AEon Three 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.

The Garuda Bird

You Will Go On

The Henry and the Martha

Wallamelon

Space Invaders

The Wrong End of the Stick

Angels of War

Just Chutney

Our Authors

The Future

The giants are falling.

If I can't see them topple, I can hear the boom as they land. And if I can't hear the boom, I can feel the vibrations from the force with which they hit the earth.

I was born into a world where Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were doing their best work, a world in which Damon Knight was arguing with John Campbell about the future of science fiction, a world that hadn't even discovered James Tiptree, Jr. Julius Schwartz was Mr. Superman at D.C. Comics, and Bob Kane was still working on Batman. In that world, Arthur Miller, that egghead who had married Marilyn Monroe, was changing the face of theater forever, more than ably assisted by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. Raymond Carver hadn't yet imposed minimalism on the mainstream short story, and Daphne Du Murier's gothics were what passed for romance.

The giants are falling.

At first, I didn't notice. I never met Raymond Carver, and didn't even hear of his death until years after the fact. I had a writing instructor who, the day after Tennessee Williams died, told us about being too afraid to approach Williams when they crossed paths in Italy. In the way of most young adults, I figured Daphne Du Murier, who wrote a book that had been made into a movie in 1940, had to have died centuries ago. Imagine my surprise when my mother casually told me Du Murier was still alive and still writing.

As I got older and sold a few short stories of my own, I learned about science fiction conventions. I saw Robert Heinlein from a distance. Isaac Asimov pinched my butt in an elevator. Damon Knight became a mentor.

At sf conventions, I heard stories about Campbell (and heard more about the arguments that still hadn't died), met the writers and fen who formed First Fandom, and saw photographs of my acquaintances with some of the greats. Julius Schwartz became a treasured friend. He introduced me to dozens of people, including several who so awed me that I couldn't find my voice (a terrible occurrence for this ex-radio newswoman). One of those people who suffered through my voiceless embarrassment was Bob Kane, who was kind enough to give me a hand-drawn Batman as a consolation prize.

When Heinlein died, I felt the earth shake. When Asimov died, I listened to my friends who were also his friends mourn. When Knight died, I watched the giant topple. Damon had been a friend. Julie Schwartz--I have no words for that loss.

The giants keep falling--and here's the frightening thing: Eventually, you can see past them, to all the rows of fallen giants behind them. My many older friends, most of whom were in their fifties when I was a brash twenty-something, are aging now, and it's becoming clear that someday, I'll probably watch them fall too.

At some point, my giants will be gone, with no giants to replace them. The world in which Ernest Hemingway co-existed with Rod Serling, the world in which Roger Zelazny and George Alec Effinger hadn't sold their first stories, the world in which Leigh Brackett was writing screenplays for some of the best Westerns filmed, that world is the past. "History," my mystery editor calls it, when I turn in my mystery novels set in 1969.

History.

Where the giants are immortal again.

But for me, these giants are living breathing people who have become friends. I dread logging on most days and seeing that little "in memoriam" sticker on one of my favorite websites.

It happens more and more. And it's so odd that the memorials have gone from writers I'd only heard of, to ones I'd met, to ones I know, to ones I like, to ones I love.

Why have I been thinking about this? Because of the death of Arthur Miller. He's one of the last I'd only heard of, one of the few I still thought of the way a child thinks of famous people--as too lofty to know.

The giants are falling.

Like they have, every generation, since time began.

Time alone will see to new writers becoming old writers, as at least one of your editors is ready to attest. But what's the formula unknown writers should use to become known writers? We could sell that recipe for big bucks if only we had it. We know some of the ingredients, though, so if you fall into either the "young" or "unknown" categories, or both, you can use them to develop your own recipe.

Talent is a given for the transformation from unknown to known to take place. Like the chicken in chicken soup, it's the one ingredient you can't make it without. A certain propensity for making words do magic is essential. But if talent is the first ingredient, desire is the cauldron. Without a big ol' dose of burning desire to do this strange thing, you won't have a context in which to mix your ingredients, and if you don't want to write so bad that it hurts when you don't, there's no point in putting yourself through it.

Desire, then. Desire that doesn't go away if you take two aspirin and lie down for 20 minutes. Desire that can withstand legitimate demands on your time from other quarters of your life, resistance you'll throw against it from within, and the withering disbelief of others, to name only a few of the writer's everyday impediments.

To your desire, add ability to work with the language, knowledge of how the rules work, and of how they may gently be bent to unanticipated ends when necessary. If you don't have these ingredients, put your soup on simmer and go in search of them. Come back when you have them in hand, and continue.

Next you will need tools, which in the 21st century means a computer, a simple labor-saving device you won't want to begin without. Those of us old enough to have begun without one will be happy to fill your ears with horror stories about the bad old days. In addition to serving as typewriters (in addition to other, less important, functions), computers deliver a world of reference and information via the 'Net. Don't leave reality without one.

Next add the time you have stolen from work, school, friends, lovers, family life, and/or leisure activities and devoted to learning and practicing your craft. When you have added enough time to enough desire and talent and applied your tools to it, output is sure to follow. Will it be good output? Well, if you're cut out for this odd vocation it will be better after you've done it a few (delete one or more as inappropriate) dozen / hundred / thousand times. You'll have that to look forward to, at least.

That's the basic recipe followed by each and every one of the hundreds of writers who have submitted manuscripts to AEon since we began reading last summer. Some of them have been following it long enough and well enough to make their names well known and frequently observed on magazine covers; most of them haven't made it quite that far. Yet.

We've been consistently amazed by the overall quality of the stories we've received, and the desire, talent, and ability that we found in the pages of the ones we chose for this issue. Some of these writers will probably be known to you, and some may not. Yet. Getting from unknown to known also involves submitting your output and getting it back, over and over, until finally one of your stories finds the editor who simply can't bear the thought of seeing that story appear in someone else's magazine. That's what we felt, ultimately, about the seven stories in AEon Three.

So here's our lineup, and we hope it pleases. Drop us a line at waves@aeonmagazine.com and tell us how you think we did.

You'll visit India twice in this issue--a Delhi of dreams and deities in Tom Doyle's "The Garuda Bird," and a Mumbai from a dark future nightmare in Dev Agarwal's "Angels of War." Childhood, with all its strange imaginings and even stranger realities, is your destination in "Wallamelon," by Nisi Shawl, and a grim, depopulated future Earth in "The Henry and the Martha," by Ken Rand. Jeremy Minton, in "The Wrong End of the Stick," transports us to a near future London where fortune might just be manipulable if one knows how, and E. Sedia, in "Just Chutney," transforms a very old man's kitchen into the epic setting for an ages-old quest for forgiveness. Finally, Jay Lake ("A Mythic Fear of the Sea," AEon One,) returns to take AEon readers to a house of many mansions and many windows on the possible in "You Will Go On."

Happy reading!

What happens if we envision the future from Bombay instead of Hollywood? Answer: a science fiction musical comedy folk action religious drama with a big Bollywood ending. "The Garuda Bird" is the story for that future film. So grab some curry-flavored popcorn and a Limca soda, and enjoy!

ON A COOL NIGHT just after the monsoon rains, the Garuda flew invisibly under the moon over the great capital city of India. After passing over the palace walls, it slowly became visible as a ghostly silhouette. The huge red bird shape hovered outside the bedroom of the Princess Madhu, then silently landed on her large balcony.

From the Garuda, a male figure alighted and approached the open glass door. He wore the regal garb of the god Vishnu, with crown, discus, and conch. He was beautiful in form, but his radiant attire looked stagy even in the moonlight.

The Princess was unimpressed. "Vishnu" was sweating, and rightfully so. She was surprised that her bodyguards hadn't rushed in. Perhaps she should call them, but not yet. She was accustomed to artifice and exaggeration. After all, "Princess" was just what the newspeople called her. Maybe a real princess wouldn't be bored, but Madhu was the daughter of the Prime Minister. Her deathly dull routine had made her crazy for adventure. She strode onto the balcony, trying to appear imposing in her sheer bathrobe.

"What in Ram's name are you doing here?"

"I came like in the story."

She eyed his bird-shaped contraption and then examined the rider again. "I don't know this story." It was not one of Daddy's films from his Bollywood days.

"You know, 'The Garuda Bird.' Your mother told it to you, or you read it in school."

"What about your damned Garuda bird?" She was losing patience. She was a university graduate. She bloody well knew what the real Garuda was. "I should call security."

"No, please, I thought you would know the story. Let me tell it to you first."

Her silence was an impatient assent. He began his tale.

This tale didn't happen yesterday. It was a very, very, very long time ago. Long before anything digital besides fingers, when the mountains and rivers and trees were young. When the avatara Lord Rama, the divine incarnation of Vishnu himself, ruled the known and unknown worlds from his sacred city. And the people in his city lived a magical existence, an existence not known to us today, of health, wealth, and love.

But far from Rama's city was the small provincial kingdom of Delhidesh, and there life was pretty much the same mediocre mess that it was last week.

In that small kingdom there lived two friends, a lame Blacksmith and an adventurous Soldier. The Smith was an exceptionally clever entrepreneurial type in his medieval milieu, though he had lost leg and love in an accident at his forge. The loyal Soldier enjoyed assisting the Smith in testing the new swords, armor, and arcane devices of war that the Smith manufactured. They were as prosperous and content as people of their castes could expect.

One day, the Smith and the Soldier managed to gain entrance to a grand and joyous festival. It was the public coming-out party for the Princess of the realm, so everyone of worth in the kingdom was there. The Smith and Soldier ate too much, watched dizzying feats of illusion, and generally had a raga-and-roll good time. Then, all were silent as the King of Delhidesh rose to address the gathering. They listened with reverence to the old King's praise of his daughter and his land.

"Reverence? Ha!"

Madhu couldn't help but interrupt. She glanced down at the man's ornately sandaled feet on her balcony. "You're the Soldier?"

"My name is Vijay." He offered his hand, English-style.

Madhu lowered her eyes, shaking her head. "I remember you from the party. But it wasn't like your story at all."

Madhu tried to keep smiling pleasantly as Daddy's party toast became another endless speech. If he could have sung it, people would have been much happier. Little did they know.

Her graduation from Harvard Medical School was his flimsy excuse to wax bloody mystical again.

"...Time can be a tricky business in our land. Is it only the end of the dark Kali Yuga, or the beginning of the next holy age of Ram Raj? I believe that it is finally our choice to make. We have struggled through a time of great danger. Now is the time of great possibility. If we work together, the Age of India will finally come again, if not for us, then for our children. For my Princess. And someday her children as well. Hai Ram." And everyone downed their non-alcoholic champagne, except Mummy, who had suddenly gone stone-faced. Trouble.

Before this kalpa-length toast had even ended, a perky aide was already explaining to a gorging journalist that Daddy had some bullet points under all the nationalist slogans. Somehow the expected nuclear boom and doom (as always over Kashmir) had fizzled. Cheap fusion energy had unleashed India's best resource, its brain power. Globally, the Indian Diaspora rivaled the overseas Chinese. (As for China itself, well, princesses should avoid schadenfreude but, hey, turned out democracy matters, chumps.) An Indian century was within reach.

But the Princess didn't want an age of India for her graduation. She just wanted a time to be Madhu, maybe even Dr. Madhu. That wasn't going to happen, thanks to Sanjay. His mercifully silent holo-image sat at an empty place at the banquet table, wild-eyed as in life. Last year, her psychotic brother had crashed in his supersonic when he manually took the controls (Sanjay is not a lucky name for a PM's son). Since then, she wasn't just her family's darling, she was their political heir.

So this party was her introduction to public life and the social event of the year. Many were invited, many more came. Outdoors in the courtyard of the PM's residence, smells of curries overran the subtler delights of neo-caviar. The band swung effortlessly from bossa nova to Brahms to Bollywood. Some big-haired hunk and a big-bosomed spoonful were dancing and crooning:

What shall we do behind this piece of fruit?

Tell me what to do behind this enormous fruit.

No, you first.

No, you!

Liberally sprinkled through the crowd were Daddy's old film cronies--the pioneers of the ironic musicals that had swept the globe. In his roles as singing gods, Daddy had been their Elvis and Heston combined. The next generation of starlings flocked around him, eager for the darshan blessing of his gaze.

Smiling now, Mummy worked the political crowd with the grace and hustle befitting the scion of India's longest running dynasty since the Nehru-Gandhis. Paparazzi were snapping holo-shots of them all, particularly of Madhu.

Madhu did not care a whit. She needed to find the covert alcohol service, hidden in particular from the paparazzi. She needed a bloody real drink.

She slipped through the dance floor, but then found her way blocked by a strange cluster of traditionally clad ultra-nationalists and high-ranking military folks. Damned odd that they were even here. At the cluster's center was a silver-haired man in western formal dress, but with only one pant leg. The other leg was a shiny metal prosthetic, a strange affectation in a city where regeneration of limbs was as common as reincarnation of bugs. She didn't want to stare, but there was writing on the leg. A woman's name, Lakshmi. Now she really needed that drink.

She skirted the fascists and slipped through the secret flap in the alcohol tent. Blast, some air-space captain was already there, and he was looking right at her.

She put on her best ingenue's face. "Promise you won't tell anyone?"

The young captain shrugged his shoulders, and gave her a goofy smirk. "Who would I tell? But more importantly, what'll you have?"

Well, this was grand, he didn't seem to recognize her. "Behewt accha. Gin and tonic, please."

She had a nice chat with the clueless yet well-formed young man, but she heard little and remembered less, distracted by his handsome dark southern features that her fair northern mother wouldn't approve of. He said something about flying and folk stories. She thought briefly of mad, sad Sanjay, and asked if they still needed human pilots. He said for some jobs, yes, they did. She spoke little of herself, not wanting to give herself away and ruin the moment. Realizing that she was going to be missed soon, she made some excuses and left the tent before he could follow. And she didn't think of him again that night.

"You didn't think of me?"

The costumed fly boy's enthusiasm deflated with a sigh. She hadn't meant to be harsh. "I had a lot on my mind."

"I understand. I thought of you though."

"What did you think?" A foolish question. Did she really want to know?

"I need to tell you the rest of the story first."

As his dharma would have it, the Soldier wandered off from his friend after the King's speech. In a small tent, he ran smack right into love. It was the always-fatal kind, because you have it from first sight till you die. After his new love left him, he was happy for about 30 ticks on a medieval watch, the happiest Soldier in Delhidesh. But then he made the mistake of asking the Smith who the strange woman was. And, as you may guess, it was the Princess herself that the young Soldier had gone soggy for.

So, the Soldier went home and had a good day-long crying jag followed by two days of quasi-coma. He starved himself in the best Hindu martyr fashion. He didn't show up for his work at the Smith's. On the third day, the Smith sensed that both the time and the Soldier's odor had grown ripe. So he broke into his friend's bachelor pad, and confronted him with the sour facts.

"Soldier, old boy, you've been like this for three days, not eating, not speaking to anyone, and letting our work go. You can't hide it from me, pal, you've got all the symptoms of love from first sight to forever. So just cough it up--who is she?"

"Her hair is black as a moonless night," the Soldier cried, "though strangely short for these times. Her skin is fair as the snows of Kashmir, but she is more remote than Everest. And yet I do not know how I can live without her."

"Soldier, I am a clever entrepreneurial fellow and you are a daring young man. Together we can achieve anything we set our minds to. We're a team! So, come on, who is she? We can win her over to you."

"Even if she's the Princess?"

Now the Smith had to admit that this was an epic task. But, after asking the Soldier about his conversation with the Princess, the Smith started laughing. "By Krishna, I've got it! The Vedas have already shown us the way." And the Smith explained his outrageous and fantastic plan.

For you see, the Smith had secretly built a flying machine in the shape of a bird. Together, the Smith and Soldier painted it bright red to look like the Garuda, the mount of Lord Vishnu, highest of the gods. And, perhaps misspending client funds, they bought the Soldier fancy clothes, a crown, and most important, a discus and a conch in the style of Vishnu. For they planned to have the Soldier court the Princess in the guise of the king of the gods.

And so, late one night, by the light of the full moon, the disguised Soldier mounted the mechanical Garuda bird. It lifted him up into the air, silently and effortlessly. He told the Garuda to take him to the palace.

As the Garuda flew, the Soldier felt strange, as if he had entered halfway into the dimension of the gods. He thought he heard someone say, "Hello, what have we here?" But he set his mind and his heart on his love, and ignored all else.

The Soldier had some reason to dream of success. The Smith had told him that the King and Queen were remarkably fond of their daughter, so fond that they would allow her discretion in choosing her husband from among the eligible princes.

Meanwhile, the neo-caviar dreams were fading at the PM's. On the verandah, Mummy and Daddy were fighting about her again.

"Madhu's life is too important to be left to Madhu. And what did you mean at the party, talking about her children?" Mummy hadn't quite recovered from Sanjay's death yet. She was used to treating Madhu with benign neglect. Now, she had to consider Madhu as important to the Family's future. How annoying!

"Well, of course she would get married first, wouldn't you, Princess?" Daddy was used to making people happy with a smile and a dubbed-in song. Mummy was more of a challenge for him.

"Who she marries is now a serious political matter."

"I'm sure she'll marry a nice boy, won't you, Princess?" He smiled at her with nervous eyes.

"She'll marry the right man, or she won't marry at all."

And so on. Madhu didn't fight, because this was all fine with her. Between medical school and accompanying Daddy on his surreptitious excursions to the cyberfleshpots of the Old City, neither sex nor romantic love held much mystery or attraction. True, her chat with the clueless fly boy from the party foreboded trouble ahead for this policy of appeasement, but she didn't have to worry about seeing him again. So she retreated to her bedroom, and opened her door to the fresh night air that follows the monsoon.

As the Soldier flew towards the palace, the Princess lay in bed and reviewed the line-up of princes, but without satisfactory results. All were worthy, but she felt nothing for any of them. In her confused frustration, she prayed to Vishnu. "Oh Vishnu, please help me find a husband."

And lo! At that very moment, a shadow of a large bird passed over the moon, and the great Garuda descended onto the balcony. Our resourceful hero dismounted, a bit dizzy from his strange flight, and beheld the abject bowing of the shocked Princess. She was babbling apologies for calling Vishnu at such a late hour and for the messy state of her room.

Then the Soldier gently said, "Rise, dear one! For I have seen your beauty shining up to high heaven, and I have come to respectfully ask if we might be 'wed as they are in heaven.'"

"He wanted to get laid."

"Um, yeah."

"That's all it took? A goofy god outfit?"

"Yep."

"Not today, sweetheart." Madhu put her fingers to her mouth to whistle.

"Wait! That's just the story. Really! I just want to get to know you."

"You could just look me up online. I have a website."

"We seemed to get along so well at the party. I had to see you again. I also prepared a song for you." He started into one of Daddy's songs: That's the way God works...

"Don't do that. It's creepy. Besides, it's an open secret that Daddy's songs were all voice-overs." She smiled at the shock on his face--disillusioning people about Daddy never ceased to amuse her. Then a cold metallic image came back to her. "So, who's your Smith?"

"He calls this machine 'the Garuda One.' He built it long before I met you, of course. But it reminded us of the story."

"And this clown suit?" She let the Smith's identity lie for now.

"My idea, I thought with your father and all."

"My father never played Vishnu. Lord Krishna sure, Lord Rama many times, but never Vishnu."

"Oh. Well, we had talked about folklore."

"Not really my area." But he suddenly seemed such a sad and tired clown again. She offered a little encouragement. "So what happened next?"

He brightened and opened his hands towards her. "He got the Princess."

"That's it?"

He waved one hand dismissively. Was he drunk, or just out of it? "There were some minor complications."

"Don't you think she would have figured out, even back then and however good he was, that he wasn't divine?"

He wagged his finger. "Always a risk." Then he toppled over like the demon Ravana on his last and worst day in I'm Your Monkey Man, Hanuman.

Oh, this was not good. She lightly slapped his face, but he only moaned bits of Daddy's songs. So she dragged him into her room and flopped him onto her bed. It was really the only place to flop someone. She eyed him closer. Even in his ridiculous outfit, she decided he was worth looking at. Maybe they could talk again when he woke up.

Before dawn, the Soldier flew off on the Garuda bird, having wed the Princess as they are in heaven.

"But then what happened?"

"You want me to keep telling the story?"

"Yes, blast it, yes! This is the best bloody part."

"You'll have to help me. Some things I don't like to tell."

"I know. I'll help. I'll help with the part about the Smith."

Mohan had remained awake all night, tinkering with his leg while he waited for Vijay to return with the Garuda One. The leg was bleeding-edge tech, like every device strewn about this vast room: the Agni particle cannons, the Arjuna invisibility screens, and the Blades of Kali--bizarre pretzel-shaped weapons that could kill a city on one setting, kill a bug on another. But as with the other devices, the leg could always be improved. Progress.

Finally, Mohan heard the Garuda's screeching signal and opened the facility's roof. Vijay descended and dismounted quickly; Mohan could tell that he was anxious to relate his exploits. Mohan had long ago ceased to care about such fleshy stuff, and he was in charge, so his questions would take precedence. Still, he would have to put on his friendly face.

"So, did you get through the security OK?"

"Ji ha, no problem--like I wasn't even there."

"You weren't, in a fashion. A good chunk of you was elsewhere and elsewhen."

"It made me kind of dizzy. I passed out when I got there."

"An acceptable side effect."

"I, um, thought I heard voices."

Shit, was his pilot going nutty? That was the problem with mucking about with transdimensional quantum level forces: you needed a pilot. Otherwise, the Garuda might go off on an uncertain flight path into nothingness. Despite this design weakness, the payoff was worth it. The Garuda could move in any direction or hover at will, and was almost undetectable. That the device took the pilot along with it into the transdimensional area and perhaps bent his mind slightly was of secondary concern, but still a concern.

"I'm sure you'll be fine after some rest," Mohan yawned. "So, why don't we both call it a night or morning."

Vijay was miffed. "You don't want to hear what happened with Madhu?"

Mohan arched an eyebrow. So it was Madhu now, was it? "No, I don't want to hear anything about it. It's a private matter. I'm sure you were a godly gentleman." He forced a wink, and the blockhead actually blushed.

"There's one other thing, boss-sahib. How am I going to see her again?"

How do you think it is for me, all the time, you human cow pie? "Oh, you can use the Garuda One of course. Just remember, be a gentleman, Vishnu." He forced another wink, and the blockhead was still chuckling and blushing as he stumbled out the door.

Mohan could finally relax when Vijay left. Good, another cooperative moron. The ultra-nationalists were ecstatic with the Garuda--of course, they thought the ancients already had this heavy equipment, according to the Vedas. The military was itching to settle all border accounts, and was perhaps even looking a country or two beyond.

As for Mohan, he had deliberately kept his accounts in a form that he could not forget. His leg helped him concentrate. In its shiny surface, he could imagine Lakshmi's long-dead face above her name. His research accident had cost him his one chance at love, and everyone--the enemies who justified the research and the government who demanded it--would eventually have to pay. Mohan didn't mind being thought a mad scientist. After all, if he didn't get mad, how could he get even?

He went to the Garuda, and from a hidden compartment pulled out a data disk. It would take him awhile to brief the ultra-nationalists and to set up a meeting with the PM. Let Vijay enjoy himself until then. He, too, would have to pay eventually.

At breakfast the next day, and every day for the next week, the Princess had a sleepy gobar-eating grin on her face. The King just thought his daughter was happy about some prospect of marriage; the Queen suspected that something like marriage was already happening. So, that night, she secretly waited outside her daughter's room to see who the suitor was. The Queen considered the possibilities with royal equanimity: if he was a prince, all the better that her daughter had had a trial run of him; if he was some common person, a bodyguard or soldier, she'd simply have him executed and hush up the whole thing.

But it was neither a prince nor a common person that she saw enter her daughter's room that night, but the Lord Vishnu himself!

She was ready to be furious, to burst in on them, call security, drive her now-only child to tears for ruining all her careful planning. But the anger wouldn't come. When she saw through her spy mote the strange young man in the Vishnu garb, she remembered the first time she had seen her husband in the wonderfully accentuated colors of Bollywood 3D, a god in god's clothing. From that moment, even as a girl, she knew she must have him and him alone, politics and the Family be damned.

Movies became reality. Her Family's resources brought her to him, love and destiny brought them together to the summit of power. It had not been a bad life. If only Sanjay...

She suddenly felt old and cold. She tottered like a blind woman back to her husband's bed and its warmth. No, she would not be the one to break their hearts. That would happen soon enough without her help.

Mohan enjoyed a rare moment of unfeigned, unadulterated pleasure as he watched the PM squirm. Under the pretext of showing him how effective the Garuda was at eluding detection and penetrating security, Mohan had shown him holovid footage of Vijay's visits to his daughter. Mohan waited as long as he could to speak, savoring the silence.

"It reminds me of some of your work."

The PM glared back at him with quiet ferocity. But what could he say? Mohan had exactly hit upon the real problem. Not the sex (though that would get the news services' attention as surely as it got the PM's) but the manner of it. The resemblance of the holovid to the PM's earlier career would just be too disturbing for the electorate.

Certainly Mohan hadn't planned it out this way. He thought he was going to have to rely on the bumbling ultra-nationalists to come up with some leverage. But that blockhead Vijay had opened up the door to this wonderful improvisation. Marvelous. The PM had no choice. If he wanted to stay in power, he'd have to cooperate with their military plans.

Time to put on his respectful face. "Sir, the advantage of the Garuda device will not last forever. The Pan-Arabs have been working along similar lines. With the Garuda, we can hit them instantaneously and invisibly. Invincibly. Please, won't you reconsider, and meet with the nationalist faction?

"Fine. I'll meet with them on one condition."

Mohan nodded that he was listening.

The PM's arm shook with fury as he pointed at the holovid. "That derivative bastard goes on the front line, and doesn't come back."

And so the royal couple found out about their daughter and Lord Vishnu. And the King was glad, but not for the same reasons as his wife. The Queen was thinking of the wonderful deities and demi-deities that would be visiting for social occasions. The King was thinking that with a son-in-law like Vishnu, he needed more enemies to conquer.

So the next day, the king made some. Enemies, that is. He delivered stinging insults to the ambassadors in his kingdom. They promptly reported the insults to their own kings, who just as promptly raised armies, and besieged the kingdom.

The King told the increasingly concerned populace not to worry--he had Vishnu as a son-in-law, so surely Vishnu would come tomorrow at dawn to destroy their enemies.

Kings can be so literal-minded.

At hearing this, the Princess grew faint. She had long before figured out that her lover was awfully good, but not divine. So she knew that the dear love of her heart and her whole kingdom were both in deadly peril. She tried to join him to flee the kingdom, but the evil forces allied with the Smith blocked her way. She sent a message to warn him, but it was too late--war was coming.

Her mother the Queen comforted her, for mother and daughter both understood the magic of the godly role, while the King had lost that magic, or perhaps was jealous of it in another.

The Soldier needed no warning--he soon enough realized his and the kingdom's danger. What could he do? Perhaps he should run away. But what would happen to the Princess, to his homeland? Probably the same thing that was going to happen anyway.

It was the day before the King's armies would attack the enemy in the confidence that Vishnu and Garuda would make them invincible. For the first time in many years, the Soldier thought a prayer might be a good idea. Perhaps a word with Vishnu.

The Vaishnavite temple was very old and in disrepair. In front sat an old sanyasi holy man in saffron robes. He mumbled to himself as Vijay approached him. Vijay dipped his card into the sanyasi's bowl, but it wouldn't take any rupees.

The sanyasi looked up at him, grinning manically. "And how are your voices coming?"

"What makes you think I hear voices, sanyasi-ji?

The old man chuckled. "You young ones think you know everything."

Vijay was beyond desperate and shameless. "Please teach me, father. I've lost the dharma."

"Kurushetra me, dharmashetra me. Hmm, teach you something. Accha, how about this: all sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."

"I don't understand."

"Right. Well how about this then: mortals become what they pretend to be."

"I'm not sure, I--"

The sanyasi landed a sharp blow to Vijay's shoulder with his walking stick. "Did you think you could just play at this? This is India, boy, where every peasant knows what happens when you play god." He wagged his stick at a campaign vid board of the PM. "Just look at him. More of an idiot than you. OK, one more try: deus ex machina, silly once-born. God from the machine!" The sanyasi turned away, and as he tottered down the street, he called back to Vijay. "Say hello for me next time you're up there," and he thrust his walking stick towards the sky.

After a sleepless night, the Soldier mounted the mechanical bird, and flew up into the dawn light to engage the enemies of Delhidesh.

It seemed he flew above all Delhideshes, past, present, and future. He flew above the Red Fort and the great mosque. He flew above Connaught Place with its teaming thousands. He flew above palaces and mansions and slums and hovels. Fair and foul scents, medieval to third world to otherworldly now, made his fearful stomach turn. Cries of joy and pain cancelled each other out in a low hum--"aummmm." Over the centuries, did anything really change?

He hovered a moment over the town walls, then flew out towards the front. He saw the vast armies arrayed against him, and the vast army supporting him, and he despaired for himself and his country. He was armed with the arcane weapons of the Smith, weapons of Agni and Kali. But the enemies had fearsome weapons as well. What could he alone accomplish? If the battle went badly, he would crash his Garuda into the enemy lines so as to do the most damage.

With this thought, he felt his love for the Princess and his native land flood open the gates of his heart, so that when he heard the voices again he was ready.

In a set of dimensions just a little askew from the familiar ones, a meeting was taking place between two powerful sentients. For convenience's sake, think of them as a giant bird and his boss.

"My Lord," squawked the bird, "that sacrilegious bozo is crossing over again."

"Yes, well, it's happened before, and will happen again," replied his boss.

The bird clucked with irritation. "Maybe, but I don't have to like it. Dressed like you, riding an imitation of me, all to get laid. And now all India's gonna pay for it."

"I suppose you think they've got what's coming to them, so what's the big deal?"

The bird chirruped gently, "Lord, no. I don't want our beloved land of Bharat to perish under our image. I just wish it was more simple, like the old days."

The boss laughed. "It was never simple, my friend. But what shall we do now? I'm open to suggestions."

"I'm afraid we have to go all the way with this one."

The boss roared with approval. "Oh, that'll show the bastards. Awesome idea, O wise bird."

Then the bird screeched with the voice of thousand eagles. "Did you hear that, Vijay? Make it so!"

And in that moment Vijay knew that he was truly the Soldier, and the Soldier was now Vishnu, and the Garuda One was now the Garuda bird.

But he wasn't sure what that meant until the Garuda turned its metal head back towards him and squawked, "Come on, Vijay, this isn't the Mahabharata. Get a move on."

Then the Garuda let forth a sonic boom of a screech that stunned friend and foe alike. And they were both suddenly and radiantly visible above the armies.

Vijay's heart spoke one last prayer. For love of her, for love of India, Bharat ki jai.

His weapons suddenly felt dirty. He threw the Agni canon and the Blade of Kali to the ground with disgust. Then, for simple joy, he blew into his conch.

A massive superquake unleashed below the armies. Soldiers of both sides fled to the open ground as their heavy equipment and transports were tossed about and wrecked.

When the quake subsided, Vijay gave the discus a throw with a child's enthusiasm.

The discus became a million wheels of light, and each wheel set to work. Some gave crew cuts to the men and women alike. Some went through weapons like knives through ghi. Some dazzled soldiers' faces with their light.

Not one soldier on the field was now able to fight. The Garuda smiled back at him and clucked wryly. "Seems like you didn't know your own strength. You stopped both armies."

"It felt right."

"You've become wise. Good job, Vijay."

"Call me ... Kalki."

"Avatar of the Future? Yes, I suppose you are, Avatara. Many lives together and all that. We'll be in touch. Ciao for now." And the Garuda One was just the Garuda One again.

But Vijay knew that he never was and never would be just Vijay, and neither were any of us ever just ourselves.

"And how does the story end, my faithful Soldier?"

"Well, the Soldier got the Princess."

"With minor complications." The Queen, née Princess, squeezed him with a laugh. She was enjoying an evening of just being Madhu in her new master bedroom.

"The enemy kings quickly became the Very Friendly Kings."

"Very prudent of them."

"The old King and Queen knew that Vishnu wasn't really their son-in-law, but they knew quality and god-blessed material when they saw it, so the Soldier got to marry the Princess anyway in a lovely ceremony."

"Very sporting of them."

"The old King went back to acting, this time as the doddering father figure. The old Queen pursued global war relief work."

"May they prosper, and not nag me for grandchildren."

"The Smith, when he heard the results of the battle, activated another transdimensional device and crossed fully over." Vijay hesitated. "He was not heard from again. I wish he could be here to help..."

"Let us not speak of him again, dear. Though I know he was your friend, my heart knows where he has gone."

"May Vishnu yet find him and preserve him."

"But what about my favorite part? What happened to the Soldier and the Princess then?"

"The Princess was elected Queen."

"No doubt due to the popularity of her husband."

"No doubt due to her wisdom and beauty."

"And her consort?"

(He still heard the voices, and they spoke of the days for which they await when all will be revealed and Kalki will ride forth again without even a fig-leaf of technology to bring god's rule to the world. But not today, hai Ram.)

"Her consort lived happily ever after with his beloved."

For once, this sentiment did not satisfy Madhu. "So everybody lived happily ever after in spite of, or perhaps because of, their own foolishness?"

And Vijay sang one of her father's songs:

That's the way God works

With fools and crooks and jerks.

That's the way God plays

Every day in India.

And they embraced and the music made the world young again to them, with young mountains and rivers and trees. And the Queen and her Soldier and every lover everywhere was a god and goddess to their beloved in the accentuated colors of the Lord's own 3D. And all their cries of joy and worship blended into one grand "Aum." The Age of India had come again at last.

May the Lord in all his names bless and keep you. This story is yours now, tell it to others in the spirit given. Hai Ram!

And that's a wrap.

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There are many mansions in this house, and this house is as great as the world, as old as the sky. What would you do with a man who fell to the floor from an empty ceiling? Where would you go if you had every room that ever was to choose from?

IT'S LONELY HERE IN GOD'S HOUSE. Though we prey as hard as we can, and eat what we kill, He rarely hears our words. Maybe He's busy out in the world somewhere. Sometimes we hear hammering and saws, the workmen who we never see changing the house. Maybe He's one of them.

Maybe He's one of us.

Whoever, He's not telling. But I'm not asking anymore, either.

There came a day during my seventeenth year when the Hunt Group--that's our tribe--found a man from outside. It happens sometimes. Old Jamie's father's father was from outside. He'd come into God's house wearing steel and linen, carrying a long pole with an axe on the end. We kept the weapon stashed in a closet in the Upper West Red Gallery these days. Though his name was lost to us now, half the Hunt Group has that outsider's brown eyes and dark, bristly hair.

Old Jamie always swore some of our words came in with his granddaddy's steel, but I never believed that. When God made us He gave us words with which to find our purpose. Our words are His. How could they have come from outside?

This new man from outside fell from a high window in the Hall of Kings. The Hunt Group was there looking for the giant rats that slip between the huge, tapering pillars. The pillars were like vases, or urns, sixty feet tall--rough stone painted with ocher and brown, holding up wooden beams bigger around even than Marta Grande when she was pregnant. The stone walls of the Hall of Kings were rough too, with tiny windows up near the top no one could reach without ladders or scaffolds or ropes.

It all looked and felt real old. Like one of His first efforts maybe, before He'd discovered crown molding and lath-and-plaster. We called it the Hall of Kings on account of the huge statue at the east end, a man almost as high as the ceiling sitting on a stool that was little to him, with a square beard and a low cap and a big, curvy sword, all out of the same rough stone. Two wide copper trays on poles, like braziers but too shallow and high up, always burned with a smelly, flickering flame to each side of the statue. They almost made up for the thin light from the tiny windows.

There wasn't no other furniture or nothing, so we skipped around the pillars, shaking our spears and shouting for the rats until there was this yelp, and a sort of wet thud followed by whimpering.

"That was a rat what am," shouted Bitros, leading our scramble toward the noise.

"Rats don't yelp," I said over the clatter of our running. We didn't have no boots nor shoes, but a lot of the Hunt Group liked to drag our spears when we weren't sneaking. Made us sound fierce and maybe kept the hall tigers away.

Then we were around him, the Hunt Group one big, metal-toothed animal, our spears pointing in like a collar to close around the neck of this stranger's life.

He lay on the ground, groaning a little, one leg folded under in a bad way. He was wearing dark wool, cut tight to his body in pants and some long, round-cornered coat with a cotton shirt underneath and colored ribbon dangling across his chest. His eyes were the gray of a rainy sky, and his hair sandy as the old king on the throne at the end of the Hall.

"You ain't no rat, neither," said Marta Grande to the outsider. She poked his good thigh with her spear, which was tipped with a hammered iron leaf we broke off a rustic chandelier in the Softwood Refectory.

"Keep that thing away from me," the outsider said, angry but quiet. He looked at us, staring at each face around the ring of the twelve of us. Finally his eyes settled on mine. "I need your help."

I didn't much feel like poking this outsider. He might be new blood for us. All three of Marta's last babies were wronged up, though we still gave them to the Sisters to tend. Which is what comes of having not enough parents and grands between us.

This man meant new seed.

"There's not much help to give, friend," I said. "We'll set your leg and feed you best we can, no worse than ourselves, but this here's your new world to live in."

He just stared at me for a moment. "I must return to my life. My work is not yet done."

Old Jamie laughed, then the whole Hunt Group picked it up.

The stranger looked puzzled, irritated, so as we quieted down, I explained. "God's house is larger than any man's life."

"Ah," he said. "Let's start with the leg, if you can. It hurts, a lot."

Funny thing was, he didn't look very hurt. I'd have been screaming my teeth out if it was me.

We hauled him back to the Lesser Silk Drawing Room, which was the Hunt Group's nest mostly. It was big enough for all of us to live in, but small enough to feel like our own, as well as close to the Upper West Red Gallery where we hid our treasures.

Marta Grande sat on the outsider's chest while me and Porter straightened the leg at Old Jamie's directing. He didn't scream, but his body tightened and twisted surely as if we'd wired him to a socket. After it was straight I splinted him with two legs off a Louis XIV chair Marta Grande had broke up in the White Wool Drawing Room a couple of weeks back. We wrapped his leg in upholstering from the chair, too, then I wiped the sweat and blood from his bit lips with one of Filippa's moon rags dipped damp in the bathroom sink.

"Thank you," gasped the outsider. "Blessings on you all."

"Get him some water now that he won't throw it up," growled Old Jamie. Though I figured our stranger wasn't the type to spew from pain anyway.

I hunkered down next to him, letting my knees burn like they had since I'd got big. "Welcome to God's house, stranger, and my name is Johnnie."

His lips flickered through a weak smile. "I'm Ben, I guess."

"Ben Eye-gas," shouted Marta Grande. "Ben Eye-gas!" The Hunt Group took it up until they were dancing around Old Jamie, Ben and me.

The next day the Hunt Group woke to the sound of workmen nearby. Little Bitros had had the watch, but strange things could happen to time and wakefulness when the workmen were about.

We all knew this was sign that we should go prey in earnest, leaving God's invisible servants to their work. This showed respect, and sometimes gifts were granted us, too.

But Ben Eye-gas was sprawled on the floor, his leg wrapped in polished maple and white silk.

I squatted down with him and gathered my hall tiger pelt around my shoulders. "Listen, you can't really move right now. I got to tell you something important. Don't leave the room."

"Why?"

"Hear that hammering and those power saws?"

He nodded.

"That's the workmen. We don't never see them, and we try to give them plenty of room. You never know when things will be better, once they've come and gone. It's time for us to go prey, and you need to stay here and stay quiet."

His hand shot out, quick as spark, to grab mine. His fingers were smoother than my own, and more slim, but strong. "Thank you, Johnnie," Ben said. "I'll be careful."

Then we ate up the last of that gazelle we'd run down in the Third Orangery, giving a few strips of meat to Ben, and were off to prey. Spears ready, whooping, we ran as fast and far as we could from where the workmen seemed to be.

It was an ugly business that day, honoring God and feeding ourselves. We were down in the Green-Tile Cisterns, walking the sandy shores by torchlight, when a water snake longer than four of us laid end-to-end thrashed out of the dark waters. It almost laid us all end-to-end too, though with some close work and a very good jab by Marta Grande, we bested it.

Then it was time to blood the floor, talk to God, cut what meat we could carry and go home.

Near to the Lesser Silk Drawing Room, we heard no more hammers and saws, so Old Jamie told off six of ours to place the hunks of slaughtered snake on the smoky fire in the Littlest Big Kitchen. I followed Old Jamie back to our camp to see what Ben Eye-gas had made of his day.

He had worked his way onto the little vine-carved settee, the one we found in the hall one night, upholstery not matching the colors of the room, but it was good for baby-making on, and baby-delivering, too.

"Hello," I said as we trooped in, dipping our spears to the hearth for the honor of God and to the settee for the honor of our guest.

He grinned at us, as if the pain of his leg was nothing. "Look." Ben brandished a carpenter's hammer.

We all stopped, horrified. "Where did you get that?" Old Jamie demanded, his voice barely above a whisper.

"I spoke to some of the workmen. They were quite polite."

"We're doomed," shrieked Little Bitros.

"It's poorly done to bother the workmen," said Old Jamie. "They're at God's business."

I tried to draw Ben's gaze. "I told you not to."

Ben stared us all down, still smiling, until the silence had spread like a stain in the hall carpet. "They came to me. And spoke a while, brought me food and water. They built the corner closet into a lavatory as well, so I could relieve myself in comfort."

Little Bitros darted over and threw open the door to the little broom closet we rarely used. True to Ben's words, there was a lavatory there, rather larger than the closet had been, with shining blue and white tiles and chrome fixtures and a pretty ceiling light of a sort I'd never before seen just visible from where I stood.

"You treated with the workmen." I shook my head.

"They are at God's business, as you said," Ben answered, "but so are you. Did you not go prey today?"

Old Jamie spat. "And a bloody business it was."

"Then rejoice in my lavatory." Ben waved toward the gleaming room. "Go. Take advantage."

It was good to wash, though no one really wanted to talk more with Ben about the workmen. Somehow, he had treated with them and bettered our lives, with a hammer and a lavatory as a token for his hubris. Perhaps our preying helped, too.

God only knew.

A week later, Ben was walking unsteadily, hopping on his good foot and stick we'd made from an ugly Victorian floor lamp. His colored neck-ribbon, cotton shirt and wool clothes had been carefully washed and folded by Bitros, who had made a cloak out of some cloth from a stock of old sheers.

Ben seemed more comfortable dressed like us, though he insisted on carrying the blasphemous hammer on a little sling at his waist.

"What's outside the house?" he asked as we made our slow way down the Funerary Arches. I had wanted to show him the Silverthorne Conservatory.

"You came from outside," I said. "You'd know better than I what's there."

"I'm not sure it works that way in this house," he said mildly.

"Well, there's a bank of windows in the Porphyry Gallery two floors above us." Though we usually avoided windows whenever possible.

"Can you show them to me?"

I scuffed along the black-and-gray carpet of the Funerary Arches, ignoring the urns and pedestals surrounding me and pretending I hadn't heard the question. Finally I glanced over at him.

"We'll come to some maids' stairs soon, on our right in an alcove. Those will take us up."

He actually pushed ahead of me in his excitement, walking stick and all.

The Porphyry Gallery was a baroque arrangement of narrow pillars rising in fours from marble plinths relieved with seahorses. The plinths in turn supported a long series of small groined arches with frosted glass fixtures depending from them, each fixture engraved to match its plinth. Tall, thin vases stood in little bays within each arch, between the sets of the pillars. They were backed by heavy velvet curtains, except that every fourth one had a mullioned window instead, tall and thin as the vase which stood before it.

I lead Ben to the first of those windows, took down the vase, and stepped aside.

He hopped up on to the little platform where the vase had stood, laid his hands to each side of the window, and stared out for a while without comment.

Finally, Ben turned and stepped down, taking up his stick. "You say there are more windows."

I nodded as I replaced the vase, not trusting myself to speak, and led him to the next bay containing a window. After I moved that vase, Ben hopped up again. This time he only looked for a moment.

"I would appreciate it if you could tell me what you see there, Johnnie."

"I don't like windows," I said. Outside had high skies and strange animals and stranger things.

"Please." His request was simple. The way he asked, without pleading or pushing, was even honorable.

I looked. Trees towered just beyond the window, recognizable from a hundred different paintings scattered around God's house. Green-clad hills rose above the trees' pointed tops, and gray mountains mantled in snow rose in turn behind the hills.

My gut lurched, and I stepped away. "A great forest," I said.

"Now come." This time he led me to the next window, and even on his unsteady legs shifted the vase. "Look again."

It is only a forest, I told myself. I will not look at the sky.

This time there were brown fields, massive machines like enormous roaches trundling over them spouting fire. The very glass of the window seemed to vibrate with their noise, though I did not hear a sound. Men and women ran screaming, tried to put out the flames ignited by the machines, died before them, struck down by invisible spears.

I jumped back into the hallway, nearly knocking Ben over. "That is why I hate the windows!" I shouted. "They show miserable lies."

"They show God's world," he said quietly, then hopped up to look, just for a moment. He hopped down again. "Let us move these last two vases back and go home. I would rather see the Conservatory another day."

Grumbling and hard-hearted, I shifted the vases without his help. On the way back down the maids' stair, he touched my shoulder. "Johnnie, I'm sorry. I did not mean to alarm you."

That night as we chewed on snake, Old Jamie finally asked Ben Eye-gas about his plans. "You going to stay on a while, Mr. Ben, or wander them halls for something else?"

"Neither," said Ben. "I'm returning outside, back where I came from. My work there is not done."

Old Jamie cackled. "No one leave's God's house."

"There are the windows," Ben said politely. "Or I might ask the workmen for a door."

"Well, and you're welcome here for a while, and welcome back after your quest fails." Old Jamie glanced at Marta Grande and the Hunt Group's other three women, Maryam, Filippa and Pale Shandy. "There's no denying we need good seed here. Could stay and make some babies, you could."

Ben nodded at the women. "That is not my purpose, but thank you for the offer."

Purpose or no, Marta Grande went to him on the settee later that night and groaned her way to a long, happy laugh with Ben's aid. I just watched the fire and wondered what would happen when our outsider opened a window somewhere, or worse, actually did get the workmen to build a door.

A week later, splints cut loose, Ben announced he was ready to leave. "My time with you has been a joy and pleasure."

Marta Grande, Maryam, Filippa and Pale Shandy all giggled, whispering together. If it weren't for new babies that we might have, I would have been jealous. Old Jamie answered for the Hunt Group. "You are always welcome here, Ben Eye-gas. We wish you well, but believe you will return. Johnnie will go with you, to see you safely off or guide you back as needed."

I was not surprised, though by now I wished Ben would go off on his own. Which he almost did, standing to circle around the room and embrace every member of the Hunt Group one by one, save me, then walking toward the door.

I watched until Ben started to pull the door shut behind him. Then I sprinted after, grabbing the knob with one hand before joining him in the hall.

"I'm glad you came, Johnnie," he said.

"I guess we're returning to the Porphyry Gallery," I answered glumly, not acknowledging his compliment. If that's what it was.

"No, I have another place in mind. Show me to the Hall of Kings, where first I entered this house."

So we went to the Hall of Kings, a journey of perhaps two hours to that strange, stony part of God's house with its sense of great age. I paid little attention to the hallways and corridors through which we passed, for my feet knew the route almost of their own accord. I kept my spear ready for rats or hall tigers, but nothing showed itself.

There was not even the distant sound of the workmen today.

When we came to the stone room, there was a pile of lumber and tools beneath one of the high, narrow windows, though it was not the same one through which Ben had originally come.

"Ah," he said, taking his hammer from its little sling. "They made ready for me."

A cold fear stole into my heart. "What will you do?"

"Outside, I was a carpenter," he replied. "I shall build me a door and go home. I have been wandering far too long, and my work awaits me."

Though I was afraid of the workmen, I helped him frame the lumber and build a door, flush against the stone. He cut no passageway, did not even seem concerned about it, but busied himself with the details of the construction.

After a matter of several hours, it was done. Simpler than our sitting room door, without the relieved panels or brass hinges, it was nonetheless a solid door, well-made. Had I found it here, I might have thought it led somewhere important, instead of opening onto coarse, ancient stone.

"What do you think?" Ben asked.

"A waste," I said. "It is nicely done, but leads nowhere."

"Ah." He smiled. "There you are wrong. This door leads everywhere."

"Like the windows?"

"Like the windows."

I glanced up at the narrow windows high above, daylight streaming through them to stab the stone floors with dusty, brilliant blades.

"Where will you go?"

"Where the way has been prepared for me."

I touched the wood, close-grained and silvery gray. It was like the finest of leather. "Good luck," I said. I realized I would miss him. Ben had given us a lavatory, and probably new children, and been pleasant and kind and never complained, though I knew we must have seemed to him like animals in an upholstered den.

"Would you have me go?"

For a moment it seemed odd, then I realized that his question was serious. "You are your own man," I said.

"Nonetheless, would you have me go?" He was gentle, insistent, one hand stroking his hammer back in its sling, the other on his chin.

And I knew right then I could keep him here in God's house. He had ceded me his power. "Why is it for me to say?"

"You prepare the mansions in God's house," he told me. "You prepared my way, and you will go on to prepare the way of those who will follow me."

I felt that little swirl of jealousy again, but I took his hand in mine. "Go."

He smiled, handed me his hammer, and opened the door. I saw a dusty land under a bright sun, a city on a hill with gray-green trees growing along its streets, then with the click of the door against the frame, Ben was gone.

Hammer in my hand, I returned to the Hunt Group, thinking on what had happened.

Sometimes we find things in front of that door in the Hall of Kings, as if someone had opened it from the other side. A cripple's crutch, a girl's doll, bottles of sharp water that warm the gut and loosen the tongue. Coins, books, little colored cards with pictures on them--pictures that almost resemble Ben. One time, three rusted nails big as spikes.

So when we prey, we leave a piece at the door, burnt in the old ways. God was in His house once in our lifetimes, and He might pass this way again some day.

Every so often I go to the Porphyry Gallery alone and shift the vases one by one. No matter how many windows I look out of, I never see Ben. I still have his hammer, in case he ever returns.

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Science fiction is about otherness, yet, to be meaningful, story must be about human emotions. You'll get otherness if your story is told through an alien point of view. But will you get humanness if the human in the story is the last of its kind--and insane?

THE MARTHA WAS DEAD.

Our lights played over the still, pale corpse, unclothed, limbs aligned, arms folded across its chest, glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling above the bed. Its throat had been crushed, bruised to a vivid black. The odor of human waste tainted the air.

Where was the Henry?

"Oh, E-gar." A-nan's voice quivered. "What could--how could..." Her throat pouch fluttered in distress and her light wandered around the exhibit bedroom area, avoiding the corpse, the beam darting across the back wall, and away, toward the transparent fourth wall behind us, beyond which tens of thousands of patrons flocked daily to see the humans in their natural, home-like habitat.

The museum opened in two hours. The human habitat was open to constant public view except for most of the bedroom and the toilet. Those rooms at the exhibit's rear gave the humans some privacy, a psychological need.

Patrons stood in line for hours in the hot Earthen sun, so hot here on the North Continent on the lip of the vast western ocean, to see the humans. How disappointed they were when they got to the head of the line to find one human had chosen that moment to hide to perform a bodily function. It took incidents, patrons getting hurt, before adequate security got budgeted.

How much more disappointed would patrons be now?

It might take the medical staff more than two hours to re-animate the Martha. Even then, it might not function as it should, not at first. We might have to delay opening. We could blame it on the storm. Patrons would not be pleased, but what else could we do?

Where was the Henry?

The Henry was the star of the exhibit, what everyone came to see. It would dance, yell gibberish, jump at the transparent wall, thumping its fists against it. Patrons shrieked in delighted terror and got back in line for more. The Henry loved the crowds and they loved it.

The Martha had fans too, but not like the Henry.

But something happened. The Henry had killed the Martha.

"We should have..." A-nan tried to continue, but what could she say? Too late? Too bad? We should have insisted on a budget that didn't leave the museum at the mercy of old, faulty power systems and the corrosive salt-sea air common to this region? We should have checked the backup generator when the storm hit, or before, when we tasted the storm in the air, and saw the clouds piling up over the ocean rolling toward us? We should have acted the instant the power failed and the exhibit remote monitors went blank?

But who could have expected--this?

I found the Henry in the toilet room.

"Forensics will tell us how," I said. How was obvious. Strangulation. By the Henry's hands.

But why?

The Henry sat, still, naked, on the toilet seat. Limp. Head bowed. It smelled of sweat and feces.

"Or I can ask it," A-nan said. She was the resident expert.

"No." I pointed with my light and she saw. "I don't think the Henry is, well..."

"Oh, E-gar." The Henry looked sick. "How sad." The Martha was dead now, and we had two hours before the museum opened to restore it and treat the Henry as well. Could we restore the Martha, or would there be--what?--glitches? Behavior lapses? Changes? Who knew?

We had to try. What choice was there?

A-nan knelt by the Henry, touched its scaleless skin and spoke to it. The Henry made no response, and A-nan looked up at me, worry flushing her throat pouch.

"Come away from it," I said. A-nan stood with a sigh, stepped away and toward into the bedroom where the Martha lay. She hovered in the doorway between the rooms, uncertain.

I tapped my comlink. The Director's code. And medical.

Opening would be delayed. There would be recriminations. The Director would start, pass the blame down to us. Then the media, then the public would join. "The caretakers' fault ... Negligence ... They let it die..."

We would be disposed, A-nan and I, or transferred if lucky.

We both stood with our backs to the bed and the bathroom door, as if not seeing would make it go away.

Waiting to connect--the storm must have affected the comlink--I scratched the webbing under my inner thumbs, a habit. A-nan touched me on the elbow. "You'll get a rash," she used to say when we first joined. Now she just touches me and I stop.

I smiled--what are mates for?--but the smile did not reach my mouth plate, dry now. The Henry and the Martha were mates too--had been mates, like us.

"We will be disposed." A-nan put our thoughts into words, an attempt to dull their eventual impact.

"The Director himself will be disposed," I said. Maybe it helped.

The Director came on first. Even as his tinny voice echoed in my inner ear, medical joined in. My report was clinical, brief, accurate. I held nothing back, and when I finished, A-nan nodded to me, confirming I'd spoken true.

Medical dispatched a team, the Director went off line for a moment to speak with patron relations, to get out a story about the delay "due to effects of the storm."

Two meds bustled in, I didn't know their names, smelling of antiseptic and pouch polish, carrying crisis satchels. We stepped aside but didn't leave. Where would we go?

Crisp and efficient in starched uniforms, they went to work on the humans. One looked at the Martha, the other knelt by the still Henry. They wore filters. They probed and poked, tested, examined, monitored scans, recorded data. The only sound was the electronic click and chatter and rubbery hiss and sigh of their equipment, listening, recording, testing.

The Director came back on. "I bought an hour, but the media's on it and patrons are complaining. Do whatever--"

"Pardon, Director," one medical said. "We must talk, secure."

I unjacked and stepped out of the bedroom into the living room. A-nan joined me and we stood looking out at the same view through the display window the humans had looked out at gawking patrons for years. I suddenly wondered how old they were. I didn't know. Did A-nan?

Before I could ask, one of the medicals approached. "We must remove the humans," he said.

"Remove?" I said. "I don't--"

"To central med. Our equipment," he pointed over his shoulder with his thumbs, "isn't adequate for, well--you wouldn't understand."

"Try me," A-nan said, but they ignored her.

We were told to report to the Director's office. Such a summons, we'd long ago learned, often preceded disposal. We had attended the mourning ceremonies.

A-nan and I linked thumbs, our scales slick with nervous sweat, as we walked through the cold, damp underground access tunnel to the Directorate wing.

On the way, we passed a security observation port, where we could look out over those lined up to see the human exhibit. The line stretched far away, thousands of patrons, many families.

I noticed one father and mother with a female cub. The cub clutched a Henry doll to her chest and her pouch rose and fell in great silent sobs. The mother knelt before the cub and the father hovered near, distress discoloring his pouch. We couldn't hear but the gestures were obvious. Here stood a family that could ill afford to travel to Earth, who had likely spent their life savings to come, and now the cub was being told it might not get to see the humans after all.

"Poor little cub," A-nan said.

Don't pity the cub. Pity us.

We arrived at the Director's office soon and saw two security guards, the ones who, after the Director disclaimed us, would take us away. Forever.

But first, the monitor.

Security had monitors in the exhibit, cameras independent of outside power except for linkage to the remote monitor station. The cameras continued recording inside when the power failed outside, but we couldn't replay from the security station. The security people had to retrieve those tapes from the exhibit. They'd done so while we walked to the Directorate, and one tape, the view of the human bedroom, now ran in the Director's office.

The office smelled of pouch polish and nervous sweat, again more nervous sweat.

"What's wrong with the sound?" the Director snapped.

One of the security people muttered something about a software problem but he stopped when the Director dismissed him with an irritated thumb-wave.

Then we saw it on the monitor. The soundlessness made it the more macabre. At first, it wasn't clear what was happening on the humans' bed. Was the Henry climbing atop the Martha to copulate, as they sometimes did at night? No. We watched the Henry choke the Martha. To death.

Then the Henry got up from the bed, stood over the Martha a moment, then arranged its arms over its chest, and pressed its knees together. The Henry spent a few minutes arranging the body, clearly dead, then it stood silent for a few more minutes, gazing down at its mate. Its shoulders slumped.

Then, head bowed, it walked into the toilet room, and closed the door.

No doubt the tape in the toilet room would show the Henry as we had found it--head down, slumped, dejected.

The Director's pouch blanched as he watched the murder and I thought he'd pass out, but then a medical came in. He was agitated, even paler than the Director, when he motioned him aside for a conference. The others--A-nan and I and the security people--moved away from the two as their conference grew heated.

The Director swore. The medical cringed, and we feared he would be disposed where he stood.

Worse, the Director looked confused.

In a moment, he ordered the medical away--"Figure something out!" he said to his retreating back.

Then he waved us to gather around him. We did. "The Martha cannot be revived. The Henry, I'm told, suffers some--" he waved thumbs, "--some medical problem. It means the exhibit is lost."

"Lost?" A-nan and I said together.

"Cannot be revived, malfunctioned beyond repair, both humans. Both. The exhibit will not just be delayed, but shut down. For good. Forever."

A-nan swooned, but I held her up and she recovered.

"Steady," the Director said. "I need answers, not fainting spells. Answers!"

The security guards looked at each other in distress. The Director turned to us. "Experts on humans, you two, the experts. Well, if you don't come up with something, soon, you'll be..."

Disposed. We knew.

I linked with medical and asked for details, putting them on a room monitor so we could all hear. No good. For some medical reason I didn't understand, the Martha couldn't be reanimated.

The Henry lived but it had been damaged in a way that the medicals expected it would never be as animated as it had been. One said he expected the Henry to forever sit and stare at the floor, defecating on itself, that we'd have to force-feed it.

This would not sit well with patrons. We could expect a riot, and our lives were in danger, I believed, no matter how confident security acted. They didn't act confident.

"Options, please." The Director's lips set in a grim line.

Henry and Martha dolls, masks, and puppets were popular with children and adults, but they weren't animated. Several animated human sims existed, but they varied in price and popularity, and none replaced the real thing. Human actions couldn't be reproduced in a machine well enough to fool anybody. It had been tried and it didn't work.

"No substitute sim, then," the Director said. He ticked off options on his thumbs, an annoying trait. "What else?"

Silence hung in the room like a syrupy mist.

"We must go," a security guard said.

"Go?" A-nan said.

"Yes, go," the Director said. Save our pouches. Run before word got out that the humans were gone forever. Run, far away.

Understanding flushed A-nan's throat pouch and she leaned against me. Tears stained her pretty cheek scales.

The Director moved behind his desk and made a call, no doubt for his private shuttle, and the two security guards ran from the office, ran from the coming chaos.

We had nowhere to go, A-nan and I. We had been with the humans from the start, studied them, cared for them, and loved them as no others did or could, even the most ardent fans. None felt the loss as we did.

I feared A-Nan and I would be sacrificed to an indignant populace. How ironic that we, who loved them more, who wanted them back more than anyone else, should suffer so.

I patted A-nan's shoulder. "There, there." It did no good. Her tears flowed, like the cub--

Suddenly, I had it.

"Director," I said, "I have it."

"What?" Hope speckled his pouch.

"Call in the medicals. And engineering. And electrical. And--" The list went on and on.

We'd have to be quick.

People loved to watch the humans, loved to see them walk, speak their gibberish at them, eat, exercise, groom themselves. They loved to see the Henry cavort and dance and sing and attack the display window in mock fury. People would stand before the display and gesture at the humans to provoke response. The Henry always obliged. They loved the Martha too.

No, we couldn't fix them or replace them with sims, however sophisticated. Nobody would ever see the humans be human again.

But what if people could be a human?

"You've had your turn," A-nan said. "Mine now."

I gave up the waldo and left the Henry dangling, suspended in the act of copulation with the Martha. Its body went limp and swayed, suspended by delicate and intricate artifices linking its nervous and sensory systems with the observer-link booth. A-nan took my place, and the humans resumed copulating, their ecstatic cries in near synchronicity. A-nan fell into rhythm.

The Martha was off-link, on stand-by mode, for a system upgrade, which is why A-nan and I had to share the Henry at the moment, otherwise A-nan would have linked with the Martha while I linked with the Henry, and we would have experienced human sexual intercourse at the same time. Maybe we would also experience simultaneous orgasm, as sometimes happens.

In a minute, the Henry reached a howling climax, and in another few seconds, the Martha, on automatic and diagnostic but not linked to a waldo, responded with its own. A-nan felt as the Henry felt.

Because we were their caretakers, A-nan and I got to link with the humans more often than the average patron did. We were wealthy is that regard. We never passed up an opportunity, even during repair and testing. A-nan unplugged, grinned, flushed, and sighed.

"Marvelous," the Director said, waiting with scant patience for his turn.

The Henry was still the more popular human, but the Director preferred being the Martha. Now, though, the Director had to settle for being the Henry during the Martha's downtime. Director's privilege: he got more time in-human than anyone.

The Director switched the program from copulation to dance. He liked to dance.

Fans signed for the copulation sim more often than any other program, but many also ran the murder program--as the Henry. In that sim, none elected to be the Martha. So far.

So, we'd saved out jobs, saved the exhibit--not what it used to be, but enough--but we hadn't solved the mystery.

Why had the Henry killed the Martha?

The Henry was insane. It couldn't tell us because we were in the real world and it had left that world, some experts contend, even as it killed the Martha, and surely as it arranged the corpse in state on the bed.

I found the answer years later after I became Director. I found it in a report our two medicals had prepared for Director's Eyes Only after the murder. Three people had seen what I now saw--the two medicals, and my predecessor.

"These files are confidential," my secretary had told me. "Director's Eyes Only." She left the office, and I secured and shielded it. Then I opened the files.

The medicals, you see, had learned the Martha was pregnant when the Henry killed it. There would be three. We knew the two humans copulated often, but we understood human physiology too poorly. Why hadn't it been impregnated in earlier copulations? We would never know.

Also, how the Martha had kept its condition from us, we would never know, but it did.

Kept us in the dark, but not the Henry.

Thus, the Henry had murdered the Martha, not to hurt the Martha, but to end the life in its womb.

The Henry was the exhibit star, the Martha an afterthought. If you exhibit a male human, so the thinking went, you ought to have a female too, for balance, symmetry, and to keep the male active, animated--for study, and to please patrons. We didn't understand humans well enough to do more than guess.

Who knew the Henry would be jealous? Who knew that, threatened with the prospect that the public might shift its ardor from it to the Martha--and to its cub--it might strike out and--restore order? And go insane.

A pity. Three humans--male, female, and cub--would have been a wonderful display. Patrons would have come from--well, everywhere.

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Barbecue in the backyard; stereo shoved over by the bedroom window, blasting out "Green Onions" by Booker T. & the MGs: these spells for the enchantments of my childhood gave rise to "Wallamelon." These spells--plus the responses I got when I answered that perennial question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" "A magician," I always replied. Not with a tuxedo, a tall hat, and rabbits, I patiently explained. I wanted to do real magic...

"BABY, BABY, BABY! Baby, Baby, Baby!"

Cousin Alphonse must have thought he looked like James Brown. He looked like what he was, just a little boy with a big peanut head, squirming around, kicking up dust in the driveway.

Oneida thought about threatening to tell on him for messing his pants up. Even Alphonse ought to know better. He had worn holes in both his knees, begging "Please, please, please" into the broken microphone he'd found in Mr. Early's trash barrel. And she'd heard a loud rip the last time he did the splits, though nothing showed. Yet.

"'Neida! Alphonse! Come see what me an Mercy Sanchez foun!" Kevin Curtis ran along the sidewalk towards them, arms windmilling, shirt-tails flapping. He stopped several feet off, as soon as he saw he had their attention. "Come on!"

Oneida stood up from the pipe-rail fence slowly, with the full dignity of her ten years. One decade. She was the oldest kid on the block, not counting teenagers. She had certain responsibilities, like taking care of Alphonse.

The boys ran ahead of her as she walked, and circled back again like little dogs. Kevin urged her onto the path that cut across the vacant lot beside his house. Mercy was standing on a pile of rubble half the way through, her straight hair shining in the noonday sun like a long, black mirror. She was pointing down at something Oneida couldn't see from the path, something small, something so wonderful it made sad Mercy smile.

"Wallamelons," Kevin explained as they left the path. "Grown all by they selves; ain't nobody coulda put em there."

"Watermelons," Oneida corrected him automatically.

The plant grew out from under a concrete slab. At first all she could see was its broad leaves, like green hearts with scalloped edges. Mercy pushed these aside to reveal the real treasure: four fat globes, dark and light stripes swelling in their middles and vanishing into one another at either end. They were watermelons, all right. Each one was a little larger than Oneida's fist.

"It's a sign," said Mercy, her voice soft as a baby's breath. "A sign from the Blue Lady."

Oneida would have expected the Blue Lady to send them roses instead, or something prettier, something you couldn't find in an ordinary supermarket. But Mercy knew more about the Blue Lady, because she and her half-brother Emilio had been the ones to tell Oneida about her in the first place.

"Four of them and four of us." Oneida looked up at Mercy to see if she understood the significance.

Mercy nodded. "We can't let no one else know about this."

"How come?" asked Alphonse. Because he was mildly retarded he needed help understanding a lot of things.

Oneida explained it to him. "You tell anybody else, they'll mess up everything. Keep quiet and you'll have a whole watermelon all to yourself."

"I get a wallamelon all my own?"

"Wa-ter-mel-on," Oneida enunciated.

"How long it take till they ready?"

They decided it would be at least a week before the fruit was ripe enough to eat. Every day they met at Mizz Nichols's.

Mercy's mother had left her here and gone back to Florida to be with her husband. It was better for Mercy to live at her grandmother's, away from so much crime. And Michigan had less discrimination.

Mizz Nichols didn't care what her granddaughter was up to as long as it didn't interrupt her t.v. watching or worse yet, get her called away from work.

Mercy seemed to know what the watermelon needed instinctively. She had them fill half-gallon milk bottles from the garden hose and set these to "cure" behind the garage. In the dusky hours after Aunt Elise had picked up Cousin Alphonse, after Kevin had to go inside, Mercy and Oneida smuggled the heavy glass containers to their secret spot. They only broke one.

When the boys complained at being left out of this chore, Mercy set them to picking dried grass. They stuffed this into old pillowcases and put these underneath the slowly fattening fruits to protect them from the gravelly ground.

The whole time, Mercy seemed so happy. She sang songs about the Blue Lady, how in far away dangerous places she saved children from evil spirits and grown ups. Oneida tried to sing along with her, but the music kept changing, though the stories stayed pretty much the same.

There was the one about the girl who was standing on the street corner somewhere down South when a car full of men with guns went by, shooting everybody. But the Blue Lady saved her. Or there was a boy whose mom was so sick he had to stay with his crazy aunt because his dad was already dead in a robbery. When the aunt put poison in his food he ran away, and the Blue Lady showed him where to go and took care of him till he got to his grandparents house in Boston, all the way from Washington D.C.

All you had to do was call her name.

One week stretched, unbelievably, to two. The watermelons were as large as cereal bowls. As party balloons. But they seemed pitiful compared to the giant blimps in the bins in front of Farmer Jack's.

Obviously, their original estimate was off. Alphonse begged and whined so much, though, that Mercy finally let him pick and open his own melon. It was hard and pale inside, no pinker than a pack of Wrigley's gum. It tasted like scouring powder.

Oneida knew she'd wind up sharing part of her personal, private watermelon with Alphonse, if only to keep him from crying, or telling another kid, or a grown-up even. It was the kind of sacrifice a mature ten-year-old expected to make. It would be worth it, though. Half a watermelon was still a feast.

They tended the Blue Lady's vine with varying degrees of impatience and diligence. Three weeks, now. How much longer would it take till the remaining watermelons reached what Oneida called "The absolute peak of perfection?"

They never found out.

The Monday after the Fourth of July, Oneida awoke to the low grumble of heavy machinery. The noise was from far enough away that she could have ignored it if she wanted to stay asleep. Instead, she leaned out till her fingers fit under the edge of her bunk's frame, curled down and flipped herself so she sat on the empty bottom bunk.

She peeked into her parents' bedroom. Her father was still asleep; his holstered gun gleamed darkly in the light that crept in around the lowered shade. She closed the door quietly. Her dad worked hard. He was the first Negro on the police force.

Oneida ate a bowl of cereal, re-reading the book on the back of the box about the adventures of Twinkle-toes the Elephant. Baby stuff, but she was too lazy to get up and locate a real book.

When she was done, she checked the square dial of the alarm clock on the kitchen counter. Quarter to nine. In forty-five minutes her mother would be home from the phone company. She'd make a big breakfast. Even if Oneida wasn't hungry, it felt good to talk with Mom while she cooked it. Especially if Dad woke up; with Royal and Limoges off at Big Mama's, the three of them discussed important things like voting rights and integration.

But there was time for a quick visit to the vacant lot before then.

The sidewalk was still cool beneath the black locust trees. The noise that had wakened her sounded a lot louder out here. It grew and grew, the closer she got to the Curtis's. And then she saw the source, an ugly yellow monster machine roaring through the lot, riding up and down over the humps of rubble like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. And Kevin was just standing there on the sidewalk, watching.

There were stones all around. She picked up a whole fistful and threw them, but it was too far. She grabbed some more and Kevin did too. They started yelling and ran toward the monster, throwing stones. It had a big blade. It was a bulldozer, it was pushing the earth out of its way wherever it wanted to go. She couldn't even hear her own shouting over the awful sound it made. Rocks flew out of her hands. They hit it. They hit it again. The man on top, too.

Then someone was holding her arms down. She kept yelling and Kevin ran away. Suddenly she heard herself. The machine was off. The white man from on top of it was standing in front of her telling her to shut up, shut up or he'd have her arrested.

Where was the Blue Lady?

There was only Mizz Curtis, in her flowered house dress, with her hair up in pink curlers. No one was holding Oneida's arms anymore, but she was too busy crying to get away. Another white man asked what her name was.

"Oneida Brandy," Mizz Curtis said. "Lives down the street. Oneida, what on Earth did you think you were doing, child?"

"What seems to be the problem?"

Dad. She looked up to be sure. He had his police hat on and his gun belt, but regular pants and a tee-shirt instead of the rest of his uniform. He gazed at her without smiling while he talked to the two white men.

So she was still in trouble.

After a while, though, the men stopped paying attention to Oneida. They were talking about the rich white people they worked for, and all the things they could do to anyone who got in their way. Kevin's mom gave her a crumpled up Kleenex to blow her nose on, and she realized all the kids in the neighborhood were there.

Including Mercy Sanchez. She looked like a statue of herself. Like she was made of wood. Of splinters.

Then the white men's voices got loud, and they were laughing. They got in a green pick-up parked on the easement and drove off, leaving their monster in the middle of the torn-up lot.

Her father's face was red; they must have said something to make him mad before they went away. But all Dad did was thank Mizz Curtis for sending Kevin over to wake him up.

They met Mom on the way home. She was still in her work clothes and high heels, walking fast. She stopped and stared at Dad's hat and gun. "Vinny?"

"Little brush with the law, Joanne. Our daughter here's gonna explain everything over breakfast."

Oneida tried. But Mercy had made her swear not to tell any grown-ups about the Blue Lady, which meant her story sounded not exactly stupid, but silly. "All that fuss about a watermelon!" Mom said. "As if we don't have the money to buy one, if that's what you want!"

Dad said the white men were going to get quite a surprise when they filed their complaint about him impersonating an officer. He said they were breaking the law themselves by not posting their building permit. He said off-duty policemen went around armed all the time.

Aunt Elise brought over Cousin Alphonse. They had to play in the basement even though it was such a nice day outside. And Kevin Curtis and Mercy Sanchez weren't allowed to come over. Or anybody.

After about eighty innings of "Ding-Dong, Delivery," Oneida felt like she was going crazy with boredom. She was sorry she'd ever made the game up; all you did was put a blanket over yourself and say "Ding-dong, delivery," and the other player was supposed to guess what you were. Of course Alphonse adored it.

Mom let them come upstairs and turn on the t.v. in time for the afternoon movie. It was an old one, a gangster story, which was good. Oneida hated gangster movies, but that was the only kind Cousin Alphonse would watch all the way through. She could relax and read her book.

Then Mom called her into the bedroom. Dad was there, too. He hadn't gone to his other job. They had figured out what they were going to do with her.

They were sending her to Detroit, to Big Mama. She should have known. The two times she spent the night there she'd had to share a bed with Limoges, and there hadn't been one book in the entire house.

"What about Cousin Alphonse?" she asked. "How am I supposed to take care of him if I'm in Detroit?"

"You just concentrate on learning to take better care of yourself, young lady."

Which wasn't a fair thing for Mom to say.

After dark, Oneida snuck out. She had stayed inside all day, exactly as she'd promised. Now it was night. No one would expect her to slip the screen out of her bedroom window and squirm out onto the fresh-mowed lawn. That wasn't the kind of thing Oneida ever did. She wouldn't get caught.

The big orange moon hung low over Lincoln Elementary. Away from the streetlights, in the middle of the ravaged vacant lot, it made its own shadows. They hid everything, the new hills and the old ones. It was probably going to be impossible to find the watermelon vine. If it had even survived the bulldozer's assault.

But Oneida walked to the lot's middle anyway. From there, she saw Mercy. She stood stock still, over on Oneida's left, looking down at something; it was the same way she'd stood the day they found the vine. Except then, the light had come from above, from the sun. Now something much brighter than the moon shone from below, up into her face. Something red and blue and green and white, something radiant, moving like water, like a dream.

Oneida ran towards whatever it was. She tripped on a stone block, stumbled through the dark. "Mercy!" she shouted as she topped a hill. Mercy nodded, but Oneida didn't think it was because she'd heard her. She ran on recklessly, arriving just as the light began to fade, as if, one by one, a bunch of birthday candles were being blown out.

Oneida bent forward to see better. The light came from a little cave of jewels, about the size of a gym ball. A blue heart wavered at its center, surrounded by tiny wreaths of red flowers and flickering silver stars. As she watched, they dwindled away and were gone. All that was left was a shattered watermelon, scooped out to the rind.

Magic! Oneida met Mercy's eyes. They had seen real magic! She smiled. But Mercy didn't.

"Blue Lady say she can't take care of Emilio no more. He too big." Emilio had been thirteen last New Year's, when he left with Mercy's mom. Mizz Sanchez hadn't been so worried about him; bad neighborhoods weren't so bad for bad boys. But now...

Mercy looked down again at the left behind rind.

Oneida decided to tell Mercy her own news about going to Detroit Saturday and being on punishment till then. It was difficult to see her face; her beautiful hair kept hanging in the way. Was she even listening?

"You better not go an forget me, 'Neida."

What was she talking about? "I'll only be there until school starts! September!" As if she wouldn't remember Mercy for ever and ever, anyway.

Mercy turned and walked a few steps away. Oneida was going to follow her, but Mercy stopped on her own. Faced her friend again. Held out her hand. There was something dark in her pale palm. "I'ma give you these now, in case--"

Oneida took what Mercy offered her, an almost weightless mass, cool and damp. "I can sneak out again," she said. Why not?

"Sure. The Blue Lady, though, she want you to have these, an this way I won't be worryin."

Watermelon seeds. That's what they were. Oneida put them in her pajama pocket. What she had been looking for when she came here.

She took a deep breath. It went into her all shaky, and came out in one long whoosh. Till September wasn't her whole life. "Maybe Mom and Dad will change their mind and let you come over."

"Maybe." Mercy sounded as if she should clear her throat. As if she were crying, which was something she never did, no matter how sad she looked. She started walking away again.

"Hey, I'll send a card on your birthday," Oneida yelled after her, because she couldn't think of what else to say.

Wednesday the Chief of Police put Dad on suspension.

That meant they could drive to Detroit early, as soon as Dad woke up on Thursday. Oneida helped her mom with the last-minute packing. There was no time to do laundry.

Dad didn't care. "They got water and electricity in Detroit last time I checked, Joanne, and Big Mama must have at least one washing machine."

They drove and drove. It took two whole hours. Oneida knew they were getting close when they went by the giant tire, ten stories tall. There were more and more buildings, bigger and bigger ones. Then came the billboard with a huge stove sticking out of it, and they were there.

Detroit was the fifth largest city in the United States. Big Mama lived on a street called Davenport, like a couch, off Woodward. Her house was dark and cool inside, without much furniture. Royal answered the door and led them back to the kitchen, the only room that ever got any sunshine.

"Yall made good time," said Big Mama. "Dinner's just gettin started." She squeezed Oneida's shoulders and gave her a cup of lime Kool-Aid.

"Can I go finish watching cartoons?" asked Royal.

"Your mama an daddy an sister jus drove all this way; you aint got nothin to say to em?

"Limoges over at the park with Luemma and Ivy Joe," she told Mom and Dad. They sent Royal to bring her home and sat down at the table, lighting cigarettes.

Oneida drank her Kool-aid quickly and rinsed out her empty cup. She wandered back through the house to the front door. From a t.v. in another room, boingy sounds like bouncing springs announced the antics of some orange cat or indigo dog.

Mercy watched soap operas. Maybe Oneida would be able to convince the other children those were more fun. Secret, forbidden shows grown-ups didn't want you to see, about stuff they said you'd understand when you got older.

Limoges ran over the lawn shouting "'Neida! 'Neida!" At least somebody was glad to see her. Oneida opened the screen door. "I thought you wasn't comin till Saturday!"

"'Weren't,'" she corrected her little sister. "'I thought you weren't.'"

"What happened?"

"Dad got extra days off. They're in the kitchen." Royal and the other kids were nowhere in sight. Oneida followed Limoges back to find their parents.

It was hot; the oven was on. Big Mama was rolling out dough for biscuits, and heating oil. She had Oneida and Limoges take turns shaking chicken legs in a bag of flour. Then they set the dining room table and scrounged chairs from the back porch and, when that wasn't enough, from Big Mama's bedroom upstairs. Only Oneida was allowed to go in.

It smelled different in there than the whole rest of the house. Better. Oneida closed the door behind her.

There were more things, too. Bunches of flowers with ribbons wrapped around them hung from the high ceiling. Two tables overflowed with indistinct objects, which pooled at their feet. They flanked a tall, black rectangle--something shiny, with a thin cloth flung over it, she saw, coming closer. A mirror? She reached to move aside the cloth, but a picture on the table to her right caught her eye.

It was of what she had seen that night in the vacant lot. A blue heart floated in a starry sky, with flowers around it. Only these flowers were pink and gold. And in the middle of the heart, a door had been cut.

The door's crystal knob seemed real. She touched it. It was. It turned between her thumb and forefinger. The door opened.

The Blue Lady. Oneida had never seen her before, but who else could this be a painting of? Her skin was pale blue, like the sky; her hair rippled down dark and smooth all the way to her ankles. Her long dress was blue and white, with pearls and diamonds sewn on it in swirling lines. She wore a cape with a hood, and her hands were holding themselves out as if she had just let go of something, a bird or a kiss.

The Blue Lady.

So some grown-ups did know.

Downstairs, the screen door banged. Oneida shut the heart. She shouldn't be snooping in Big Mama's bedroom. What if she were caught?

The chair she was supposed to be bringing was back by where she'd come in. She'd walked right past it.

The kitchen was crowded with noisy kids. Ivy Joe had hit a home run playing baseball with the boys. Luemma had learned a new dance called the Monkey. Oneida helped Limoges roll her pants legs down and made Royal wash his hands. No one asked what had taken her so long upstairs.

Mom and Dad left right after dinner. Oneida promised to behave herself. She did, too. She only went in Big Mama's bedroom with permission.

Five times that first Friday, Big Mama sent Oneida up to get something for her.

Oneida managed not to touch anything. She stood again and again, though, in front of the two tables, cataloguing their contents. On the right, alongside the portrait of the Blue Lady were several tall glass flasks filled with colored fluids; looping strands of pearls wound around their slender necks. A gold-rimmed saucer held a dark, mysterious liquid, with a pile of what seemed to be pollen at the center of its glossy surface.

A red-handled axe rested on the other table. It had two sharp, shiny edges. No wonder none of the other kids could come in here.

On every trip, Oneida spotted something else. She wondered how long it would take to see everything.

On the fifth trip, Oneida turned away from the huge white wing leaning against the table's front legs (how had she missed that the first four times?) to find Big Mama watching her from the doorway.

"I--I didn't--"

"You aint messed with none a my stuff, or I'd a known it. Sall right; I spected you'd be checkin out my altars, chile. Why I sent you up here."

Altars? Like in a Catholic church like Aunt Elise went to? The two tables had no crucifixes, no tall lecterns for a priest to pray from, but evidently they were altars, because there was nothing else in the room that Big Mama could be talking about. It was all normal stuff, except for the flower bunches dangling down from the ceiling.

"Then I foun these." Big Mama held out one hand as she moved into the bedroom and shut the door behind herself. "Why you treat em so careless-like? Leavin em in your dirty pajamas pocket! What if I'd a had Luemma or Ivy Joe washin clothes?"

The seeds. Oneida accepted them again. They were dry, now, and slightly sticky.

"Them girls don't know no more about mojo than Albert Einstein. Less, maybe."

Was mojo magic? The seeds might be magic, but Oneida had no idea what they were for or how to use them. Maybe Big Mama did. Oneida peeped up at her face as if the answer would appear there.

"I see. You neither. That niece a mine taught you nothin. Aint that a surprise." Her tone of voice indicated just the opposite.

Big Mama's niece was Oneida's mother.

"Go down on the back porch and make sure the rinse cycle startin all right. Get us somethin to drink. Then come up here again and we do us a bit a discussin."

When Oneida returned she carried a pitcher of iced tea with lemon, a bowl of sugar and two glasses on a tray. She balanced the tray on her hip so she could knock and almost dropped it. Almost.

It took Big Mama a moment to let her in. "Leave that on the chair seat," she said when she saw the tray. "Come over nex the bed."

A little round basket with a lid and no handles sat on the white chenille spread. A fresh scent rose from its tight coils. "Sea grass," said Big Mama in answer to Oneida's question. "Wove by my gramma. That aint what I want you to pay attention to, though. What's inside--"

Was a necklace. Made of watermelon seeds.

"Aint everybody has this in they backgroun. Why I was sure your mama musta said somethin. She proud, though. Too proud, turn out, to even do a little thing like that, am I right?"

Oneida nodded. Mom hated her to talk about magic. Superstition, she called it. She didn't even like it when Oneida brought books of fairy tales home from the library.

"How you come up with these, then?"

"I--a friend."

"A friend."

"Mercy Sanchez."

"This Mercy, she blood? Kin?" she added, when Oneida's confusion showed.

"No."

"She tell you how to work em?"

"No." Should she break her promise?

"Somethin you hidin. Can't be keepin secrets from Big Mama."

Her picture was there, on the altar. "Mercy said they came from the Blue Lady."

"'Blue Lady.' That what you call her." Big Mama's broad forehead smoothed out, getting rid of wrinkles Oneida had assumed were always there. "Well, she certainly is. The Blue Lady."

Oneida suddenly realized why no one but Mizz Curtis and Dad had come to her rescue when the white men tried to arrest her. For the Blue Lady to appear in person, you were supposed to call her, using her real name. Which Mercy and Emilio had never known.

"What do you call her?"

"Yemaya."

Oneida practiced saying it to herself while she poured the iced tea and stirred in three spoons of sugar for each of them. Yeh-mah-yah. It was strange, yet easy. Easy to say. Easy to remember. Yeh-mah-yah.

She told Big Mama about everything.

"Hmmph." Big Mama took a long drink of tea. "You think you able to do what I tell you to?"

Oneida nodded. Of course she could.

Big Mama closed the curtains and lit a white candle in a jar, putting a metal tube over its top. Holes in the sides let through spots of light the shape of six-pointed stars. She made Oneida fill a huge shell with water from the bathroom and sprinkled it on both their heads. Oneida brought the chair so Big Mama could sit in front of Yemaya's altar. She watched while Big Mama twirled the necklace of watermelon seeds around in the basket's lid and let it go.

"Awright. Look like Yemaya say I be teachin you."

"Can I--"

"Four questions a day. That's all I'ma answer. Otherwise you jus haveta listen closer to what I say."

Oneida decided to ask anyway. "What were you doing?"

"Divinin. Special way a speakin, more important, a hearin what Yemaya an Shango wanna tell me."

"Will I learn that? Who's Shango?"

"Shango Yemaya's son. We start tomorrow. See how much you able to take in." Big Mama held up her hand, pink palm out. "One more question is all you got for today. Might wanna use it later."

They left the bedroom to hang the clean laundry from the clothesline, under trellises heavy with blooming vines. In the machine on the back porch behind them, a new load sloshed away. Royal was watching t.v.; the rest of the kids were over at the park. Oneida felt the way she often did after discussing adult topics with her parents. It was a combination of coziness and exhilaration, as if she were tucked safe and warm beneath the feathers of a high-soaring bird. A soft breeze lifted the legs of her pajama bottoms, made the top flap its arms as if it were flying.

Mornings were for housework. Oneida wasted one whole question finding that out.

Sundays they went to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Not to church. "God aint in there. Only reason to go to church is so people don't talk bad about you," Big Mama told them. "Anything they gone say about me they already said it." They got dressed up the same as everyone else in the neighborhood, nodded and waved at the families who had no feud with Big Mama, even exchanging remarks with those walking their direction, towards Cass. But then they headed north by themselves.

Big Mama ended each trip through the exhibits in the museum's tea room. She always ordered a chicken salad sandwich with the crusts cut off. Ivy Joe and Luemma sat beside her, drinking a black cow apiece. Royal drew on all their napkins, floppy-eared rabbits and mean-looking monsters.

Oneida's favorite part to go to was the gift shop. Mainly because they had so many beautiful books, but also because she could touch things in there. Own them, if she paid. Smaller versions of the paintings on the walls, of the huge weird statues that resembled nothing on Earth except themselves.

The second Sunday, she bought Mercy's birthday card there. It was a postcard, actually, but bigger than most. The French lady on the front had sad, soft eyes like Mercy's. On the back, Oneida told her how she was learning "lots of stuff." It would have been nice to say more; not on a postcard, though, where anyone would be able to read it.

In fact, in the hour a day Big Mama consented to teach her, Oneida couldn't begin to tackle half what she wanted to know. Mostly she memorized: prayers; songs; long, often incomprehensible stories.

Big Mama gave her a green scarf to wrap the seeds in. She said to leave them on Yemaya's altar since Oneida shared a room with the three other girls. After that, she seemed to forget all about them. They were right there, but she never seemed to notice them. Her own necklace had disappeared. Oneida asked where it was three days in a row.

"That's for me to know and you to find out," Big Mama answered every time.

Oneida saved up a week's worth of questions. She wrote them on a pad of paper, pale purple with irises along the edges, which she'd bought at the gift shop:

1. Is your necklace in the house?

2. Is it in this room?

3. Is it in your closet?

4. Under the bed?

5. In your dresser?

And so on, with lines drawn from one to another to show which to ask next, depending on whether the response was yes or no. On a separate page she put bonus questions in case Big Mama was so forthcoming some of the others became unnecessary. These included why her brother had hardly any chores, and what was the name of Yemaya's husband, who had never turned up in any story.

But when Big Mama called Oneida upstairs, she wound up not using any of them, because there on the bed was the basket again, open, with the necklace inside. "Seem like you learnt somethin about when to hole your peace," said Big Mama. "I know you been itchin to get your hands on my eleke." That was an African word for necklace. "Fact that you managed to keep quiet about it one entire week mean you ready for this."

It was only Oneida's seeds; she recognized the scarf they were wrapped in. Was she going to have to put them somewhere else, now? Reluctantly, she set her pad on the bed and took them out of Big Mama's hands, trying to hide her disappointment.

"Whynchou open it?"

Inside was another eleke, almost identical to Big Mama's. The threads that bound the black and brown seeds together were whiter, the necklace itself not quite as long.

Hers. Her eleke. Made out of Mercy's gift, the magic seeds from the Blue Lady.

"So. I'ma teach you how to ask questions with one a two answers, yes or no. Bout what you gotta know. What you gotta. An another even more important lesson: why you better off not tryin to fine out every little thing you think you wanna."

Oneida remembered her manners. "Thank-you, Big Mama."

"You welcome, baby." Big Mama stood and walked to the room's other end, to the mirror between her two altars. "Come on over here an get a good look." She pulled the black cloth off the mirror, stepping aside.

The reflection seemed darker than it should be. Oneida barely saw herself. Then Big Mama edged in behind her, shining. By that light, Oneida's thick black braids stood out so clearly every single hair escaping them cast its own shadow on the glass.

"Mos mirrors don't show the difference that sharp." Big Mama pushed Oneida's bangs down against her forehead. "Folks will notice it anyhow."

Oneida glanced back over her shoulder. No glow. Regular daylight. Ahead again. A radiant woman and a ghostly little girl.

This was the second magic Oneida had ever seen. Mercy better believe me when I tell her, she thought. It was as if Big Mama was a vampire, or more accurately, its exact opposite. "How--" She stopped herself, not quite in time.

"Sall right. Some questions you need an answer." But she stayed silent for several seconds.

"More you learn, brighter you burn. You know, it's gonna show. People react all kinda ways to that. They shun you, or they forget how to leave you alone. Wanna ask you all kinda things, then complain about the cost.

"What you gotta remember, Oneida, is this: there is always a price. Always a price. Only questions is who gonna pay it an how much."

No Mercy.

When Oneida got home from Detroit, her friend was gone. Had been the whole time. Not moved out, but run away. Mizz Nichols didn't know where. Florida, maybe, if she had left to take care of Emilio like she was saying.

Mizz Nichols gave Oneida back the birthday card. Which Mercy had never seen.

The white people's house next to Mizz Curtis's was almost finished being built. Everyone was supposed to keep away from it, especially Cousin Alphonse. While she'd been in Detroit, unable to watch him, he had jumped into the big basement hole and broken his collarbone. Even with his arm in a sling, Aunt Elise had barely been able to keep him away. Why? Was it the smell of fresh cut wood, or the way you could see through the walls and how everything inside them fit together? Or just the thought that it was somewhere he wasn't allowed to go?

No one wanted any trouble with white people. Whatever the cause of Alphonse's latest fascination, Oneida fought it hard. She took him along when she walked Limoges to Vacation Bible School, and managed to keep him occupied on Lincoln's playground all morning. From there they walked all the way to the river, stopping at Topoll's to buy sausage sandwiches for lunch.

So successful was this expedition that they were a little late getting home. Oneida had to carry Limoges eight blocks on her back. Aunt Elise was already parked in front, and talking angrily to Dad in the t.v. room. It was all right, though. She was just mad about the house. She thought the people building it should put a big fence around it. She thought one of their kids would get killed there before long. She thanked Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Oneida had enough sense to keep the others away from it.

But after dark, Oneida went there without telling anyone else. Alone.

Below the hole where the picture window would go, light from the street lamp made a lopsided square. She opened up her green scarf and lifted her eleke in both hands.

Would it tell her what she wanted to know? What would be the price?

Twirl it in the air. Let it fall. Count the seeds: so many with their pointed ends up, so many down. Compare the totals.

The answer was no. No running away for Oneida. She should stay here.

Her responsibility for Cousin Alphonse--that had to be the reason. The Blue Lady made sure kids got taken care of.

Would Mercy return, then?

Yes.

When? Before winter?

No.

Oneida asked and asked. With each response her heart and hands grew colder. Not at Christmas. Not next summer. Not next autumn.

When? And where was she? There were ways to ask other questions, with answers besides yes or no, but Big Mama said she was too young to use those.

Finally she gave up guessing and flung the necklace aside. No one should see her this way. Crying like a baby. She was a big girl, biggest on the block.

"Yemaya. Yemaya." Why was she saying that, the Blue Lady's name? Oneida had never had a chance to tell Mercy what it was. It wouldn't do any good to say it now, when no one was in danger. She hoped.

Eventually, she was able to stop. She wiped her eyes with the green scarf. On the floor, scattered around the necklace were several loose watermelon seeds. But her eleke was unbroken.

Yemaya was trying to tell Oneida something. Eleven seeds. Eleven years? Age eleven? It was an answer. She clung to that idea. An answer, even if she couldn't understand it.

On the phone, Big Mama only instructed her to get good grades in school, do what her mama and daddy said, and bring the seeds with her, and they would see.

But the following summer was the riots. No visit to Big Mama's.

So it was two years later that Mom and Dad drove down Davenport. The immediate neighborhood, though isolated by the devastation surrounding it, had survived more or less intact.

Big Mama's block looked exactly the same. The vines surrounding her house hung thick with heavy golden blooms. Ivy Joe and Luemma reported that at the riot's height, the last week of July, streams of U.S. Army tanks had turned aside at Woodward, splitting apart to grind along Stimson and Selden, joining up again on Second. Fires and sirens had also flowed around them; screams and shots were audible, but just barely.

Thanks to Big Mama. Everyone knew that.

Oneida didn't understand why this made the people who lived there mad. Many of them wouldn't even walk on the same side of the street as Big Mama any more. It was weirder than the way the girls at Oneida's school acted.

Being almost always alone, that was the price she'd paid for having her questions answered. It didn't seem like much. Maybe there'd be worse costs, later, after she learned other, more important things. Besides, some day Mercy would come back.

The next afternoon, her lessons resumed. She had wrapped the eleven extra seeds in the same scarf as her eleke. When Big Mama saw them, she held out her hand and frowned.

"Yeah. Right." Big Mama brought out her own eleke. "Ima ask Yemaya why she wanna give you these, what they for. Watch me."

Big Mama had finally agreed to show her how to ask questions with answers other than yes or no.

Big Mama swirled her necklace around in the basket top. On the altar, the silver-covered candle burned steadily. But the room brightened and darkened quickly as the sun appeared and disappeared behind fast-moving clouds and wind-whipped leaves.

"It start out the same;" Big Mama said, "lif it up an let it go." With a discreet rattle, the necklace fell. "Now we gotta figure out where the sharp ends pointin," she said. "But we dividin it in four directions: north, south, east an west."

Oneida wrote the totals in her notebook: two, four, five and five.

"An we do it four times for every question."

Below the first line of numbers came four, one, seven and four, then six, zero, two and eight, and three, three, seven and three.

"Now add em up."

North was fifteen, south was eight, east was twenty-one and west was twenty.

Big Mama shut her eyes a moment and nodded. "Soun good. That mean--" The brown eyes opened again, sparkling. "Yemaya say 'What you think you do with seeds? Plant em!'"

Oneida learned that the numbers referred to episodes in those long, incomprehensible stories she'd had to memorize. She practiced interpreting them. Where should she plant the seeds? All around the edges of her neighborhood. When? One year and a day from now. Who could she have help her? Only Alphonse. How much would it cost? Quite a bit, but it would be worth it. Within the Wallamelons' reach, no one she loved would be hurt, ever again.

Two more years. The house built on the vacant lot was once again empty. Its first and only tenants fled when the vines Oneida planted went wild, six months after they moved in. The house was hers, now, no matter what the mortgage said.

Oneida even had a key, stolen from the safebox that remained on the porch long after the real estate company lost all hope of selling a haunted house in a haunted neighborhood. She unlocked the side door, opening and shutting it on slightly reluctant hinges. The family that had briefly lived here had left their curtains. In the living room, sheer white fabric stirred gently when she opened a window for fresh air. And leaned out of it, waiting.

Like the lace of a giantess, leaves covered the housefront in a pattern of repeating hearts. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, sibling plants, self-sown from those she'd first planted around the perimeter, arched from phone pole to lamp post, encircling her home. Keeping it safe. So Mercy could return.

At first Mom had wanted to move out. But nowhere else Negroes could live in this town would be any better, Dad said. Besides, it wasn't all that bad. Even Aunt Elise admitted Cousin Alphonse was calmer, better off, here behind the vines. Mom eventually agreed to stay put and see if Dad's promotion ever came through.

That was taking a long time. Oneida was secretly glad. It would be so much harder to do what she had to do if her family moved. To come here night after night, as her eleke had shown her she must. To be patient. Till--

Then.

She saw her. Walking up the street. As Yemaya had promised. And this was the night, and Oneida was here for it, her one chance.

She waved. Mercy wasn't looking that way, though. She kept on, headed for Oneida's house, it looked like.

Oneida jerked at the handle of the front door. It smacked hard against the chain she'd forgotten to undo. She slammed it shut again, slid the chain free and stumbled down the steps.

Mercy was halfway up the block. The noise must have startled her. No way Oneida'd be able to catch up. "Mercy! Mercy Sanchez!" She ran hopelessly, sobbing.

Mercy stopped. She turned. Suddenly uncertain, Oneida slowed. Would Mercy have cut her hair that way? Worn that black leather jacket?

But who else could it be?

"Please, please!" Oneida had no idea what she was saying, or who she was saying it to. She was running again and then she was there, hugging her, and it was her. Mercy. Home.

Mercy. Acting like it was no big deal to show up again after disappearing for four years.

"I tole you," she insisted, sitting cross-legged on the floorboards of the empty living room. One small white candle flickered between them, supplementing the streetlight. "Emilio axed me could I come help him. He was havin trouble..." She trailed off. "It was this one group of kids hasslin his friends..."

"All you said before you left was about how the Blue Lady--"

"'Neida, mean to say you aint forgot none a them games we played?!" Scornfully.

The price had been paid.

It was as if Oneida were swimming, completely underwater, and putting out her hand and touching Mercy, who swore up and down she was not wet. Who refused to admit that the Blue Lady was real, that she, at least, had seen her. When Oneida tried to show her some of what she'd learned, Mercy nodded once, then interrupted, asking if she had a smoke.

Oneida got a cigarette from the cupboard where she kept her offerings.

"So how long are you here for?" It sounded awful, what Mom would say to some distant relative she'd never met before.

"Dunno. Emilio gonna be outta circulation--things in Miami different now. Here, too, hunh? Seem like we on the set a some monster movie."

Oneida would explain about that later. "What about your mom?" Even worse, the kind of question a parole officer might ask.

Mercy snorted. "She aint wanna have nothin to do with him or me. For years."

"Mizz Nichols--" Oneida paused. Had Mercy heard?

"Yeah, I know. Couldn make the funeral." She stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her high-top, then rolled the butt between her right thumb and forefinger, straightening it. "Dunno why I even came here. Dumb. Probably the first place anybody look. If they wanna fine me." Mercy glanced up, and her eyes were exactly the same, deep and sad. As the ocean. As the sky.

"They won't." The shadow of a vine's stray tendril caressed Mercy's cheek. "They won't."

A disclaimer: the system of divination Big Mama teaches to Oneida is my own invention. It borrows heavily from West Africa's "Ifa," and it also owes a bit to China's "I Ching." To the best of my knowledge, however, it is not part of any authentic tradition.

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From out where the sun blends into the general starscape, a huge envelope of ice chunks--the Oort Cloud--encloses the sun's entire planetary system. Perhaps looking like ice itself, an object glides into the cloud from interstellar space directing short radio pulses toward Earth. Our land- and space-based telescopes swivel toward the data stream generated by this self-propelled comet. Arecibo listens from its tropical valley in Puerto Rico. The concise message announces simply, "We are coming."

Now what do we think about that?

Somewhere right now there are alien civilizations interacting with each other. They are communicating over vast distances, muddling through first-contact situations, negotiating trade issues and exchanging embassies. At least we want to think so. But how do they manage it? Are they friendly distributors of the Encyclopedia Galactica, or aggressive empire builders?

Any kind of behavioral interaction is subject to the constraints of evolutionary costs and benefits. Strategies among the players are delimited by certain rules. This is not to say that these rules are consciously followed. They are not. They are ingrained within the DNA and behavioral repertoires of every creature, even ourselves. We follow them without awareness, and we derive many of our social responses from them.

These rules of interaction are termed Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS) and provide us with a bulwark from which to evaluate unknown situations. We know how evolution has developed across taxonomic lines, including our own. Our understanding of ESS allows us to step back and make accurate predictions concerning how the players will mutually interact.

ESS is a part of your everyday life, although you may not know it. "Do unto others," and "tit for tat" are common terms for recognizable ESS analogies easily found in an evolutionary milieu. And while these various socially derived expressions of the Golden Rule might lead you to believe that ESS would result in networks of philanthropic individuals, think again.

Computer simulations studying ESS often model the situation known as the Prisoner's Dilemma. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, two players are set against each other. Will two captured prisoners with no way to communicate together cooperate with their captors to inform on each other, or will each stay true to the other in hopes that the other prisoner will do likewise? The simulations show that starting with cooperation and continuing a tit for tat approach provides the safest and highest returns in most cases, unless there is a cheater.

Evolution still requires a gain for your actions, and sometimes a gain over competitors. There may be multiple strategies for doing this. That is to say, in any ESS you should expect cheaters. Cheaters exploit your interpretation and actions within the game rules for their own good. As often as we see long-standing ESSs in nature, we also find these strategies are susceptible to invasion by cheaters.

In fact, cheating or exploiting an ESS is common in nature. The key to success is proportions. Monarch butterflies are common and conspicuous. Flashy monarchs often attract foraging birds, which, once having eaten one, become deathly ill. So ill, in fact, that they will never again prey upon monarchs. Another butterfly exploits this system by cheating on the efforts of the monarch. Viceroy butterflies do not pay the metabolic price of stocking toxins in their bodies, yet still reap benefit from the monarchs' efforts. The system works perfectly for the cheater, but if the birds were to eat a viceroy first, they may never learn to avoid the consequences and the system collapses.

A more titillating example from the animal world comes from freshwater sunfish. During the breeding season males excavate round depressions in the warm shallows of lakes and ponds, from which they display themselves to attract females with eggs. Fertilization in sunfish is external. Females approach male breeding territories and once they approve them, they lay eggs that settle to the bottom of the nest. The males then squirt their sperm over the eggs. Small males cheat by sporting gravid female markings and behaviors. They look and act like they are prepared to lay eggs for the male, but once permitted access to a male's territory they spray their own sperm over the cached eggs and swim away before the larger territorial male realizes he's been had by a transvestite.

In both cases it's important to realize the significance of proportions. If there are too many viceroys, the chances of eating a safe butterfly first go up enough to cause the collapse of the system. If there are too many transvestite sunfish, the territorial males become more discriminating and the transvestite option disappears. So cheaters are part and parcel of any ESS as long as they stay below a certain percentage of the general population.

Including cheaters in ESS computer models illustrates an interesting fact. Not only do the invaded ESS systems continue unabated, they can support up to 1/3 of the players as cheaters. That means that for every nine smiling aliens that cruse into the solar system, as many as three of them could be powering up their weapons as they attend our catered welcome dinner.

So we dream about Space Invaders, rows of malevolent crab creatures scuttling lockstep toward our great cities. Their implacable phalanx shifts right and left, lobbing nuclear missiles, their ships caterwauling through the sky. As frantic and accurate as we are able to return fire, eventually we get overrun. We are always overrun. They out-gun, out-tech, outnumber Earth forces and will not stop before we are enslaved.

We might give lip service to the idea of gentle ETs with a sweet tooth for Reese's Pieces. But we harbor misgivings. It's just as easy to imagine gluey reptiles with exoskeletons, pulse weapons, and a hankering for human flesh, which probably reflects a deep, instinctual understanding of what could be coming our way. However we finally meet up with aliens, we will assuredly find ourselves in a game of Prisoner's Dilemma.

In fact, we come pre-adapted for interaction in a galactic community. Homo sapiens arose in a world with several contemporary lines of intelligent humans. Those that were more aggressive and so less trustworthy might have been opposed or avoided to death. On the other hand, the more trusting ones were probably exploited to extinction. Whatever the balance, we have negotiated it and our psychology itself reflects it.

Look around the room, whatever room you are reading in right now, and see shades of people that might have been there with you but aren't. They belong to the tribes that lost, the species that never were. Your guys won. Don't feel too bad about that. Your guys weren't too aggressive; they just weren't too passive, either.

So when we meet the aliens, what do we do? If they are experienced, they will not be too ready to trust us. If we have thought things through, we should not be too ready to trust them either. The trick will be to find the mutually beneficial road to prosperity while holding our cards close.

Traversing rapidly through the orbits of the gas giants, and then the asteroids and Mars, the alien ship finally inserts itself into a cislunar orbit. The Earth's billions watch as the shining object hangs above. Strange chatter bleeds through radio and television frequencies from the halls of power in Washington, D.C., to thatch-roofed huts scattered throughout the Congo Basin. There is a quiet calm from Palestine and Baghdad, a pause in the Ukraine and Ohio. Something wonderful may happen soon. But let's keep our powder dry.

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I was walking through town one day when a man in front of me, a stranger, keeled over. He fell without buckling or bending and the crack as his head hit the concrete echoed off the shop windows. I went to help him up and his body was rigid, like warm, cloth-covered bone. He was only a little guy, but when he threw his arm over my shoulders so I could lever him up it was like being held by steel. Well, I got him on his feet and he dusted himself off and I never saw him again. But I can still recall the moment that his arm latched onto me, the strength of that grip, the brief but scary conviction that I'd made an awful mistake.

AS WE CROSSED THE LOBBY, I shot a glance at the corner where the doorman used to sit. Lord knows why: we'd sacked him months ago, and anyway the guy had a sight defect and about three words of English. The chances of him noticing that I had a gun pressed to my kidneys were low and the chances of him doing anything about it were sub-zero.

As we rode the lift to the eleventh floor, I could feel the emptiness of the building all around me. When I'd moved in, this had been one of the most desirable addresses in the city. Today, I could have bought it outright for half my first down-payment, and the only souls still here were cranks like Mrs Meyerhoffer and fools like me, too habit-bound to move.

Out in the corridor there was only Economy Lighting, and the afternoon was gloomier than twilight. I thought about making a dash for it, but the odds did not seem good. My new friend might have looked like a derelict when I had lifted him out of the snow, but he'd moved fast enough once my arms were round his shoulders. Acts of sudden rashness seemed unwise.

"I'm reaching for my keys," I said as we stopped by the front door. I'd already sussed that he was almost as nervous as me, and I wanted to keep things calm. I had this recurring vision of something startling him and my guts coming out through my shirt.

Just then, a scream rang out. Not me, something from upstairs. It was deafening and bestial and it was followed by the sounds of huge hands battering the walls.

"What in the name of God--?"

"Orangutan," I said. "She's got baboons up there as well and they sound a bit alike, but that's definitely the orangutan. She calls him Charlie."

I got the idea I was not scoring too highly on his credibility meter. I tried to elaborate.

"It's Mrs Meyerhoffer's menagerie. She owns the top two floors, turned the place into a zoo. She's got hippopotamuses in there. Baboons, gibbons, you name it."

"You're having me on."

What could I say? Most people don't believe me when I say there's a zoo in my building. They don't understand how much you can do if you've more cash than the average country and are as nutty as a macadamia plantation.

"I presume you want to go inside," I said.

It was only after I'd put my shoulder to the door that it occurred to me that I should have mentioned Mrs Vichey.

"Back so soon?" she said. She sounded irked, as if she had got to an especially good bit of her campaign to destroy my livelihood and was aggrieved at being interrupted.

And then she saw the gun.

I think all of us were surprised by what happened next. Maybe I'm old and think in stereotypes, but I hadn't expected someone from the tax department to be capable of such quick, decisive action.

On the wall behind my desk was a big yellow panic button, linked to the local cop shop. It was a good fifteen yards from where Mrs Vichey had been sitting, but from a standing start, she got within a foot of hitting it.

There was a blur at the corner of my eye and the feel of something cold being pressed against my temple.

"Don't try it! Don't even think about it. Your hand touches that button and I'll blow his head away."

This struck me as little unfair. It also suffered from a serious logical flaw. It would have been fine if Barbara Vichey had liked me, but Barbara didn't like me. In fact, so long as they did not come within two or three feet of her sharply-pressed suit, I'd say that the sight of my brains being splashed across the wallpaper could only lend enchantment to her day.

She stood there for a couple of seconds that felt like an awful lot longer, and finally sat down.

"Smart move," he said. And to me: "What the hell is she doing here?"

Which had been more or less my reaction when she'd turned up at my door with accusations and a total disclosure warrant.

"This is Barbara Vichey. She's a tax inspector."

To my surprise, that earned me a grin.

"You're having a bad day, aren't you, Peter? This some more of your past coming back to haunt you?"

"Apparently so," I said. "I'm afraid you're going to have to make your own introductions; I don't believe we've previously had the pleasure."

For reasons I've never quite fathomed, in times of peril my mind insists on acting like it's at a cocktail party.

"Oh come on, Peter. You're not going to pretend you don't know me. Not after all these years. Not after all the things you've done to me."

"What things?" said Barbara Vichey.

Wrong question, I thought. Definitely the wrong question.

"How many years?" I said. Had to be safer, surely.

"You really don't remember, do you? It's been more than thirty years since we met. Thirty years that you've been screwing up my life. September '89, start of Michaelmas term."

My memory did this funny little slip, and for a moment he was back on the pavement with his coat spread around him, only it wasn't a coat, it was an academic gown, and the face that grew out of the neck of that gown was the lean, eager face of Otto--

"Otto Anderson!" I exclaimed. "My God, I don't believe it. You look so different." The cocktail corner of my brain had just gone into suicide mode. "What have you been doing with yourself?"

"That's an odd way of putting it. Kind of self-serving. I mean, we both know it's not what I've done that's left me like this. It's what you've done to me."

"And what has he done to you?" said Barbara. She wasn't just making small talk, she really wanted to know. She was obviously determined to slot Otto into the pattern of conspiracy her department had built around me.

"It's not just what, Ms Vichey. If it was just a question of what, I could put it down to bad luck. It's a question of when as well. When all these miserable things occurred. Let me try a couple of dates." He straightened his shoulders, and I was reminded of how he'd looked in tutorials when he'd clamber onto his hind legs and dazzle us with some show of erudition.

"April 27th 1994, December 13th 1999, November 10th 2004, March 12th 2006." A darting glance at Barbara. "Those dates mean anything to you?"

Bastard's still sharp, I thought. Whatever else might have happened to Otto, he'd not lost his powers of perception. Of course those dates meant something to Barbara; most of them appeared on the Anomalous Transactions Report which had brought her into my life.

"Money," she said. "They're all to do with money."

Close but no cigar, I thought. None of this had anything to do with money. Not the way that she was imagining it, anyway.

"March 12th," she mused. "Was the day that five and a half million U.S. dollars were wired into Mr Congreve's current account."

"March 11th," I countered, "Was the day I liquidized my Q-Bit stock; nothing illegal about it."

"I know about that stock," said Otto. "When you bought into Q-Bit they were worth three bits a share. When you sold, their value had grown by around two thousand per cent. You must have been pretty pleased."

"I felt I'd done well. And I felt I deserved to do well. I bought those shares when the company was worth zip. I held on when other people sold. I backed their research with my cash. When it paid off, I deserved a share."

"Must be nice to get what you deserve. Do you want to know what happened to me on March 12th 2006? Do you want to know what happened to my family?"

No, I thought, I don't want to know about it. I wasn't sure where this was going, except it was nowhere good.

"At about three in the afternoon a man called Leo Zellig was driving his car along the road that ran past my daughter's school. It was a fine day with good visibility. The car was two years old, in sound mechanical order. Mr Zellig was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He was driving in excess of the speed limit but only by a couple of miles. The court and the accident investigators both agreed that speed was not a decisive factor in what happened.

"Nor was carelessness on the part of my daughter. Trudi had a clarinet exam that day and she was preoccupied, but not so much that she forget her Green Cross Code. All the witnesses agreed that she did nothing wrong when she stepped onto the crossing. If the brakes on Zellig's car hadn't failed there would never have been an accident."

Just then, the lights flicked, dimmed, and came back again. One of Mrs Meyerhoffer's animals let out a screech.

"The car hit my daughter at thirty-five miles an hour. One of her arms and both her legs were broken. She sustained a range of injuries, but the worst was caused by the impact of her skull against the road."

His voice was unnaturally calm. He might have been reading the details out of a local paper.

"She spent three weeks in intensive care, had five operations. She is twenty-four now, but her vocabulary is that of a six year old and is never going to get any better. All the time she was in hospital, the doctors kept telling us how lucky we were: lucky she was still alive at all."

"That's a terrible thing," said Barbara. She hesitated. "But I don't see what it's got to do with Mr Congreve. Are you saying he was responsible for the accident?"

"I wasn't even in the country that day."

"What the hell difference does that make? It's not like I think you went and sawed through the brake cables."

"So what are you accusing me of?"

Before he could answer, all the lights went out. Not just in our building. Half the city must have gone off-line. There was a timeless moment as we waited to see if they would come back up again, then the animals started screaming and Anderson started shouting.

"Nobody move! Especially you, you piece of rancid turd." Somehow, I just knew he was speaking to me. "I know where you're sitting. I've got the gun pointing at your heart. If I hear you moving, if I even think you're moving I'll shoot and keep on shooting. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you," I yelled back, wondering how he was going to hear me or anything else over the tumult from upstairs. "Don't do anything stupid. Everything's going to be cool."

Eventually the lights came back, the animals quietened down. But the power seemed faltering and I reckoned it wouldn't be long before it went for good. Anderson clearly had the same idea. He put his free hand in his pocket and pulled out a small, blue box which turned out to be a clothesline dispenser. He threw it to Barbara.

"Use this to tie him to the chair. Do it properly. I'll be inspecting the knots and if there's anything tricky about them I'll put a bullet through one of your ankles."

The promise of violence turned out to be redundant. I don't know what they're teaching on Civil Service courses these days, but I reckon Houdini would have had trouble with those knots.

"Now it's your turn," he told her. "I'm going to put the gun down and I'm going to tie you up. Don't try to struggle. If you do, you'll get hurt. Understand?"

Barbara nodded. "Mr Anderson," she said "I know that what happened to your daughter was an awful, awful thing."

"Yes," he said. "It was."

"But surely you can see it was an accident? A dreadful, miserable accident."

"An accident?" I could see his face twitching. It looked like someone was making him smile via electrodes in his cheeks. "Maybe I could believe that if it wasn't for the date. If it wasn't for all of the dates. Listen. On August 25th, 2004, this git was made Operations Director of his company after the previous incumbent was attacked by an alligator while on holiday. That same day I was due to attend a job interview. I never got to go. My house was hit by lightning. I was in the shower and suffered second degree burns over ten percent of my body.

"The same day that his self-help guide Screw Your Way To Success was published, my wife entered hospital for a routine operation. The book spent sixteen months on the best-seller list. My wife contracted a superbug and spent six months in hospital while they tried to stop her pancreas from turning into slush.

"On 15th May 2011 Peter walked into an antique fair and paid 120 quid for what turned out to be an piece of Wedgewood fashioned by Josiah himself which ended up selling for eighty thousand dollars. On 15th May 2011 my father-in-law walked into a McDonald's. While he was queuing for his food he and nine other people got shot by a nutter with an AK-47.

"Three start-up companies, all majority-owned by Peter attained blue chip status the same day that the mobile home we'd been forced to move into got burned to pieces during a freak accident when a badger got ingested by the engine. We'd had to move into the home after my boss caught salmonella at a party that we'd thrown."

I didn't ask what marvellous successes I was supposed to have been having while Otto was poisoning his employer. I knew there was bound to be something. Nor did I point out that I buy around a hundred pieces of porcelain a year and the Wedgewood was the only one I'd ever made a killing on; or that I had written three books before Screw was a success. Otto wasn't here to listen to reason.

"Do I have to say more? Do I have to say any more?"

He was panting, sweating, swaying on his feet. His eyes were rolling like Ping-Pong balls in a pan of boiling water.

Barbara, who'd sat silent throughout this recitation, forced her jaw back into an upright position and said: "That is an--" she was struggling for the word "--An astonishing list of misfortunes. But surely they were all accidents?" She looked to me for support, but I just looked right back. If she wanted to argue with Otto she could do it on her own. "I don't like Mr Congreve. I'm happy to admit it. I think he's a crook and a swindler and most of his success comes from insider dealing, false accounting and possibly worse things too. But I don't see how he can be responsible for the things you have described."

"I know you don't, Mrs Vichey. That's why he's been able to get away with it."

He swung around to point at me the way that prosecutors do at the climax of courtroom movies, only with a .45 in place of the traditional finger. "But he knows! He knows perfectly well. You do know, don't you? Don't you?"

I could have tried to bluff, but sometimes there's just no point.

"Yes, all right, I know. I know why I'm responsible." After all these years, it felt good to confess. Not astonishingly good, not like sex or cocaine, but as good as a warm bath or taking off your shoes at the end of a long day. "That is, I know why you think I am responsible. This is all to do with Bletchly, isn't it?"

"Who's Bletchly?" said Barbara, but Otto was nodding like a teacher who's seen a mediocre student crack an unusually tough puzzle.

"Did you know he was dead?" he said.

"I saw it in the papers." It had given me a nasty turn, and not for sentimental reasons. Three weeks before the obituaries appeared I'd had a letter from him, first one in years. After I'd read it I started looking over my shoulder every time I went out.

"Bill Bletchly," said Otto, and even after all these years I could still hear the respect in his voice.

"Our professor at Oxford."

"One of our professors."

"One of our professors, sure. It's not as if we were even on the same course, was it? I was reading Maths, Otto was reading Physics. Didn't matter. If you were doing any kind of science course, attendance at Bletchly's lectures was just about mandatory."

"He was a truly great man," said Otto. "He was the man with the Knowledge."

"That was surely true," I said. "Bletchly had the answer to the biggest scientific problem of the time."

"Which was?"

Otto and I answered in unison.

"How to get funding, of course."

"The man was a financial wizard," I said. "He had strategies for turning arcane maths into fully paid research that most people couldn't even follow let alone emulate."

"Not just government money, either," said Otto. "He could get businesses to stump up cash for his stuff. He was an authentic, one hundred per cent genius."

"He had to be," I said. "How else could a man like that have possibly held down a job?"

Even by the standards of Oxford colleges, Bletchly had been ... special. He was a foul-mouthed gnome who turned up to lectures looking as if he kept his clothes in a pile and got dressed by picking out garments until he was more-or-less decent. When Otto and I were privileged enough to be invited to his rooms for sessions of Real Education we were delighted to learn that this really was how he got dressed.

In spite of the stained, foul-smelling underwear that lay around the place, being allowed to experience Bletchly's Real Ed sessions was widely regarded as the pinnacle of education at Oxford. The sessions were free-ranging discussions divorced from curriculum, convention, or, quite frequently, reality. They were oiled by libations of Growling Magician, a sinister concoction which Bletchly brewed in his bathroom. Hops, malt and barley were the principal components, supplemented, according to rumour, by dubiously legal hallucinogenics. It was after imbibing a particularly lethal quantity of Growler that Otto and I fell into the discussion which would lead to me being tied to a chair while my one-time friend pointed a gun at my chest.

I said, "Do you want me to tell her this part, or would you like to talk for a while?"

"You carry on," said Otto. "I want to see how you'll re-write this bit so you don't look like a turd."

I had been wondering about that myself. I said: "The idea we came up with was that when one was looking at Complex Adaptive Systems--"

"That means systems where the relationship between input and output is distorted by chaotic interactions and variable feedback loops," Anderson interrupted.

Good God! I thought. Was he still doing that? It had always been the same; he'd invite you to talk and then get bored by the slowness of your mind and insist on butting in.

"In other words," I said "Any kind of system which moves from the simplicity of the lab into the messiness of real life. Bletchly said that in situations where the complexity of interactions exceeded our ability to build mathematical models then the laws of probability should no longer be considered as a form of mathematics. They should be considered--"

"As a form of accountancy," Anderson chipped in.

I glared at him.

"Do you want me to tell this story?"

"Not if you're going to make such a meal of it. Shorn of the fancy language, Bletchly's idea was simple. He said the reason mathematicians failed to come up with tractable equations to describe water turbulence or stock markets or horse races was not because the systems were complex--"

"Although, of course, the systems are complex," I said.

"Yeah, but that's not the point. The point is these systems are overly complex. They are deliberately over-engineered to let smart operators fiddle with the rules."

Now, that caught Barbara's attention. I'd no idea how good her maths was, but I'd bet she could recognise the concept of a fiddle with her gut.

"You're saying that it's possible to tweak the laws of probability?"

"Tweak," said Otto, "Is a mild term for what he had in mind. Bletchly said that the maths of chaotic systems was like corporate accounting. After a critical threshold, the numbers lose all relation to reality. Input-output functions fracture, triumph and disaster blur into each other, and with the slightest slip of the pen you can flip from one into the other."

"According to Bletchly," I said. "God did not merely play dice, he deliberately rigged the game."

"You must have all been very drunk," said Barbara.

In the room above our heads I could hear something heavy thudding on the floor and a stressed-out voice shouting, "Damn it, just stay put!"

"I guess we were," I said. "But even without the Growler it would have been an intoxicating idea. I mean, anyone who's studied the way reality works knows that life is not just random and unfair."

"Well," said Otto. "A lot of life is pretty damn unfair."

"Yes," I said. "But it isn't really random. Luck, like most things else, is not distributed evenly. Some people have more than their share, and if you come in at the A-level, you can shift it from one place to another."

"From one person to another," said Anderson.

He sounded shocked, and I knew why. It was because I had mentioned the forbidden term. A-level. Audit-level. Bletchly had let it slip at the end of our discussion. Just the one mention, and afterwards he always denied it. Sometimes he'd make a joke, say he couldn't talk too much or the Auditors would hear. But he always looked spooked when he said it. Something of his attitude must have rubbed off on us; in all the hours we worked on the theory, I don't think we mentioned the A word more than twice.

"You took him seriously?" said Barbara. "Seriously enough to try and develop the theory?"

"Of course," said Otto. "Who wouldn't? It felt like we'd been given the key to the universe. Fools always say: it's not the luck, it's how you use it; but smart people know that enough good luck will overcome any adversity. We could be the Bill Gates of good luck. How could we not try and make that dream real?"

"Did it never occur to you that your professor might be playing a game, testing your gullibility?"

"It occurred to us, sure, but we thought that if he had been playing with us, he would have carried on playing. Dropped more hints, fed us more lines. He wouldn't have just clammed up. Besides, it wasn't a delusion, was it? The evidence is clear. The evidence of Peter's life. The evidence of mine. All those years I was trying to accumulate a little extra luck, he was stealing it from me. He was stealing my luck. And now I want it back."

Very gently, I said, "Otto, old man, I haven't a clue what you're on about."

"Of course not," he sneered. "You never knew anything about anything, did you, Peter? I suppose you'll be telling me next that you've never seen one of these before?"

He pulled this thing out of his coat and brandished it before me. If I had seen it under any other circumstances I would have burst out laughing. It looked like someone had tried to construct a sceptre from things in a junk shop. There was a big, cracked, crystal ball at one end and bits of printed circuit gummed at haphazard angles to the sides. There were lengths of coloured cable which ended with crocodile clips. There were tiny pentagrams fashioned from silver wire. There were chopped up bits of tarot card sticking out on pins, and something like a dirty cotton wool ball which I couldn't quite identify.

"I built this," said Otto. His voice was triumphant but his eyes were furtive: at least some part of him seemed aware of the discrepancy between the fancy mathematics and actual machine. "All my own work. Mine."

Somehow, that didn't surprise me. The device was clearly the product of a mind that had fallen off its trolley and landed terribly badly.

"Very nice," I said. "The--um--the decorations?"

I had just worked out what the cotton wool thing was: it was a decaying rabbit's foot. He had the grace to look embarrassed. "Yes. I did those as well. I thought they might help."

"Help?" said Barbara.

"When it didn't work. When I tried to use it and it didn't bloody work. I thought that if I maybe, you know..."

His voice trailed off. His eyes were dazed and confused. It felt like he really wasn't with us at all. He was off in some other place, a world that still made sense. He snapped back with a jerk. "I didn't know! I didn't understand that the machine was going wrong because it was being sabotaged. All those years, all those times I've just tried to get a little bit of luck for myself, you were there in the background screwing it up for me."

"Otto, I didn't even know you were alive."

"I don't care!" he howled. "It had to be you. It had to be. If it wasn't you stealing my luck then why else would it never work?"

"It didn't work because you're a fruitcake," I yelled back. Not a tactful response, but I couldn't think of any other way to answer. "You're an obsessive, delusional fruitcake. This whole thing is made up out of your head. Isn't that right, Barbara?"

Appealing to an impartial outsider felt like such a smart idea. But it wasn't. I saw her hesitation. So did Otto Anderson.

"She doesn't think so." The coldness in his voice was like the kiss of snow on glass.

"Yes I do," she said. "I wouldn't have put it quite the way that Peter did but--"

He turned the gun towards her.

"No, you don't. You don't think I'm mad." I watched him cross the room and kneel down next to her. "And I want to know why not."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Wrong answer," he said and placed the muzzle of the gun up against the skin of her wrist. "Do you want to try again? Or do you want to say goodbye to your hand?"

His finger was white on the trigger.

I learned something about myself, then. I learned that even if someone had come into my life with the intention of doing me harm, I couldn't just sit there and let that someone be hurt. I think I feel good about that.

I said: "She knows you're not mad because she's seen a machine like yours before."

He didn't move. Didn't even blink. After a long, long pause he ground out a single word.

"Where?"

"In the bedroom. She must have seen it when she went though my things." That was a guess, but it made sense. Never leave a sneak alone with your possessions, not if you value your privacy. Another long pause. Then Otto said: "You made one?"

"Yes."

I was hoping for anger. I was hoping for abuse. Hell, I was just hoping for any kind of reaction. This total deadness was infinitely scary. He climbed to his feet.

"I think I should like to see it."

We listened to the sound of drawers being pulled out, nice things being broken. There was a purple gasp, and then a hectic silence. And then the sounds of further breakages. Nothing systematic this time. Otto wasn't searching any more. He was simply trashing my home.

"Nice try," said Barbara. "You almost had me fooled."

"What?" I had not got a clue what she meant.

"This whole set up. This thing with transferable luck. It's so screwy it's almost convincing."

I was still baffled. Several more things got shattered before I clicked. Even when I'd got it, I couldn't really believe it.

"Do you seriously believe he and I made this up? That we set this up to distract your investigation? You think I had the time and the imagination to invent a thing like this?"

It was her turn to stare. She stared real hard. But eventually, she crumbled.

"I guess not. But I really hoped you had."

"Why, for God's sake?"

"Because if you and Otto were in this together, he would only be pretending to be mad."

I heard the fear in her voice. She did the tough thing well, but deep down she was as scared as me.

"Don't worry," I said. "I don't think he is mad. Not entirely, anyway."

The noises from the bedroom suggested that Otto was kicking my bed to pieces.

"That thing in your bedroom." she sad.

"Yes?"

"What is it?"

Before I could answer, Otto reappeared. There was something in his hand. I've described it once, so I won't go thought it again, except to point out that my version didn't look like it had been built by a drug-dependent schizoid with motor-control problems. Otto's fingers were running over the shaft. His face was livid with rage.

"Look at it," he breathed. "It must be bursting with luck."

"Honestly, it isn't."

"My luck. My luck that you stole." He raised the Fortune Stick high above his head.

"Don't do it," I said. "You really do not want to do it."

But, of course, the moron had to do it anyway. He pulled back his arm and sent my machine hurtling through the air. It hit the wall and shattered. I suppose that the bang was simply due to the vacuum which the crystal ball contained, but it sounded a lot louder; it sounded like a bomb had gone off. There was a moment of broken-eared silence and then all the creatures upstairs started screeching at once.

"And now all that luck is loose in the world."

I could hardly hear him over the animals. He was waving his device around as though it was a torch or a vacuum cleaner and he couldn't quite figure out which it was or what he was meant to do with it.

"Loose and there to be gathered in by me."

"You stupid prick!" I shouted, but he didn't hear and I don't suppose he'd have paid any attention if he had.

"It's all going to be mine," he sighed. "Think about that. Think about that, you bastard."

I was thinking about it. But mostly I was thinking about the gun and what he was likely to do with it now he no longer had any reason for keeping me alive. He oozed across the room and positioned himself behind my right shoulder. "Close your eyes," he said.

I'm not going to repeat what I said. I'll just confess that I didn't face death with either pride or dignity.

The bang, when it came, was almost enough to give me a heart attack and several awful seconds passed before I realised that he had not actually shot me. He had tipped the chair over and left me face down on the floor. He did the same to Barbara. Then he went and opened the window. The thin, sad sounds of a once-vibrant city drifted into the room, along with a flurry of snow and a bitter wind.

It had been six below zero outside and that was before the sun had dropped below the skyline. Anderson was fiddling with the thermostat and I felt pretty confident he wasn't turning it up. He knelt beside me and whispered, "You could always try calling for help." We were both aware of the emptiness of the building, both aware that the only human ears belonged to Mrs Meyerhoffer and she had problems of her own. "Maybe you'll get lucky and somebody will come." He clambered to his feet. "Oh, I forgot. You're not going to get lucky, are you? Not ever again. That's all for me now."

"What about me?" said Barbara.

For a moment, I saw him hesitate. There was a look of uncertainty, maybe even compassion.

"Sorry," he said, and left.

I waited until I was sure that he wasn't coming back and then gave vent to my feelings. It took a while and it was solid, colourful stuff. Barbara cut me off.

"I'm sure that's all very satisfying but it's not really helping. We need to get ourselves upright before we freeze to death."

I said, "Unless you've got talents as an escapologist then all we can do is wait. I don't suppose it'll be long before people show up to investigate the accident."

"What accident?"

I don't know, precisely. But I have an idea that it's going to be spectacular. I just hope he gets clear of the building before whatever it is happens. The stupid, arrogant, pig-headed..."

"What are you on about?"

"Coming around here, waving guns in my face, spattering me with abuse. What had I done to him?"

"Apart from stealing his luck and ruining his life?"

"I never stole his luck. I never stole anyone's luck."

"So you weren't manipulating the laws of probability?"

"Of course I was, but it never had anything to do with good luck. You can't cook the books with good luck. It's too hard. Too many things have to fall into place. The auditors get suspicious. If you're going to play the numbers, you have to focus on bad luck. There's so much more of it. So many more ways that things can screw up than they can turn up right. That's what happened to Otto. For thirty years I've been taking my ill fortune and dumping it onto the world at large and he's been using his machine to suck it all back up again."

I wondered how much more I should say. Should I mention Bletchly's last letter, where he'd reiterated his concerns about the Auditors? Should I tell her that since that letter I'd not dared to discharge my machine in case somebody, somewhere was paying special attention? Probably best not to. Best to keep it simple.

Barbara said: "And now it's out in the world again; all that stored ill fortune."

"Not for long. It won't stay loose for long. Luck is like lightning. It wants to ground itself."

Just then, there came a particularly ferocious bellow, followed by the sounds of an iron cage buckling under pressure. The floor above our heads thundered and shook. Then there came a crash and a scream of animal panic as one of the last elephants on Earth went plummeting past the window. I was sure I only imagined the splat. But I was equally sure it had happened.

I thought: Man Killed By Elephant Falling Out Of Skyscraper. That was unlucky, all right. Even in these days of lousy fortune that was seriously bad luck.

We sat in the dark and listened for the sirens.

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Several years ago, a friend of mine said to me, why is it in science fiction that whenever they engineer a new race, they're always less intelligent that humanity? If we can kink DNA and build new people, why don't we make them smarter? Out of this idea arose the Salusa, a race produced by humanity's remodelling of their own DNA. "Angels of War" is part of a cycle of stories featuring the aftermath of a global conflict when the Salusa rise up against their indentured service to human corporations.

MUMBAI AT NIGHT is a dream, a delusion of shadows and heat, of bright lights and motion. There are people everywhere, small and dark, sliding past in ground cars, jabbering in a hundred tongues, laughing and drunk.

Fenner walks through them, gliding on Nembutal and bright Thorazine. The drugs spread his emotions out, blunting their edge, but the anger's always there, weighty and strong. His anger brightens the golden light of Mumbai's cinemas and powers the thunder of her ancient arcade parlours.

Tonight is the first night of Diwali, the Festival of Light, and Fenner walks through a tumult of carhorns and jangling bangra music, of beggars, zealots and Shiv Sena thugs. He hears it all, but does no talking.

He turns at random through pungent fish stalls and Gujurati restaurants. The street smells become a blend of buttery ghee, cumin and coriander.

Asha is with him. Asha is everywhere, in the bombsites and garbage-strewn lots. The memory of his dead wife chases Fenner, a single phosphor in the Festival of Light, burning with her own death.

By midmorning, Fenner is still walking. He crosses a canal between the Arabian Sea and rows of mansions. The faded marble town houses appear to sag beneath a black hieroglyph that sweeps the skyline. A landing torus for suborbital shuttles, the hieroglyph's switchback arcs are pure Salusan elegance.

The day is blistering hot already. The sunlight is a physical presence, frying away last night's Nembutal drift. With his eyes squinting, Fenner reaches a fruit stand beneath a beach umbrella. The umbrella bears a moving Campari advert and is big enough for four people. The vendor smiles good-naturedly, teeth bright in his dark face. Fenner watches the waiting men. One is V.J. Choudhary, a mayor of Mumbai; the other is white and a stranger.

V.J., stick-thin and balding, bids Fenner good day. "Nomastagi." His formality is a warning. "Here is colonel Bishop."

The colonel smiles, his eyes glowing a relaxed blue above his slim moustache. "Heard you're from Detroit, Mr Fenner. Little different for you here."

Fenner ignores that and sits, impatient already.

Bishop nods, accepting the slight as welcome enough. Neither of the men is sweating. V.J.'s a native and Bishop sounds Midwestern, perhaps used to searing Kansan summers. Only Fenner is damp with the day's regular draining sweat.

V.J. says, "The colonel has news for us."

Bishop smiles again. "We've come to clean house. Got a deserter downtown who went over to the Salusa during the war."

"You came to Mumbai for that?" Fenner asks.

"Not exactly. Our boy's American and Uncle Sam's got a fair trial and a sharp needle waiting in D.C."

Bishop is amiable and relaxed, but his gaze is all over Fenner. His eyes are both intent and amused.

Fenner barely controls himself. This up-town prep school asshole is due for an ass kicking. "Who is the boy?"

"Herbert Hatcher," Bishop says.

V.J. grunts, gathering some detail that passes Fenner by.

"The Nakarja commune is the only organised group in Mumbai--apart from the commies and fascists." Bishop's eyes flick to V.J. and back. "Good practice dictates we don't step on any toes. If you can get hold of Hatcher we want him back. We'll go into partnership with you guys."

"Indeed," V.J. says. "Partnership. Opportunity for all."

Bishop gets to his feet. "Uh huh." Standing, he's a fussy child, adjusting the creases in his khakis. "The U.N. pays top dollar rewards for Salusan contraband. We could all make a little money, right?" He gives them yet another easy, slightly stained smile. "I have a lieutenant here called Andy Mason. He'll be your liaison."

A ripple of distortion washes his body and his hologram flips black and white. It turns on its side, flat as a playing card, and is gone.

In reflex, Fenner looks at the sky, seeing only the Salusan torus' wide arms, reaching up for the burning penny of the sun.

Fenner pops with pinheads of sweat. "What is this shit?"

V.J. starts up a Marlboro. "Hologram emitter sent by carrier wave from Washington. Low orbit satellite. Look for fraction of second delay next time."

Heat burns Fenner's face at Bishop's arrogance. "Good practice dictates..."

"Bishop is colonel in Special Intelligence. Too important to send here himself. Salusan Intelligence expert." He snorts, as if there could be any such thing. "When the Salusa left the Earth there was no explanations. It is possible, is it not, that they leave men like Hatcher behind to spy?" V.J.'s reasonable, step-by-step tone only ratchets up Fenner's anger. He wants to lean over and shout at him to stop fucking around.

"Herbert Hatcher is a man who buy and sell anything--ration book, weapons, V.R. time--why not information too?" The mayor exhales twin streams of smoke. "There are things no one know about America and Salusa."

"And what the fuck are those?" Fenner says, more angry than he himself expects.

V.J.'s calm stare is only disturbed by his left eye's bruise from a microsurgically replaced cornea. "The Salusa destroyed Texas and Florida. America is hurt too. But what has happen afterward?" V.J. spits loose tobacco from his Marlboro. "The Salusa go. Twenty-one hundred hours GMT across the globe they stop fight and are gone from Earth. Off to Jupiter." V.J. shrugs. "No one know why they behave like they do. Are they come back? Will the war resume?"

V.J.'s words are hard to care about. Words didn't send Fenner to the camps and kill his wife.

V.J. says, "This man Hatcher has a Salusan."

Fenner's head feels full of spiders, buzzing behind his eyes.

"Bishop is here to find him," V.J. says. "Not Hatcher."

"That's not all, is it?"

"No. This is more important than another one Salusan. U.S. have no need of being polite with us. They may shut down the Nakarja commune--they see no difference in us and Indian Communist Alliance." He smiles, his face creasing in unpleasant caramel wrinkles at Fenner's lack of understanding.

V.J. tries a different line. "The Americans are your people, yes?"

"I thought I was your people."

V.J. ignores this. "Pick a driver from Nakarja. This man Hatcher has made contact also. He says he wants to deal with us. Meet Hatcher at Byculla cafe. Bring him to us, not Americans."

The talking stops and maybe the bullshitting does too. Or not. Fenner stares at the bright sky again. The Salusa are up there somewhere, beyond Earth's orbit and humanity's reach. They're said to be waiting on the edge of the solar system. But if there's a Salusan trapped here, alone in Mumbai, he belongs to Fenner now, and to the memory of Asha.

The Salusa were smart, a new order of intelligence.

Fenner remembered life before their cutting-edge genius. He was old enough to grow up jobless and washed-out in Detroit--with the assembly lines of Dodge Main and GM long gone. After American and Jap geneticists developed the Salusa, their patents flooded the earth: cheap fusion, interplanetary travel and supersonic monorails across the ocean bed. At thirty-two, Fenner had started over, following their economic boom to Asia. He worked on boats harvesting plankton in the Sea of Japan, then did maintenance in Bengal Bay on their orbital launcher. Finally he wound up cleaning floors in the Kerala space project, south of Mumbai.

The Salusa, busy kinking cancer cells and reforesting the Sahara, had by accident rescued Fenner from Detroit. They shrank the world till even he could travel across it. He came to India, just another face among the country's billion raucous voices. No one was looking for him, no one knew what he'd done back in Detroit.

He arrived in Mumbai in the heat before monsoon, the city stifling like heavy mink. Each morning was thick with languor, each day clamorous and fevered.

Asha came to him, dark as a moonless night. Her brown eyes were so bright they could be lit with the same phosphor as the tree stumps on Walkeswar Drive. Asha showed him how to make up for lost time. To begin again in Mumbai.

And Mumbai, confident Americans predicted, would see the birth of the New Asia--now that the U.S. had sold them the Salusa.

The Salusa were hairless albinos, fertilised in test-tubes. They were force-grown from altered human DNA and bred for intelligence. Fenner never met one till the war. But in HV and on flatscreen, the Salusa carried themselves with the silent presence of priests, confident of their own genius, and above physical prowess. They were also indentured labour and almost humanity's friends.

Since the war, Fenner has remained in the arc of their ingenuity. He spends his days in a commune shadowed by a Salusan geodesic. The commune was thrown together after the Salusa grew tired of being almost friends to dim-witted, grasping humanity. They revolted against their masters, shrivelling the earth's cities with fusion weapons and particle beam guns. Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims cursed the Salusa long before war ripped open the world, but a Zoroastrian priest told Fenner, "Even Salusa deserve justice."

Fenner saw Salusan justice last year. He'd been on a street called Potters' Row when they stoned fleeing Indians with teflon marbles. He saw Salusa in hulking exoskeletons shovel aside broken corpses, their railguns spitting liquid fire. Fenner ran into a piss-stained alley to hide. An exploding railgun shell sent bodies slamming over him. He was buried beneath a tide of wet body parts, till he was wedged into their still beating mass. He lay on his face, unable to breathe. He was trapped in the dark, his mouth wet where severed limbs twitched reflexively.

He fought to see, fought to turn his face away and then, more frantically, to suck a single breath. An arm that was cut flat as a ham stroked his face. Fenner tore neck muscles trying to break free.

He screamed till his throat bled and lights burst in his eyes like every Diwali all at once. He was screaming until the next thing he saw were pink tracers shining on the satin finish of Salusan visors. Gently humming exoskeletal arms gathered him up. The survivors of Potters Row were the indentured labour now. They were bio robots, part of the Salusan war machine.

The Salusa lasered a barcode to Fenner's shoulder and set him to work loading bodies into incinerators. They made him stack damp piles of severed arms and legs into burners that ran day and night. The war raged on around him as the Salusa hammered the city, blasting and scouring her streets. He worked on, his fingers caked with the slop of guts and bloated maggots.

The Salusa, methodical in everything, made him batch and sort the bodies. Men from women, children from parents, pyramidal mounds for heads or feet or hands. Soon it was all just meat, spoiled and wet. He tossed the parts to the gleaming furnaces and in one intense flash they were gone.

He was staying alive for Asha. He stared into each face in turn, looking hard, never finding her, and gaining strength to go on.

Chola drives him down town. She's a camp survivor with scars on her belly where her ovaries were cut out by the Salusa. She races their h-cell Jeep between burdened trucks and families in Ambassador saloons, impatient with the city's traffic.

So many people dead and there are still so many cars. Fenner imagines that these rickshaws and electric buggies are empty--just bright scuttling shells--their drivers burned away at the wheel by orbital Pillars-of-Fire.

The traffic runs across broken overpasses and melted tarmac. The damage is a tide of shattered road and pounded earth, the buildings flipped on their heads or stripped down to girders. Jagged concrete rises on all sides till the sky is a pinched rusty ribbon and the rubble itself becomes homes strung with corrugated roofs and rough cut windows. The air is heavy with open sewers, roasting vegetables and scavenged, boxfresh plastics. Naked children dart between craters towards a communal kitchen.

Fenner had told Asha before the war, "Salusa's been pretty good for everyone so far."

His wife smiled, tolerant of his ambitious mouth. "The West always knows what is best for everyone on this planet. You sold us crops we could not afford to eat and pesticides that deformed our children. Now you are giving us the Salusa. Another miracle we will pay for later, husband?"

He hears her words as they drive, then hears her say her own name when they first met, her voice like a distant tune in the empty days since.

The Byculla, beside the Byculla railway station, is a Zoroastrian cafe opened by Iranian émigrés fifty years ago. Its interior is bright with mirrors, white tile and photographs of someone called the Shah of Iran. It stands among a street of rubble, veg stands and buildings that survived at random, including the entire rail station.

The cafe is filled with intent young Hindus, eating syrupy cakes and watching a talking head from the Shiv Sena movement on a fuzzy holoset. The Shiv Sena have always been in Mumbai, spouting fascism and hatred of Muslims, but since the war they've been flexing their muscle as the local police.

Chola is a Muslim and especially affronted by them.

"Someone might have accident there," she says. She looks angry as she pulls a sports bag from under her seat. Fenner will have to watch her among them, but he chose Chola because she has a nose for scrounging Salusan technology. He sends her away on another job.

As she steps away, she glances carefully across the street at a brawny Westerner in a white t-shirt and chinos. The man is buying a kilo of mangoes, grinning at the stallholder. He has an outmodish moustache, drooping round his mouth like brown fur. His arms are explosions of coloured flesh--yinyang symbols, a flaming tropical sun and a wriggling bargirl.

"Lieutenant Andrew Mason," Chola says quietly. "Army assassin."

The Americans are here already, waiting. The man never looks directly at them, but his body is heavy with the excitement of violent expectation.

Fenner sends Chola away. The café was a place to be seen by Mumbai's elite. Now its trade are Hindu militants and shaven-headed Polish sailors from the tankers Gdansk and Walesa. Fenner stands at the doorway, breathing the odour of trapped animals. He flashes for a second--and the people are all leaky sacks of meat sprawled at each table. They're already dead--breathing, eating and ignorant that each day brings them closer to the incinerators.

The sensation dims, as reluctant to release him as a lover in the sultry morning. Mumbai settles back into its usual tattered shape. The street is noisy and grimy. Traffic creeps through the crowds, flowing between the rubble walls and vegetable carts.

When Fenner steps into the café, he hits the intensity of a disturbed stare. It stops him like a stiff arm. Two men sit at a formica table. Hatcher must be the one staring at him. The other man is a sumo-shaped meatboy.

Hatcher is gaunt with stringy hair and a stained caftan. His eyes settle on Fenner, satisfied, shining and wrong.

Herb Hatcher's a deserter from the Saudi Arabian Front. He has a reputation as a dealer in Salusan optical weapons and vivisected human parts--both hanging offences in India.

Before Fenner can get closer, Hatcher rises from his table. His docile muscle boy pulls on an aerated duster coat and follows.

Fenner speaks first. "I know who you are. Who's the meat?"

Hatcher's squat companion stares at Fenner through eyelids the texture of wrinkled leather. "I am Bel," he says in passable English. "Captain Hatcher want offer you shipment."

"Shipment?" Fenner surveys the street vendors among their carts of bruised fruit. "Do you mean the Salusan you got?"

Hatcher's bloodshot eyes narrow. Smoker's wrinkles explode over his cheeks at Fenner's crassness. Bel speaks again. "The captain want reward."

Fenner fixes on Hatcher's reddened eyes, pushing back at the mercurial light within. "The U.S. gives you money. Fucking with Nakarja commune gets you a hanging."

In flawless Hindi, Hatcher replies, "But we're cooperating, boss." His laugh is a manic rising giggle. Hatcher's a basket-case. He ought to be insane; the Salusa put him in a concentration camp. Fenner bets that Hatcher has the same barcode under that grubby white caftan as he does. A Salusan tattoo's a warning. Fenner should shove Hatcher's face into the cafe wall, beat his ass and Bel's too.

And why not? He closes on Hatcher, getting into his face. But something--a woman's voice, or the scent of rosewood--brings Asha popping into his mind. She's right there, watching him, asking him where his shame is? He flinches and Hatcher smiles. He touches Bel with a slender hand.

"The captain will take us now," Bel says promptly. The moment slips from Fenner. He could have settled it all right then. Either with Hatcher or himself lying bloody in Victoria Road. Instead, Bel leads them onto the street, his raincoat's tails swirling. Fenner shakes himself loose of the warm, bright sensation of Asha and follows them.

The crowd spills about them, sailors in ice cream white and Malabar Hill women in expensive silks, incongruously clean among beggars and slack-eyed war victims.

A sim-head tumbles out of an alley. Fenner steps aside as what's left of the man staggers by. His legs jerk with feedback from the dense tech that the Salusa loaded into his brain. Audios in the crowd lower in volume as he approaches, turn to static with his passing, and randomly oscillate through a dozen stations as he leaves. The sim-head's temples bulge with shiny black implants and reddened sores.

Fenner turns away. Obliviously, Bel is reciting a speech on Hatcher's devotion to the Zoroastrians. "The captain understands that the Salusa are more than creations. They are angels come to test the planet."

Hatcher smiles. Cripples and sim-heads struggle through the crowd, the gifts of Hatcher's angels.

They enter the high brick walls of a housing project. Bel leads them up a stairwell. The steps turn and rise through trapped air, shadows and dust. Fenner walks through the old flavours of drowsy Mumbai; heat, sleep and surrender. They step out on the fourth floor and pass plant pots lining a balcony. The hem of Bel's coat drags against thorny leaves and burnt-out red paper rockets leftover from Diwali. The festival is fading away, only its gunpowder-stained garbage lingers. Trains sound high electric horns as they pull into Byculla station, running the gleaming line of the monorail. The air smells of hot metal and pops with back-firing combustion engines and stray fireworks.

Bel stops by a jammed-open elevator door. The interior is littered with a yellow newsfax covered with minute blocks of Hindi. Fenner turns his back, ignoring this boxed space that so resembles a Salusan oven.

"Go room 407," Bel says. His teeth are a red and uneven mess.

"Well, Mr Fenner," Hatcher asks, "You ready for all that reward money?" His pink lips flirt, almost laughing at Fenner's stupidity.

Fenner loads his stare with anger. "What we're gonna do is take you back to Nakarja." He flicks Bel a glance. "Standing up or lying flat--up to you."

Hatcher squashes his cigarette under his sandal. "I'm not too keen on jails." He looks up, giggling again.

And Bel comes at Fenner like a storm.

Fenner ducks a hooking fist and gets a double handful of Bel's coat as he charges past. He swings Bel hard about and slams his head into the elevator's doorway. Bel's dark face collides off the door, the hollow steel booming and the raincoat whipping from Fenner's grasp. The meatboy collapses. His coat puddles over him in tan wrinkles.

Adrenaline sings in Fenner's ears. He runs at Hatcher, ready to hurt him. But Chola is there, stabbing a pistol into Hatcher's cheek and driving him into the balcony. She slides the gym bag across the red concrete to Fenner. Fenner stops and picks up the heavy bag. His hands are thick with fatigue, sweaty on the nylon handle. Hatcher is silent, staring as Fenner unzips the bag. A wasp the size of a carrot shoots from the shadows and circles Fenner's head.

"You're taking them back to Nakarja, right?" Hatcher says quickly. He's still staring over Chola's shoulder, seeing the huge shotgun that Fenner pulls from the bag.

Fenner kicks open the apartment door. Hatcher had said them.

Not one Salusan, but two. Bound hand and foot, they crouch beside a pool of their own spilled urine. They're identical--small as children and bald as eggs. Two pairs of eyes scorch through him like an unfeeling Antarctic night. They are cold and inhuman, measuring him, even here in this tiny, stinking room.

He sees in their stare the camps; the spiral factories that vivisected families, the chimneys thickening the sky with the precise scorch of the incinerators. That is where Asha went, her flesh tattooed and torn open, then cooked like steaks.

The shotgun slams Fenner's hip and buckshot shrieks through the room. The Salusa erupt into black mist. Their bodies jump and blood streaks the walls, slung by a huge paint brush.

The gunpowder stench slaps Fenner's face. The smell of the Salusa, of the future, sears him with its burning. The gunshots ring through his head. The Salusa never change expression. Their eyes are as round and innocent as the dark children of Mumbai, even as they burst apart.

In a purple flare of afterimages he sees Asha in a sundress against the perfect blue of a Mumbai morning. Her head is shaved and the interlinked ovals of the Salusan logo stamp her mouth as if she were one of their constructs. Her lips are made fuller, more sensual, with their corporate bruise.

She's smiling, smiling and on her way to the incinerators.

Fenner doubles over his shotgun and vomits till he passes out.

When Fenner resurfaces, V.J. stands over him. His face is blurred by a dream-world of Salusan machines. They shimmer in and out of phase, till V.J. steps through them, breaking open spinning blades and segmented jaws.

"Come, Fenner-ji. Time to go."

Fenner is shivering. His t-shirt is dark with sweat and plastered to his body. The memories of Salusan war machines fade, reluctant to leave as always. Fenner knows by instinct that hours have passed in nightmare. Hatcher is sitting in a corner, his bloodshot eyes on Fenner with a dog's intensity.

V.J. leads Fenner and Hatcher out of the apartment. Chola waits by the door. It's late afternoon, the sun is still bright, but not exhausting anymore. Stepping outside, Fenner sees that they are on the opposite side of Byculla station. Chola must have tucked them all out of sight till V.J. could take charge.

"Where's Bel?" Fenner asks and Hatcher smiles.

Chola's face is neutral. "Gone away."

Gone away while Fenner lay helpless.

They walk down another brick staircase and onto street level.

The Americans are waiting in Victoria Road among the stalls and double-parked taxis. Bishop's VR ghost watches them approach, flanked by two soldiers who could be exhibits on steroid abuse. The men are identical--except that one is black--and their faces glow with excitement behind their Salusan-adapted weapons.

Fenner watches the soldiers fondling their rifles. They're kids from some ratass stringtown riding a heart-pumping rush, one Fenner used to be on. They know they're unique, just a trigger-pull away from tearing up an entire street full of people. If they're lucky, eventually they'll be middle-aged and washed up jarheads, but right now they're young gods. Perhaps the Salusa had that feeling too when they strode these streets.

Standing beside Bishop is his lieutenant, Andrew Mason. His body is compact within his off-duty uniform of short-sleeves, chinos and running shoes.

"Not expectin' to see us, Herb?" Mason calls out. He ignores a pissed-off glance from Bishop and takes a machine pistol from one soldier. When he moves, his tattoos jump like coloured claws off his forearms. He slots an oval magazine home into the gun with a long, sensual click.

"We'll take Hatcher now," Bishop says.

V.J. makes no reply. No reply is enough to press Bishop. He says, "Captain Hatcher is an American citizen."

"Nakarja have him first," Chola says.

"You serious?" Bishop is appalled. "He's ours."

Mason's grin brightens beneath his long moustache. "Y'hear that, Hatch? The coppertones're fighting over you."

Bishop asks V.J., "You want to die for Herb Hatcher?" Hearing that, the soldiers behind him swell with excitement.

"You know what it's like to get shot?" Bishop is saying. "Any of you got any idea what it's like to get shot in the face?"

V.J. snorts. His entire family were scorched into shadows by Salusan fusion torches. Being shot is for children to fear.

The weight of the entire street squeezes against Fenner's skull. He faced the Salusa today. Childish men should not risk him.

"Better give it up, boys," he says. But he knows he'll fight Mason. He knew it when he first saw him. Now or later, it makes no difference and at least now is face to face.

"Is that spew you got on your shoes?" Mason shouts at Fenner. His grin widens to show a pink tongue and a flash of gold filling. He locks his heavy fist on the machine gun and his tattooed bargirl rolls her oiled hips.

"You musta missed the entire war to be such an asshole now," Fenner says, seeing a direct hit as the man's face reddens with outrage.

They are edging in, tipping into a well of irresistible gravity. The throb in Fenner's head becomes a sucking thunder. Light falters and time stutters. He sees Bishop gesture, hears the black soldier snigger before Mason says, "Some of you coloureds even call yourselves black, right?" and past the piled vegetable carts, the silent crowd and the yellow carapaces of rickshaws, he sees Bel in the cage of a roll-bar Jeep.

Bel's mouth moves. The words are lost but his meaning is clear in the instant before his splinterhive detonates. The handheld weapon sweeps the street with a sonic blast before a thousand flechettes scour the air. The crowd ducks in a single instinctive convulsion. The smart missiles collide with Mason and pump his body. He spasms and is dead too fast for pain. His chest bursts apart, the micromissiles bouncing through him like he's pink, wet paper. They shred a taxi and chop the arm off the black soldier before rising into the air in an enraged Rorschach, hungry for more flesh. Concrete burns Fenner's palms as Chola sweeps him and V.J. to the ground. The flechettes pounce through Bishop's hologram, blasting a stall of radish into white pellets.

Bel's Jeep races away, with Hatcher tucked inside. Only colonel Bishop is left standing, screaming incomprehensible threats and shaking with fury.

Chola and V.J. sit opposite Fenner in the last tricycle of the double-parked line of taxis. An elderly man scrubs the yellow carapace with a rag. Behind him the local Shiv Sena are acting like cops and cordoning off the spot where Mason died.

"Americans," V.J. says wistfully, exhaling thick Marlboro fumes.

Fenner waits, but the only sound is Chola's fingers, clicking the plastic mouth of the taxi's fax machine.

"My daughters loved watching American cartoons on the HV." V.J.'s voice lilts with the cadences of his mis-stressed English.

In the war, Fenner had loaded bodies that were frozen and smashed, charred and stumped. He stacked them into the steel incinerators till the sky was sodden with smoke and ash lathered his skin. Once he'd gripped a girl's hand to pull her corpse to him and her arm slid in a tentacled flop, her bones jellified. She could have been one of V.J.'s daughters.

You're never ready, Fenner knows, for the Salusa and their toys. And so he lightens up on V.J. a fraction.

He asks, "What's goin' on? What's Hatcher hidin'?"

Hatcher pissed and moaned when he saw what Fenner was doing to his Salusan. So why give them up to the socialists in the first place? Just one of the Salusa would make him rich with a public hanging in Beijing or disappeared back into a corporate superfortress.

"What's worth more to him than two Salusa?" Fenner says.

Fenner hears Hatcher's high, disturbed giggle again and then another voice, rising through it with bass authority. Mason saying, "Not expectin' to see us, Herb?"

"He expected us," Fenner says, "but not Bishop."

V.J. stares at him. He's sweating. Fenner has never seen him sweat before. The taxi smells of trapped meat.

"What do you know?" Fenner demands.

Reluctantly, V.J. answers. "A story. Herbert Hatcher find one of the bald scum in a camp and begin praying to it. His angel. After the war it is sick or injure and he smuggle it out. Now Hatcher think all camp survivors are part of his special religion."

"So he give away two Salusa?" Chola asks.

"These not matter to him." V.J. shakes his thin face, dismissing Chola's arithmetic. "They not Hatcher's god. He prays to the one that he nursed back to life."

Fenner pictures Hatcher at his devotions, hair spilling in white rain down his skinny back, painting his Salusan with holy bull's urine, chanting to his angel. Those thoughts begin to pound like a hammer in Fenner's head, steel bouncing on bone. A human praying to the Salusa and V.J. kept it from him. "Why the fuck didn't you tell me this?"

The elderly cleaner stops moving outside, alert to the tone of Fenner's anger. No one moves for an instant, then the man looks away and resumes his silent wiping.

V.J. smiles sadly. "Send Fenner, they tell me. He shoot ten Salusa. No question asked."

The heat rushes through Fenner's face. "Go fuck yourself, V.J."

V.J. crushes his Marlboro packet into an angry red and white corkscrew. "When we find you, you scrape their ovens clean of gristle. We give you your life back."

Fenner's anger feels good, a rush of confidence and reassurance. "You regular fucking asshole."

The fax's clicking stops. Chola leans forward, breaking Fenner off from V.J. Her eyes find Fenner's, making him see her instead. He forces himself back, meeting her level stare. Her eyes are as dark and warm as Asha's.

In his head, Fenner hears Mason's last words: "Some of you coloureds even call yourself black."

For the Americans, V.J. and Chola aren't black. They're kids with impenetrable names and amusing accents. Harmless with their pungent food and jabbering tongues. They're not even worth calling niggers. Fenner married a woman unworthy of the word nigger. His anger's back again, and this time it's a molten weight, pressing at his face. It turns everything flat and toy-like. For an instant he's sorry Mason is dead, and isn't here to whip stupid with his fury.

V.J. clambers out of the tricycle. The sweat stains under his arms are distinct twin moons. "Don't come back to Nakarja commune," he says, anticipating obedience. "Americans are all over there. Engineers to check the geodesic's integrity." He tuts.

"Where is he?"

"I do not ask you go there," V.J. says.

By way of reply, Fenner snaps the crumpled Marlboro packet into the gutter beside V.J.'s shoes.

"Weren't we friends before the Americans come?" V.J asks.

Fenner stares till V.J. says, "Malabar Hill. Look in Tower of Silence."

And their friendship is over.

Chola drives Fenner across Mumbai, past Chowpatty Beach and the Hanging Gardens. Their Jeep's wheels hum along alloy bridges woven as finely as cobwebs. Moths stutter through the car's headlamps and flash over billboards ten metres wide. The board's milky surfaces are smartware designed to colour into giant bottles of Tiger beer and swirling saris from the Silk Emporium. Now they buzz with scrambled images, flashes of damaged Mumbai's autistic mind.

They turn onto Walkeshwar Road. Shimmering fluorescents and guttering oil pots run into one coloured blur along its length. The Jeep purrs past men selling fruit juice from dirty steel presses--villagers staying close to Mumbai after the war.

The Zoroastrians' tower stands cracked and grand among concrete high-rises and the industrial grey of the city reservoir. Its ornate column rises above even the mansions on Malabar Hill. Chola drives through iron gates at its base, passing a wall decorated with patties of cow manure, and parks in a courtyard filled with bicycles and the huge vanes of disassembled windjammers. Mumbai fades behind them in a murmur of combustion engines and chattering crowds. Her weight settles like a gentle breath in the dusk.

The Jackhammer weighs Chola down, but she makes no word of complaint as they walk through high-domed rooms, past columned doorways and fountains standing on checkerboard mosaic floors.

Deeper within the building, priests chant an evening prayer. The Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda, is the most luminous of all bodies, but perhaps Hatcher's bald little angel holds sway now. The Zoroastrians have been dying out since before Fenner was born. It has nothing to do with the Salusa. Each year the number of pure born Parsees shrinks, and the number eligible to follow Zoroaster falls.

Chola spots a boy and gets him running to lead the way past a line of polished statues. The chanting swells as they walk down a dim corridor cut at intervals with curtained alcoves. In places, bare brickwork gapes through scabs of flaking paint. The boy opens a door and stands aside. The room within is hazy with bluish fumes from a stone furnace. Every surface is cluttered; hardcopy books, wrinkled clothes and VR glasses are spread everywhere. Lattices of white plastic in the walls gape from the powdery paint like grinning skulls.

Hatcher sits on a futon against one wall. Candle wicks floating in oil dishes spread a wavering light over him. For some reason he's too confident to hide. Hatcher laughs on seeing them, the same giggling, distressed noise as before.

"You got here first? I had a dream about you, Mr Fenner." He has time to say all that before Fenner swings down and hits him hard in the mouth. Hatcher's head bounces off the wall and Fenner gets a sloppy fistful of his blond hair. Ripping hard, he tears Hatcher screaming off the futon and into another clubbing fist. He scatters Hatcher onto the mosaic floor.

"Fuckin' glad to see me now, asshole?" Fenner shouts. His rage is clear and bright. So many dead in one day, so many hurt, and this shithead strolled away untouched.

Hatcher shivers, blood on his chin and in his hair. He spits wetly, reminding Fenner of a scared animal that's been beaten. Hatcher's a talker--he always knows more than you do--and, very quickly, Fenner tells him, "Say one fuckin' word and I'll split your head open."

Hatcher nods, hunched between his shoulders, understanding the danger and cooperating.

Fenner's anger eases. It's an eager hound, pleased with its success where all other plans have failed. He nods to Chola. She decocks the Jackhammer and passes it to him.

"All right," Fenner says, "you can talk now. Where's Bel?"

Hatcher sits against the futon, giving himself time to think. "I sent him to get my sudrie shirt." Hatcher spits more blood and says, "I'm still glad you came. Bob Bishop doesn't understand. But you--" he leans forward, his intensity on again and pushing at them. "--You two know. You belong here with me. We've all come from the same place."

"And where that?" Chola asks.

Hatcher's excited stare rushes at her. "In the test. The camps." He sinks back into the wobbling shadows. "Is there anything else I can help you with?" When he gets no reaction, Hatcher asks them both, lisping slightly. "Go on, ask me something. I'll see what light I can throw on it."

"Where's the Salusan?" Fenner says.

"Ah, just the big question for Mr Fenner." He smiles and sits up. His lips are swollen, but he's relaxed again.

Without meaning to, Fenner asks him, "You have dreams?"

"Do you?"

Fenner thinks of black wheels that spin higher than his head. Machines that run on blood, machines built from human parts, beings that are man and Salusa both.

Hatcher's eyes glow unnaturally bright in the gloom. His hands rest on his bony knees--a shaman ready to guide them. "I'm unlucky for most people. I got a lot of 'em killed. All my men in Saudi before the Salusa took me. Then almost everyone in the camp." He brushes this fact aside with one hand. "I don't know what'll happen to you, boss. But I can see there's no distinction between us. The Salusan calls me to him. You come here for the Salusan. So you're called too. I tell you I'm unlucky, that I kill people, and you saw what happened at Byculla. I see the same things as you--but I also see their magic. You can't see that yet--but you will. The Salusa have opened a gateway to another realm. Some of us are gonna go through. But don't dismiss me as a crank, Fenner. I have what you want."

Somewhere in all those words, control shifted to Hatcher again. Bloody-mouthed and on his ass, he doesn't recognise that he's beaten. Fenner feels boxed in. But now is not the time to quit. He takes Fenner by the arm and pulls him to his feet.

"That's as may be, Herb. But you're takin' us to your god." He puts the heavy Jackhammer in his other hand and sets its wide mouth behind Hatcher's ear.

Hatcher laughs and says, "Good thoughts, good words, good deeds."

Fenner is drifting through the temple's corridors. Everything could be underwater, languid and undisturbed. He moves from room to room, from dark to light to dark again, as if he's been swimming in a warm ocean for years. Grey-bearded priests brush past him. They're like fat-bellied fish, vague and unimportant. He is alone now and responsible. Hatcher even warned him. "I'm unlucky for people. I get 'em killed."

Bel found them as they opened the door to leave. He was hurrying back, carrying a white cotton shirt. Fenner remembers each detail with hyperreal clarity. Bel's bare arms were thick with black hair. His cheek was swollen where he bounced off the elevator door at Byculla, and beneath its red velvet his face was as dull and brutal as a frying pan. His mouth was pinched and pissed-off beneath his moustache when he saw Fenner.

They were facing each other when a tongue of flame smacked Chola off her feet. Door splinters and honeycomb cardboard rained over Fenner and Hatcher as both of them ducked.

Then Fenner was staring upwards at Bel, seeing the blue steel revolver in his hands like a magic trick, presto. Bel's dark eyes bulged with anger. His mouth moved without words in the detonation's aftershock.

Fenner took his head off with the Jackhammer. Bel died in a rolling wave of concussion. The shotgun slammed Fenner's shoulder, the mag-cylinder turning with a clock-like ticking, the machined parts working perfectly.

And it was still no good. He couldn't keep anyone safe. Chola smiled that morning at the café. She'd watched over him all day. And he let her die.

He crouched beside her. Her face looked peaceful now, even with her body bent in a hard angle over a spine broken in two.

He wouldn't be leaving her, because she was already gone. But before he could go, he had to touch her. He touched her because had to search her. Fenner moved her body, his hands sticky as blood flowed through her shirt like gravy. Chola's body was light as a bird's, even in death. He drew the shiny Salusan tech from the drawstring of her trousers. He felt like a violator, a grave-robber. Standing, with his hands wet, he gripped the angled Salusan device--a snark that Chola had scrounged for him at Byculla--and he wandered from the bodies. Hatcher and his white shirt were long gone by then.

He surfaces from the memory of Chola's death in a greenhouse odour. A smell of ripe, wet things surrounds him. Figures move between halogen floodlights bolted to a tubular scaffold. More grey men with long beards and smocks move between the cones of light. The monks are gardeners here and tend a sprawling greenhouse within their temple.

At the heart of the greenhouse is a huge banyan tree. The Zoroastrians pick their way through its jumbled roots in the opalescent light. Overgrown branches burst from plastic irrigation bins and fallen fruit mulches beneath Fenner's shoes as he approaches. Deep within the spidery banyan is the Salusan. The creature squats among horse mane grasses, his ankles bound in chains of gold. When he looks up at Fenner, Fenner's pulse races and his mouth feels stuffed with cotton. He knocks over a hydroponics tray before he knows he's retreated.

The Salusan's eyes burn with force. His head twitches and insects sprint from the drool at his mouth. The creature is sick. He's covered with unravelling bandages, rubbed and worried in black, bloody stains by his own hands. The bloated worms of machete wounds track his skull. Someone chopped him up when they caught him. But the eyes retain their power. They blaze at Fenner with animal understanding.

Fenner feels dipped in ice water. But he approaches, nudging vines aside.

The creature's arm is malformed, trapped to his body within a translucent envelope of burned skin. The bones within are thin and fluid against the pumping organs. The Salusan shivers and his scabbed flesh dissolves. A cloud of flies rises off him on crooked legs and clicking silver wings.

The creature opens his mouth and through his tubes of shiny drool announces in English, "Dead bolt. Bed dolt, bull dead, dead dolt."

The Salusan rocks on his ankle bonds and waddles closer. He tramples flower garlands and mango slices left by his devotees, babbling in Hindi and then, in more broken English, "Bed bolt, dead dolt," as if it's a message Hatcher understood and Fenner must learn too.

Ignoring him, Fenner levels the shotgun.

The Salusan's scarred face strains. He reddens through his mask of sickness with his need to share. His scabrous mouth grows wide and wet. "Asha," he says and, his tension broken, he collapses on his back.

Fenner is drenched with sweat. He tightens his finger against the trigger's silky give. But the rest of his body is stone. Paralysed with confusion, he does nothing.

The Salusan's gilt chain jingles as he rolls among the long grass.

Finally, Fenner says, "What about Asha?"

When there is no answer from the creature's dripping mouth he hesitates, then lowers the Jackhammer and begins breaking the banyan's branches open.

He drags the misshapen Salusan through the temple's tiled corridors. The Salusan limps along, his withered arm sagging, his spit spraying the dusty floor.

Fenner's gone wrong somehow. He stumbled into an unexpected turning--shedding the skin of loyalty and Nakarja. He doesn't quite know what will happen next.

Concrete steps at the back of the temple run down to a bright red fire door. Hatcher is waiting in front of it, framed against decals in Hindi and English. He looks composed, dressed in his long cotton shirt and a lamb's wool belt.

Fenner runs the Salusan aground in a corner. His sweating, crawling skin continues to twitch. When Fenner grips his forearm, shells of wet scabs break free, sticky in his palm.

Looking amused, Hatcher shoves the fire door open onto dusk and clouds of insects.

He says, "Like you to meet someone..." and Bishop shimmers into being in the exit's doorway.

"I see you took care of business." Bishop's VR image nods at Fenner. "Good work."

Hatcher's lips flirt with a smile.

"Time to come home," Bishop says. "Captain Hatcher's had a change of heart. He's come over to our side."

Hatcher continues to smile.

"Now why don't you come on too? Join the home team? The Army's going to need allies to help interpret this particular Salusan," Bishop says. "You can see he's special. And crazy."

Hatcher stops smiling, staring hard at Fenner. "Forget it, colonel. He's one of V.J.'s communists."

Bishop smiles. "That so? You gone native and think V.J.'s coming to your rescue?" Taking charge with his know-it-all tone. "Well, old V.J. is coming. But since we locked his commie paradise up with marines, the boy doesn't have too much weight anymore." He inclines his head. "I, however, have got all the weight we'll need."

Fenner tilts the shotgun down from his shoulder, levelling it at them. That may be the first true thing Bishop's said. He's too important to send in person. He is snug within the deep structure of the Pentagon.

Bishop shakes his head. "I've seen your file, son. You think that black boy you busted up in Detroit makes you tough? You ran away to India. You never even killed a real person till today. Now look at you." His blue stare is firm, still in charge. "All turned around and upside down." He nods his chin at the Salusan, at the saliva hanging in silvery strands to his waist. "You murdered Bel for that?" Then his voice barks. "And what the hell d'you think that shotgun's going to do to me?"

"This?" The Jackhammer rolls left to right, light running over the barrel. "This is for Hatcher." Fenner raises his left hand, pointing Chola's pewter snark at Bishop. "This is for you." He finally sees Bishop's expression change as the snark flowers from his hand and chases Bishop's VR signal home. The snark bypasses the hologram, gobbling up the narrowbeam, into orbit, into the satellite, then back down to Washington where Bishop stands in the VR chamber in real-time.

A Luddite weapon, the snark turns the transmitting chamber into its own incinerator. Bishop blinks out of sight. There's no screaming, here in Mumbai. But Bishop is burning to death right now and far away.

Dropping the snark, Fenner asks Hatcher, "How's your angel look to you now?"

And Hatcher's eyes squeeze shut as Fenner's fist convulses on the Jackhammer and thunder sweeps the stairway.

Sunlight spreads across Mumbai's shining penthouses and down to the Hanging Gardens and the faded column of the Zoroastrian Tower. Dawn's red light flashes off the city's reservoir till the water is bathed with bloody veils of mist. The languorous city winds blow a warm caress as Fenner leans over a penthouse balcony.

The breeze shifts, swirling the dead Zoroastrians to heaven. The Mumbai he knows, war-torn, starving and disturbed, is nowhere to be seen from high on Malabar Hill. But even here, past the balcony's blue-veined marble and the dung-caked walls of the temple, the Americans are gathering.

V.J. is with them, calling to Fenner with a Japanese loudhailer the size of his palm. His face is strained. He's a small man, shrunken still further in the sea of huge Americans.

Fenner watches, barely interested. The gentle morning bathes him, close as a womb. He feels himself dissolving in its safety, and becoming two men. They both stand on the hot marble, lighting Marlboros and drawing in smoke. But one is the shell who loaded corpses for the Salusa, while the other is the real prisoner, trapped inside all this time and screaming for his dead wife. The real man steps away, leaving the shell and its camouflage of leaden violence behind.

He turns and watches the Salusan, crouching and drooling in the shade.

Fenner wonders if he's taken Hatcher's place as the Salusan's disciple. He spent last night talking to him as the marines ransacked the abandoned apartments at ground level. The creature said nothing more and the soldiers have reached the penthouses and tiered gardens of the Hill. He'll move the Salusan soon and they'll spend another night in hiding. If there's anything about Asha inside him, Fenner will pry it loose.

The Salusan touched Fenner with one word. It brought no peace, but he needs to know if there are any more about Asha. Down through the sedimentary layers of guilt and longing Fenner feels the twitch of some new emotion. Like a fragile creature stirring within the ocean's silt it rises up, fitting inside him with a skeleton of frail bones.

The Salusa, he knows, have mastered perfection, and this sense of hope is so perfectly cruel it must be another Salusan gift.

He thought Asha was gone, but who knows what the Salusa are capable of? They took themselves to the edge of the solar system, shedding stupid, slow humanity like a wornout shoe. What inventions did they casually discard behind them?

Standing over this Salusan, he wipes his face clean with a rag. A wasp darts over the grey, flexing mouth. A flash of memory, of purple afterimages and blood-slung walls, hits Fenner. His desire to tear at the Salusa streaks through him, intense as ever. He leans into the thing's confused face and yet, without realising it, he is talking once more.

"What do you know?" Fenner says, ignoring the men calling for him in the street below.

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The story of Cain and Abel has always struck me as odd. It seemed deeper than mere sibling rivalry, grander than a simple murder. Moreover, Cain seemed to be the real victim. What happened to Cain after his marking and exile to the land of Nod? What had become of his sacrifices? And, most importantly, can one fit six recipes for chutneys into a short story?

EVERY TIME I THINK about my brother I make chutneys, mango or cranberry, mint or date; it doesn't matter as long as the recipe calls for onions. An old man crying would look too pathetic otherwise. Tears flow down my cheeks, but that's onions for you.

Cranberries, fresh and sour, spill around an eviscerated orange like drops of blood. One medium onion and one knob of fresh ginger look on, unmoved for now. They are next. I chop and grate, and drown their misery in vinegar, brown sugar and bourbon. Something tart, something sweet, something bitter. But that's just chutney for you.

I let them simmer and bubble, seeping clear liquefied torment; they shrivel as I watch. Heat and time shrivel all, but still we bleed, forever paying for a single sin. The pungent smell of ginger fills my nostrils, erasing the memories of other smells--blood and lamb, metal heated by the sun. I read somewhere that the part of the brain that knows smells is the oldest of them all. I suppose this is why I make chutneys, to flood out every memory I have.

I cut strips of mangoes, mince garlic, chop apples and onions, my eyes watering all over again. I smell coriander and cardamom, I gut the tamarind and mash its pulp, red as flesh. I measure out the cayenne pepper and taste it. It is hot enough to set my mouth aflame, reminding me of sacrificial fires.

Why was I the one to be punished? He cut flesh open every day, and the heavy greasy smoke of his sacrifice rose in great sooty puffs heavenward. God found this stench pleasing, but not I. I retched at a hint of it, and collected mint and mustard seeds to smell, to erase the foul taste of burned flesh from my throat. How was I supposed to know that human flesh would not please God? It smelled the same to me.

I put the bowl with mangoes, apples, vinegar, sugar, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, raisins, allspice, carrots and cloves into the fridge, to let it all sit, and soak and mingle and swell with misery.

I put dates in a saucepan and cover them with water, letting them soak. I could speed it up by boiling them, but why hurry? I'm an old man with a birthmark on his face and all the time in the world. I had to learn how to pour my regret and despair into chutney, just to keep my sanity. The trouble with immortality is that you still get old, it just lasts forever.

I stone the plums, twisting their halves apart. The dark skin rips and gives way to underlying flesh, bright yellow of human fat. I feel nauseous, and only a whiff of ginger and allspice keeps me on my feet. I wish I did not have to remember the sound of my brother's skin ripping, and my surprise at the yellow grains right under it. I bruise the mustard seeds, releasing their aroma. I simmer the plums in vinegar, sugar, cinnamon and ginger. I need another pan.

And another onion. I chop it, blinking away hot, pungent tears. I did not want to kill my brother. Even though I remember little, I am certain that I loved him. It was God's appetite for flesh that made me a murderer. I gave God what I treasured most--and he punished me for the generosity of my sacrifice. He wanted neither my grain nor my brother. I suspect that no sacrifice of mine is going to satisfy him.

I quarter peaches and apricots, and squeeze lemon juice. It burns through a fresh cut on my palm, and for a moment I forget about everything else, immersed in the present pain. It passes. Cloves, ginger and cinnamon. Sugar and allspice. Nothing nice about it, but that's chutney for you.

I grind turmeric and mix it with pitted apricots and chopped onions, with cayenne pepper and grated orange peel. I add coriander and crack walnuts. They split, their rough furrowed meat showing between fractured shells. I temper their bitter iodine with vinegar and brown sugar. Poison and acerbity and sweetness. Only salt is missing, and I cry harder. Peaches and apricots bubble, exhaling the aroma of innocence and sun. I smudge my tears and start on coriander chutney.

Green and red chili peppers are so festive, they remind me of winter, when all is quiet, and I am almost able to believe in a different, nicer God, younger than me. But the smell of coriander and coconuts returns me to a hot, unforgiving place; I can almost see the sun-parched hills. The scents are so primal that I can almost smell the greasy burnt lamb; I imagine my brother's voice, rising over the din of his herd. I don't think I will be making mint chutney today.

Instead, I blend lentils--channa dal and urad dal--with mustard seeds that pop like tiny fireworks. I mince coriander with chili peppers and grated coconut, and add water. Coriander chutney is easy to make, and its bouquet is more complex and bitter than others. It becomes me--I am a bitter old man, my hopes and kindness bled from me over the past eternity. I pay and I pay and I pay for my only crime. That's justice for you.

The smells of allspice and ginger and coriander and turmeric and apples and mangoes and raisins and lemons and peaches and cranberries and apricots and onions mingle together in an orgy of fragrance, and leave my apartment through the window, reaching for the sky. I used to sacrifice the fruits of my labor; then I gave the flesh that was most dear to me. Now I sacrifice chutneys, I sacrifice spices and fruit and fragrance and onions and tears. What else can I give? I have no brother anymore. I walk over to the window and look up expectantly, like I do every day, looking for a sign that my sacrifice has finally been accepted. I stand by the window and wait for forgiveness.

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Dev Agarwal ("Angels of War") currently works for the government in Britain. As his father worked for an airline, he was lucky enough to be able to travel extensively as a child. This included many trips to India, where even to walk across the street is to travel through a stunning and exotic landscape.

He has also published fiction in Albedo One and Altair.

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Tom Doyle ("The Garuda Bird") studied the history and folklore of India in college, and visited that country during a summer break. There, desperately seeking air conditioning, he saw a lot of Bollywood films.

Tom's stories have appeared in Strange Horizons and Futurismic, and he has contributed to a forthcoming book on millennial studies. He writes in a creepy turret in Washington, DC, and is currently working on a novel.

Visit Tom's website at:

ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tmdoyle2

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Dr. Rob Furey ("Space Invaders") worked on his PhD in Gabon, West Africa, on social spiders. He has returned to his study site several times for his own research, with students and once as a forest guide for a natural history film crew from the UK. He has faced down cobras, retreated from army ants and slept on open wooden platforms in African swamps. Later he went to French Amazonia to work on another social spider species. Not only did he spend time with the spiders, but he watched a gunfight between gold prospectors and French army troops while he ate a meal of roasted tapir. Since then Rob has returned to the tropics several times, usually with students. He spent time as a student himself attending Clarion West. He has published a couple of stories in anthologies since then in addition to articles for dusty tomes on arcane spider behavior. He is currently part of the charter faculty at Harrisburg University, the first new private university in Pennsylvania in over 100 years.

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Jay Lake ("You Will Go On") 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, and his article "Genre is Dead, Long Live Genre" appeared in AEon Two

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

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Jeremy Minton ("The Wrong End of the Stick") still regards himself as young but will no longer formally commit to a specific date of birth. He lives in southern England with his wife and too many cats for comfort. He writes for love, programs for money and drinks champagne whenever the opportunity arises. He has previously sold stories to F&SF and to The Third Alternative.

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Ken Rand ("The Henry and the Martha") has sold short stories to four dozen magazines and anthologies, including Weird Tales, On Spec, HP Lovecraft, and Faeries. He's sold a lot of nonfiction, including interviews for Talebones and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Books: The 10% Solution: Self-editing for the Modern Writer (Fairwood Press), Tales of the Lucky Nickel Saloon and The Golems of Laramie County (Yard Dog Press), Fairy BrewHaHa at the Lucky Nickel Saloon (Five Star), Bad News From Orbit (Silver Lake), and Phoenix (Zumaya). He publishes monthly e-mail newsletter The Editor Is IN. Full bio, bibliography and sample chapters on website, below. His writing and living philosophy: Lighten up.

Visit Ken's Website at www.sfwa.org/members/Rand/

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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/

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E. Sedia ("Just Chutney") lives in Southern New Jersey, in a company of the best spouse in the world, two emotionally distant cats, two leopard geckos, one paddletail newt, and an indeterminate number of fish. To date, she has survived drowning in the White Sea, standing in front of a moving tank, and graduate school. Her first novel is forthcoming in May 2005 from Five Star Books, and her short stories have sold to Analog, Fortean Bureau, and Poe's Progeny, among others. More about her can be found at www.ekaterinasedia.com

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Nisi Shawl ("Wallamelon") has had stories published in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Lenox Avenue, and both volumes of the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthology series, which focuses on speculative fiction by people of African descent. Her story "Deep End" appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy. With her friend Cindy Ward, she teaches "Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction;" the companion book is due out in early June from Aqueduct Press. A scholar and critic of speculative fiction and a board member for the Clarion West Writers Workshop, Nisi likes to relax by pretending she lives in other people's houses.

Visit Nisi's Website at www.sfwa.org/members/shawl/

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In AEon Four we celebrate the annual dying of the light with a dark August Issue. Lawrence M. Schoen reveals the players and rules of an ancient game of human fates: "The Game of Leaf and Smile." Kelly Hale revisits an age-old story that plays out with a new conclusion in "Blood Pith Crux." Carrie Richerson shows us the ancient enmities of one of the most ancient families of all in "A Game of Cards." M. Thomas, in "The Tinker's Child," explores the dark (and rainy) side of the Pinocchio story. Kij Johnson, in "The Knife Birds," creates an edgy new myth of death and dying. In "Copper Angels," Joseph Paul Haines introduces us to a very good little girl who only wants to do what's right. Laura Anne Gilman illustrates some harsh realities of family and survival in "End of Day." Bruce Boston contributes three poems with an edge, and in AEon Four's nonfiction offering, Dr. Rob Furey returns with a science article whose theme we hope you will find suitably autumnal and creepy.

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