!"

Luke's slick soles scrambled for a purchase on the deck. Lil' Eunice listed sideways. He knew what that meant. Water in the hull. Luke dropped the anchor then untied the rope holding the tarp over the furs. Wind caught the underside of the canvas and billowed it like a sail. With a handful of pelts, he headed below. He dropped off of the last rung of the ladder into calf-deep water. Empty liquor bottles and the remains of half-eaten meals floated by, along with twelve empty gas cans. The sea streamed in through a pair of fist-sized holes. Luke stuffed the pelts into the gaps, reducing the flow to an ooze.

The boat turned in small circles as Luke figured out how to use Hasselborg's hand-held bilge pump. "Byt v glubokay," he cursed as he cranked.

It didn't take long for terror to degrade into boredom. By the time half of the water was pumped from the boat, and the storm had weakened by a third, Luke was looking for ways to amuse himself. First, he spelled his father's many names forward, then backward, then inside out. When he ran out of languages that had titles for their god, he picked out words at random.

LIVE. VILE. EVIL.

ART. RAT. TAR.

EL. LE.

A.

Short on amusing words, Luke sang both Cole Porter songs that he knew, but he didn't know the lyrics well enough to try them in reverse.

Lil' Eunice turned slowly port, then slowly aft, then didn't turn at all. Luke climbed up to the deck and looked at the sky, now quiet and still. Instead of black, the clouds were a foggy gray. Faintly, through the mist, Luke could see the hard projections of land. Fainter still, he could make out the stick-figure silhouette of a pier.

With the water in the hull down to ankle deep, Luke dropped the bilge pump and raised the anchor. He goosed the throttle. Lil' Eunice's engine sputtered then died. Nothing he did could restart her.

"Mandavoshka," Luke swore. "How could I possibly be out of gas?"

"Wazzat?" Hasselborg awoke with a start. As his eyes came into focus, his hand went into his coat and his flask into his hand. "Are we there yet?"

"Another hour, Daniel," God cut the throttle. The storm seemed to be behind them, pushing them home. "I think there are a few biscuits left, if you're hungry."

"Ah, thanks anyway, Joe," Hasselborg grunted. "I hope your boy is as good at bargaining as you say he is. McGrath's a cheap old Scot, probably try to jew him down--you ain't no Heeb, are you--not that it makes me no never mind."

God studied the pearly sky, aiming Peaches between the wispy clouds. "No more or less than anything else."

"Ah," Hasselborg said, "didn't think you were a church-going man. Eunice said she's never seen you or your missus at the Holy Family Cathedral."

"Crosses," God said, shaking the image of his youngest son out of his head. "Can't abide them."

Hasselborg snorted and coughed. "Never had much use for sermons, myself. No matter what the stripe. Imagine a priest or a preacher tellin' me how to live my life! You tell me how a man who don't have to worry where his next meal is coming from can tell me to trust in the Lord? It's a bunch of hooey. That's what it is. God don't love nobody and he don't love me."

God wrinkled His brow. "Of course God loves you. He loves all of His children. Why else would He be here but to watch out after them?"

"Watch ‘em? Watch ‘em, he does? Watch ‘em kill each other? Watch ‘em die? Saints preserve us from a God who likes to watch!" Hasselborg rubbed an eye with a balled up fist then took a long swig off of his flask. "Was God watching my boy bleed to death in a foreign foxhole? Was He watching my first missus and my little girl cough their lungs out?"

"God doesn't like to watch," God corrected the man. "He has to."

Hasselborg turned his flask upside down. Nothing came out. He patted his thick coat, coming up with only a small bottle of cough syrup. He took a swig and frowned. "If there is an Almighty, I'll tell you this, he is one mean sonofabitch. Why else would he allow sickness and war?"

God sighed. "You wanted President Wilson to be impartial--why can't God be? God is neutral. He doesn't interfere. He doesn't take sides."

"You some kind of spiritualist?" Hasselborg slurred. "How'd you know what God thinks?"

The wind sang a hymn through Peaches' wings, vibrating the small plane in middle C.

"I am God," God said.

"Oh, right then. That explains it. And I expect your wife is the Blessed Virgin." Hasselborg stood, bumping his head on the low ceiling. He grabbed the handle, kicked the door open and swung a leg out into the sky.

"Daniel!" God reached for Hasselborg, grabbing a handful of beaver-skin coat.

"Whoanellyboboreno," Hasselborg yiped, scrambling, slipping further outside. "What's going on? Where am I?"

God wedged the stick between his knees and leaned as far as he could in the direction of the flailing Hasselborg. The man held on to the door-frame with both hands. His legs dangled in the watery air. Wind and mist howled into the plane. Peaches inclined to the right. Steering with his knees, God tilted the plane left, sending Hasselborg back to his seat with his head in God's lap. God reached past him and shut the door.

Hasselborg straightened into a slump. "Sorry, Joe." He cleared his throat. "Guess I forgot I wasn't in the back room at the Panhandle, there for a mi-mi-minute."

Hasselborg started coughing and didn't stop for five full minutes. When he was finished, and slightly blue in the lips, he turned to God and said, "I'm feeling kinda tired, Joe."

"Take a nap," God told him. "I'll wake you when we get home."

God glanced at the passenger door, making sure it was truly closed. His passenger leaned well away from it, eyelids fluttering. The first signs of civilization appeared below the plane. A wide swath of bare dirt sliced across hills and hollows. Freshly cut logs, chained and ready for shipment, were stacked in a series of piles, leading downhill.

"Goddamnhell, I dunno know." Hasselborg muttered. "Maybe He's tired of watching."

"What's that, Daniel?"

"Watching ‘em. His kids. Maybe He's letting them do themselves in, to be rid of them, to relieve Him of all that responsibility."

God's head jerked toward Hasselborg. A single vertical line creased his forehead. "What do you mean?"

One fur-covered shoulder rose and fell in a sleepy shrug. "All fathers get tired of their kids, always under-foot, gettin' into trouble. Even if they don't mean to, sometimes ... fathers yearn to be free." Hasselborg blinked slowly, eyes glassy, red-rimmed and bloodshot. "No matter how much they love their kids..."

God waited for the man to say more. Hasselborg's mouth stayed open but all that came from it was a snore.

God turned back around and studied His instruments. The compass needle spun slowly, counter-clockwise. Quietly, God said, "Daniel, I'll have to think on that."

Night fell like a chador over the face of the Earth, obscuring Her beauty--or Her homeliness, Luke reflected--for if one had never really seen Her, one wouldn't know. He steered Lil' Eunice toward the lights of Seward. With his free hand, he counted the coins in his pocket. After paying an Aluet canoeist for four gallons of fuel, he had little more than a dozen silver dollars left.

He tied the boat to a slanted post on the end of a pier that was more missing than there. The working docks that Hasselborg had warned him to avoid, were a few hundred yards down the half-moon shore. He sat down on the bobbing prow. In the distance, a dog barked. Owls conversed from the pinnacles of pine trees in echoing hoots. Waves licked against the foamy shore, glowing an electric shade of gray in the clouded moonlight.

Luke leaned on one elbow and contemplated fur. There was no sense feeling bad about the animals. They were already in their next lives. Someone might as well make a profit from their pelts. Hasselborg had been pretty close-mouthed about how the fur trade operated, but Luke had learned from the canoeist that the Aleuts who harvested the pelts were paid fifty cents a skin. The government sold the furs to a processor in St. Louis for $35.34 a piece. That left a fair amount of money in the middle that was going somewhere--somewhere he wanted to be.

Workers filed on to the docks, filling fishing boats and grappling with freight. Luke hopped on to the half-rotted dock. Boards dipped under his feet. He followed Hasselborg's directions to a row of wooden shanties, squatting on stilts on the muddy waterfront. He stopped on the stoop of a shotgun shack and knocked four times.

"Come in, already," a voice grunted.

The cabin smelled of fish and ash and wet dog. A fat beagle-husky mix curled around a litter of squeaking puppies in a nest of rags. Unmarked wooden crates were stacked about the single room. A man in a plaid shirt and metal-riveted canvas pants leaned over a potbelly stove, feeding scrape wood to the fire-box. Smoke leaked out of the loose seams of the stove and drafted out holes in the tin roof. The man glanced up at Luke then over at a long-barreled pistol, sitting atop a cask, within easy reach.

"Daniel Hasselborg sent me," Luke said. "I have pelts."

"Pelts?" The presumptive McGrath repeated, eyes darting back to Luke.

"Seal."

McGrath ran a hand over the reddish-blond stubble covering his chin. "Only the feds are allowed to buy seal. Do I look like the federal government?"

Luke smiled. McGrath looked more like a lumberjack. It was the setting that told him that the man was a black-market dealer. He slapped his best poker expression over his face and smoothed all the curves out of his voice, and said, "You look like a man of great business acumen who recognizes a fair deal when he is presented with one."

"Fancy words from a man in wet clothes. Sit by the fire and dry yourself out."

Luke seated himself on an upturned crate and nudged the fresh flames his way. Steam rose from his pantlegs.

"The seal harvest was months ago." McGrath drummed his fingers against his thighs. "A man takes a big risk when he trades in felonious goods. They call that pelagic sealing. It's been illegal for years."

"A big risk for a big profit," Luke said evenly.

McGrath's busy fingers twitched once then stilled.

Luke encouraged the fire to rise. While he waited for the room temperature to climb, he did a mental count of the number of furs on the boat that were in saleable condition. Those not singed too badly from putting out the fire, and those not plugging holes in the hull, still numbered well over one-hundred.

When the temperature in the cabin was hot enough to encourage drowsing, he looked into McGrath's glazed eyes and said, "You're a savvy businessman. A wise man, too. I know you'll give me a fair price. More than a fair price, actually."

"More?" McGrath asked, sleepily.

"More," Luke agreed.

The landing came at a good time. Peaches was low on fuel and Hasselborg's bottle was as dry as stone. It was a quiet homecoming. Hasselborg mumbled an unintelligible word then coughed his way down Ninth Avenue and all the way home.

Lil' Eunice sailed lighter, unburdened by furs. Hasselborg's $2000 was tucked in Luke's right pants pocket. Luke's own was stowed securely in his left, where no one would know. Luke cut the wheel, trying to remember the details of a promise. Something about survival. Something about change.

The weather turned tepid for a day then snapped back to cold. Edna stood before an open kitchen cupboard. She picked up a pink and green bowl, adorned with porcelain seashells, then set it back down. Next, she selected a plain wooden bowl and filled with dried roots, bone needles, and smooth stone fetishes. God walked through the door.

"I took apples and eggs over to Kisik Nowitna's, this morning," she said without turning around. "Poor Kisik is beside herself. It seems her fifteen year old daughter is in the family way. The father shipped out as soon as he heard the news."

God sat down at the kitchen table, hefted one leg over the other and unlaced a boot.

Edna picked up a sturdy earthenware jar etched with images of the moon, the sky, and the Earth. "Kisik is sending her to Seattle to stay with cousins until the baby is born. They'll give it away down there, so that no one will know. We can fly down in April, a couple of weeks early."

God looked up at his wife.

"We can do some shopping and catch a few shows." She closed the cupboard door. "If it's a girl, we'll name her Marjorie. If it's a boy, I'm partial to Walter."

God pursed His lips. "Good names," He said.

"They'll do. This time around. We need more wood. I'll call you when dinner's ready."

Edna exited into the hush of fresh snowfall. God made himself comfortable on the couch. No sooner did he have a pillow in his hand, ready to fluff, did the front door swing open. Luke swaggered in. "Pa."

"I'm resting."

"You've been resting for millennia, Pa."

"Less than a day, son, less than a day." God swiveled his legs off of the couch, and sat up. "Did you bring Daniel Hasselborg's boat back?"

Luke shifted his weight from his right leg to his left. "The boat's perfectly safe," he said, at last. No one would bother to take such an unsightly hulk off a sandbar. "Pa--"

"Go help your ma with the firewood, Luke." God yawned and stretched his arms over his head.

Luke cleared his throat.

"And tell her I said to let you have the money in my sock drawer."

"Gee Pa, thank--"

"Go. Let me nap."

Luke didn't break into a grin until he was out the door.

God watched His wife and His son talking through the mist-edged parlor window. Snow swirled around them, landing on their shoulders and powdered the branches of the encircling evergreen trees. Luke's arms moved in exaggerated animation. He gestured at the sky. Edna, feet planted firm upon the milk-white earth, smiled and pointed down.

God could have heard what they were saying, if the wind were to pick up and change directions, but it remained westward and mild. He fluffed a Niagara Falls pillow, untangled the golden fringe, and laid His head down.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Genre is in a parlous state, at least with respect to the short fiction markets. Ask anyone. Over in the world of romance, the striking and well-funded Arabella just folded. Back here in speculative fiction, Amazing is toast, yet again. Respected smaller outlets have been going the way of all flesh, from the lamented Spectrum simply disappearing, to the implosion of 3SF a year or so ago, to the loss of Challenging Destiny's print edition. And the list goes on, bloody and ugly as it is.

Or maybe not.

The death of genre has been predicted about as often as the death of traditional values. Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle said, "Teenagers today are out of control, they eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers." The same complaints about traditional values are bandied about today, two and half millennia later, in the headlines, on conservative blogs, and on talk shows. A mere 300 years or so after Aristotle, Cicero said, "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." Yet somehow traditional values are still around to be considered in decline.

This tendency to view the current state of things as degraded and collapsing is called declinism. It's been in vogue since the days of Classical Greece, and possibly as long ago as when Gilgamesh ruled in Uruk. Declinism is the flip side of the Myth of the Golden Age, that pervasive belief, at least in Western Culture, that things used to be better.

If only we could get the Good Old Days back, tomorrow wouldn't be as bad as it seems.

And strangely enough, even here in genre, we talk about the Golden Age and Silver Age of fiction, as if the field had been in a steady decline ever since. Are these the Dark Ages? Do we camp amid the ruins of Roman architecture and pelt each other with shattered roof tiles?

Hardly.

Pessimistic observers have always complained about the death of genre. Optimists have always claimed it ain't so. The lessons of history notwithstanding, there are solid reasons for optimism today, in the current marketplace, among the current generation of writers, editors, and publishers.

Why?

Consider this: over 30,000 books are published each year in the United States. The major New York houses publish almost 300 new genre novels a year, along with anthologies, the odd collection, backlist, and reprint inventory. Small press produces at least that many titles again and probably quite a few more. The major short fiction markets publish roughly 350-400 stories per year, and again, small press quite a few more.

Is the Death of the Midlist real? Certainly. What about the consolidation of the major publishing lines? Absolutely. So is the collapse of the magazine market, a problem that was real when the Saturday Evening Post folded back around the time I was born.

But the market keeps experimenting. Web sites, .pdf publications, electronic books like Aeon, print-on-demand (POD) small press, letterpress small press, photocopied ‘zines. The production of literature is diluting to a wider range of shallower options--more output, lower readership.

And all of that is a marketing problem, not a genre problem.

Genre is fine. Publishing might be looking for some white knights, but there's no lack of professional writers, rising amateurs, editors both pro and semipro, and so forth. An eruption of creativity can be seen across the entire field, from New Weird and British Space Opera across the pond to our own experiments in genre piracy and slipstream here in USAnia. The breadth of markets publishing stories, and authors, appearing on major award ballots has grown. Linda Nagata won a Nebula award in 2002 for "Goddesses," a story first published on SCI FICTION--the first major award to a Web-published story. Bruce Holland Rogers won a World Fantasy Award in 2004 for "Don Ysidro," a story published in Polyphony 3, a small press anthology series from Wheatland Press.

The markets are changing. The markets are diluting, rates have failed to keep pace with inflation--which has been true since the end of WWII--and category churn infests both the book lines and the short fiction outlets.

All of this is good.

Not for writers' paychecks. Not for editors' job security. Not for the likelihood of any of us having stable careers. But good for the readers, and good for the field.

The shifting markets, the shifting means of production, and the changes in book distribution and selling have all allowed new experiments to flourish. The Leviathan series from Ministry of Whimsy might not exist except for the ongoing state of flux within the field. A whole constellation of small, prestigious ‘zines, led and mentored by Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, has proven fertile ground for literary and stylistic adventures of all sorts. Under-the-radar publishers such as Prime Books and Nightshade Books have been able to release old and obscure material by established authors as well as exciting, risky projects by new authors.

Some of these have paid off--K.J. Bishop's excellent (and award-winning) The Etched City from Prime Books was picked up by Bantam/Spectra. Writers such as Jeffrey Ford, Jeff VanderMeer, and Ray Vukcevich have flourished, in part, because of the room they have had to develop their voice and craft among the curious corners created by all this churn.

To hell with declinism. Our analog of the Roman Empire may be collapsing--and it may not--but genre is alive and well and living in a thousand underpaying, cheaply produced corners of independent bookstores, on web sites, in e-books and on dealer room tables. What movement seizes our imaginations next, who the big authors of 2008 will be--these are questions which will be answered over time. But we have all, in effect, been granted an insurance policy against the long-reported and long-delayed Death of Big Publishing. Market fragmentation and new media are our friends. Cicero was correct. Everyone is writing a book.

Genre is dead. Long live genre.

Notes

1. Per the index in Locus Online. (back)

2. Disclaimer: Along with publisher Deborah Layne, I am one of the editors of that series. (back)

[Back to Table of Contents]

"I dedicate this story to my late aunt Joan Louise Sweany, my intellectual stimulus, mentor, spur, and marvelous friend ever since my teens. She was a longtime member of the Buddhist Temple of Chicago, and assisted Reverend Gyoko Saito in translating the works of Haya Akegarasu, a Japanese Buddhist master, into English. Her picture stands on my bookcase. I miss her, even though I feel she's still here."

I TOOK MY SEAT in the advanced physics lecture hall, trying to get the morning's extra caffeine working. Cosmic inflation had been the subject the day before: time and space coming into existence all as one, such that time itself did not exist outside of this creation. Hard to squeeze into a human brain so early in the day.

There's no set of tenses in human language to describe a situation where time is no more than a measure like space, and getting from the point of the singularity to the expanse of our time and times beyond is a journey in a languages of tenses other than past, present, and future. Physics alone possesses the language. So I believed, and I was struggling badly with its formidable mathematical thickets. Had I wasted all these years of study to find that I couldn't do it?

The professor came into the hall, not carrying her usual sheaf of notes and transparencies. She looked up at the seventy-five of us and grinned.

"We have a guest lecturer today. The Buddha has decided to visit us and give today's lecture." She inclined her head toward the door, and reached out a hand of welcome.

There was a rustle in the seats as students shifted uneasily. I wondered what this was all about. Some guy dressed up in costume, no doubt, to jar us awake for a change. Early-September fun. Too bad there was so much material to cover--this was a detour from needed lecture time. I fiddled with the bookmarks in my copy of Dodelson.

A man quietly entered and walked to where the professor stood. He wore a pair of chinos and a tee-shirt with the equation for Stokes's Theorem printed on it, except that the manifold designations were printed in what I took to be Chinese characters. I couldn't decide whether he had more of a Chinese or an Indian appearance, because his eyes were large and dark with a smooth epicanthic fold, while his nose was more prominent, and his skin tone fell between tan and olive. Had I seen him on campus the previous spring? He nodded to the professor, and she sat nearby.

He spoke. "I arrived this morning and walked on the grass still wet with dew. I found buttercups growing. See?" He held up a flower which had a single stem that branched into two smaller stems, and at the end of each smaller stem shone a small bright yellow blossom, like a bloom of sunshine.

"Like you, I study cosmology," he said. "You see, when the universe was created, time was created--there was no ‘before' or ‘after'." He pointed at the main stem. "So time was just a part of the universe, like this stem. Time is nothing but the path from the root to the blossoms. Time grew." Then he drew a line in the air between the upper stems. "And space is the path from stem to stem, from blossom to blossom. Space grew."

Then he held up the flower as a flower. "And this is all."

At that moment Buddha laughed and nodded his head, and a murmur spread softly in the hall. Buddha's illustration was no surprise to us--it was almost a classic contrast of timelike versus spacelike intervals in relativity. Maybe he'd done a little basic reading.

The professor stood up and thanked him, and he waved to us and walked away.

I opened my text and started tracing out one of the more difficult equations in my struggle.

"Uh ... Mr. Buddha?" It was our top teaching assistant, whom none of us liked. I looked up. This could be interesting.

Buddha stopped and turned. "Yes?"

"But where is the flower planted?" A whisper grew and then subsided to an expectant silence.

Buddha stood for a long moment in the quiet. His smile glowed. He put a finger to the side of his head. "The flower of creation is planted in the mind."

The assistant pounced. "In whose mind is it planted?"

A long silence now. The Buddha held up the little flower again. "How many plants do you see?"

An awkward pause, then a muttered, "One."

"How many blossoms do you see?"

"Two."

"Mind is one. Perceptions are many."

Oh, no. Here came the anthropic principle again. I started doodling in a page margin.

The teaching assistant raised his hand, asking more politely, "Mr. Buddha, we try to understand. How many dimensions does the universe have?"

Again I looked up.

Buddha's smile grew. He held up fingers and began counting, a deep frown on his face. He ran out of fingers and looked up, his eyebrows raised. We leaned forward.

Then he started counting his knuckles and the gaps between his fingers, faster and faster, laughing, until he raised both hands and waved them wildly in the air, the flower still between finger and thumb. Everyone started laughing along with him. At least he was a good performer.

He stopped moving, his hands still raised, and we fell silent as quickly as if sound had vanished from the world. He said, "Dimension is number. What lies between the numbers?" He pointed to the Stokes's Theorem displayed on his chest.

Gasps from a few places in the hall. One of them was mine.

He continued, "And what lies between the blossoms?" He twirled the flower. "Excuse me now." He left the hall.

We stayed silent for a long minute, and then everyone started talking. Stokes's Theorem gives an intimate relationship between space and surface, manifold and boundary. What if the boundary had fractional dimension? Do the dimensions of spacetime become blurred, shaded over, and where and why and how does that happen? A light beat upon me from a deep inner place, and words and equations blurred and ran in my head.

I looked at the floor where the Buddha had stood. One small yellow petal lay there. I went down, retrieved it, and placed it between the first two pages of my book.

Centuries before, the Gautama Buddha gave daily addresses to his disciples. One day he appeared before them, silent. In his hand he held up a small yellow flower for them to see. He said no words at all. That was his sermon.

Today he carried a different name, and we physics students weren't yet his disciples. With us, words and numbers were still necessary. But as I left, a tiny verse sprouted in my mind, and I would follow its trail for a lifetime:

Universe--

Yellow buttercup!

Time and space blooming.

[Back to Table of Contents]

"It was a long-past January 8th, Elvis Aaron Presley's birthday. I was vegging out on the couch with my new puppy Carmen, reading a book of world mythology and watching a show about post-mortem Elvis sightings. "Hey," I said to Carmen. "What if he really is still alive?" She regarded me thoughtfully and belched. I glanced down at a drawing of the Egyptian god Osiris in my mythology book. "Or maybe he did die, but he rose again!" Carmen yawned, and used the opportunity to bite my arm. I took that to mean she agreed with me. I started writing "Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go" that very night."

WELL, BILLY JAMES, the whole thing started about four months ago. Earl and me had just read in the paper how--are you sittin' comfortably, Billy James? That's good, we take pride in our hospitality. Anyhow, we was sittin' at the breakfast table, and Earl had just finished his salt pork and eggs, when he spits coffee all over the newspaper. I says, "Earl, what on earth has possessed you to do such a disgustin' thing. And on a Sunday, too!" And he just looks at me with these grim eyes, and holds up the newspaper.

There it was, just as big as life and twice as ugly. Jerry Sparkle, our most favorite Elvis imitator in the whole wide world, had got hisself murdered. Oh, it was a shockin' thing. They found him split open like a spring lamb. His insides was out, and his outsides was in none too purdy shape neither. It was purely horrible.

Needless to say, we was both heartbroken. We barely had the get-up to drive ourselves here, but somehow we managed. Billy James, you know the Elvis Is Our King Boutique is our very lives. But we barely managed to open up this place of beauty on that terrible mornin'. We was both slumped behind the counter, limp as chickens on a hot day. We put on the King's Moody Blue record, on account of us bein' so blue ourselves. Also, we thought it was kinda respectful.

When Millie June come in to see if we'd gotten in her Hound Dog salt-and-pepper shakers yet--Oh, they're so cute, Billy James, they got little bouffant hairdos just like the King himself! Anyhow, she come in to see, and normally we woulda been thrilled to death. We woulda put Hound Dog on the record machine and hidden them shakers under one of these official Elvis wigs for her to find, like an Easter egg hunt. But we was so dejected that we just plopped ‘em on the counter like they was hamburger patties.

Millie June knew right off there was somethin' wrong. Earl just looked at her with those big, sad eyes of his, and held up the newspaper. Well, she started a-squeakin' and a-gaspin'. We had to give her smellin' salts and a belt a' Southern Comfort.

When she could breathe, Millie June started cryin'. "Oh Earl, oh Effie," she was moanin'. "It's terrible. Just terrible. A cryin' shame." And cryin' she was. It was a regular flood. It got me and Earl goin' all over again, and there we was, all wailin' away and clutchin' that soggy newspaper to our bosoms.

Right about then, Millie June give a big snort. "And to think," she says, "That I had come here not only for my Hound Dog salt-and-pepper shakers, but to tell you that Bob Aaron King is comin' to the Celebrity Theatre this Friday." "Bob Aaron King!" We both hollered. Now, I know he wasn't nigh as good as Jerry Sparkle, but he was a pretty fair Elvis imitator anyhow. That cheered us up a bit.

But all of a sudden, Earl gets this terrible scowl on his face. "Millie June," he says, "How come we didn't hear about this before? This is awful sudden notice."

Well, Millie June looked all perplexed. Pretty soon, she comes out with, "I don't rightly know, Earl. They just announced it today, all sudden-like." Now, Billy James, you know Earl is a mighty smart feller. So he gets that look like he gets when he's thinkin' real hard. You know, with his forehead all scrunched up, and makin' those little grunts and all. Me and Millie June just sat back and watched, respectful-like.

After awhile, Earl says, "Maybe ... maybe, someone's been killin' other Elvis imitators, you know, in the Big City. Maybe Bob Aaron King was afraid to publicize hisself."

Me and Millie gasped, all horrified, but to tell you the truth, we shouldn'ta been surprised. All sorts of things happen in the Big City. Phoenix is a terrible place, Billy James. Anyhow, we don't hear much about what goes on there, ‘cause we only get the Tuba City Star, not any fancy papers like the Mesa Tribune.

So, we all thought about it real good, but we decided to go see Bob Aaron King anyway. Us and Millie June said our goodbyes, and Earl and me went back to tendin' the shop and mournin'.

The next day we wasn't near over the shock, but Earl decided to do some detective snoopin'. He drove across town to his cousin Freddy Jack's house, and spent the whole day lookin' through his back issues of the Phoenix Gazette. That meant I had to watch the Boutique myself, but I didn't really mind. Besides, I was expectin' a shipment of official Elvis towels, monogrammed with E. A. P. and scented like the King's own sweat. I was pretty excited.

By the end of the day, though, I had gotten pretty cranky. My shipment didn't come, and Earl was late. He finally walked through the door, and I was about to scold him somethin' fierce, but then I saw the look on his face. I was stopped short like a pole-axed puma.

"I was right," he says, his eyes all wild and bulgy like Billy Graham's. "I was right. There has been two other Elvises killed. Butchered like pigs, Effie." Well, I darn near fainted. It seemed that one Elvis was found dead in the back room of the Velvet Pelvis lounge in Benson right after his act, and the other was spread all over the back seat of his pink ‘58 Cadillac. All me and Earl could do was sit and shake our heads awhile. We had always planned to go to the Velvet Pelvis someday, and now our dream was soiled.

The followin' week was like a wakin' nightmare. The joy seemed to have gone out of our lives. When them Elvis towels finally showed up, it was all we could do to crack a smile. I had been stitchin' on the hand of my lifesize Elvis soft sculpture, but my sewin' machine was silent that week. Billy James, you know I been workin' on that sculpture for the past seven years. It will be my masterpiece, and my immortality when I'm nothin' but dust. But I couldn't bear to work on it. It was so limp and still, it made me think of Jerry Sparkle and all them other poor devils. I took to eatin' moon pies instead.

Then Friday rolled around, and we started to feel a mite better. We was carpoolin' with Millie June to Phoenix, on account of she's got a big old Nash Rambler and all we got is our Elvis Memorial Pickup. We closed up the shop early, went to Piggly Wiggly for Yoo Hoo and beef jerky, and hit the open road. We wasn't the first ones in line, but purdy near. We got glorious seats. You know what they say, about every seat bein' a good one at the Celebrity Theatre on account of the stage rotatin', but let me tell you, some seats are better than others. We was right up front.

Bob Aaron King's show was just beautiful. If you squinted a little, he looked so much like Elvis it made you wanna cry. While he was singin' "In the Ghetto," he kept gettin' closer and closer to me and Millie June. And then--oh, Billy James, I can barely say it ‘cause my breath is comin' so quick--and then, durin' "Love Me Tender," he came right up to us. He blew Millie June a kiss, but he put his scarf around my neck and sang right in my face. I nearly died of pleasure.

Earl was a mite jealous, but he tried not to show it. "I don't blame you," he told me. "What woman in her right mind could resist him." Darn right, says I. Anyhow, after the show was over, me and Millie June dried our tears and prepared ourselves for the long ride home. All of a sudden, Millie June gets this wild look in her eye. "Effie," she says, "Let's see if we can get backstage for a peek at Bobbie."

I thought it was a tad silly, women of our age and social position sneakin' backstage like a couple a' bobby soxers. But Earl thought it was a fine idea, because he was determined to see if Bob Aaron King's chest hair was real or not. To tell you the truth, Billy James, I think he was a bit envious. So sneak we did. It wasn't terribly hard. The bouncers was all in the bar out front, gogglin' at that strumpet Madonna struttin' around the TV in her grandma's underwear.

Bobbie had a star on his dressin' room, just like in Hollywood. My heart was poundin' somethin' fierce. We knocked, quiet as mice. "Mr. King?" Millie June called. "Bobbie, honey, are you in there?" But there was no answer atall. After knockin' awhile longer, Earl gets this cross look on his face and says, "That fella thinks he's just too good for the likes of us. I got nothin' to say to him." and he turns to leave. But Millie June's havin' none of it.

"Maybe he's just not there yet," she says, her eyes gleamin' like a weasel in the chicken house. "Let's just go on in and wait for him."

Well, I thought that was a dandy idea. Earl just snorted. Together, me and Millie June opened the door.

I will never forget what I saw there that night. Bob Aaron King was lyin' on his back in the middle of the floor. His chest hair was unglued and throwed up over his face, and he was cut open like a catfish. There was innards everywhere. You could hardly see an inch of white on his rhinestone jumpsuit for all the blood.

Earl was busy throwin' up his Yoo Hoo and beef jerky, and Millie June was leanin' up against the wall a-wheezin', and her eyes bulgin' like Blanche Jeter's poodle. That's when I noticed it.

Bob Aaron King's Elvis wig was gone.

Suddenly, in the corner of the room, I seen one of the shadows start to move. Needless to say, we hightailed it out of there like the devil hisself was behind us. I had to drive, ‘cause Earl kept throwin' up and Millie June was purely useless. Now, I know you're pry thinkin' we should have called the police or somethin', Billy James. But you gotta understand, we was in shock.

On that long stretch back to Tuba, I did some thinkin'. I wondered if all the other Elvises had their wigs stole too, and I wondered why the papers hadn't said nothin' about that. I reckon it was just too terrible to mention. I had trouble thinkin' clearly though, ‘cause of all the retchin' and wailin' and what-not. Pretty soon I just gave up. It was an awful trip home.

It was awful late when we got back, but Millie June just wouldn't leave. She was scairt clean out of her wits. She wouldn't let neither of us out of her sight. Earl started to run down the hall, and she was on him like a duck on a June bug ‘til he ‘splained to her that he had to go upchuck again. I couldn't imagine him havin' anything left in his stomach, but he clearly did.

Well, the upshot of it all was that Millie June spent the whole weekend with us, which was kinda horrible, ‘cause she snores and is prone to havin' wind. But we all lived through it, and like they say, life goes on.

We put our minds to forgettin' what we saw, although Earl went to Freddy Jack's house and cut the article out of the paper when it come out. He kept it under the drawer of the cash register, for some unknown reason.

Days went by, and then weeks. Our life was not the same as it was. How could it be, after a thing like that? But we survived, and so did the Elvis is Our King Boutique.

The day finally came. January 8th, Elvis Aaron Presley's birthday. Of course, we always keep the Boutique open ‘til midnight on that wonderful day, ‘cause folks around here get sentimental. Just think about it, Billy James. You're sittin' up late, watchin' a tribute to the King and drinkin' mint julips in his honor, when suddenly a powerful need comes over you. We sell more Gyrating Elvis dolls on that night than we do durin' the whole rest of the year.

Well, it come to our attention that the Tuba City Chamber of Commerce was givin' a We Love Elvis parade that night, complete with a float shaped like Graceland and a young Elvis imitator named Jamie Sequin. At first we was kinda sad that we'd miss it, ‘cause of course we'd never dream of leavin' our posts at the Boutique. We have a duty to this town, Billy James. Then we got to thinkin' about the last Elvis imitator we saw, and suddenly we was just as glad to stay in. I know it's a blasphemy, but we couldn't wait ‘til that night was over. Oh, we did well. We was busy most of the day, and the whole of the evening. We made enough money for a week's vacation in Tucson, but to tell you the truth, all we could think about was goin' home and goin' to bed.

I finished totalin' the day's receipts, and Earl put the watch tarantulas in the windows and switched off the lights.

Just then we heard this godawful, unearthly sound comin' down the street toward us. It sounded like a cross between a police siren and a cat in heat. I shrieked and called for Earl, and he ran to my side. We throwed our arms around each other and waited, our eyes bulgin' in fear.

It was Millie June. She come runnin' in the Boutique, wailin' like a fire engine. Her hair was stickin' out every whichaway, and her eyes were wild as a colt's in spring.

"He's daid!" she shrieked. "They kilt him! Oh, he's daid, he's daid." When Millie June gets upset, her West Virginia accent gets real strong. I usually correct her real polite, remindin' her that she sounds like a peckerwood. But I was so taken aback that I just gaped at her.

"Didn't you hear me?" she bellered. "Jamie Sequin is daid. He's murdered, Effie! Poor, poor little feller. Some evil thing pulled him into the Graceland float and popped him like a tick."

Suddenly, she went all stiff, and started a-groanin' and a-droolin'. "He's cooooming," she moaned. "He's almost heeeere!" And then she turned tail and run out into the night.

I nearly collapsed of nerves. Earl began cussin' and rummagin' under the counter for Grandpa Juke's old shotgun. We didn't know who it was Millie June was talkin' about, but we didn't aim to find out.

It was too late.

An unnatural cold wind blowed in through the door, knockin' over the rack of Baby Elvis postcards. And all of a sudden, there was a dark figure standin' by the King Koffee Kups.

I started squeakin' like a rabbit, and Earl froze like a jacklighted deer. The figure laughed, low and mean. He jingled the Elvis Head medallions, and then started toward us.

It was the King. He was beautiful, Billy James, beautiful and terrible. He was young and skinny, wearin' a black leather motorcycle jacket and tight bluejeans. His chest was bare ‘cept for a silver necklace shaped like a skull.

Then I saw his hands, and I nearly got the vapors. They was all bloody, and the arms of his jacket too. He was wearin' this big wide belt with a Harley Davidson buckle, and hung all around it was Elvis wigs of all shapes and sizes. I like to died. He had that sneer on his face, and he swaggered as he walked at us.

He come right up and put his bloody hands on the counter. "Hi," he says.

"Hi," says me and Earl, grinnin' like dogs caught grazin' in the stable. We darn near wet our Levis.

"I'm pleased to make your acquaintance," says the King, like a perfect Southern gentleman. His voice was sweet as summer magnolias, and he smiled that little-boy smile that always broke my heart.

Well, then he slicks back the sides of his D. A., and looks right at me and grins. It occurred to me that he just greased his hair with blood, but I wasn't about to say nothin. I just grinned like a fool my own self. "I'm always delighted to meet those folks who've kept the faith," he says. "I'm truly grateful to y'all."

"Thank you," I says back in a tiny voice. Earl was just standin there, eyes as big as pie tins.

"You folks are my immortality," he says. "My high priests and priestesses." He wipes his hands up and down the thighs of his jeans, real slow and sexy-like. There was red streaks when he got done.

"I know you love me," says the King. "But sometimes love isn't enough." His grin got wider and wider, ‘til I thought it would wrap around his head. "What do you know about theology?" he asks.

Billy James, to be perfectly honest, he just about lost me there. I'll do my best to recall what he said, but it was pretty odd, and you know me. I ain't the brightest light in the outhouse.

Well anyhow, he asks me this question. "Not much," says I. I could barely get them words out of my mouth.

"Let me teach you," says Elvis. He swaggers right to the middle of the Boutique, then spins around like he was startin' a performance. I could just about see the guitar in his hands.

"The birth of a religion," he says, "is a mighty strange thing. Catholicism meets the Cult of Damballah, and boom! Instant Voodoo." I squinted, tryin' to understand him. He was standin' perfectly still, starin' right at me and Earl. I thought I would either melt or burn to ashes under the weight a' them eyes. "Do you know the name Kuan Yin?" he asks all of a sudden.

We both stood there a sec, and then Earl says, real timid, "Ain't he the feller who works nights at Kwiki Mart?"

The King don't even bother to look at him. He just kinda chuckles, and says "Kuan Yin is a Chinese goddess. She's the protector of mothers and children. Isn't that sweet, Effie?"

I nearly threw a piston when he said my name. "Awful sweet," I says, all meek. So he scratches his chest and says, "She didn't start out that way, Effie. Kuan Yin was a man, who lived a long, long time ago. Then he died, and he became a god. Over time, the stories changed, and then he was a goddess."

I didn't know what the hell he was talkin' about.

He just kept on. "The ancient Egyptians had more gods than Graceland has lawyers. One of them was named Horus. He was a pretty important fella. He started out bein' the god of the sky, then he was the god of wisdom. He kept changin', and eventually, he was seven different gods at the same time."

Earl's face was all screwed up, and I heard them little grunts, so I knew he was tryin' his darndest to take it all in. I was feelin' purdy stupid. But then the King smiles at me, as if to say, "You can do it, Effie!" And you know what, Billy James? I started feelin' like I could.

Elvis nodded at me, grinnin'. "Ever hear the name Kali?" he says.

I smiled back. "Bud Rollins has a collie dog," I says.

"I don't mean Lassie, woman!" he bellered, in a voice like summer thunder. Chills went up and down my spine.

But he never stopped smilin'. "Not collie," he says. "Kali. The Hindu death goddess. At one time, that was the most feared name in all India. A whole tribe called the Thuggs worshipped her, and so did a lot of other folks besides."

The King stepped into the shadows, so he was just a big black shape. His voice sounded like it was right by my ear when he started speakin' again.

"They sacrificed people to her out in the desert. They'd dig the graves first, then go out and find somebody." I could hear Elvis breathin'. "They'd end up with their throats cut ear to ear."

There was this big long pause. I was shakin' like a chihuahua. Earl had stopped his gruntin' and was whindelin' under his breath instead. Finally, the King spoke. "No one's scared of her anymore," he says. "Heck, she even showed up in a Beatle movie, back when Johnny was still mortal. Gods change, Effie. But they don't always go from fierce to funny. Sometimes it happens in just the opposite fashion."

He was suddenly right in front of me. He pointed at the jumbo-sized poster of himself on the powder room door. It was the one I used to like so well, with Elvis in his white karate suit and sweat all over his sideburns.

The King had this big old sneer on his face.

"That," he says, "Is dead. I left it on the toilet at Graceland." He reached out and touched my face, Billy James. His skin was hot as fire. "That's dead," he said. "But I will never die."

That poster suddenly burst into flames, and so did Elvis himself. Then, just like that, he was gone. Vanished like a sucklin' pig at Easter. There was nothin' left of the poster but ashes. As they floated to the floor, real easy-like, I realized I understood everything he said.

It took Earl a mite longer, but he got it after a fashion.

Billy James, when I saw your show at the Golden Oldies Saloon, the buttons near to popped off my shirt with pride. My very own nephew, up there on the stage singin' "Teddy Bear." I do love you, boy. I hope you understand this is for the best.

Fetch the meat cleaver, Earl.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Pretend that nothing's changed as I guide you past the broken doors, the lines of empty cars beneath a dull orange sky. We keep upwind of the smell until we reach the sea.. You spread a tablecloth, I bring rocks to hold it down against the wind. You've prepared a mock picnic of conversation. Fictive wine and

Camembert. Sand sticks to your lips, you laugh a little too hard and I kiss you.

The dogs follow sunset. They travel in packs, some with collars. I've grown too weak to beat them off. Days ago I'd try, but even the small ones are gone. We brought the gun.

One bullet left. Yours, or mine?

[Back to Table of Contents]

"The graveyards of the world are littered with artists who never quite became (one sometimes feels their lost works when wandering through museums). Among past prodigious talents, why did some fail while others succeed? For some it was a lack of health, conviction, single-mindedness, commitment, finances, or good teachers. For others, it might have been so simple as a missed rendezvous."

THE MUSTACHE struck the canvas first, soon followed by the attached Catalan dandy. If not for the bell, the fight might then have ended. Now sure and muscular hands dragged him into the claustrophobic obscenity of a corner. Two vague ovals hovered over him.

"Salv, keep your guard up," said Miro, waving a tin of sulfur yellow beneath his nostrils. "And jab. Jab, jab, jab."

"You'd do well to keep circling," added Picasso, sealing his brow with retouch varnish.

Dali gazed across the abyss of countless rounds at what had first manifested as the barest figment of his imagination--a smudge of intrigue, of isometric eccentricity with cannibalistic impulses, a pebble of perverse contours threatening sodomistic intent. He had maneuvered about it for a time, more intrigued than threatened, wanting a fuller declaration of its being before troubling his shoe to stomp it out of existence. By then it had grown in a misfit of mischief to truly horrific proportions, acquiring a distinctive limp, stirring up a terrifying swarm of grasshoppers, at every stage resisting the analytical faculties of his paranoiac-critical method--such that even now he had no idea what it was.

Now looking up at his two close Catalan brothers, Dali imagined them wearing scatalogical headpieces: owls topped by turds. He broke into hysterical laughter.

Picasso cursed while helping Dali back to his feet. After nudging the flamboyant artist forward for the start of another round, he and Miro jumped down off the ring apron, nearly toppling a very confused new arrival.

"Pablo? Joan?" Rene Crevel straightened his cap and looked about. "What is this place?" He squinted through the ropes. "Is that Salv? Who is he fighting?"

"We've no idea," said Miro, brushing aside squiggly lines and snared objects that kept impinging on his vision. He noticed words forming above Crevel, liquid phrases full of degenerate wit, nouns decomposing into obscene epithets.

"You're younger than you were," said Crevel, studying the pair. After looking at his own hands, he exclaimed, "And so am I!"

"I recall a long and full life," granted Picasso. He picked up a palette and brush, turned to a blank canvas, and began to work, objects all about him taking on hard angles.

"The truth be told," said Miro, watching him, "you died at 91." At Picasso's curious look, he added, "No doubt I died soon after."

"And me?" asked Crevel.

"You died young," said Picasso, "at age--" Catching Miro's sharp look, he finished, "I forget when."

"Are we ghosts then?" said Crevel. "I don't even believe in them. And why would we return to a time in our past?"

"The place seems equally significant," said Miro. When he and Pablo had first "arrived" here--witness to Salv fighting who knows what for how long--the surroundings had been as undefined as a Tanguy painting. But slowly a landscape had revealed itself, of rock and sand all about, with the roar of surf, the stink of fish..."

Picasso inhaled deeply, following it with a slow exhale. "Figueres, Cadaques, Port Lligat. We're somewhere in the Dali Triangle, I'm sure of it."

Miro concurred.

"How can you know that?" asked Crevel. He glanced upward, only now noticing the words floating above his own head.

"The salty breeze, hint of fermenting olives, harsh lapis-lazulian sky," said Miro. "The very gravity of the place."

Picasso paused with brush poised. "This is the day, isn't it. The day Salv meets Gala. On the beach at Cadaques, that's where we are."

"If so," said Crevel, looking about, "where is she?"

The air around the ring began to ripple, and stadium seats materialized, along with ghostly spectators. The trio found themselves staring at a vacant front-row seat.

"She's a no-show?" said Picasso, scratching his full head of hair. "This can't be good."

Miro batted a squiggle from his vision. "Impossible. She has to be here. She's--" He glanced behind at Dali sagging into the ropes. "She's to be his salvation!"

"We seem to have discovered Salv's problem," said Picasso, "though without a clue how it's come about."

"Gala's nearby," said Miro. "I sense it. Pablo, Rene, tend to Salv as best you can. I'm off to find her."

Picasso, wincing at a crushing blow that came from the ring, called after him, "Do so quickly!"

Such was the tangle of lines and objects orbiting about Miro that at times he could barely see. Even now several cotton swabs, a pair of scissors, and a jump rope leaped into his celestial mobile, leading him to stumble over someone's feet.

"Sorry," he said, about to move on. Then he stared in astonishment. Andre Breton sat in a front-row seat, looking like the Grand Inquisitor. Poet, writer, founder of Surrealism and now its dictator, he was dressed head to toe in his favorite color: bottle green.

"Come join us, Joan," Breton spoke with unsettling calm. "Let us enjoy the spectacle together."

Seated around Breton were several artists--some of them Miro's good friends--but Miro focused on the writers and poets. Soupault, Reverdy, Desnos, Char--In a show of support they had all dyed their hair the green of Breton. Above them churned their word-craft, ranging from the fluid and prolific of Aragon to the sparse, wooden and coldly intellectual of Breton himself. Then he discovered a pocket of richly imaged verse, subtle yet vigorous, full of innuendo, that could only flow from the pen of Paul Eluard.

"Paul?" said Miro, spying him several rows back. "Where is your wife?"

Eluard appeared uncomfortable with the topic. "Gala is about."

"Paul. You know Salv is meant to meet her today."

Glancing uneasily at Breton, Paul lowered his gaze.

"We have rethought the matter," said Breton, "and deemed such a meeting inappropriate."

"Inappropriate!" He should have known Breton would be behind this. "She's to be his Muse! You can't change what is!"

"Laws," said Breton, smoothing the magnificent mane that framed his solemn and humorless face. "We reject them all, do we not? Why should universal laws be exempt? Thus do we apply the red pen to time and space and continuity itself--for Dali's sake."

"For Dali's sake," said Miro, letting a challenge creep into his voice.

"She's not a fit Muse for Dali," scolded Breton. "In due time he'll find The One."

Another hysterical outburst reached them. Dali was on the ropes, pummeled by a tentacled headless monstrosity.

"How I warned him," brooded Breton, "that he was sliding towards the trapdoor of the wild sky. Now he must find his own way out."

Gala is the way! Miro wanted to shout. In the months prior to meeting Gala, Dali had exhibited a rapid deterioration in his mental state. His hysterical outbursts had grown ever more frequent, his actions increasingly irrational and disturbing. Only weeks ago he had performed a gruesome surgery on himself, attempting to remove a cockroach from beneath his skin. He desperately needed a stabilizing influence--and Gala would provide it.

Miro started past.

"Joan!"

He stopped. Breton's voice was full of command, hard to ignore.

"You know where this leads. Salv's better off not having met her."

You certainly would be, thought Miro, though he did not say it. Dali and Breton were destined to battle long and hard for prominence in the Surrealist Movement. Already there was bad blood brewing between them: artistic, political, and religious. Gala would eventually become the scapegoat for much of it.

"Must I remind you, Joan," continued Breton, "that despite our anarchic agenda we do require a singularity of purpose, an agreement on fundamental matters." He paused. "For everyone's sake, including yours, sit with us. Enjoy the show."

But already Miro was walking off.

In the center of the ring, circling alternately left and right before an oversized hand whose thumb kept switching sides, Dali puzzled over recent events. With friends coming to visit him in Cadaques, he had rented a seaside cottage. Magritte and his wife had shown up early yesterday. Then late last night Paul Eluard had arrived, accompanied by his wife. Dali had but glimpsed her, as she was tired, irritable, and had quickly gone to bed. But this morning--This morning everyone was to meet on the beach, and there he would make her acquaintance.

Why the occasion should seem so precipitous he could not have explained. But there was no denying its delusional and paranoid aspects. He had been most diligent in his preparations, fastidious in every detail. He had put on his best silk shirt only to sense its wrongness. So he tore holes in it, exposing his navel and a nipple. Then he cut the collar loose so it hung free about his neck. After that, it seemed only appropriate to shave his armpits, which he did repeatedly, streaking himself with the resulting blood such that it coagulated everywhere. He further painted his armpits blue. Then he waxed up his hair and tiniest mustache to a gleaming defiance of night and, as a final titillating touch, perfumed his whole body with a heady mix of fish paste and goat dung.

Poised at the door, hideous and superb, he had surveyed the beach with exquisite hauteur. There, in plain sight, sat Gala. All he could see was her back, but it swept over him, athletic and fragile, taut and tender, feminine and energetic, sublime beyond comprehending. And suddenly all of his preparations seemed woefully inadequate.

That was when everything began to fade, leaving him alone among anthropomorphic rocks on a sandy beach, until a smudge appeared and grew, followed by ropes all about--

In a small outdoor café, Gala sat at a table with human legs. As she nibbled at Omelettes with Dynamic Mixed Herbs, she stared hard at a distant bust of Voltaire, causing it to dissipate into a group of figures--in this way protecting Dali from the critical skepticism of the French Enlightenment. Then she heard someone calling to her.

"Gala? Gala!"

The café was situated atop a rock that resembled a face or a fruit dish, depending. After sipping a spillage of water from Still Life Fast Moving, she rose and ventured near the edge. Joan Miro stood below in the sand, barely discernible through a churn of trinketed filaments.

"Gala, have you forgotten about Salv? You are to meet him today!"

As if she could forget such a thing. Her husband Paul had told her they would all meet up here. Had there been a change in plans? Taking in the greater vista, she spotted a boxing ring in the distance. Then she gasped, for Dali was in it, lolling on the ropes, getting pounded by some large and incoherent thing. Now she recalled the slight quaver in Paul's voice as he told her where they should meet. Breton! She could feel it in her bones. Breton was about and up to no good.

"My little boy," she cried, starting down steps carved into the rock.

But something peculiar happened. No matter how quickly she descended, she found herself ever on the steps. A glance down revealed a multiplicity of hands, feet, arms, legs...

Dali's mustache changed with each blow--from straight and thin to thicker with a twirl and then back, or sometimes growing so enormous and gel-laden that it weighed down his upper lip. In the back of his mind he had a vague recollection of having been a painter, but with each blow it seemed less clear. He felt himself knocked from Cape Creus to Figueras to Port Lligat. Once he was nearly consumed by the shadow of Mount Pani. Chased by a grand piano, he hid behind a cranial harp. All about him the rocks mutated into telephones, giraffes, lions and thumbs while in his ears the passage of time grew ever louder, a relentless drip, drip, drip--

"Salv," said Picasso. "Salv!"

He found himself on all fours, though that hardly steadied him. What he had thought was the passage of time was blood leaking from his nose. He gazed down, head weaving, as it slowly spelled out DALI.

"How do we help, Salv?" Picasso called to him. "What can we do?"

Having signed the canvas, Dali felt finished. But how could that be? He had not yet met Gala. Famished. Perhaps that was what he felt.

"Bread," he murmured. "Bread, bread, and more bread. Nothing but bread."

Picasso nudged Crevel. "You heard the man. Fetch all you can."

Crevel started off, but pulled up short. "Bread around here? We're in the middle of nowhere!"

"Look for abnormal protrusions from the hips, aberrations in atmospheric skulls. Suspect anything phallic. Sniff all that arouses suspicion."

"But--?"

"Follow your nose!"

"A ferociously anti-humanitarian loaf," murmured Dali, staggering back to his feet. "Hyper-evident."

"Duchamp," Miro growled, looking about as Gala continued to descend the staircase. Sure enough, a tall thin man sat at a nearby table, employing the Sicilian defense against his slight opponent, Man Ray.

Hurrying to the table, Miro tapped him on the shoulder. "Marcel. Marcel!"

Diffident and ascetic, lost in his own world, Duchamp might never have taken notice had not squiggly lines strung with little goblins of gaiety dipped low, soon adding pawns, knights, bishops and rooks to their number before bobbing upward once more.

Following his queen's ascent, Duchamp blinked and looked about. "Joan?"

"Sorry to intrude, Marcel, but you must release Gala. She is meant to meet Dali today. If anything is preordained--"

Marcel had by then spotted Dali in the ring and Gala fast-stepping to no avail. Though neutral by nature and deaf to the constant squabbling in the Surrealist camp ("Duchamp is his own Movement," some would say), he did have a soft spot for the rebels' rebel, the misfits' misfit; and now he pulled from his suit a brush not used in three years but kept ever primed with earth tones. Extending it with a deceptive reach and flair, he graced the art world with another of his rare efforts, painting out all but one Gala. As an afterthought he slapped a mustache on Man Ray that made him resemble the Mona Lisa.

Gala broke free and finished her descent.

"Thanks, Marcel," she said in passing, handing him a lambchop.

Miro rushed to catch up, surprised at her dogged stride. She was so full of determination that it seemed nothing could stop her. But then she faltered. Looking beyond, he saw why. Breton and his cronies had risen as one, a phalanx not to be trifled with.

"Joan? How are your pugilistic skills?" Gala asked.

"I box for fitness, not resolution," Miro conceded. "If only Luis were about..." Even as he thought it, there materialized in the distance a park; and unless his eyes deceived him, Luis Bunuel lurked there, doing something to a statue.

"Luis!" Miro called to him. "Luis, if you could spare a moment. We're in a bit of a thicket."

Bunuel turned to them. A childhood friend of Dali's, he was a big blockish man, an imposing presence, and--most importantly in the present circumstance--better versed than Miro in the art of pugilism.

Bunuel took in the situation, eyeing first Breton and then Dali. His frown was eternally unreadable. Standing on tiptoe, he finished balancing a loaf of bread atop the statue. But of course! thought Miro. Bunuel was even now filming L'Age d'Or. Bunuel now walked quickly towards them, kicking a violin before him. Only then did Miro realize the fuller circumstance. Bunuel and Dali had collaborated to high acclaim on an earlier film, un chien andalou. This was to be their second collaboration. But at the moment they were to flesh out the script, Dali had met Gala. After that, Dali's mind had turned to mutton.

Reaching them, Bunuel grabbed Gala by the neck.

"Luis, stop!" Miro pleaded.

Her windpipe closed off, Gala glared up at him with a voluptuous calm. Somewhere in the distance a half-melted aphrodisiac telephone on crutches kept ringing. At last Bunuel shoved her to the ground, where she lay gasping, the barest smile on her lips.

"The tongue of a viper," Bunuel spat. "That's all I wanted to see." Crushing the violin underfoot, he shouted, "Action!"

In the park, a cameraman began to crank. A man with a loaf of bread atop his head started past the statue. But at that moment someone in the trees threw a stone, dislodging the bread that Bunuel had balanced atop the statue.

"What are you doing!" cried Bunuel. The man grabbed up the bread and fled through the trees. "Rene?" Bunuel broke into a run. "Rene Crevel, it's you! Bring back that loaf, you oaf!"

Miro helped Gala to her feet. She seemed okay, though her eyes did not focus on him but looked just beyond. Turning, he jumped. Marcel Duchamp stood there.

"Perhaps I can be of help," said Duchamp, swatting away part of Miro's mobile, "as long as it doesn't involve doing anything."

Dali now fought a thicket of sadistically mutilated limbs, headless trunks, seething entrails and hopeless genitals. In a fit of metaphysical umbrage he cast off his trunks and presented to his opponent a tumescent taunt, only to be promptly floored.

"That bombastic blasphemous iconoclast of a fool!" grumbled a spectator. "I bet all on him, and what does he do? He masturbates on the ring apron."

Dali lifted a glove and gesticulated in the air, painting crutches on all the spectators' faces, symbolic of snobbery, or was it sexual dysfunction, or love, or maybe death? The language of his art had grown unwieldy, a constantly mutating monster of staggering complexity, impossible to read.

"I have painted myself illiterate," he thought.

"Salv. Salv, we've got bread!"

Peering into the corner, he saw an Average French Loaf with Two Fried Eggs without the Plate, on Horseback, Trying to Sodomize a Heel of Portuguese Bread. Suddenly ill, he retched into the ringside seats. "I am done with bread," he murmured. Looking frantically about, he seized upon a new obsession. "Wheelbarrows!"

Failing to recruit Bunuel to their cause, Miro, Gala and Duchamp advanced to confront the Surrealists. Andre Breton stood at their head. Though he wielded a heavy knobbed cane, he seemed bolstered more by a paradoxical duplicity of beliefs.

"Well, if it isn't the nymphomaniacal harpy," said Tsara, standing to Breton's left.

"Out to rob another cradle," said Masson on his right.

Miro glanced aside at Gala. Ten years Dali's senior, she would be part wife, part mother.

"If Salv falls into your perverse clutches," said Breton, "I will cast him out as a Surrealist."

"How do you accomplish that," asked Gala, "when Dali is Surrealism?" Her remark caused paroxysms in Breton, who was only too aware of Dali's growing fame and how it threatened them all with oblivion.

"Paul, talk some sense into her," said Breton.

Paul Eluard stood off to the side, looking as alone as Duchamp. At last he ventured to look up at his wife. Eyes brimming with love, he spoke:

"I was born to know you

To give you a name

Freedom."

It wasn't the strong statement Breton had been hoping for.

"You don't belong here," said Breton simply.

"Of course I don't," she retorted. "You want women as patrons, or objects d'amor. But I lack money and have ambition, which makes me unfit for your purposes."

"You are unfit, period," said Tsara, "as a mother, and as a companion for any man."

Paul Eluard seemed to recede ever further from the scene.

"You didn't complain when I slept with you," she said.

Miro tried to follow her gaze, but it seemed aimed at all of them.

"In other words," said a woman deserting their ranks, "she has a brave and independent spirit."

"An entrepreneur's ruthlessness," said another woman, departing as well.

"Which would be well-regarded in a man," said another, stomping off.

"Tramps, all," said Breton, standing taller than ever, rigid in the egomaniacal glory of his self-righteousness. "You'll not be missed."

Even as he spoke the women faded into the mists, replaced by fresh recruits full of naivete, only too anxious to be associated with the Surrealists. As for the men, though many felt compassion for Dali, none dared cross Breton.

"What's to be done?" whispered Miro.

"Nothing," said Duchamp. "That would be best."

"Well enough for you to say!" Miro exclaimed, seeing Dali knocked down again. "But my Catalan brother pays heavily for your coveted inaction!"

"There is no limit to what can be accomplished," said Duchamp with calm forbearance, "if you do nothing long enough."

Dali hit the canvas so hard that--were it not for his mastery of the soft and the supersoft--he might have come to serious harm. Regaining his feet, he found himself groomed with flies. He brushed them off, then watched in fascination, for in their erratic departures he saw clearly the nature of Brownian movement, which in turn provided him with a keen insight into the discontinuity of matter.

None of which helped him avoid a right uppercut.

His vision jumped, and jumped again. The ropes forever burned his back. He had taken so many punches over so many rounds that he now resembled Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon.

Rebounding off the ropes, he threw a wild hook at William Tell's chin, connecting instead with his own shoulder. Then he looked up and upward still, for unless he was mistaken, there now confronted him an elephant of uncommon proportions, legs grown thin as giraffe's.

As Miro and Gala stood idly before the wall of Surrealists, reluctantly following Duchamp's lead by doing absolutely nothing, a long and mysterious shadow crept across the beach. Suddenly a man leaped from it, revolver in hand, and proceeded to fire into the crowd. It was the ultimate Surrealist act as defined by Breton himself, though he could never have accepted that the crowd would be composed of Surrealists.

Vache fell to an opium overdose, Cravan set sail to oblivion. Rigaut shot himself. Artaud, Dominguez, Paalen...

In the temporal storm now raging, Breton subjected the Surrealists to a succession of petty tribunals, one member after another ejected over a trifle, whether it be politics or socializing or too much fame and fortune. Few intentionally violated Breton's edicts, but so gangly had his theory of non-art grown that it became impossible to avoid all the tripwires.

Beset by ejections, suicides, and schisms, the group fell victim to its own farcical nature. Trapped by its own dogmatic and paradoxical rules, it imploded.

Artaud was kicked out and receded into obscurity, followed by Soupault. Aragon clashed and left of his own accord. Giacometi got the boot, as did Bataille, Tanguy and Ernst. Though some were soon reinstated, the gaps were enough to allow Miro, Gala and Duchamp to advance.

Now Breton alone stood before them. Rigid, humorless, yet charismatic, he understood the importance of scandal; but he demanded that it bear his stamp of approval.

Dali sought no one's.

"Gala is right," Miro tested him. "Dali will soon be seen as the sole authentic Surrealist."

"Pshaah," said Breton. "I will expel him. And he will not be a Surrealist at all!"

"An empty gesture," called Picasso. "For without Dali, Surrealism is pure nihilism."

"Better that than excrement!" retorted Breton.

"I invented excrement," Duchamp absently remarked.

Breton gave him an uncomprehending look and chose not to pursue the matter. "Avida Dollars," he then taunted, using the clever anagram he would think up for Salvador Dali. "Let his fame and fortune be his downfall. I warned him his art was hallucinatory to a dangerous degree, capable of unleashing creatures of evil intent. How ironic, that the most evil creature should turn out to be the almighty dollar. Now see the dark joy this creation inflicts upon its creator in its impulse to multiply and merge. See what it has earned him."

Drawn by an odd clang, all turned to the ring.

Dali now wore a deep-sea diving suit. Though awkward and hot, it was well-padded, providing some respite from the tremendous kicks of the pachyderm. But the faceplate was rapidly steaming up.

As he rebounded off one set of ropes after another, there came a moment when lips pressed against the faceplate. He heard a faint metallic voice barely recognizable as Picasso's.

"Salv, we've located Gala. Her arrival is imminent."

"As imminent as the arrival of the conical anamorphoses?" he inquired.

"Duly so."

"Is she raw?" he further inquired.

"In the pink."

Swept by a new wave of panic and paranoia, Dali stomped back out to center ring. He took a swing at the condensation and heard a loud clang. He could see nothing now. The air was hot and stuffy, impossible to breathe.

"Gala, hated and despised Gala," Breton crowed. "The great corrupter. You would lead him to the bank and destroy the firmament of his brush, such that ever after he paints only dollar signs. But I will not have it. We, the Surrealists, will not allow it! If need be, let this--" He gestured towards the ring. "--be his end." He winced as Dali took another terrible blow. "How ironic and utterly just," he added, "for Avida Dollars in all his vainglorious copraphagic indulgence to get the shit beat out of him."

Gala gazed upon Dali, her newborn baby, her child, her son, her lover. He was a miracle of fate, the magic element in her life. She would cure him, give him the telluric vertical forces needed to function as a man. Through her he would differentiate between ethereal intentions and practical inventions.

"I am his atavistic impulse," she murmured. "The hard to his soft. Without me, he is a paranoid rampage of listless strokes."

Dali. Her lord high executioner. Her love.

Gala glared at Breton, who had assumed a wide stance, arms folded, cane cocked in an attitude midway between arrogance and menace. Then, lowering her eyes, she dropped to all fours and crawled. She crawled forward to kiss one of his bottle-green shoes. She licked the dust from its gloss. She did the same to his other shoe. Though she could not see it, she imagined his gloat of triumph, of conquest, of destiny, even as she crawled onward between his legs and jumped up to rush forward.

"Bitch! Come back here!"

His voice held no sway over her. Rolling beneath the ropes, she came up in a crouch beside Dali, who was on his knees, clawing frantically at the helmet. Though she pried at it, the helmet was on tight, needing a spanner wrench to remove.

"The spanner!" she cried, looking about. "Who's got the spanner?"

Magritte, beset by a cloud, climbed onto the ring apron. In one hand he held an apple in front of his face; in the other, the spanner, which he now lobbed to her side.

"Thanks, Rene," she said, grabbing it up. But as she prepared to use the tool, she noticed the inscription it bore: "This is not a spanner."

With a curse she flung it away.

"What's wrong?" asked Miro, joining her.

There was no time to explain. She reached up into his bird's-nest sky, fished about a moment, and pulled down a cue stick. Using it like a can opener, she pried the helmet off.

Dali breeched like some exhibitionist whale. Brushing back sweat-soaked hair from his gasping mouth, he looked about in a daze. Then his eyes discovered Gala.

Gala, his blood, his oxygen. She was the Immaculate Intuition, reading his deepest darkest impulses. He felt stripped to his soul before her, a naked singularity of psychotic impulses. But now her eyes shifted, looking past him, distending in a paroxysm of concern. He turned and saw his opponent towering above, tusks sharpened to razor points, trunk weaving with menace, legs absurdly long and thin.

"I should like to sew a bit now," said Gala, rising to leave.

"But what do I do?" cried Dali, alarmed more that she should depart--even for a moment--than by the prospect of going another round with the pachyderm.

She turned back to him, her face thin and olive-dark, eyes penetrating as an atomic knife. "You must be cold and ruthless, my love. You must put yourself above the concerns of others. You must think only of yourself and your art. Your vision alone matters."

Gazing into her hazel antireality eyes, he was overwhelmed by her clairvoyance, her metaphysical intuition, her enigmatic anagrams of unquestionable truth.

"That," she said, walking off, "and money."

Even as she stepped from the ring, he knew what he must do. Buy her a Cadillac. But that could wait. Right now he had an oversized monstrosity to deal with. In that regard, he had another idea.

Despite the gloves, he somehow managed to snap his fingers. "My aphrodisiac dinner jacket, please."

Picasso looked at him in dismay. "Salv. Is this the proper time for something like that?"

But Gala, sewing at light-speed ringside, finished a final stitch and jumped up; and as Dali spread his arms like some cosmic vulture or Christ upon a hyper-aesthetic cross, she eased the dinner jacket onto his lanky frame, taking the utmost care lest she spill a drop--for sewn to it were fifty liquor glasses, each filled to the brim.

Ready now, giving his mustache a rakish tilt (while careful not to compromise his even keel), he advanced in pursuit of ecstasy, mind orgasmically imaged, gloves uplifted in an attitude of seductive--

The pachyderm punched him hard into the ropes.

Picasso and Miro gasped as glass shattered all about, but Gala merely smiled. And now, as the pachyderm moved in for the kill, it slipped and slid in a sea of crème de menthe; then with a beleaguered gasp it upended itself, crashing heavily to the canvas with a splash, trunk listing off the ring apron, legs scrawling defeat in the incandescent haze.

"Well done!" Miro, Picasso and Crevel chorused, joined by a score of Surrealists from Breton's camp, though they whispered it.

Hanging the ruined jacket on a cornerpost, Dali looked down at the canvas where he had signed his name. It no longer looked right. Wiping the blood from his nose, he stooped and scrawled, "Gala," before it, so that it read, "Gala Dali," a signature that he would use henceforth and forever.

"You'll regret it," said Breton, rapping his cane smartly in his palm. "She's a landscape beyond your reach. Your brush will fail you in the end."

And he was right. Breton was always right, even when he was wrong. She would treat him badly in time. She would betray him in countless ways. But time itself is the great betrayer, and Gala was just along for the ride. She would be his partner, guide, mentor, preceptor, his double, his faith, his conviction, his indefatigable defender in the face of adversity.

And he would love, worship and honor her to the end.

Gala climbed back through the ropes. She was done up as a choice corpse. On her head she had a doll that looked like a baby with its belly eaten away by ants, its head in the claws of a phosphorescent lobster. She gently took his hand.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked, filled with bewilderment, disbelieving her hand in his, and further distressed by the realization that she was crying.

"I want you to kill me," she said.

It would take a lifetime, and the annihilation would be mutual, leaving in its wake a hysterical wreckage of incalculable carnage, an art world turned not just on its ear but twisted, torn, melted and burned, and left out in the hot sun to rot.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Howard V. Hendrix ("The Self-Healing Sky") is the author of Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), Better Angels (1999), Empty Cities of the Full Moon (all published by Ace Science Fiction); and The Labyrinth Key, published in 2004 by Del Rey. His short fiction collection Möbius Highway is published by Scorpius Digital Publishing. Hendrix holds a BS in Biology as well as MA and PhD in English literature, which means he is at times able to manage fish hatcheries or teach literature classes at the nearby state university. He and his wife Laurel go for long backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada Mountains every summer, which is their avowedly masochistic idea of fun.

Visit Howard's website at www.howardvhendrix.com

Jay Lake ("Genre is Dead, Long Live Genre" ) lives in Portland, Oregon within sight of an 11,700 foot volcano. His fiction appears in Asimov's, Postscripts, and Realms of Fantasy, as well as the critically acclaimed collection Greetings From Lake Wu. In 2004 Wheatland Press published his collection American Sorrows, which was also published electronically by Scorpius Digital Publishing. He is editor or co-editor of the Polyphony anthology series, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, TEL: Stories and Exquisite Corpuscle. He is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for 2004, and a finalist for both Hugo and World Fantasy Awards for the same year.

Jay's short story "A Mythic Fear of the Sea" appeared in AEon One.

Visit Jay's website at www.jlake.com/

Pat MacEwen ("A Voice for the Goddess of Mercy") is a physical anthropologist (translation: bone freak) who has worked in the forensic field for the past 13 years, including 9 years as a crime scene specialist for the Stockton Police Department and a stint as a Scene of Crime Officer for the UN's War Crimes Tribunal. Currently working on various archaeological digs in Central California, Ms. MacEwen holds a B.S. in Marine Biology from Long Beach State and is finishing a master's thesis in forensic anthropology at Cal State University Sacramento. Her interests include alien sex, cathedrals, Darwin Award winners and stupid crook stories.

Pat's nonfiction article on gender reassignment in the animal kingdom, "Sex Change: a Few Simple Rules," appeared in AEon One.

Dana William Paxson ("The Buddha Lectures on Cosmology") writes patent applications for a law firm, course mini-lectures for online classes, magazine articles, poetry, and fiction. Four of his stories appeared in Science Fiction Age magazine during its ascendancy in the 1990s. His short fiction collection Neuron Tango was published in 2004 by Scorpius Digital Publishing. He has acted, sung, and danced in Gilbert and Sullivan productions, created abstract-constructionist works of art, and designed and built monster spreadsheet models of large-scale computer systems. He has studied mathematics, medieval and modern poetry, astronomy, molecular neurobiology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and a few languages. He teaches courses on Tolkien, da Vinci, and Picasso. Along with more short stories and a screenplay, he is writing two or more novels, depending on how well he tangles and untangles their threads. Watching him, his wife is never bored. Neither are his friends.

Visit Dana's website at www.danapaxsonstudio.com/

Bruce Holland Rogers ("Vocabulary Items") writes SF, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. His short stories, which have appeared in Amazing, Century, Fantasy and Science Fiction and many other markets, have won two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, where writers seem to grow like weeds. In addition to writing, Bruce has trained people in government, business, and the arts to solve problems creatively.

Visit Bruce's websites at www.sff.net/people/bruce/, and shortshortshort.com/

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's novels (science fiction, fantasy, mystery/crime, and romance) have been published in 14 countries in 13 different languages. She is the only person in the history of the science fiction field to have won Hugo awards for both editing and fiction. Her short work has been reprinted in six Year's Best collections. She has also been the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel, the Ellery Queen Reader's Choice Award, the Science Fiction Age Reader's Choice Award, and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award, and been nominated for the Locus, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards, and the Asimov's Reader's Choice Award.

From 1991-1996 Kris was the editor of the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene, Oregon. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.

Visit Kris's website at www.kristinekathrynrusch.com/

Lorelei Shannon ("Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go") writes and edits dark fantasy and even darker horror. She is the co-editor of the Scorpius horror anthology Hours of Darkness, and the author of Vermifuge, and Other Toxic Cocktails, and Rags and Old Iron.

Lorelei's previous career as a game designer produced (among others) A Puzzle of Flesh (a groundbreaking horror game that saw her interviewed by Cosmopolitan Magazine and banned in Sears stores everywhere). She lives in the woods of western Washington with her husband, Daniel Carver, sons Fenris and Orion, two big, hairy dogs, and an immortal goldfish.

Visit Lorelei's website at www.psychenoir.com/

Gary W. Shockley ("Dali, at Age 25, Believing Himself to be Heavyweight Champion of the World") recalls at a very young age sitting across the kitchen table from his older brother Rick, copying down whatever his brother wrote. This was how he first learned to write--not only with his left hand (as did his brother), but backwards and upside down. He also recalls drawing ducks with umbrellas, entire families of them, copied from some source without recognizing the irony.

English was never easy for him; foreign languages were near impossible. But two very good English teachers disciplined and inspired him, leading to essays and then stories demonstrating a unique voice. Likewise, he benefited from an art teacher who dared teach modern art at a rural school, with surrealism growing into a major influence. Sometimes he paints something that inspires a story; sometimes it is a story that inspires a painting. Whichever, he enjoys expressing both sides of his brain.

Gary's short fiction has appeared in The Clarion Awards, (Damon Knight Ed., Doubleday, 1984), World's Best SF (Donald A. Wollheim Ed., DAW 1985), Writers of the Future V (Algis Budrys Ed., Bridge, 1989), and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,. Upcoming appearances include Exquisite Corpuscle, (Jay Lake and Frank Wu Ed.,Wheatland Press, forthcoming), SciFiction, (Fall 2004 issue), and a new story in F&SF to appear in spring of 2005.

Visit Gary's website at www.garywshockley.com

P.R.A. Stillman ("Eyes the Color of Earth as Seen From Above") has had stories published in The Third Alternative, Aberrations, Pulphouse, and Thirteenth Moon. She has recently completed a fantasy novel about inadequate gods. She lives in the hills north of San Francisco with an assortment of formerly feral animals and a minimally house-trained archaeologist. Pras divides her time between writing fiction, creating sculptures out of old cars and earning a living in industrial medicine.

In AEon Three, fade up on a Bombay night at the cinema of life in Tom Doyle's "The Garuda Bird." A scientist learns the ways of fortune and the dangers of lending a hand in Jeremy Minton's "The Wrong End of the Stick," while aliens struggle to understand human motivations for murder in Ken Rand's "The Henry and the Martha." Nisi Shawl evokes the true magic of childhood in a gift of "Wallamelon." Campbell Award winner Jay Lake offers up a story of alternate realities and alternate redeemers in "You Will Go On." Dev Agarwal transports us to a dark post-invasion India in the hard-hitting "Angels of War," and E. Sedia's "Just Chutney" tells the story of one man's ages-long quest for forgiveness.

We'll also have another wonderful column from Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Dr. Rob Furey will contribute what we hope will be the first of many science articles. It's a future we're looking forward to, and we hope to meet up with you there.