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Editors

Marti McKenna

Bridget McKenna

Five

I just finished reading Jack Finney's Time and Again. Even though the book is a science fiction classic, I had not read it before. Our only copy was a first edition, and since I'm notoriously hard on books, I didn't want to ruin it. So I didn't read that copy--and I was too cheap to buy a new one. Finally, I ran across a battered reader's copy in a local bookstore, and settled in my favorite chair for a long summer's read.

Those who say the golden age of science fiction is twelve forget that many of the genre's classics weren't written for twelve-year-olds. Time and Again is a heartfelt work ("Romance, mystery and time travel!" my copy's cover blurb says) but a twelve-year-old wouldn't grasp the subtext. In the novel, Simon Morley, an artist working in the late 1960s, joins a project that enables him to go to 1880s. Finney recreates the period with incredible detail. He also makes living breathing characters who interact in their various worlds with complete believability. The comparisons he draws between 1960s New York (a decaying city which would go bankrupt not ten years later) and 1880s New York are palpable.

Ultimately, though, the novel is about loss and regret and making correct choices. It's also about the value of a single human life, and it poses an interesting question about what kind of actions will have enough importance to influence history.

No wonder the book is a classic. Thank heavens I didn't read it when I was twelve.

The bio at the back of my battered reader's copy told me that Jack Finney had written many. I felt surprised. I had read Invasion of the Body Snatchers twenty years before, and as many of Finney's short stories as I could find. But I had only heard of these two novels.

I asked my husband the book collector and former owner of a used bookstore if he'd read Finney's other novels. He seemed surprised. He too thought Finney had only written two.

Using Bookfinder.com, I located half a dozen of Finney's novel, including his first which became the basis for the original Oceans Eleven movie. I've ordered them and will work my way through them slowly.

But this incident got me thinking about classics and how they are made.

During his lifetime, Jack Finney was a working writer. He was prolific. He published short fiction in magazines, sold his work to Hollywood, and wrote novels--at least a dozen that I could find.

Two have been issued and reissued. In my (albeit sketchy) research for this column, I walked to one of the best used bookstores in the United States (sometimes choosing where you live is quite a perk!) and scanned the shelves. Five copies of Body Snatchers--one the original paperback edition, two 1970s editions with a still from the Donald Sutherland movie on the cover, and two more from the mid-1960s. No Time and Again, and nothing else.

Since Finney's first novel was suspense, not sf, I moved to the mystery section. No Finney. Then to the mainstream section. No Finney. Finally, I gave up and had the owner search his database for me. Only the 5 Body Snatchers. As he searched, he said, "I had no idea Jack Finney wrote other novels. I'll have to look them up."

Some folks might find this little anecdote discouraging. I find it encouraging. Finney, the lucky dog, happened on the magic formula twice. Twice he wrote books good enough--and powerful enough--to touch a universal note, one that will bring readers to his work decades from now.

Most writers never achieve that. I've been alphabetizing our book collection, culling duplicates, and finding dozens of books by authors I'd never heard of--writers who were famous in their day, but go unread now. Writers who, despite their popularity, never managed to hit that universal note.

Which is why I think it so funny when publishers declare a book an instant classic. How do they know? I have hundreds of books on my shelves with that kind of hype on the cover, and none of them are remembered today.

I also find it amusing when writers tell me they've slaved on a novel for decades because when they finish, they know it will be a classic. Let's assume that the book is good (most aren't; few novelists who make statements like this even get published). The chances of that book becoming a classic are between slim and none.

Readers do what I do. If they find a novel by someone they like, they'll search for more books by that person. They read, preferring some books to others, and recommending the very best to their friends.

As a result, some books become classics years after they've been published. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby disappointed readers in its first publication because they weren't ready for its message (a disillusionment with the Jazz Age, among other things). The book became a classic after Fitzgerald died in the early 1940s. In his obituaries, he was declared a has-been who never quite achieved his bright promise. But his death revived his works, causing people--who were now disillusioned with the Jazz Age, and familiar with loss because of the Depression and the beginnings of the Second World War--to rediscover him.

Huckleberry Finn was not the most popular work of Mark Twain's lifetime. Twain, too, was a prolific author and, except for Twain scholars, few of us read more than one or two of his novels. The universal book is the one that survives. The others fade away.

So how does a writers write a universal book? They don't. They just write as much as they can and market those works. The market and the audience take care of the rest.

But those of you who love to read create the next classic. If you like a book, do this: Give a copy to your best friend. Hand your children the favorite novels of your childhood. Give them the books you loved as a young adult.

Read to your children. Discuss books with your friends. Word of mouth is what creates the next classic--not publisher's hype, not even million-copy sellers. Readers' enthusiasm keeps books alive.

So I am now as enthusiastic about Jack Finney's Time and Again as the friends who recommended it to me. If you haven't read it, buy a copy. I can't promise that you'll like it--none of us can predict what others will like. But I can promise that the book will take you to another place and another time. I can also promise that it'll make you think.

As for the rest of Finney's works, I don't know much about them yet. Maybe there's a reason they've been forgotten. Or maybe, like Gatsby, they haven't been revived yet. If I like another as much as Time and Again, I'll report it here.

If I like it, then maybe you will, and so will your best friend. Maybe we'll begin the process of creating a classic--together.

Five

W e've been publishing Æon for a year now, which is the blink of an eye in geological time, and barely a short nap in human time. Looking back it's seemed like no time at all. Still, we've managed to learn a thing or two in that brief period--we may even have learned something about putting together a magazine, though we hope always to find areas where we can improve.

One of our recent improvements was to add a science column by Dr. Rob Furey, which has been a real education for us in many ways. Not only did we learn a few things about game theory and the behavior of spiders (one of Rob's areas of specialization), but this issue's column touches on areas of current and ongoing social significance, as he demonstrates why creation is not equal to evolution as a scientific theory, and why it does not belong in our educational curricula. "it cannot be said enough," Rob reminds us as we struggle to find a way to get this message across to those who are hostile to it: "a scientific theory is not a guess."

Steven Jay Gould, an acknowledged giant of biology and evolutionary theory (with Niles Eldridge he developed the theory--punctuated equilibrium--that effectively plugged the apparent "gaps" in the fossil record), felt that science and religion occupied non-competing spheres of influence, and that they could and should, for that reason, co-exist peacefully. Neither should make it its mission to invalidate or destroy the other. This live-and-let-live attitude shows that Dr. Gould was not reflexively hostile to religion per se, but like any real scientist he believed that the business of science is science, and that science is none of religion's business at all.

"Facts are the world's data," Gould explained in his 1981 Discover article, "Evolution as Fact and Theory." "Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts…. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

"In science," he continued, "'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."

And so, too, believes Dr. Rob Furey. And so do we. And if you find this issue's column, "Venn Diagrams, or, There is no O in 'Intelligent Design' to be even the slightest bit controversial, just wait for the next one, in which he takes on the Pennsylvania "Monkey Trial" from a seat in the Dover, PA courtroom where it's all happening.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is back with another interesting and thoughtful column, her fifth for Aeon, and a call to action for all lovers of good literature wherever found: pick up those beloved favorite books and go forth.

This issue's fiction offerings are also pretty special, a lineup featuring works by both established and new authors. Howard V. Hendrix makes a welcome second appearance in our pages with the mostly-true story of a responsible and concerned US citizen-to-be in "Waiting for Citizen Gödel." 2004 Campbell Award-Winner and multiple World Fantasy Award finalist Jay Lake is also making a return appearance with a story of the importance of individual identity he calls "Green.". Our third returnee is Dana William Paxson, who contributes three very short stories to turn your head around: "Appeal," "Adrift on the Mare Commutatio," and "The Visitors on the Fourth."

Nor are we short on new faces, or at least faces new to our pages. Sf/f veteran Mark Bourne makes his first appearance in Æon with "The Nature of the Beast," a secret history of one of the greatest beasts of them all. Craig English tells the story of a devout and guileless young man coming of age in a world of "Tribes." Justin Stanchfield takes us back in time to fly on "Gypsy Wings." And Renee Stern illuminates a tragic clash of beliefs in "Fire and Ice." Two talented poets make Æon debuts as well: Scott E. Green with "Corvus Nation," and Jaime Lee Moyer with "Asha." So without further ado let us present Æon Five.

Waiting for Citizen Gödel

Howard V. Hendrix

"I suppose some people will wonder if this is really a science fiction story after all, given that it is about our 'consensus' historical past and not about an alternate timeline. I believe it is sf--not only because it's a fiction in which the science is integral to the story, but also because it's an example of that fine old subgenre of science fiction, the 'cautionary tale.' Although the door into dictatorship Gödel anticipated has not come to pass, the extensive subversion of the US constitution which he so feared is, in fact, more real than ever. That's why I wrote 'Waiting for Citizen Gödel' at this very time, on this very timeline."

O N THE DRIVE FROM the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to the government offices in Trenton, Einstein and Morgenstern spend the entire time keeping Gödel distracted by telling stories and jokes.

"Another of those autograph hunters came after me yesterday," Einstein says, shaking his head. "You know those primitive tribes that won't let you take pictures of them? Out of fear the camera, by making an image of a person, steals the soul of that person, or at least part of it?"

Gödel nods.

"I've heard cannibals believe that, particularly," he says.

"That's why they eat the flesh of their defeated enemies," Morgenstern adds from the driver's seat. "The greater the warrior they eat, the greater the soul they incorporate into their own."

"Exactly!" Einstein says. "I think they might not be so far wrong. Autograph hunters are the last of the cannibals! They try to take a little bit of your soul even as they're eating up a lot of your time making small talk and joking!"

Morgenstern and Gödel laugh.

"Really though, Albert, you should be flattered," Morgenstern says. "They obviously think you're a great soul."

"Such flattery I can do without. I don't mind the jokes so much, though. Hey, I heard a new one from Veblen the other day…"

Albert Einstein, Oskar Morgenstern, and Kurt Gödel don't walk into a bar in New Jersey. Actually they appear before the bar, in the government offices in Trenton, on December 5, 1947, for Gödel's citizenship test.

By some fluke, oversight, or loop-hole, Gödel has been allowed to apply for American citizenship--despite the fact that US immigration law expressly excludes from citizenship application all persons with histories of hospitalization for mental problems.

Persons like Kurt Gödel.

Einstein and Morgenstern, who are to serve as witnesses for Gödel at the hearing, are a bit nervous. They are well aware that Gödel is sometimes more than a little bit crazy. That the great wizard of logic should be appearing for this oral citizenship examination at all is an inconsistency in the logic (or at least the application) of the law, but there it is.

Morgenstern and Einstein are less worried by this inconsistency, however, than by another. Gödel has taken extreme care in preparing for his citizenship test, going far beyond the simple background in US history and civics that passing the test actually requires.

At first he seems unfazed at the prospect of the citizenship test. During this period of test preparation, however, Gödel reads the US Constitution like the critical thinker he is, carefully pondering every phrase and sentence of the document for paradoxes and lapses in logic. As time goes on, he becomes agitated enough for his witnesses to take note of it.

"I think I've found a logical inconsistency in the Constitution," Gödel remarks to Einstein in the hallway at IAS, a couple of days before the test. Einstein pretends not to have heard him.

"I've discovered a legal-logical loophole that could allow a fascist dictatorship to establish itself in America in a fashion that has complete constitutional legitimacy!" he tells Morgenstern, in a phone call the night before the test. "Just as Hitler came to power legally in Germany! I must inform the judge of this."

Morgenstern is a strong-featured, bespectacled man with a good head of hair swept back from his prominent forehead. He could almost pass for Gödel's bigger, stronger, healthier brother. He is at first much amused by his friend's comments, but becomes less so as Gödel continues to insist on the importance of this presumed flaw in the Constitution.

Fearing that Gödel will reveal his findings about the Constitution during his immigration hearing, come off as a crazy crank, and thereby seriously harm his chances of being granted citizenship, Morgenstern and Einstein urge Gödel to keep his discovery to himself. He seems disinclined to do this, however.

Longtime hypochondriac obsessed with presumed flaws in his own physical constitution, Kurt Gödel is, in January of 1978, at last prepared to actually step into the grave. He is doing so of his own free will, if the will of those who are mad can also be said to be free.

Gödel's weight is down to sixty-five pounds. He is paranoid enough to believe his food is being poisoned. Convinced his belief is correct, he is starving himself to death. When his death certificate is filed in the Mercer County courthouse at Trenton, New Jersey, it will show that Gödel died of "malnutrition and inanition" brought on by "personality disturbance."

Before that final step, however, even as he sits in a chair in his room in Princeton Hospital, he is thinking furiously. He knows the stories about "your whole life running like a high-speed flashcut film before your eyes" at the moment of death. So far, though, the main thing flashing before his mind's eye are the events of his citizenship-hearing day, over thirty years earlier.

That day of his next-to-last examination.

Now that he has well and truly arrived at the most final exam of all, he does not fear it. In fact, he finds it even less fraught with drama than that earlier exam.

"Oswald Veblen!" Morgenstern says. "I haven't seen him in ages. How's he doing?"

"Same as always. I know I'm not the summit of sartorial splendor myself, but that man manages to make all his clothes look like he's been wearing them for years--even if he just put them on himself for the first time that very morning. I wonder how he does it."

"Maybe he hires people to wear his suit-jackets and pants for a couple of years before he wears them," Morgenstern says with a smile.

"No, no! He has a time machine just for his clothing!" says Gödel.

They laugh. It's well known at I.A.S. that Gödel's been working with Einstein on unified field theory problems. Rumor has it he's succeeded in constructing a rotating universe in which no privileged notion of universal time prevails absolutely throughout the cosmos, without arbitrariness. Plenty of time machine possibilities in that.

"What was Veblen's joke?" Morgenstern asks Einstein.

"It was about you and me, Kurt."

"Oh? Both of us?"

Einstein nods.

"Let me see. How did it go? Ah, I remember. Einstein and Gödel are having a joke-telling competition. Einstein says, 'A bar walks into a man--Oops! Wrong frame of reference!' And Gödel says, 'I think whether or not that's funny is an undecidable proposition!'"

Einstein and Morgenstern are pulled up to the curb, waiting for Gödel to join them on the drive to Trenton. Morgenstern is behind the wheel.

"So, Oskar, you had von Neumann talk to Kurt about this 'constitutional inconsistency'?"

"Earlier today," Morgenstern says, nodding. Morgenstern the economist and John von Neumann the polymath are longtime colleagues. Together, just a few years earlier, they produced The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the founding document of game theory.

"Any luck?"

"I think so. Johnny understands Kurt's long chain of reasoning--better than I do, to tell the truth. I think he may have convinced Kurt that the 'door into dictatorship' would not only be hard to find, but very, very difficult to open."

"How so?"

"Kurt's concern involves Article V of the Constitution," Morgenstern says, looking about to make sure Gödel is nowhere to be be seen. "What the lawyers call the Amendment Clause. I've got a copy of the section here--but whatever you do, don't let Kurt see it."

Morgenstern stealthily hands Einstein a folded sheet of paper.

Sitting in the chair in which he will soon die, Gödel knows that most people believe death completes life but is inconsistent with life. He believes the opposite. What could be more consistent than that a life which has a beginning in time should also have an ending in time? Death is utterly consistent with life because it makes life incomplete.

The whole tradition of life flashing before the mind's eye at the moment of death is reassuring to him, for Gödel has long believed that the very incompleteness of mortal existence requires a life beyond death.

Gödel remembers trying to explain his thoughts on all this in letters to his mother back in the early 1960s. If, as science shows, the world is not random and arbitrary, but rationally ordered and meaningful, then there must be another life. Why bring forth an essence--the human being, so well-constructed for the purpose of coming to a better existence and more meaningful life through learning--when one life is not nearly enough life to learn all the things we need to learn? When we present so vast a range of possible individual developments yet are never in this life allowed to realize even a tiny fraction of them?

"I think I might have a better joke than that, Albert," Gödel says sheepishly. "I heard it from one of our graduate students from the deep South, before I kicked him out of my office."

"What?" Morgenstern asks gently. "Do you always kick students out of your office after they tell you a good joke?"

"Only when they go on to ask about the deeper connections between my incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle," Gödel says. "The boy riled me so much I whipped the blanket off my legs, got up from beside my electric heater, and physically pushed him from my office!"

The thought of frail little Kurt pushing some burly kid from Texas or Alabama out of his office is rather amusing. They know how often Kurt is pestered with that connection question, and how much he hates it. Einstein and Morgenstern are sympathetic.

"I must admit I regret doing it now--a bit, anyway. He seemed a bright enough boy, other than asking that question. I don't think I can quite do the accent the way he did, but I'll try."

"Is it about us?" Einstein asks.

"No, no. It's about Goldilocks and the three bears--or three 'bars,' as they say in the south."

Morgenstern and Einstein nod. They know how much Gödel loves fantastic things--be they fairy tales or Franz Kafka's stories, or animated fairy-tale films, most of all. They particularly remember how much he enjoys Disney's Snow White, and the rumors of all the many times he has seen it.

Opening the folded sheet, Einstein finds the following words typed, with a few errors he ignores.

Article V. The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

"Sounds like lawyers, all right," Einstein says with a wry grin, refolding the slip of paper and handing it back to Morgenstern.

"Right. So Johnny called his lawyer before he talked to Kurt. What Kurt's afraid of, as near as I can tell, is that Article V establishes procedural limitations but no substantive limitations, so it could be used to overturn the democratic institutions described in the rest of the Constitution."

"I see," says Einstein. "Johnny calling his lawyer helped, then?"

"I think so. I was there when Johnny ambushed Kurt with a lot of legal jargon, mostly something called the 'lex posterior principle'. I gather it means the priority of new rules over old rules of the same type."

Einstein nods but says nothing. He can tell that Morgenstern is not only remembering all this but also thinking it through as he remembers.

"In a conflict between rules of different types, though," Morgenstern continues, "the superior rule in the legal hierarchy takes priority, even if it is older. Constitutional provisions always take priority over statutes, for instance. This I think Johnny called the 'lex superior principle.'"

Einstein nods.

"Conflicts between rules. That's Kurt's meat."

In his death chair at Princeton Hospital, Gödel believes our mistakes and experiences from this world are simply raw material. In the next world, by carefully recalling and truly understanding for the first time our experiences from our mortal life, we will at last be able to really learn. For Gödel the sometimes fanatical film buff, the idea of his life passing before his eyes is not a review of past events so much as a preview of coming attractions--of that intellectual paradise in which both memory and understanding, so important to learning, will at last be made perfect.

Not perfect from the start, he thinks. Humans as perfect machines would have nothing to contribute and no reason to exist in time. Eternity is in love with the productions of time, as William Blake once put it. Imperfection allows mistakes, mistakes are integral to learning, and learning is the most important part of human efforts to overcome the separation of fact and wish--in order to get at truth, which is itself the meaning of our mortal existence in the world.

From everything Gödel has seen, human understanding of truth is always incomplete at best. An afterlife with an infinitude to learn, but an eternity in which to learn it--maybe that's what getting at the truth of it all, and of oneself, finally requires.

Reliving in perfect detail every instant of one's life--every bitter defeat as well as every triumph, every wrong turn as well as every right one in that quest to overcome the separation of fact and wish--would such a next life be heaven, or hell?

"Three bars walk into Goldilock's Place," Gödel begins. "They are Yankee bars and not familiar with the ways of the locals. From behind the counter, Goldi asks Papa Bar, 'What'll ya have, honey?'

"'No honey, thanks,' says Papa Bar. 'I just had supper. I'll have a gin…and tonic.'

"Goldilocks notices the long pause but says nothing about it as she turns to Mama Bar.

"'How about you, sugar?'

"'No sugar, thanks,' says Mama Bar. 'I'm on a diet. I'll have a martini with…no olive.'

"Again Goldi notes the oversized gap in Mama Bar's words, but says nothing as she turns to the bar cub.

"'And how about you, little fella?'

"'I'll have a Shirley Temple,' the smallest bar quickly responds. Goldilocks smirks.

"'What? No big pause?'

"The little bar looks somewhat dejectedly at his small forelimbs and says 'No, not yet. I'm still only a baby bar. But I will have some of that honey and sugar, kiddo!'"

Einstein and Morgenstern laugh, almost as much out of shock at how well Gödel has told the joke, as out of any content to the thing itself.

"There's more," Morgenstern continues. "Any legal system that's a reflexive hierarchy displays many exceptions to the lex superior principle--cases where superiority is measured on a circular scale. There's also a third major rule of priority, the 'lex specialis principle.' It means that the specific ought to be favored over the general in conflicts at the same hierarchical level."

"Three principles, now?" Einstein asks, arching his bushy brows.

"Not only that, but the interactions among them, too. The lex superior principle usually takes priority over both the other two rules, but the relative priority of the lex posterior and lex specialis principles among themselves is very much unsettled. When a new rule and an old rule of the same hierarchical type are irreconcilable, but the new rule is less specific than the older rule, then it is apparently permissible to favor either rule, all else being equal."

Einstein sits back in his seat, contemplating it.

"If the question of the relative priority of these rules of priority comes up," he says, shaking his head, "then boom! We're headed toward an indefinite regress--maybe an infinite one."

"Right--or toward a theory of types. That sent Kurt and Johnny veering off on whether or not the tenth and fourteenth amendments were self-amending. Then it was on to the horrors that'd be generated if you attempted to amend the amendment clause."

Einstein nods. Knowing von Neumann's work on computing and his "halting" or "exit" problems, he can see where this is going.

His strength ebbing away by the minute, Gödel smiles to himself the only way he can--weakly. He remembers discussing with Einstein a tradition out of Kabbalah that describes God as absolute undifferentiated infinite being with neither will, nor intention, nor desire, nor thought, nor speech, nor action, yet outside of which no thing could exist.

To the extent that you participate in the divine, he thinks to himself, you too are the nothing on which hangs everything. You are the only god who can condemn yourself to the hell you yourself have created. You are the only god who can save yourself to the heaven you yourself have made.

"How about you, Oskar?" Einstein asks.

"How about me what?"

"A joke! Just because you're driving doesn't mean you get off without telling one."

Morgenstern glances through the windshield.

"Okay, I've got one. It's one Johnny von Neumann told me, so blame him. An economic forecaster has a copy of our Games and Economic Behavior prominently displayed above the door frame of his office. Asked what it's for, he replies that it's a good luck charm that helps his forecasts. 'Do you really believe in such superstition?' he's asked, and he says, 'Of course not!' 'But then why do you keep it there?' 'Well,'" the economist says, 'I'm told it works whether you believe in it or not.'"

Einstein and Gödel laugh.

"I know where von Neumann stole that joke from," says Einstein. "When I heard it before, it was Niels Bohr and a horseshoe!"

"What Johnny finally got Kurt with--I think," Morgenstern continues while they wait for Gödel, "was the fact that the relative priority of the rules of priority almost never comes up in the law, and certainly never has done so in cases involving the amendment clause. He argued that the procedural limitations become so intractable--"

"--that they in essence become substantive limitations," Einstein said, finishing his colleague's thought. "Sounds like something of a sophistry to me, actually. Did Kurt accept it?"

Morgenstern shrugs.

"It seems to have quieted him down on the whole issue, but you know Kurt--he may just be thinking about it."

"And with Kurt that can be a dangerous thing," Einstein says, laughing.

"I think that, if we want to keep Kurt from thinking about his 'discovery'--"

"--and prevent him from talking about it to the judge!" Einstein breaks in.

"We should divert his attention from it."

"Right. I agree completely. Jokes, stories. Anything but conversation about consistency and completeness in the Constitution!"

"Ssh! Here he comes."

Gödel is a short, slight man with prominent cheekbones and even more prominent eyeglasses. Everything slight seems even slighter and everything prominent seems even more prominent today. Gödel's wife Adele has been out of the country and Gödel has not been taking particularly good care of himself.

Gödel does not want to die in a hospital bed. He wants to stay in the chair, but he is so weak he can barely hold his head up, even to gaze at Adele.

Odd that he should be remembering that Kabbalah conversation with Einstein now, he thinks. Einstein was neither traditionally nor mystically religious in his beliefs. Gödel himself is also only nebulously religious, at least in terms of strict denominational adherence.

Anti-Catholic from having been born and raised in a country whose state religion was Catholicism, the shy Gödel nonetheless married his Adele there, a lively Catholic girl six years his senior who worked as a night club dancer (much to the chagrin of Gödel's parents, particularly his mother).

The marriage is successful. Adele protects her frail genius husband--once quite literally, when she beats back an attack on her husband by a pair of Nazi thugs with nothing more than her fury and an umbrella.

Gödel smiles, remembering, though he does not have the energy to push the smile all the way to his lips. The Nazis were always mistaking him for a Jew because he was an intellectual who often wore black, and was part of the Schlick Circle in Vienna.

Alas, he has never been all that politically astute, himself. He probably would never have emigrated to America had it not been for Morgenstern, his other great protector, dead now these six months. Gödel wonders what might have happened to him had he not emigrated.

He looks at his arms sticking out of the hospital gown. They are knobby, withered and emaciated, like those of a concentration-camp survivor. Or the corpse of someone who didn't survive the camps. Had he not emigrated, odds are he would have come to this condition thirty-five years before now.

He sighs. He wishes he had been more politically aware. Wishes and facts. Wishes and horses.

You can remember the past, and you can physically affect the future, he thinks, but you can't physically affect the past or remember the future. At least not on the scale of classical physics, given the arrow of time.

Yet the quantum physicists find no arrow to time on the quantum scale. There, it is possible to physically affect the past. To remember the future. There, you can go home again. Maybe the afterlife will be like that too.

Or maybe it will be unending insight into all the infinite complexity of an endlessly branching tree of universes.

One of those students he threw out of his office all those years ago, for asking about the deep connection between the incompleteness theorem and the uncertainty principle--that student went on to envision just such a physics of innumerable universes.

If he had not kicked that student out of his office that day, Gödel wonders, might the boy have been content with a more traditional physics? Might he never have gone on to dream of many worlds?

Gödel, too weak to smile, is laughing inside. He has just imagined a world where Snow White has awakened at a kiss to discover she is an enormous insect--but then again, so is Prince Cockroach.

As Gödel gets into the car, Einstein turns to him.

"Well, are you ready for your next-to-last test?"

"What do you mean, 'next-to-last'?"

"Very simple. The last will be when you step into the grave."

Morgenstern frowns as they pull away from the curb, but Einstein's conversational gambit seems to do the trick. They do not speak of the Constitution, consistency, or completeness as they drive toward the courthouse in Trenton. All is jokes and stories, even when they get out of the car.

"A Czech, a Hungarian, and a German appear before an immigration judge," Gödel says as they walk up the courthouse steps. "Sounds like the first line of a joke!"

"No," says Einstein. "For a joke, one of the three must be a Jew."

"And it should somehow involve the gates of heaven and Saint Peter," Morgenstern says, "as the final judge."

"I've heard some jokes where I'm in front of the Pearly Gates talking to the saintly gatekeeper," Einstein says. "I find these types of jokes to be in very poor taste."

"Because they put a Jew in a Christian heaven?" Gödel asks.

"Not that!" says Einstein. "It's because, in the jokes, I'm already dead!"

They enter the building laughing, but their laughter does not last long when they see the line of other applicants ahead of them. Einstein and Morgenstern glance at each other over Gödel's head, wondering how long they will have to keep distracting Kurt.

"Professor Einstein!" a man in judge's robes calls out to them. "It's been a long time since I've seen you in my courthouse."

"Judge Forman!" Einstein says, shaking the man's hand.

"Ah, you remember. I'm honored, sir, honored. How long has it been? Six years?"

"Seven, since you administered the oath of citizenship to me."

"What brings you to court today? Nothing troubling, I hope?"

Einstein explains to Judge Philip Forman that he and Oskar Morgenstern are to serve as witnesses for their fellow professor, Kurt Gödel here, during his citizenship hearing.

Forman ushers the three into his chambers at once, leaving the long line of other applicants behind. Forman clearly enjoys chatting with the famous Einstein. It turns out that he knows of Morgenstern's work on game theory with von Neumann too--mainly from von Neumann's statements in the press lately about the value of that theory in the growing conflict with erstwhile ally Soviet Russia.

Von Neumann has stirred up a bit of controversy with his calls for a preventive war against Russia, before the communists develop an atomic arsenal to match that of the United States. Einstein shakes his head, unhappy with any talk of "preventive war"--no matter how much game theory predicts such a conflict might benefit America.

Gödel feels supernumerary for a time, a tag-along, but soon enough the judge gathers up Gödel's paper work and turns his attention to the logician. Although the interview is supposed to be private, the judge allows Einstein and Morgenstern to remain for the entire proceeding.

"Now, you came here from Germany, is that right?" the judge asks over his reading glasses.

"From Austria, sir," Gödel says, politely correcting Forman.

"Well, they were both under the control of an evil dictatorship at the time, isn't that right?"

"Yes, sir."

"And would you say one of the reasons you came here was because a dictatorship like that which arose in Germany could never arise here?"

Einstein and Morgenstern flash each other a look.

"I did use to believe that, yes," Gödel says, "but no longer. On the contrary, I think I know how such a thing might also happen here!"

"Oh?"

Morgenstern is jabbing Gödel with his elbow, and Einstein is squeezing his arm, but Kurt is plowing ahead.

"Hitler, as you may recall, was initially elected to the chancellorship of Germany. Legally. Article V of the Constitution of the United States, the Amendment Clause, if interpreted to be omnipotent, places no substantive limitations on the amending of the Constitution. Conventions called to consider amendments proposed by Congress or the state legislatures could be used to nullify the democratic institutions described in the rest of the document. Everything in the Constitution could be overturned. Even the Amendment Clause itself could well be amended irreversibly--"

"You needn't go into all that," Judge Forman says, interrupting, realizing the avalanche his question has triggered in Gödel. "Tell me, Mister Gödel: what was the importance of Marbury v. Madison?

Forman's ploy works. The rest of the examination is concerned with more and more basic questions about US history and civics. Einstein and Morgenstern begin to breathe a little easier. In the end, Kurt Gödel passes his citizenship examination with flying colors. Two weeks later, Adele does the same.

Forman again presides on April 2, 1948, when Kurt and Adele take their oaths of citizenship. The judge speaks for over an hour on the past and present circumstances of the United States, so effectively that (as Gödel confides later, in a letter to his mother) "one went home with the impression that American citizenship, in contrast to most others, really means something."

In his chair in the hospital, Gödel finds enough last strength to stretch luxuriously. In a moment of aching clarity, he has just realized he was right to try to explain his discovery to the judge.

True, the door through which a dictator might yet enter American history has not opened. At least not in this universe. The current occupant of the White House is a gentleman peanut farmer--hardly the stuff of which tyrants are made.

Still, isn't it the duty of citizens to speak the truth as they see it, even to the powerful? Even when, in doing so, they might well cause harm to their own prospects?

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" God would certainly need to help with that, because only a divine being could possibly know the whole truth.

Or perhaps even infinite truths, in infinite worlds.

Like Judge Forman, would such a god also say "No need to go into all that"--because everything Gödel could say would already be known to such a being? He wonders. Might he too, someday, understand his own life so simply and naturally that he might also be able to say to himself the judge's words, and need no judge thereafter?

The movie of his life, passing before his eyes, becomes a film melting in the projector. The bright light of a truer reality shines through as the movie stops. Our truth is full of holes, he realizes, but the holes are also full of truth.

Kurt Gödel finishes stretching, the houselights come up, and he is gone.

Appeal

Dana William Paxson

I CLING TO A STEEL RIB with my two human hands and gape at these balls of radiating rubber sticks, the Ko Duessinach Marseein, aliens each two meters across, the two hundred arms of each one whipping in a nonexistent breeze to a music of light that comes from nowhere.

How do they dance here, without gravity's anchor? The walls turn thin and sun blooms into our Lagrange bubble, where we welcome these refugees from what they called the Kaliari Expansions in the galactic interior. Here and there officials from Earth, most of them space-sick, hang by strapholds.

"We will dance for you," the Marseein promised five years ago, as their interstellar trash-heap decelerated toward us.

"Ridiculous," I said to Jedediah K. We laughed, remembering the telecasts of their forms.

Now they shrink together into a quivering heap of flaccid limbs. Jedediah, clinging at my side, elbows me.

The light flashes purple; the heap blows apart. Each of the Marseein flattens to a disk, spinning, sailing out at the bubble walls. They rebound as one, becoming balls of limbs again. A giddy weaving begins. My head aches; I see in my mind a child skewered on a bayonet. I shout "No!"

The Marseein spin and explode, bounce and grip, not once touching anything but minds. Beside me Jedediah curls into a ball; his vomit floats before him. I shut my eyes. A burning man beats at his own blackening clothes. A machine seizes him and gnaws away his limbs.

The bubble's light shifts and leaps. My inner eye sees ocean; laughing mer-creatures skip on the sea-spume. Peace: my heart slows once more. From the dancers come soft undulating waves, urging. Hope. I catch a strut of the bubble wall. They have come to us for hope. For help.

I stare at Jedediah. "What can we do for them?"

He shrugs. "Got to do something, I guess."

The Marseein float, waiting, to the bubble wall opposite the sun. Officials mutter in floating clusters. The bubble's brain dims the sunside protectively. Nightside, the stars lie stubbornly in blackness.

Adrift on the Mare Commutatio

Dana William Paxson

S O YOU PUSHED the ejection handle," Soprano Atropos said, a scowl on her face. The ammoniac sea tossed their raft high; tears ran from seven pairs of eyes.

"It read 'ejaculation', and I was watching that sex holo we liked so much," Sweet Bella Donna answered. She turned and voided her lunch into the pale-blue waters. The multicolored feast spread and sank, the bits changing shape as they went. A huge dark shape passed beneath them; the sea whelmed.

Bitter wind lashed them from pink and curdled skies. The Wastrel Monkshood murmured, "Fine vacation. I hope we're near shore. Exorphins are getting low."

"Shut up, Wastrel." Farouk the Cardsayer shifted his bulk and the other six bodies heaved upward, almost over the raft's bulky gunwale.

"Hey!" It was Pseudolus Maestro, at last awake and clutching a rope. He raised his pencil-thin body and looked around at the sloped and shifting walls of water. "Where's Nostradamus Feingold?"

"He fell overboard an hour ago," Rosetta Stone yawned. "Leaves more food for the rest of us." She stretched, rearranged the wet and half-dissolving shreds of her undersuit, and winked at Monkshood.

He looked her over; his eyes gleamed. "Care to test that fine physique of yours with me when we get to land?"

"Shut up, Wastrel," Farouk said again. "This water changes things, see?" He held up a hand; his fingernails had grown long and brilliant green.

"Then we're doomed," Soprano Atropos said. The wind whistled through her words.

"Maybe not," Sweet Bella Donna answered. "Maybe we'll just become something marvelous instead."

Beneath the raft, Nostradamus Feingold spread his ten-foot jaws in a hungry smile.

The Visitors on the Fourth

Dana William Paxson

W E DRIFTED IN GUSTS, sometimes quick like our photon brothers, sometimes slow like our electron sisters, swirling through the solar storms to this little planet coated with water. Water! Great swaths of it, tiny dribbles of it, long strings of it crossing humid land. We found a puddle and sank gently down through a darkening evening to its center, where an object floated. Life-forms moved about upon it. We penetrated their electricity and danced with its images: fires in their hands, fires they were preparing, to tickle the night sky for the thousands of their kind gathered on the shores of this--lake?--their word for the water, their word in waves of sound.

We scattered to the lake's edges. More of these--humans--large and small, gathering, feeling the electric pulses of each other growing. Some of us whispered, and the little ones pointed at us and said, "Fireflies!" The big ones laughed and squeezed each other.

The fires began, climbing from red sparks from the lake up into the darkness and exploding into holy words of joy. And we all sang with them, and raced out in a blaze to where the humans set the fires on their raft, and we watched the words of angels form and fade in eternal night; and when the last words were said all together in a great shouting chorus, we answered with our own galactic symphony of light, filling their eyes with the story of the Making until they all jumped up and down and forgot their sad apehood. And then we said goodbye and soared away, dusting them all with the scintillas of our memory, a rain of silver and gold that frosted even the naked skins of the lovers lying entranced and hidden on the shore.

Asha

Jaime Lee Moyer

Mama rarely speaks of Mars,
Serenity hard won in
Seven years of struggle.
You have your father's eyes
She says when Asha asks,
The cruel decision to
Banish her and newborn child
Explained in one brief phrase.
Though Mama rarely speaks of Mars,
She braids plaid ribbons,
Blue and green for luck,
In Asha's long dark hair,
Weaves patterns, pictures,
Seen by Asha's golden eyes,
Tells bedtime tales of crystal spires
Rising high on plains of
Rust stained dust,
Teaches Asha words that,
If she listens with her heart,
Sing the songs of comet's dreams--
Though Mama rarely speaks of Mars.

Gypsy Wings

Justin Stanchfield

"Is there a Valhalla for heroes who failed, or do they simply pass from reality to reality, forever running from things they didn't do?

I'll admit it, I'm addicted to the sky, the joy of seeing the world slip away beneath a set of wings more intoxicating than moonshine. This story grew out of my love of flight, and a fascination with the old legends of pilots who took off, never to return."

T HE SKY GROWLED. Jerry Mackie felt it before he actually heard the odd, popping rumble, felt it deep in his guts the way he could sense a storm long before the first thunder broke. Faint, but growing louder by the heartbeat, the sound spread across the drowsy pasture. Beside him, his brother Wes, younger by three years but nearly as tall, stiffened, then began to thrash as if he was drowning.

"Ghosts coming," the boy blurted in his strange, flat voice. He shook his head madly from side to side.

"Wes, stop it." Jerry grabbed him by the arms and tried to shake him out of the fit, but Wes pulled away and jabbed a finger at the cloud-spotted sky. Jerry glanced upward.

"Wow."

Garish wooden birds slid overhead, at least a dozen of them, and skimmed the cottonwoods that lined the pasture. Jerry watched, amazed as the biplanes rocked on the breeze, flames belching behind their whirring props. In all his fourteen years he had never seen an aeroplane, never in fact talked to anyone who had, so to see an entire flight buzz past was almost magical. The machines lumbered across the pale, midday sky, lifted over the low ridge to the east, then as one, banked into a slow turn back toward him. One, a sleek craft with blue and red hearts painted on its coal black fuselage, did a slow roll before it lowered its tail and clipped the tall grass. The others touched down beside it, some bouncing, some settling to ground as deft as ravens. The black machine shut down with a cough of blue smoke. A stocky man in a long, oil-streaked coat jumped to the ground.

"Hey, kid? What town is this?"

"Town?" Jerry blushed as he realized how stupid he must sound. The nearest town was three miles away and across the river, but must have seemed a hop, skip and jump to the airmen. He pointed toward the distant church spire, just visible over the waving treetops. "That's Elk Creek."

"Yeah?" The pilot swept his leather cap off and grinned. He had curly brown hair that looked as if it hadn't seen a comb in months and a lopsided grin, toothy as a mongrel dog. "Elk Creek got a telephone?"

"Yes, sir." Jerry nodded, then added quickly, "but it don't work."

He had all but forgotten about Wes. Now the boy staggered backwards, throwing his arms in wild circles. "Go away! All of you! Go away!" The boy picked up a rock and hurled it at the nearest aeroplane, then sprinted away. A second pilot, tall and lanky, wearing a heavy canvas coat that hung nearly to his knees, stepped out of a bright red machine with green wings. He tipped his head toward Wes as the boy vanished behind a clump of chokecherry bushes.

"Looks like we frightened your brother."

"Don't worry about Wes. He ain't quite right in the head."

"This pasture belong to your old man?" the first pilot asked.

"Yeah." The word caught in Jerry's throat. Farmer's Bank of Montana owned the field, and lately had made certain they knew it, but he wasn't about to tell that to a pack of strangers. "It's ours."

"Think he'd mind if we camped here a couple days?" the taller man asked. Jerry shrugged. The first pilot laughed a little louder than he needed.

"Just tell him Les Gitans are here. You ever heard of the Gitans, kid?"

Jerry swung his head in an emphatic no. The short man grinned all the broader. More pilots were stepping out of their machines now, a motley collection. Several held bottles in their hands and were passing them around. Even from where he stood, Jerry caught the sour scent of bootleg whisky.

"Well, kid," the pilot took out a silver flask, tipped it back, then wiped the stray drops off his face with his dirty sleeve. "Now you've heard of us."

Jerry's eyes roved around the strange collection of aeroplanes, their cloth skin stiff as wood. Some had rifles fixed to the upper wings, a few even boasted round-drummed machine guns. His eyes widened as he looked back at the pilots. "Have you been to the war?"

The men laughed, all except the lanky pilot who simply nodded. "Yeah, we've been to the war." He smiled in a friendly way, but his eyes were gray and sad. "Your pa have anything against the war?"

"I don't think he cares one way or the other," Jerry lied. For some reason, he desperately wanted the Gitans to camp in their cow meadow. "But it might be best if you laid a little low."

"Kid," the stocky pilot said with a flourish. "Laying low is what we do best."

Wes was already home by the time Jerry returned. Relief that his brother was safe quickly faded to worry about what the boy might have told his parents. He washed his hands and face in the chipped enamel bowl on the porch, shook the water off, then went inside. His father looked up as the screen door banged shut, but said nothing. Garr Mackie was not a large man, but he was strong and stiff as sun-baked leather. Jerry hung his hat on the peg near the stove, then quickly took his place at the table. His mother leaned over his shoulder and set a plate of cold biscuits beside a pitcher of water. Jerry caught her eye as she straightened, the unspoken message plain.

Be careful.

"You find the break in the fence?" Mackie speared a thin slice of deer meat onto his plate.

"Yep. A tree fell across it and knocked the top three poles off." Jerry tried to sound nonchalant. "Wasn't too hard to find."

"You fix it?"

"I will." Jerry stole a glance at Wes, but the boy was silent, his attention fixed on a hairline crack on his plate. His father chewed slowly, then looked pointedly at him.

"You see those aeroplanes go by?"

"Yes, Pa," Jerry said.

"Wes said they landed in our field. That so?"

"Yes." Jerry stole a look at his mother, but she steadfastly kept her face turned away. He took a deep breath. "They landed up by the cottonwoods."

Mackie's eyes narrowed. "You tell them to leave?"

"They were just passing through," Jerry said.

"They better be." Mackie took another bite and spoke as he chewed. "I won't have gin-runners and warmongers on my place. Understand?"

Jerry nearly said it wasn't his place anymore, but quickly thought better of it. Instead, he simply nodded. He forced himself to eat, but his mouth was so dry he could barely swallow. A breeze sprang up and rattled the door, the air heavy with the touch of coming rain.

"Storm's here," Wes muttered, his gaze still fixed on his plate.

A peal of thunder rolled over the house. Jerry flinched as it shook the windows and faded, certain he caught the sound of whirring engines skipping bird-like on the wind.

The rain shower was brief, more bluster than downpour. Jerry wished it had been longer as he sweated through his chores. It took him longer to patch the broken fence than he expected and by the time he was finished the afternoon was on the wane. All the while Wes stood in the middle of the yard, throwing rocks at chickens or drawing crooked lines in the dust with a stick. Now and then the boy would speak to someone who wasn't there, the one-sided conversations unintelligible. Annoyed at having to work while his brother did nothing, Jerry scowled as he herded the milk cow into the barn and locked her in the stanchion. The alternating streams of hot milk against the tin pail wove a ragtime beat in his mind, and again his thoughts drifted with unbridled envy to the aeroplanes less than a mile away. Once he heard an engine and rushed outside, but was disappointed to see nothing but a rusted Model T truck rumble down the dirt road at the end of the lane.

"My luck," he thought bitterly as he tromped back inside the reeking barn and plopped down on the low stool. The cow flicked her tail as he grabbed her teats, dotting his face with tiny green freckles. He scrubbed them off on his shirt-sleeve then bent back to milking.

The repetition lulled him as he fell into a rhythm, and he imagined himself in one of the planes, racing above the treetops, firing long volleys of machine gun fire at a fleeing zeppelin or strafing the traitorous Czar's trenches. Once, years ago, his mother had taken him to the movies. Jerry had sat enthralled with the flickering picture, some tear-stained war epic, lost in the make believe. He had long forgotten the story but remembered every second of the dogfight scene, the dipping, whirling melee an intoxication to his young imagination. When they had returned home he had run across the dusty yard and proudly told his father he intended to enlist and become a pilot when he was old enough.

Instead of a beaming, fatherly reply, he received a back-hand slap across the face. "I'll be damned if any son of mine becomes a soldier."

Jerry could still feel the slap. It had been the last time he had seen a movie, and the last time he had spoken with his father about leaving home, but Jerry hadn't forgotten. He was nearly old enough now to run away. Canada lay less than a hundred miles to the north. It would be an adventure, he told himself. He would sneak across the border then proudly present himself at the Mounties Post where he would tell the man in the bright red uniform why he was there.

"Aren't you an American?" the Mounty would ask.

"Yes, sir, I am," Jerry would say.

"Don't you know your President Bryant has declared it against the law for an American to fight in the Great War?"

"I don't care, sir. I'm here to fight. I want to be a pilot." And there and then, Jerry dreamt, the Mounty would swear him in and usher him with a hero's welcome to the train depot for the long ride east. He smiled grimly as he milked, his resolve stronger than ever.

Finished, Jerry hauled the bucket to the house. Foamy milk sloshed over the brim as he hefted it onto the battered cupboard. He washed his hands, then, making certain he wasn't noticed, slipped off toward the cow pasture. His heart sank as he broke over the low hill and found the meadow empty.

"Damn it to hell." Jerry swore under his breath. His mood brightened after a second look. At least one of the planes remained, partially hidden in the trees that lined the field. More than a little nervous, Jerry screwed up his courage and marched across the grassy stretch toward it.

The pilots had built a hobo camp among the cottonwoods, crude tarpaulin lean-to's strung between branches. The aroma of wood smoke, beans, and gasoline hung thick on the languid air. Jerry looked around, wondering where the airmen had gone, then finally spotted a pair of legs sticking out from beneath the front of the aeroplane. Still nervous, he sauntered closer.

"Howdy," Jerry said, desperately hoping his voice didn't crack.

The lanky pilot he had spoken with earlier scooted out from under the thick wooden prop, and grinning, wiped a smudge of grease off his forehead. "Howdy, yourself."

"I thought," Jerry said hesitantly, "you fellas had pulled up stakes."

"Not yet. Some of the boys just took a jaunt up North."

Jerry didn't ask why. It was common knowledge, even in Elk Creek, that the roving gangs of pilots operated unhindered across the border, hauling Canadian whiskey southward. Even his father kept a bottle of it hidden behind the canning jars.

"How come you didn't go?" He nodded at the front of the aeroplane. "The engine busted?"

"No. At least not too badly." The tall man laughed, then extended his arm. "Give me a hand up, would you?"

The man was heavier than he looked, and Jerry nearly lost his balance as he helped him to his feet. The tall man arched his back to work out the kinks. "My name's Albert Aimes, but most folks call me Preacher."

"Are you a preacher?" Jerry asked, surprised at the thought. Preacher laughed again, the sound of it infectious.

"Let's just say I've been known to pray a time or two."

The pilot took a wooden handled screwdriver from his back-pocket and methodically began to tighten the unshielded wires that bridged the magneto to the sparkplugs atop each of the finned, gray steel cylinders. Jerry watched with interest. The motor was nothing like the little flat-headed engine in his father's Model A. His gaze roved over the strange machine, amazed at the spiderweb of cables and struts that bound it together. His eyes settled on a painting of a dark-haired woman with exaggerated breasts, a tambourine in her slender hands. Above her long, flowing hair, painted in elegant black letters were the words "Les Gitans." Beneath the painting ran a long line of blimps, a trail of smoke out the top of each.

"What's Gitan mean," Jerry asked.

"Huh?" Preacher turned, surprised it seemed that Jerry could read. He nodded at the painting, then bent back to the engine. "It's French for gypsy."

"You were in France?"

Preacher nodded.

"Why'd you came back?"

"Guess I got tired of fighting."

"But, we're winning, right?" Jerry asked, a little more eagerly than he intended. "I mean England and Canada. You know, the good guys. We're going to beat the Huns, right?"

Preacher's face darkened. "I don't think anyone's going to win that war. Fifteen years is a long time to spend killing each other."

A distant buzz swept through the trees and became a roar as one after another the rest of the Gitans flew over the meadow. Jerry rushed out to watch, entranced as the aeroplanes rolled and twisted at treetop level, playing a dangerous game of follow-the-leader. The black machine with the blue and red hearts led the procession as they swooped low then settled to earth. Their engines sputtered and died, leaving the meadow ominously silent. The airmen crawled out and laboriously began to push their ships toward the trees.

"Hey, kid?" The stocky pilot of the black machine waved Jerry toward him. "Give me a hand, huh?"

Glad to help, Jerry hurried across the meadow and took up position on the opposite side of the fuselage, his hand wrapped around a leather-edged pocket recessed into the wooden frame. He was surprised how light the craft was as they rolled it toward the sheltering woods.

"So, you and the Preacher been swapping war stories?" The man stretched his neck until he could look over the plane's narrow back, a boyish grin plastered on his oil-smudged face.

"He said he was in France," Jerry admitted.

"France. Belgium. Poland. Hell, the Preacher was in 'em all." They swung the machine around until the nose pointed back toward the field. The stocky pilot lowered the tail to the ground, then pointed at Preacher. "You are looking at the second-best balloon buster in the history of aviation. Only Frank Luke brought down more observation blimps than the Preach. And that's only 'cause we busted out of the Legion and come home."

Jerry stared at the gangly Preacher with newfound admiration. Puffing a little from exertion, the short pilot drew his flask from an inside pocket, took a long drink then sighed with obvious pleasure. "Damn, that's good. So, what do they call you, kid?"

"Jerry. Jerry Mackie."

"Pleased to meet you, Jerry Jerry Mackie." The little man's grin broadened. "I'm Stumpy O'Toole. Say, you know the roads around these parts, right?"

Jerry nodded.

"How would you like to earn yourself an aeroplane ride?"

"You mean it?" Jerry's heart practically stopped at the thought of it.

"Sure, I mean it. Tomorrow, we're supposed to get a truck-load of gasoline in here. You meet the driver at daybreak down at that railroad bridge and lead him here, and I'll see you get a ride upstairs. Hell, you help us load up and I might even let you fly the damn thing. What do you say?"

Before Jerry could answer, another rumble cut the evening air. Everyone fell silent and stared upward. High overhead a single aeroplane drifted across the sky. It flew in a perfectly straight line, no playful loops or dives, its path business-like and serious. Out the corner of his eye Jerry saw Preacher turn and walk away.

"Who's that?" Jerry asked softly.

"That?" Stumpy smiled, but there was no humor in his voice. "Remember I told you the Preach' was the number two balloon buster in the world? Well, that was number one."

A light wind stirred the willows along the river bend, and Jerry pulled his threadbare coat tighter around his shoulders. Nervously, he waited near the footing of the railroad bridge, the river's swoosh and gurgle somehow ominous, as if the swirling water was filled with dark spirits eager to trap the unwary. He glanced up at the sky, sunrise only a pale swath along the rolling hills to the east. It had taken him nearly an hour to make his way to the bridge in the dark, stumbling and tripping along the shadowed road. The night had been short and he had barely slept, his mind filled with worry. It left him hollow, sick to his stomach, all too aware what would happen should his father discover where he had gone.

A sputtering engine broke the stillness. A flat-bed truck rattled along the narrow dirt road then ground to a stop. Jerry shrank closer to the cement footing, but the promise of an aeroplane ride was too tempting. He took a deep breath then stepped out. An unshaven, jowly man, face lit by the cigarette dangling from his lower lip, stared at Jerry from the driver's window.

"You the kid 'sposed to take me to them flyboys?" The man's voice gurgled like the river, his breath reeking of cheap tobacco and whisky. Jerry nodded. "Get in then."

He hurried around to the passenger side and crawled inside the little cab. The seat cushion was long gone, replaced by an upturned apple crate. Jerry clung to the door frame as they pounded down the rutted path, tin cans banging against each other in the back. The driver remained silent, grunting now and then at the worst of the jarring bumps.

"Turn here." Jerry pointed at a gap in the sagging barbwire fence. The driver dropped into a lower gear as they climbed along the slowly rising terrain. The narrow tires spun as they neared the top of the wooded hill, then, just when it seemed the engine would stall and send them hurtling backwards to their death, the truck topped the ridge. The familiar sight of their cow pasture gave Jerry only momentary relief, the thought of his father weighing him down as the truck rolled to a stop at the edge of the trees.

The morose driver popped the hand-clutch to kill the engine, and Jerry nearly slammed into the dashboard. Figures ambled out of the trees and slowly surrounded the battered Ford. Stumpy O'Toole circled the front of the truck and peered inside. Satisfied they were who they were supposed to be, he gave a backhand wave to the men around him. Jerry pushed the door open and jumped gratefully to the ground. The hair on his neck stiffened at the unmistakable sound of gun hammers being lowered.

"Hey, kid!" O'Toole slapped Jerry on the shoulder. "Give me a hand with the gas cans, would you?"

For the next half hour, Jerry was too busy to worry about his father or anything else except staying upright as he hauled the heavy, over-filled cans from the truck to the aeroplanes. Sweat poured down his back as he hefted another of the square containers up to O'Toole, the stocky pilot balanced precariously one foot on the lower wing of his plane, the other on the wire-spoked wheel.

"Thanks, kid." O'Toole upended the can into a dented tin funnel crammed into the fuel tank nestled in the center of the upper wing.

Jerry passed another fuel can into the pilot's waiting hand. Behind him, he heard the clink of bottles as wooden cases were loaded on the truck. The sky had brightened enough to make out individual faces. Jerry tried to spot Preacher, but didn't find him.

"Where's Preacher?" he asked as he took the empty can back.

"Huh?" O'Toole leapt nimbly to the ground then wiped his hands on his filthy pant legs. "The Preach? He had some night flying to do." He left it at that and walked off toward the truck. The other pilots were already rolling their machines out and pointing them into the wind. Some swung their props in slow, ponderous arcs while others oiled and primed the cylinders. One after another, the machines roared to life, the air whipped into an oil-soaked storm of exhaust and dust. Jerry had the sinking feeling that the promised ride was not going to happen as he watched the truck bounce away and vanish over the hill. He felt a tap on his shoulder, and startled, spun around. O'Toole stood grinning behind him.

"We've got to fly, kid," he shouted over the accumulated roar. "You gonna be around this evening?"

"Are you?" Jerry shouted back, not hiding his suspicion. O'Toole laughed and thumped him on the shoulder.

"Damned right, we'll be back. I owe you a joyride."

Jerry watched the machines as they gathered speed and staggered into the air. Despite O'Toole's assurance, he couldn't shunt aside his doubt. Feeling like a fool, he ran home, and hurriedly drove the milk cow into the barn, anxious to seem as if he had simply been at his chores early instead of hauling gas to whiskey runners. He locked the spotted Jersey in the stanchion, then turned to see a figure silhouetted in the crooked doorway. Wes stared at him, his face blank as always. Jerry brushed past him to get the milk pail, but Wes grabbed his sleeve.

"You got ghosts with you," the boy said, then without explanation, turned and walked away.

The sun was up in full by the time he slogged back to the house for breakfast. His mother's brows furrowed as she sniffed the air, and suddenly Jerry realized he reeked of gasoline. To his relief she said nothing, but set a plate of fried potatoes and more of the stringy deer meat in front of him. Trying a little too hard to seem nonchalant, he took a bite then asked where his father was.

"Went into Browning," his mother replied. Her tone left little doubt he had gone once more to the bank to plead for time. Never an easy man, Jerry's father had fallen more and more in upon himself as the noose of debt tightened around the homestead. These days, his mother flinched when he walked into the room. Jerry understood all too well and left an ever-widening berth around his father when he could. Across the kitchen, the screen door banged and Wes wandered in but didn't sit down. Instead, he simply stood, his eyes fixed on a spot over Jerry's left shoulder.

"What's wrong with you?" Jerry snapped.

The boy said nothing.

"You're crazy in the head." Jerry wolfed down his breakfast and left. He grabbed his shovel and marched out to clean the unending network of irrigation ditches. The morning grew oppressively hot, filled with mosquitoes, the stench of soured blood drifting with them. He paused and looked skyward. Far above, a lone aeroplane traveled a straight path east to west, but it was too high to make out details. Disheartened, he bent back to his work.

Finally, after lunch, Jerry heard the unmistakable drone of a prop cruising unseen just beyond the low rise. After making certain he hadn't been seen, Jerry slipped away. His heart lurched as he broke into the rocky clearing. A red and green aeroplane sat askew in the middle of the pasture, the left wheel collapsed. A man knelt beside the wing, doubled over, his face nearly touching his thighs.

"Preacher?" Jerry charged toward the craft. "Are you okay?"

The man muttered something, but his words were slurred and incoherent. He barely glanced up as Jerry helped him to his feet. A thin trickle of blood seeped out of a cut on his lower lip. Carefully, Jerry ran his hand along the stunned man's forehead, then recoiled. For one second, just at the moment of contact, Jerry felt as if he stood in two places at once. Gone was the quiet meadow, replaced by a gray and ruined land. Shattered trees poked up from shallow, muddy pits while another aeroplane lay on its nose, tail high, little more than a broken frame covered with shredded cloth. Jerry snatched his hand back and the sensation vanished. Hesitantly, he touched Preacher's forehead again, but to his relief felt nothing.

"What happened?" Jerry led Preacher toward the trees and the welcoming shade, then eased him down beside a gnarled cottonwood.

"Why won't he leave me alone?" Preacher seemed to be speaking to himself. Exhausted, he slumped against the tree.

"Who? Who won't leave you alone?"

As if in answer, another aeroplane, the motor faint with distance, hove into view far overhead. Jerry stared as it slowly crossed the sky, then entered a wooly cloud. He waited, but the machine didn't reappear.

"Damn you!" With surprising force, Preacher leapt to his feet and shouted at the sky. "Don't you know it's over?" He took a single, faltering step, then collapsed back to the earth. Jerry dragged him into the shade, and not knowing what else to do, sat waiting for O'Toole and the others to fly home. He didn't have long to wait.

A soft drone piggybacked the wind and became a roar as the Gypsies popped over the low ridge. They landed haphazardly, several barely missing Preacher's upended machine as they careened to ground. Engines died and men leapt from their tiny, open cockpits, shouting and laughing at each other. Most of them. Jerry could see, were already drunk. He walked out to meet O'Toole.

"I think Preacher's hurt."

"Yeah?" O'Toole frowned. He hurried toward him, bent down and made a quick examination. Preacher's eyes fluttered open but he didn't seem to notice the stocky man above him.

"Is he going to be okay?" Jerry asked, more worried than he wanted to admit.

"Sure, kid. He'll be jake in a couple hours." O'Toole tried to appear unconcerned, but his eyes betrayed him. "He gets like this sometimes, that's all."

"He kept yelling at someone to leave him alone."

O'Toole scratched his nose, obviously weighing his words. "Look, kid. The Preach wouldn't want me to tell you this, so let's keep it on the QT, right?"

Jerry nodded, and O'Toole launched into a brief explanation. "You probably figured already the lot of us got good reason to avoid the law, right? Hell, most of us are deserters from one army or another. Got tired of being shot at, or sick of taking orders. But not the Preach. That man would still be 'over there' if he could."

"Then," Jerry asked, confused, "why's he here?"

"Cause I shanghaied him and put him on a freighter out of Calais before he woke up." O'Toole shrugged. "He wasn't too happy about it, but like I told him, it beats spending the next five years in prison."

"Prison?" Jerry looked down at the man curled on his side against the old cottonwood.

"That's where you go after a court-martial, kid. Our boy Preacher had a little run-in with the brass. They blamed him for getting another pilot killed." O'Toole waggled his bushy eyebrows. "See, the Preach and Frank Luke had an unfriendly little competition going to see who could flame the most observation balloons. Ran neck and neck for months. Every time one of them would make a kill, the other would go out of his way to even up the score. At first, the CO looked the other way. Hell, we were supposed to be shooting down their sausages, right? But after a while even he could see someone was going to get killed. So, he ordered them to knock it off."

"And Preacher disobeyed?"

"Hell yes, he disobeyed. Luke was one blimp ahead, and that didn't sit right with him. So he takes off just before sunset one day and goes balloon hunting. Luke got word and took off in his plane, too."

"What happened?"

O'Toole shrugged. "Preacher came back. Frank Luke didn't. The Old Man hit the ceiling when he found out. Said he was going to see him court-martialed. And he would have, too, if I hadn't got him drunk that night and stole a truck. Got both our asses out of France and glad of it."

Jerry twisted around and stared at the green and red aeroplane. Several of the other Gitans were busy fixing the broken wheel and checking the wing for damage. Suddenly, they stopped and looked up. Jerry followed their gaze and saw, once again, the lone aeroplane cruise past, a speck against the pale sky.

"What happened to Frank Luke?" Jerry asked quietly. O'Toole spread his hands in front of him.

"Like I said, he never came back." Abruptly, O'Toole's good humor returned. He took out the little silver flask Jerry had seen earlier, took a long pull, then clapped Jerry on the shoulder. "Hey, I just remembered something. I owe you a plane ride."

Wind in his face. The scent of hot steel, castor oil, and spilled fuel. Wires singing as O'Toole revved the engine. Jerry's fingers tightened around the edge of the wicker seat nestled inside the forward cockpit as the black aeroplane began to roll. Every bump, every patch of uneven ground traveled up the fuselage and through his legs. He held his breath as they picked up speed, the bumps and jars so hard now he was certain the rickety collection of stick and fabric would shake apart. His stomach lurched as the tail rose.

"Hang on, kid!" O'Toole shouted from behind. "Here we go!"

The sound was deafening. Jerry's legs stiffened, the vibration terrifying until, like a horse stepping out of a trot into a slow, easy lope, they broke ground. He craned his neck over the side of the machine, his face in the slipstream, and watched the ground fall away. Trees passed, every detail so clear he felt as if he looked down through a clear pond at a world unseen until only now. An invisible hand shoved him against the left side of the cockpit as O'Toole banked sharply to the right.

"You doing okay up there?"

"You bet!" Jerry shouted in reply, though he had no idea if he could be heard over the roar. They climbed above the mottled patchwork of creeks and fields and toy houses no bigger than his thumb. Nothing he had imagined about flying could compare to the actuality. For the first time in his life, he felt as if he belonged somewhere.

"Hang on, kid. You're going to love this part!" The aeroplane leveled, then dipped down. The wind became a cyclone as they plunged almost vertically, then pulled up into a slow circle. Jerry felt himself grow first heavy then perfectly weightless as he hung upside down. Again, the pressure surged as they started down the other side of the loop. O'Toole threw the craft into a Lazy Eight. Jerry whooped as the plane hung on a stall, flipped over and regained the air.

"Hey, kid!" O'Toole leaned over the narrow space between the cockpits and shouted in Jerry's ear. "See that stick between your legs? Grab it like you're taking a piss."

Hesitantly, Jerry took hold of the hardwood shaft but nearly let go as he felt it push against his palm. He gritted his teeth and held it more firmly, amazed at how the plane pitched and bucked with the simplest twist of the wrist.

"Great, kid! Now, reach up with your feet and put them on that yoke on the floor. Step right when you turn right. Step left when you turn left. That's all there is to it."

A sudden tightness curled in Jerry's throat. "I can't fly this machine!"

"Yeah? Well guess what?" O'Toole leaned further and spread his hands, one on either side of Jerry's head until they were in plain view. "You better be flying cause I'm sure as hell not."

For one sickening moment it seemed the plane might fall from the sky. When it didn't, Jerry began to relax and experiment with the controls. By the time O'Toole took the plane back he understood on an instinctive level what it meant to fly.

"Okay, kid, let's go home."

O'Toole banked as he throttled back and let the craft slip groundward. Jerry kept his head in the slipstream and watched as the landscape, so flat only moments before, once again took on details as they skimmed the treetops. A run-down farmstead flashed beneath and it took Jerry a startled moment to realize it was his own home. The engine sputtered as O'Toole blipped the cylinders, cutting the spark in and out to decrease power. The ground blurred then vanished from view as the little machine pitched nose high and settled to ground with a single easy thump. O'Toole killed the engine.

Ears ringing, Jerry fumbled with the rope that held him to the wicker seat, then climbed out. His legs shook and he had to steady himself against the varnished fabric to keep from tilting, but he couldn't stop grinning. A tall, familiar figure ambled out of the trees toward them.

"How'd he do?" Preacher asked. He was pale, the welt along his forehead still visible, but he seemed otherwise fine. O'Toole slapped Jerry on the back.

"The kid's a natural-born pilot."

"That so?" Preacher's solemn face warmed. He held out his right hand. "Welcome to the club." Jerry shook it, but couldn't think of anything to say, his mind still lost in the drifting clouds.

He was a giant now, and wore seven-league boots as he marched home. Even the unending string of chores waiting for him seemed bearable. But, the closer he came, the smaller he felt, diminished by the notion of his father waiting for him. To his dismay, their rusted truck sat near the house, his already father returned from his business with the bank. Jerry considered turning around, but fought down the childish fear. He was a man now, and men faced their troubles square on.

Wes sat on the front steps, his attention fixed on a dead beetle. Jerry stepped around him and went inside.

It was cool in the house, the cloying scent of raw milk and coal smoke permeating everything. Jerry washed the grease stains from his face and dried off, all the while listening for his father's heavy, shambling footsteps, but the house remained quiet. Feeling a little braver, he turned around.

"Where were you?" His father's voice was low and tight, soft as a snake's rattle, but his eyes burned with rage. Startled, Jerry stepped back.

"I was in the cow pasture."

"With those whiskey runners, weren't you." It wasn't a question. "You deliberately disobeyed me."

"Pa…" Jerry started to explain about hearing the aeroplane in trouble, but before he could say anything, a strong backhand slap raked his cheek. He staggered, but refused to go down. Instead, he glared at his father. The anger in the thin man's eyes spread across his face. Again, he raised his hand, but Jerry blocked the blow with his forearm. The shock was strong enough to make his wrist go numb.

"You're worthless." The older man's lips drew in. "After everything I've done for you."

"What? What have you ever done for me?" Jerry was shaking with his own long-suppressed fury, years of resentment welling up.

"Everything I do is for you and your brother. This farm, this house…"

"You don't even know we're around unless we forget to latch the damn gate!"

The next strike was no slap. Jerry was hurled backward against the iron stove. He crumpled to the floor and tried to roll away, but his father's square-toed boot caught him hard against the ribs. Unable to move, he crouched on the bare floor and waited for the pain to arrive. His father drew back his foot for another kick, but a soft, hesitant voice from the other room made him spin around.

"Garr, stop it."

Jerry crawled away as his mother stepped into the kitchen. Her face was bone white save for the redness beneath her left eye that soon would be purple. She had been crying, and her voice quavered, but she held herself straight. Again, his father's leg drew back, but his mother stepped closer. "Garr… you'll kill the boy."

Without another word, Garr Mackie stomped out of the kitchen. Slowly, his ribs aching, Jerry raised himself to his feet, using the table for support. He started to say something, but his mother cut him off.

"What were you thinking?"

Jerry had never heard such bitterness in her voice, and suddenly he realized she blamed him, not his father, for the fight. Unsure what else to do, he stumbled to the screen door and kicked it open. Wes didn't look up as he passed, but ten feet from the house he stopped and went back to the porch. Gently, Jerry bent down and hugged the strange boy.

"Goodbye, Wes."

Wes glanced up from the shriveled insect in his palm, but remained silent. Jerry smiled at him, then turned and walked away.

"They're all dead, you know."

A cold tingle raced up Jerry's neck at his brother's high, reedy voice. He looked back at the boy, not sure if he had meant the whiskey runners or the beetle in his hand. Fighting tears, Jerry raced away from the only home he had ever known, his brother's words echoing in his mind.

The plan was simple enough, he decided as he hurried along the rutted path to the cow pasture. If the Gitans wouldn't take him--and he was certain they would--he would find some other way to reach Canada and enlist. He wanted the sky, and one way or another, he would have it. Puffing a little from his fast pace, his ribs not as sore as they would be by morning, Jerry topped the low hill and looked down upon the little field.

"What the hell?"

The pasture lay empty. No rickety aeroplanes waited, no makeshift tents or whiskey crates. He ran down the slope, unable to believe the little band of smugglers could have left so quickly. A low branch tore at his shirt as he ducked into the shaded trees, but he found no trace of the camp. No footprints. No tire-marks. A half-buried fire ring lay beside a fallen log, long unused. Weeds poked up between the stones while charred sticks crumbled in the ashes, a forlorn reminder that once a fire had burned here. Jerry began to shake, the impossibility of the situation more than he could comprehend. Slowly, he turned around.

"Sorry, kid. They couldn't wait for you."

Preacher stood on the edge of the trees, hands in his pockets. A reluctant smile crossed his homely face.

"Where is everybody?" Jerry stammered.

"Gone. Off flying, I guess." Preacher shrugged. "It's what Les Gitans do."

"My brother says you're all dead." Jerry fought to form the words. "Are you?"

Preacher frowned. "I don't feel dead."

"Then, what are you?"

"Lost. I think we're just terribly, terribly lost." Preacher stared westward, his eyes hazy as the mare's tail clouds gathered along the horizon. "Sometimes, when I'm flying, I can see it, that other place where things you should have done really happened. A place where that damned war ended ages ago."

"So," Jerry asked quietly, "how come you don't go there?"

"How come?" Preacher smiled wistfully. "Because he won't let me."

Jerry didn't need to look up to know who he meant. Far away, nearly buried on the wind, an engine droned, a lone plane high above the earth soaring arrow straight into the unseen. Slowly, he turned and faced the melancholy pilot. "Why did you come here?"

"Why?" Preacher laughed softly. "Kid, if I knew that, maybe I wouldn't be in the hell-hole I'm in." His face grew serious once more. "I can tell you this much. Once you start running, it's hard to stop." He clapped Jerry on the shoulder, and without another word walked away. The boy watched him go, then let his gaze travel skyward, hoping to catch a final glimpse of the lone aeroplane. When he looked back, Preacher was gone.

He didn't want to go back, but went anyhow. The shabby barnyard, the rusted tin roofs and sagging fences seemed somehow smaller now, diminished. Once, they had threatened to swallow him, to wrap around his legs like the weeds that encircled the barnyard until he become rooted to the thin soil. Now, it was just another farm. Someday, he knew, he would take the sky again. When he was ready. Until then, he could wait.

Jerry stopped on the porch and wiped his hands on his pants, buying time, then stepped inside the kitchen. His father sat at the table, staring at a half-empty coffee cup. He glanced up, his expression unreadable.

"Pa?" Jerry dug his heels in and forced himself to meet his father's eye. "I'm sorry I disobeyed you. What I did was wrong."

Garr Mackie nodded, as a king might grant a peasant some trifling request. Before he could speak, Jerry pressed on. "But, that doesn't make it right what you did to me. And it doesn't make it right what you did to Mother, either." Jerry took a deep breath. "And I won't let it happen again."

Anger flashed in Garr Mackie's eyes. His fists bunched on top of the table as he glared at his son, the little hollows behind his jaws drawn tight. Finally, after a long moment he nodded, an acknowledgment that his son, if not quite a man yet, was certainly no longer a boy. Slowly, Jerry turned around and went back outside. Wes stood barefoot in the dooryard, wiggling his toes in the fine, silty dust.

"See any ghosts now?" Jerry asked. The boy cocked his head and stared at him, then shook his head side to side. Jerry smiled and gave the strange child a hug. "Come on, Wes. Let's get the milking done."

Tribes

Craig English

"I find people's identification with corporations horribly fascinating. Corporate entities are reptiles. People are mammals. When a person speaks to me about their corporation as if it were their family I think of a newborn puppy trying to suckle an alligator. Combine corporate logo worship with fanaticism and you get Tribes. That, and I thought the idea of warring Microsoft workgroups was pretty funny."

B Y THE GRACE OF THE GODDESS and for the price of an ounce of sacred beans, I found passage across the Puget Sound. I landed at Bremerton in the first light of a cold October dawn, gliding past the burnt hulk of a ferry, the last of them. Twenty years ago, the Spotted Owl Tribe had chained themselves to the passenger deck and burned themselves up--along with the ferry and its riders, and the last spotted owl--whoo-whoo-whooing all the while. "Eco-tribe stupidity," my father had said when he taught us history.

I could see the rear end of a submerged car bearing a distinctive symbol, a three-pointed star in a circle, and a barnacled license plate that read: "IMRich."

This was my first time away from my tribe. I almost jumped out of the boat when the boatman cut the motor 100 feet from the shore and demanded the rest of his pay.

I fought back tears as I handed him the little pouch. It was a measure of my desperation that I should give up even a few of my remaining sacred beans. He pocketed them in his filthy jacket.

"What's in the backpack?" he asked.

"My lunch. A blanket. My portable stove," I said.

"Gimme the lunch too."

"I've already paid you a fortune."

He eyed me. I'm six feet tall but skinny. He was shorter but far more solid. He slipped a hand into his other pocket.

"Do you know the Word of the Goddess?" I asked.

He pulled a rag from his pocket and rubbed at his brow. "Crap, kid, I heard you goddessmongers got the snot beat out of you last week. Where was your goddess when the machinists were kicking your asses? Drinking a latte?" The boatman chuckled at his own joke. "No, kid, don't you preach to me."

He put the rag away, reached down and scratched his groin.

"Tell you what, half your lunch and we call it even."

I nodded. I just wanted to out of the boat.

I gave him half a heel of bread and some cheese.

"Swiss?"

"Muenster."

"Fucking A," he grunted.

"Praise the Goddess," I replied.

"Yeah, sure, kid." He rowed the last few yards and let me off on the asphalt embankment, then steered his dinghy northward, presumably toward some hideout where he could wait out the daylight. No one but pirates plied the Sound during the day.

I looked up toward the ferry town. I knew the Goddess protected me, but even so, I was scared. I started walking up the beach, skirting the town. I was here to find my Uncle and Auntie Raymond. They were Unitarian Tribe, so I hoped that they would take me in.

Not far up the beach I discovered an abandoned lean-to made of seawrack. It would do. I fired up my camping stove and cooked some soup. The Goddess, green and inscrutable, gazed at me from the flavor packet, from the water bottle, from the camp stove, from the backpack. As I ate I contemplated her flowing hair, her three-pronged crown with its star, her gentle gaze. It helped.

She calmed me as she had always done. She helped me breathe, though my stomach was clenched and my hands shook and my head pounded.

A wind whipped up as the daylight grew. The lean-to groaned but did not fall. I felt as though I were a crab that had scuttled naked and vulnerable from the Sound and found a shell--just big enough.

For the first time since my father's death, I wept. "You are the last of our Tribe," he had said. "Stay alive. Restore our Tribe. Resurrect the Faith. Take revenge on our enemies."

I prayed then that I would not fail my father.

Later, to celebrate my seventeenth birthday, I brewed the sacred drink and felt my headache subside.

Six nights of walking country lanes in the moonlight and six days of hiding in copses of trees between fields brought me to my Uncle and Auntie Raymond's house. I had followed the Goddess map and I had known the address, but still, when I arrived, I felt lost.

It's not something you want to believe, severed heads on a picket fence. I knew what they were immediately, but my brain refused to process the information and I kept walking toward them until I was close enough to see that the one on the right side of the gate was a ghastly color, its eyes long since pecked out by birds. The smell was horrible. And then I was backing up while my eyes flicked along the fence and even though it had been six years I recognized Uncle Raymond's nose. That, and someone had put his hat back on him.

I looked up the walkway. The house was freshly painted and the walk recently swept. The doormat said "Welcome Friend."

Then I was bolting like a terrified hare down the path and onto the overgrown lane and across the fields, heading east toward the Sound. I had run long-distance for the Tribe, but never with terror cramping my gut. When I reached the beach my chest burned and my legs shook. I crawled between three speckled boulders planted in the sand like the eggs of some monstrous bird. I vomited. A wave swept up, washing the sand clean. Another swept in cold against my knees and hands. Each wave washed a bit of the terror from me, until I was exhausted and shivering.

I hauled myself out from between the boulders. The Sound was drab in October, the dawn bloody and gray as a gutted fish. I saw no craft on the waters, for which I was grateful. I stumbled above the rising tide and found shelter in a dry creek bed overgrown with blackberry brambles. I changed into my shorts and hung my pants on the blackberries to dry.

A year ago, the Microsoft kingdom collapsed, splintering into hundreds of hostile work groups. The ensuing internecine warfare spread to other tribes, turning Seattle deadly. I had hoped that the sparsely populated peninsula would be safer. But it was clear that a tribe had taken my Uncle and Aunt's house by force and lined the fence with warnings. I had heard that the Nikes did such things, but they were hundreds of miles to the south.

Birds racketed around me, squabbling over a few shriveled berries.

I remembered the south Seattle warehouse where we held sacred council. I remembered shouting. I remembered a wrench lifted high, covered in blood.

I felt utterly alone. Had the Goddess forsaken me?

I scrabbled in my pack and found it--the ziplock bag full of sacred beans. I opened the bag, stuck my nose inside and inhaled deeply. The headache I had been carrying for the past week eased. I inhaled again. Oh, Goddess! Oh, Siren! Praise her with great praises!

Three days later I was crouching behind a gigantic barbecue grill on the outskirts of a park overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It was evening. Across the water to the north, Vancouver Island was a golden haze. Before I left Seattle, reports had the Island up for grabs, half Moosehead and half Royal Canadian Mounties.

Grass still grew at its edges, but most of the park had become a fortress. RVs were parked--smashed actually--nose to tail in a great circle. Any space between the vehicles had been filled with detritus--tennis rackets, bungee cords, chicken wire, toilets, computers--forming a solid wall. Behind this outer circle I could see the roofs of larger motorhomes.

It was the cooking smells that drew me. Casserole! Oh, Goddess, it smelled good: tomato sauce, onions, garlic, meat. Meat! Saliva gushed in my mouth.

I could see an old woman through the window of the camper nearest me, bustling about the kitchen--setting the table, I hoped. She was stout, with thin strawberry hair. Her lips moved and I realized she was singing to herself. She bent down, then stood up again carrying something in her hands. My stomach snarled. My head pounded.

I got up and walked across the grass toward her trailer. "I've got to eat," I told myself. "And perhaps the Word of the Goddess will be welcome here."

I knocked on the metal door and the singing stopped. I knocked again.

The woman yelled, loud: "Winnebagoooooo!"

I backed up a couple of steps and movement caught my eye. A stocky old man stood on the roof of the RV looking down at me. He cradled an antique rifle--a squirrel-gun, my dad would have called it. Another old man stepped from a door two trailers to my left. He carried a sleek flamethrower, one of the last Nintendo models, no bigger than a vacuum cleaner. A window opened to the right and the round mouth of a personal missile launcher slid out. I knew the make and model--the "Turf Protector" from the Whole Earth catalog. It was useless this close, but if I ran….

The door in front of me opened. The old woman had put on a green straw hat with "Tailgatin' Fool" printed on its band. She wore a lime-green muumuu festooned with orange hibiscus. Each hand was covered in a lobster oven mitt.

The man on the roof said: "How'd you get past the sentries, boy?"

"I just walked up," I said. "I didn't see any sentries."

"Gosh darn it. I told 'em, mahjong and brandy don't mix with guard duty. We're Winnebagos, boy. State your tribe."

I thought of how my father had died for our tribe--of the hatred in our enemies' eyes. "Stay alive," had been my father's first commandment.

"No tribe," I lied.

More doors were thrown open, hatches, hoods, gates between trailers, and every oldster who stepped out was armed to the teeth. Somewhere deep inside the stockade, someone put on an etherdisc, the latest and last advance in entertainment technology. A sodden voice crooned:

"Tiny bubbles, in the wine
Make me happy, make me feel fine . . ."

The music sounded like it was inside my head and I knew it sounded like that to everyone else.

"No tribe?" the man on the roof repeated. "No tribe? Jiminy Christmas, Madge, can you believe it?"

Madge winked hugely at me from the trailer door.

"Would you like some milk and cookies, son?"

It really wasn't a question I had been expecting, but Goddess, I was hungry.

"Yes, please, ma'am."

"Chocolate chip or oatmeal?"

"Mercy, Madge," the man on the roof said.

"If it's all the same to you, ma'am, I could sure use a regular meal."

"Really?" Madge raised an eyebrow. She put the top of one lobster mitt in her mouth and pulled with her teeth. In her hand she clutched a semi-automatic pistol. She tugged the other mitt off, revealing a second pistol.

"I'll give you a bellyful, boy," she cackled, and then opened fire.

I fell backwards, struck down by terror.

"Run, No-Tribe, run!" the man on the roof urged.

"Winnebagooo!" shrieked Madge.

I got up and started running. They must have been playing with me, for I was unscathed when I dived over the barbecue. Bullets slammed into the metal, denting it toward me. Several of them popped through and landed in the grass.

The etherdisc cranked several decibels in my head.

"And here's to the silver sea.
But most of all, a toast . . ."

A jet of flame engulfed one end of the barbecue. The heat fairly lifted me to my feet and I was up and streaking away from the park. The gunfire redoubled.

A maple tree exploded not fifty feet in front and to my right--they were using the Turf Protector. I swerved left, toward the sea, and heard whoops behind. I saw a wooden rail ahead of me, and beyond--far below--the surf. I swerved right and another tree disintegrated. I was trapped.

The gunfire stopped. I stopped. It was maybe 50 feet down to the Strait. My ears, still booming from gunfire, could not hear the surf.

I turned. A dozen old folks hobbled and puffed their way toward me.

"I have a confession," I offered, desperately. "I'm Goddess Tribe. Have you heard the Word? Let's all go back and I'll brew the sacred drink for you. The Goddess brings clarity and energy. She will--"

A tall, stooped woman pointed something at me and clicked it. I flinched, then realized it was an ether-remote. She kept clicking, frowning in consternation, as I was not replaced by something better. "I hate Don Ho," she said, as the music swelled even louder. My head was throbbing now.

"We're just having fun with you," Madge said.

"We are Winnebago," the stocky man said.

A breeze gusted, ruffling hats and gray hairs. A man with a tremendous white beard spoke. "We used to be for the U.S.A. Now we are Winnebago."

"We used to hate the red menace," Madge said. "Now we hate the Streamliners."

"Fucking Streamliners," a fat man wheezed.

"It's history," the white beard pronounced gravely. "Krauts, gooks, Streamliners."

"We've got to do something about those Streamliners," Madge said nervously.

"There's war in Nebraska," the tall woman said, in the modulated tones of an ether-caster. "The Cornhusker Tribe has declared war on the German Lutheran Tribes. In Idaho a splinter Pepsico Tribe has been clearing out Aryan Youth Tribes. "And, under the category of strange bedfellows--"

"Ethel!" the stocky man shouted. "Quiet, now."

"Shhh," the oldsters shushed in unison.

"I've got an idea," the stocky man said. "We'll send this boy to the witch as an offering."

"That's it," the fat man said. "Send him to the witch. That'll put us one-up on those Streamliners, with their pathetic offerings of apples and carrots."

"See, No-Tribe," Madge said, "we usually shoot outsiders after we're done playing with them. But today's your lucky day. Look there." She pointed down the coast to a sand spit that stretched in a lazy arc miles out into the strait. Far away I saw the top of a lighthouse.

"The witch's lighthouse. You get out there, boy. Tell the witch that the Winnebagos sent you. Ask her to bless the Winnebagos and curse the Streamliners."

"What do you mean, a witch?"

"Go on, boy," the stocky man said. There's no way down but to jump. The tide will carry you out."

I turned and looked down. I'm not ordinarily afraid of heights, but the churning surf scared me. Even if there were no rocks beneath the surface, I could easily break my back on the water. A seagull wheeled along the cliff below me, then banked out to sea.

"Maybe the witch will invite you to dinner," Madge cackled.

"And don't think about weaseling out on us, boy," said the stocky man. "We'll be waiting above the base of the spit. Now go on, boy, jump!"

"In the name of the Goddess, give me a second!" I pleaded.

"My casserole's getting cold!" Madge snarled.

There was a shot, and I was slammed hard in the ass. Then I was tumbling down, panic screeching through me. The same soggy voice burbled up from the ether-disk as if from the sea itself:

"So here's to the ginger lei
I give to you today,
And here's a kiss that will not fade away."

I lay on the sand counting pains. The biggest came from my right buttock, where waves of agony alternated with a nasty stinging. A sharper ache welled up between my shoulder blades. Hitting the water had knocked me unconscious but I came to almost instantaneously when I bumped the sandy bottom. The cold grabbed me then and squeezed hard. Between the pain and the cold the swim to the spit had been a nightmare.

I raised myself up on my hands and knees and groaned. I looked around and saw sand rising gently to the hump of the spit some forty feet distant. Low, succulent plants grew there, and grass. Two geese with sooty black heads stood at the edge of the grass, staring at me. They bobbed their heads together as if conferring, then turned and waddled over the spit and out of sight.

It was dusk. To the south I could barely make out a bluff where the spit jutted from the land. There was the silhouette of a man. He raised what might have been a rifle.

So it's to be the witch, I thought. Goddess protect me.

I realized that my pack was still on my back, so I gingered it off and made the mistake of trying to sit. The pain was hot and ugly. I lay down on my stomach until it settled. I took a long drink from my Goddess water bottle.

Everything in my pack was soaked. My extra clothes were as wet as the ones I had on, but I took off my shirt anyway. The breeze dried me quickly. I would have taken off my pants, but I couldn't bear to think about touching the wound.

My Goddess stove would probably never light again. The square of Goddess chocolate I had saved for the worst was a soggy lump.

A terrible thought struck me.

My cold fingers sought the bag that held the sacred beans. I lifted it carefully. But the ziplock had burst open and the beans were gone. My talisman, my last holy link to my Tribe, the only remedy for my pounding head--gone.

A wave of rage shook me. Father had always told me that Goddess products were the best. Why then had the bag failed? What had I done wrong? I must have forgotten to zip the corner when I camped at the creek bed.

"Why?" I howled. "Why do you hate me? Why did you kill Father? If I'm supposed to restore our tribe, why do you send me nothing but maniacs? I can't convert people who are shooting at me. Why do you torment me?"

I tried to catch my breath. I thought of my father's quiet demeanor, his half-smile, the way his eyebrows raised behind his glasses while he read the holy texts. I heard his voice. "The Goddess will test you, my son. But she counts on your faith. If you put one foot forward, she will give you the juice for the next step. It's a blending, you see? You and the Goddess, together, maintaining uncompromising principles."

Maybe, I thought, it's supposed to be this way. Maybe the witch is an oracle. Or maybe she is the Goddess herself. Did not Goodman Schultz come empty-handed to Seattle? Will not I come to the witch with nothing but my faith? I am the last of my tribe. If I am meant to spread the Word, to take vengeance on our enemies, then I must survive.

Standing was a new agony. Walking was worse. I found that I could minimize the pain by talking small steps with my left leg and barely moving the right. My lower back soon fused into a single slab of pain.

I walked like this for a long time. It never really got dark. As the last sunlight vanished, the moon rose, as bright as a headlight. Stars webbed the sky. I could see well enough, but I had no idea how far I might be traveling. Pain was my only measure of time.

To my left the waves gentled the sand. To my right was the hump of the spit, but I could not muster the energy to hobble up and see what lay on the other side. A breeze started up, chilling me. I ignored it as best I could.

Something was floating in the air above me, which I recognized, even as it faded into the night, as an owl with a mouse clutched in its talons.

As I limped on, I began to feel a certain peacefulness. The pain flowed and ebbed, but somehow I was not entirely miserable walking out to sea on that spit of sand. I realized that I was grateful to be alone. People who did not know the truth scared me. Other tribes had no Goddess. They were violent. Even the religious tribes--the Catholics, the Muslims, the Jews--had become savage. My father's voice came to me: "Ours is the gospel of compassion and caffeine, my son. We love our own. And when we must kill, then we kill with love. We look into our enemies' eyes and we bless them. Ours is the world's only hope."

There was a screaming of birds and I was surprised to find that morning had come. I had imagined I was walking with my eyes closed, watching the illusory lights play on the back of my eyelids. But I was awake and my eyes were perceiving the sunlight, soft and peachy, seeping across the spit.

My hunger came back with a vengeance. Exhaustion dropped me to my knees. Pain lurched up my spine. I grunted and, without thinking, touched my buttock. It was cold and sticky.

The world swarmed. I dropped on my belly and lowered my head to the sand. Up the slight incline of the spit I could see three gaunt figures above the tall grass. They wore aprons and sweater-vests and scarves. One had on a fishing hat that said "My Wheels Are My Home." Another wore shorts that said "Hook Me Up!" They looked like the Winnebagos. Birds circled them, landing on their shoulders, pecking holes in their heads. I saw a crow pull out a chunk of glistening white brain only to have a gull steal it away. I passed out.

When I came to, somebody's fingers were holding my eyelids open.

I flinched and found that my arms and legs were bound. The fingers let go. An old woman was bent over me, looking into my eyes. Her breath smelled like cinnamon.

"Are you the Goddess?"

She snorted.

"Are you her oracle?

"Stick out your tongue," she said.

I tried to move again, but could not. "You're the witch!" I said.

"Ha!" she honked.

"Let me up!"

"No."

The witch stood up, moving her face away from mine. I took a breath. There was a ceiling above me. I was indoors. I saw a weathered beam hung with clusters of handkerchiefs, bundles of herbs, racks of antique hand tools.

I looked at the witch. In the candlelight I could see a spray of silver hair, a nose that bent to the left, and shrewd gray-green eyes.

"I've got a message from the Winnebagos," I tried.

Her eyes went flat and her mouth hard. I flinched as she reached out.

"Hold still!" Her voice rasped, as if she used it rarely.

She placed her left hand behind her ear, then reached out with the right until it hovered over my toes. She closed her eyes. Slowly, she passed her open palm over the length of my body, keeping it about half a foot above me all the way. Her hand dipped or raised slightly as she went, as if the air itself was full of pockets and bumps. She frowned, cupping the hand behind her ear as if listening. Her eyelids twitched as she passed my right hip, and again as her hand passed over my stomach.

I felt the beginnings of panic tickle my gut. If those maniac Winnebagos are afraid of this woman, I thought, she must be dangerous. And here I am tied down and helpless.

I raised my head and looked around. I was lying naked on some kind of narrow table, covered from the waist down with a blanket. Straps bound my upper torso and my legs. The table had a gap, so that my injured buttock was suspended in the air, touching nothing. I saw a trail of sand on the wooden floor, and it dawned on me that this little woman had somehow dragged me who knows how far across the sand, inside the lighthouse and up onto this table.

I could see my jeans in pieces on the floor (she must have cut them off of me) and my underwear too. The panic pushed its way to my chest, and I fought to hold it there.

When the witch's hand reached my head, her eyes snapped open as if she had been slapped. "Hell of a headache, boy." Then she turned away, muttering vehemently. She was wearing an ankle-length red dress, an old-fashioned, summery kind of thing. I glimpsed muscled, unshaven calves and gnarled sandaled feet.

She dragged a chair next to the table and plunked a towel and a fishing tackle box on it.

She tipped a plastic bottle to my lips. "Drink."

What would a witch have me drink? "No!"

Her lips tightened and she tipped the bottle further, splashing my face with water. "Drink!"

I drank.

"More, please."

"Wait," she said.

I turned my head and watched as she opened the tackle box. I didn't know what most of the stuff in there was, but it scared me. There was a gleaming steel instrument with a roller and spikes. Bell-shaped glass cups scorched black around the edges. Electrical wires with clips. And hundreds of needles.

The panic reached my throat and I clutched it there. I considered my options. I could scream and thrash and probably hurt myself. Or I could try to keep my dignity and make the Goddess proud. I took a breath. "What tribe are you?" I asked.

"I don't believe in tribes," she said, drawing three of the longest needles from the box. Each was capped with a glass knob; one blue, one red, and one yellow.

"Please don't hurt me."

"Hurt you?" the witch asked, selecting the red-capped needle.

"Faith," I muttered, steeling myself.

"What are you prattling about, boy?"

"I have faith in the Goddess," I said.

She honked her laugh again. "Your goddess is a corporate logo, you idiot, dreamed up in some advertising company boardroom."

That pissed me off. "I saw my father die at the hands of the Boeing Machinists 203," I said. "I know who I am. I'm the last of my tribe! Goddess Tribe, and proud!"

"Crap!" said the witch. Then she stuck the red-capped needle into my chest.

I shouted out and then realized there was no pain. "What? What are you doing?"

"Diagnostics."

I lifted my head and watched as she twirled the glass bead between her fingers, pushing it deep into my chest. I let out a groan, though there was still no pain. The blue and yellow needles followed suit. I lay my head back. It made my headache worse when I moved.

"I saw three thin men," I said, "and the birds were feeding--"

The witch hiked up her dress and leaned against the edge of the table. She placed her fingers lightly on the inside of my left wrist.

"Made of bamboo and weeds," she said. I stuffed crabmeat inside their heads. I saw you coming, thought you were a Winnebago or Streamliner. Put 'em up to scare you away. It helps that they think I'm a witch. How long since you've eaten?"

"Two or three days. Are you helping me?"

She did not answer. Her fingers adjusted on my wrist, probing gently.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm listening to your pulses."

"Are you really a witch?"

"No. Stick out your tongue."

I stuck out my tongue. She pursed her lips. "All right. Where do you hurt?"

"My butt…"

"Besides that."

"My back. From the fall."

"Where?"

"From the cliff."

"No, coffee-boy, where does it hurt?"

"Between my shoulder blades."

"Where else?"

"My head hurts bad."

"You're a wreck," she said. "Why are you here?"

"Will you let me up if I tell you?"

"No."

"Then I won't tell you."

"Then I won't take the bullet out of your ass. You've got a good chance of infection."

Something caught my eye and I raised my head to see a strong, steady light shining from the blue-bulbed needle. The yellow needle pulsed faintly, but the red needle was unlit.

"You're basically healthy," she remarked. "Now, why are you here?"

I told her about my journey, about the Winnebagos. "Will you let me up now?"

"No. I don't trust you."

"The Goddess teaches peace--"

"Sure, sure--the inquisition, jihad, crusades--all in the name of peace. You all talk a good line, but –"

"We're different!"

"Really? You told me that your father was murdered by the Boeing Tribe. Did he fight back? Did you fight back?"

"He forbade me! I disobeyed him and snuck in. I saw it all. He killed two of them before they--" I realized I was yelling, straining against the straps. "I would have fought. I would have!"

The witch just stared at me until I stopped struggling.

"You did the right thing," she said, "obeying your father. You say your goddess teaches peace and you have stayed your hand in the worst of circumstances. It's against my better judgment, but I'm going to trust you, boy."

The witch undid the straps.

"Do you believe in the Goddess?" I asked.

The witch cackled. She opened a drawer and started hauling out kitchen utensils. "Do I believe in Starbucks?" she asked, pulling out fondue forks, kabob skewers, chopsticks, a hemostat, and an apple corer.

"We do not speak her name!"

"Well why not?"

Here's my chance, I thought. Someone had finally asked about the Goddess!

"There was a field hand named Jesús," I started eagerly, "working on a coffee plantation. One day as he sat under a cactus taking his mandatory break, he saw a miraculous vision in his coffee cup. Do you know what he saw?"

I glanced at the witch. She was staring at me, her mouth open and her eyes wide. She's listening, I thought.

"There, at the bottom of the simple mug of Jesús the Bean Picker, floated the face of the Goddess. She spoke to him: 'Jesús, I have chosen you to be my messenger because your heart is pure. Go forth and tell the world: No longer shall my name be spoken aloud, for though my name is known to all, I am yet unknowable. Mere words are insufficient. Go forth!' And at that very moment, the Goddess's name disappeared from every cup, every napkin, every one of her products around the world."

The witch started laughing.

"I'm sorry, boy," she gasped. "But you should see how serious you look."

I felt my face turn crimson. I was supposed to be resurrecting the faith, but all I had attracted was bullets and laughter.

"It's just," the witch said, catching her breath, "that I remember the whole deal pretty well. I was living in San Francisco with a woman named Bernie who ran a hummus factory out of her basement. Starbucks sold mostly coffee drinks back then, and they had swallowed up all of their competition. Their brand name had become synonymous with coffee. So some advertising genius came up with a campaign where the corporate name was removed from every product. It was like a big bully flexing his muscles."

The witch started pouring water into a soup pot. "When did you start drinking coffee, boy?"

"It ran in my mother's breast milk," I said, my face still burning. "I was weaned on the sacred brew. We are the chosen--"

"What a shitty thing to do to a kid," she said. "They gave you coffee as an infant?"

"Every day of my life. The headache is the mark of--"

"Muscular tremor," the witch interrupted, "nervousness, anxiety, irritability, headache, disturbed sleep, stomach upset, peptic ulcers--just what an infant needs. Christ, do you suppose that when I take this bullet out of your ass I might find your brain in there too?"

I was so angry I sat up and barely noticed the pain in my butt. "Blasphemy! The Goddess gave us--"

"The Goddess is inside you, boy! The Goddess is in the sea, the wind--can't you hear her whistling around outside? The Goddess--"

"Do not speak of what you do not understand!" I thundered. "My Goddess is not outside the building or anywhere else but inside me! I carry her. I love her. I cherish my headache--"

"I can cure that headache," the witch interjected.

"It's all I've got left!" I was shouting again. "They beat my father to death with wrenches. They murdered everyone. Little children. I taught classes for the little ones and…don't you think of taking my pain."

The witch stared at me for a long time, then picked up a fondue fork. "All right, let's see just what's plugging up your ass."

"With that?"

"I'm not a surgeon," she said, throwing more kitchen utensils into the pot. "This is what I've got to work with."

She opened a cupboard and rummaged through it. There was a burlap sack with the words "Un Producto de Colombia" printed on it. Beans! An entire sack of premium Colombian beans. And next to it, pristine and glorious, the deluxe Athena-model espresso machine! I had seen such a thing once before, in the inner sanctum of our warehouse, before we burned it--burned it to the ground to keep it from the engineers.

The witch grabbed a bottle of tequila from the cupboard and brought it over.

"Drink!"

"Why?"

"Shit, boy, why do you think? This is going to hurt like a son-of-a-bitch."

On a cold, wet November afternoon, near the spit's lone wind-warped pine tree, the witch and I dug a drainage ditch. A month earlier, after anaesthetizing me with her needles and a healthy dose of tequila, she had taken the bullet out of my butt. She had fed me and clothed me.

And every day she had spewed sacrilege. While I learned to tend the garden, she'd pull up a potato and say: "Here's your goddess. She's no caffeine-pushing corporate logo. She's sunshine grown fat and juicy in the ground."

As I fed the goat: "Sadie here has got more compassion in her old hide than most people, let alone any of their gods."

And when I learned to run the generator: "Power can be used for good or bad, boy. Give it to an individual and you've got a chance of decency. But give it to a tribe and watch it rot."

Daily, she spoke heresy--clever, honey-dripped words, meant to test my faith. Daily, I resisted her. I endured her insults. I stopped speaking to her. I refused her treatments and lived with the pounding head that reminded me of my faith. The Goddess sang her song inside me, beat her rhythm in my head, and promised me that my father had not died in vain.

The witch jammed the shovel into the dirt and jumped on it with both feet. "Want to know where my bag of Colombian beans came from?" she asked.

I didn't respond.

"Shipwreck. This place has a history as long as your legs. The bark Christopher Mitchell, the R.K. Ham, the steamer Sioux, god knows how many pirate ships, the pleasure yacht Tatoosh." The witch struggled with a shovelful of sand, flipped it aside and then turned to face me. "That's where the espresso machine and the beans came from."

I kept digging.

The witch put her hands on her hips.

"Goddamnit, quit pouting!"

I ignored her.

"Goddamnit, boy, grief for your father I understand, but…" She stopped talking. Her eyes flickered to the spit. "Did you know there were tribes hundreds of years ago? Even thousands of years ago?"

The witch pointed to a slight crook in the spit, about a half-mile away. "Right there," she said, "in 1867, eighteen Tsimshian Indians camped. The Clallam Tribe massacred them--men, women and children. There's your noble tribes, boy."

"My Tribe would never do such a thing," I blurted. "We are loving."

"Did you share your beans with the less fortunate?" she snapped.

"The Goddess chose to give us the sacred beans," I protested.

"Well then, I guess she also chose to hand them over to the Machinists, didn't she?"

I did not answer, but I thought: Yes, and the Goddess chose to bring me here, to a lighthouse at the end of the world where a bag of Colombia's finest and an Athena espresso maker awaited me.

"Oh hell," the witch said, sounding suddenly tired. "I'm going to make a cup of coffee. You want one?"

I couldn't help it; yearning welled inside me. "Yes, yes, I want it!"

I looked into the witch's eyes, but it was hard to tell what I saw there--Pity? Disgust?

She turned toward the lighthouse and I felt a tremendous urge to hit the back of her head. I lifted the shovel. One swift blow would do it. To end the lies. To avenge my people. I would build a shrine to the Goddess and her servant, Athena, and the lighthouse would become a beacon.

She was so tiny, her skull delicate, her gray hairs springy and wild. I lowered the shovel. "May I make the coffee?" I asked.

She sighed. Turned to me. Grinned. "I'll bet you make a mean cup of coffee."

I took the shovel with me. Inside the lighthouse, I retrieved the Athena espresso maker from the cupboard. Streamlined, pump-driven, steel-bodied, with a gleaming graphite finish, its trinity of buttons--power, brewing, and steaming--glinted in the candlelight.

Though my hands shook terribly, I worked with care. I plugged the Athena into the generator itself. Chanting praises, I pushed the power button. Athena's green light winked at me like cat's eye opening after a nap.

I tore the wrapper off a sacred pod and the complex aroma of freshly ground beans quivered my nostrils. I held steady. Carefully, I tamped the pre-ground beans in the portafilter. Then I locked it firmly into the machine. I filled the gleaming reservoir and gave thanks as always, seeking purity in the presence of water.

Reverentially, I placed the Goddess glass under the spout. There was only the brewing button left. Though I had goats milk, I would not steam it. This was to be a pure offering.

"The gospel of compassion and caffeine," I thought, pushing the button. The Athena hummed, burbled, winked at me. "And when we must kill, then we kill with love. We look into our enemies' eyes and we bless them." The brew trickled into the glass. I said the blessing.

The witch came in, undid her boots, and sat down with a grunt at the table. Cradling the shot, I carried it to her and knelt at her feet. I dipped my finger into the glass, reached up and anointed her lips. She looked startled but did not protest.

"Bless the truth you have spoken," I said. "As bitter as beans."

I anointed my own lips. "Forgive me Goddess for what I must do."

I set the shot on the table and picked up the shovel.

"What are you doing, boy?"

I turned and with every ounce of my strength I brought the blade of the shovel down on the Athena. The plastic casing cracked. And then the Goddess entered me and rode me. I cracked the heads of the machinists and the Winnebagos and the bastards who killed my Aunt and Uncle. I opened my own skull, ripped out my aching brain and pulped it. Metal squealed and plastic crackled and boiling water hissed.

Afterwards, the sobs took me hard. I lay on the floor and the witch knelt beside me, a hand placed on my heart. "All right. All right. That's a good boy. You let it come out, that's the best. The world is big enough to hold all your sorrow."

The sobs lessened. There was warmth in the witch's touch.

"I broke it," I croaked, and realized what an amazingly dumb observation that was. The witch's eyebrows crooked and my next sob sounded suspiciously laugh-like. "You sure did," she said and chuckled. I laugh-sobbed again. And then the Goddess took us both with laughter. By the time we were done my ribs ached and my nose was full of snot.

The witch brought me a handkerchief and the shot of espresso. She sat down beside me while I gratefully blew my nose. When I was done she handed me the shot. I said my prayers and trembling, brought it to my lips. Oh, Glory! It was the best I'd ever had. I felt light and headachy, like I'd puked up something nasty that I'd been carrying for a long time. It took both hands to give the shot back to the witch.

She cradled it, but didn't drink. I saw sadness touch her brow. "What's your name, boy?"

"Joe," I said.

The witch laughed again, a single honk, but without derision. "As in 'a cuppa,' huh?"

"It's old school," I said. "What's your name?"

"Irene."

"Irene," I repeated. "Irene, have you ever thought of lighting the light?"

She glanced at the staircase that followed the curve of the wall. "I've been afraid of who might come."

"Well, someday, maybe, we could light it?"

Irene brought a spotted hand up to her nose and scratched it. "Maybe someday, Joe. Maybe we just might."

Venn Diagrams

I have some changes I'd like to see implemented over at your vocational school. Just a few; don't fret. We need to return to the old ways of lead pipes and aqueducts. Yes! Gimme that old tyme plumbing. It was good enough for Caesar and it's good enough for me.

OK. So I'm not really a plumber. And anything I say about plumbing must be weighted against my paucity of education and experience in the area of pipes and water flow. A Venn diagram enclosing my familiarity with the subject, and the body of knowledge delimiting modern plumbing techniques would show very little overlap.

Venn diagrams are handy tools to tease out all kinds of hidden and interesting things. Simply put, a Venn diagram gives a visual representation of the totality of a set. Everything in a set is placed within a circle that in turn provides an indicator of the size of the set. So each defined set has a specific size and content. Where these circles overlap illustrates how much is shared between sets. For example a set of automobiles built by Ford and another set of automobiles built by Chevrolet might overlap where each company includes engines built by the Chrysler Corporation. This overlapping is graphically shown using Venn Diagrams. I would like to use some examples to show how this powerful tool can be employed. Since this is a science column, let's look to science for examples. There is a word in science that is sadly misunderstood: theory. If we were to open a dictionary to "theory" we would find the word, like so many others, carries multiple definitions. Considering only two definitions is enough to illustrate the salient point.

If you are talking to a fellow cheerleader about plans for Saturday night you might say: "My theory is that the entire football team will show up at Peggy Sue's party." You are making a guess, speculating with no real support save conjecture. But if you are talking to scientists you need to know how they use the word. To a scientist, a theory is a powerful framework of facts and principals tested and retested for their relations and used to explain certain phenomena. A robust and viable theory will do this better than another explanation. A scientific theory is not a guess.

The Venn diagram for defining a theory in the vernacular and as it is used by scientists would overlap at little more than the spelling. If you ever hear the phrase, "Even scientists admit it is only a theory," you should try not to chuckle in the face of ignorance, but guide the poor disillusioned creature who said it into the light. If you are within earshot of someone is discussing the subjects of atomic, gravitational, and evolutionary theories you are not listening to guesses. You are hearing a robust explanation of a problem that many trained and educated people have had a collective part in constructing and testing. Again, it cannot be said enough: a scientific theory is not a guess.

So we've used our Venn diagrams to look at the nature of theories from the outside. Let's go inside a theory and look around. If we explore the theory of evolution we find three tenets in evidence: the presence of vestigial organs, the fossil record, and the conservation of chemicals. We can use Venn diagrams to show why the evidence supports evolution.

Vestigial organs are structures found in organisms somehow reduced or atrophied and no longer serving a function. Examples are hip structures in whales and some large primitive snakes. Our Venn diagrams help us decide what these structures are by matching morphology with things that walk, such as jesus lizards, peacocks, and people. Of course none of the overlap includes the function of walking. Many creatures show lack of overlap for function in various body parts. In your own home you will find wisdom teeth, an appendix, and a tail bone as non-overlapping portions of your personal Venn.

The fossil record adds a dynamic aspect to our use of Venn diagrams. Fossils allow us to see the morphology of extinct organisms and the changes they have undergone through time. The farther back in time we look, the less overlap in physical appearance we find. By tracking amounts of physical overlap we can trace ancestral organisms through development from primitive to more modern forms, and finish with a phylogenetic relationship of organisms both extinct and extant.

Lastly, we can look at the chemicals of life, specifically deoxyribonucleic acid. DNA, of course, is the genetic medium that contains the blueprints all living things use to put themselves together and pass on construction plans to offspring. Looking at the genomic overlap of different organisms we can get an idea of how related different species are to each other.

Many of us have an interest in knowing how closely human beings are related to some of the other things living on our planet. Drop a circle full of human genetic information down on that of a pygmy chimp and find over 98% overlap. That's pretty good. If we were to do the same thing with rattlesnake DNA our overlap would be in the vicinity of 86%. Ok, so a bunch of animals are close. But duplicate the Venn diagram using human and pumpkin DNA and we still find a whopping 72% genetic overlap. Nature is conservative; evolution keeps working from the same toolbox.

Since we have been discussing what evolution is, it might be illustrative to examine what it isn't, and the abuse of Venn diagrams. One menacing idea is that of biblical creationism. Biblical creationism is a social virus trying to insert itself into society by pretending to be scientifically relevant. Strangely enough, creationism makes its attack on rationalism and science by misappropriating the trappings of science even as it ignores the rigor. Its attack on Evolution is an attack on one of the most supported theories in the history of science, all in the name of narrow religious interpretation.

Although now the proponents of biblical creationism call it intelligent design, don't get fooled again; it's the same old stuff still draped in desert linen. Why are they calling it intelligent design? Well, they are playing with Venn diagrams of course. So we drop our Evolution circle down on the table and prepare a similar circle for intelligent design. Upon an examination of intelligent design we find that other than reinventing itself behind a new scientificky sounding handle, there is zero overlap with Evolution, or any other science. If someone tries to make connections where none exist their argument might as well be, "I'm not a well-informed citizen, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night." And even a pumpkin has better odds than that of getting it right.

A codicil to creationism: Last week, as I write this, our president announced his support for teaching creationism in our public schools. Never mind the embarrassment of global proportion. Never mind the insidious effect on research. Never mind the brain drain and technology flight crippling the once proud leadership of the American sciences. Oh, well. He may not be a biologist, but he did stay at the White House last night. Now how that happened is another mystery. Where's a Holiday Inn when you desperately need some answers?

Fire and Ice

Renee Stern

"'Fire and Ice' grew out of a midwinter writing challenge delivered while I was researching medieval Spain for another project. Include a snowy night, they said. (I'm pretty sure most everyone else wrote sweet, or comic, or poignant Christmas stories. I've always been contrary.) Christians, Jews and Muslims coexisted in medieval Spain for nearly 800 years, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in uneasy peace and sometimes in bloody war--a rich landscape for questions of Good vs. Good, of equal but conflicting convictions."

S AFIYYA HUMMED as she drifted low over the hermitage atop the Virgen de la Peña, slipping into shadow and then moonlight in a dance to the tune she and the night created. Along the mountain's crest the wind was sharp and high-pitched, alive with tumbling snow. Lower down, tall firs softened the wind and added their own breathy rasps, punctuated by crackling branches like the beat of a tambour.

She owned the sky tonight, for the storm silenced the troublesome bells from the church and monastery far down in the valley along the Pilgrim's Road. Tonight's song belonged to the wild; rabbits and a pair of martens moved below her to add their thumps and cries to the music.

She coaxed the winds to carry her higher, far above the river valley that funneled pilgrims through the forbidding mountain barrier between al-Andalus and the rest of Europe. A small party sheltered there, doubtlessly dreaming of their saint at Compostela and his coveted cockleshell badges.

Once past their camp, Safiyya listened for the song of the proudest of the Illón mountains, El Borreguil. Woodcutters had ventured partway up the slopes and left tiny clearings to vary the sound of the wind; a wolf howled in response to a stray goat's bleat. Safiyya sang with El Borreguil, reveling in the vibrations caressing her from all sides and the still-foreign sting of snow.

It was a night to praise the Creator, who had given her and her brothers and sisters the jeweled bowl of the sky.

She spiraled up from the trees, above the storm, and sipped the diamond and ruby and sapphire rays of the stars, headier than any forbidden wine. Then she dived back toward the mountains, sated and giddy.

Snow hissed against her skin, altering the rhythm of her song. She skimmed the trees, buoyed higher by the currents around the thick-needled firs that mingled with naked beeches and oaks.

A rough groan, broken by harsh coughing, tore through her worship. Safiyya stilled, alert and sober, searching for the intruder. She circled outward, forcing her way against the winds.

"Dios glorioso, Dios del cielo--"

The voice was there and gone in a blink as she moved. Weak and male and clearly Christian, far from the road where he belonged. Safiyya reversed her course, moving with the wind to the back side of El Borreguil.

The coughing drew her, midway up the mountain to a jagged knob exposed to the wind. Nothing grew there. As she neared, she heard his voice again, a whispered moan: "Help me."

Little good came these days when their people met, but still she couldn't turn away from that plea. Charity was one of the pillars of the faith. She couldn't sully such a glorious night.

She saw him now, curled into the meager shelter of the rocks without even a cloak to break the force of the wind or hold off the snow. His boots looked worn, but the cloth of his cote was tight-woven wool, the dyes still bright. This was no beggar or priest.

"Hear my prayers, sinner though I am, Santa María Madre, San José, Santiago, San--"

Safiyya shaped robes to cover herself for his comfort, white as the garments of the Prophet. She drifted down to the rocks out of his reach, wary of his reaction. "I will help you," she said in his tongue.

He stiffened, eyes wide, then scrambled to his knees and bowed his head. "An angel of the Lord! Is this a sign that my sins are forgiven?"

The wind that lifted her soul drove hard against him. His skin had a dusky blue tinge and he didn't shiver. Safiyya remembered those were signs of danger for mortals.

She stretched her arms to the side, gentling the wind around them. "Come, let me warm you. Then I will guide you to safety." The snow sizzled where it touched her--skin, hair and robes alike.

He glanced up. Ice rimed his dark beard and the hair above pale blue eyes. "You are warm with the light of Heaven," he said. "I am not worthy of such mercy."

"Would you prefer to die for your humility? I mean you no harm."

He bent his head lower. "As you command." He inched forward on his knees, movements awkward and slow. "I have heard that some pilgrims are favored with visions, but I never thought that I would be among them after the blood on my hands from Barbastro."

"Tell me." She armored her heart. Mortals seemed to know only brutal tales.

"I am Jimeno Iñiguez, a knight of Ribagorza. I followed my lord to battle against the Moors, and we fought hard in the streets of Barbastro. Almighty God led us to victory, allowing us to take many of the infidels as slaves and kill the rest." He stopped to cough, hunched on hands and knees. He recovered, and crawled forward again. "We carried the banner of Santiago Matamoros, and we killed many Moors for his glory. But we did not know that the town was home to Christians as well. We killed them alongside the Arabs, and used the women equally in our lust. I learned too late my sins against those unlucky Christians. And when I returned from Barbastro, I watched my wife die of sudden fever, while all around us remained hale. My deeds cursed us."

He drew closer. Too close: An icy whisper of power flicked against her, raising memories of her homeland, and slavery. Safiyya shrank back to a safe distance.

He stopped and bent his head low to the ground. The lines of his neck were tight. "Forgive my error. My soul is too black and heavy with sin to approach an angel of the Lord."

He would die without help. Safiyya groped for the right words, recalling snatches of sermons and pilgrims' debates she'd overheard.

"Is it not said that repentance and obedience will wash away all sin?" she asked. "Is this not why you journey to Compostela?"

He looked up partway. "Then I should obey you?"

"Wait!" She stopped him before he could begin crawling forward again. "Do you carry a relic, something blessed by a priest?"

"Only the crucifix my father left me." Iñiguez pulled a heavy silver chain from beneath his cote.

Safiyya forced herself to remain still as the power in his hand reached toward her. "Take it off. Then I will warm you."

He looked from her to the crucifix in his hand and back again. "No messenger of God would ask such a thing." He clasped the ornament tighter. "Do you seek to warm me with the light of Heaven--or the fires of Hell? What are you? A fiend of the mountains? A succubus scenting the sins of lust on my soul?"

"None of the above, not even an angel," she said. "I am Safiyya al-Ifriqiya, a jinniyeh of the desert, and in the name of Allah, the compassionate and all-merciful, I mean you no harm."

He scuttled back to his earlier position against the granite knob, facing her with the crucifix held out like a shield. "Leave me in peace, demon! In the name of my Lord Jesu Cristo, return to your masters in Hell."

Safiyya knelt on the icy rock. He was stubborn and full of hate, but the fire that burned in his eyes and voice drew her, called to the fire in her own soul. Allah, the all-powerful, had formed jinn from the fires of the universe. She couldn't bear to see even a fragment snuffed out so uselessly.

"I thought your priests condemn suicide," she said, pitching her voice to break through his prayers. "How will you gain entry to Heaven and your prophet Jesus?"

He stared at her, mouth open, surprised perhaps that his crucifix and saints had not driven her off, or perhaps that she could speak of holy things. It didn't matter, so long as he listened and lived.

"Why are you lost in this storm instead of sleeping safely with your fellow pilgrims?" she asked, voice mild. "Did you forsake shelter to die for your sins?"

His face darkened. "Of course not! The priest who set my penance required that I stop to pray at every shrine on the road to Compostela. I came seeking the Virgen de la Peña."

"This is El Borreguil, west across the Esca from the hermitage," she said. "An experienced knight would know this." He twitched, as if hit, and she continued, "Would you die unshriven, with your sins upon you? How can you hope to escape Jehenna if you hold to this foolish path?"

Iñiguez pushed his free hand against the granite beside him, levering himself to his feet, then lurching forward with a terrible roar. Safiyya absorbed her uncomfortable robes, ready to leap into the wind before the blessing on his crucifix could come near enough to leach her fire and crush her will. She had barely escaped a similar power that day on the golden hills outside Jerusalem, when King Suleiman ibn Daud enslaved so many of her cousins.

Iñiguez faltered, balancing with one arm against the rock and hiding his eyes with the other. "You are shameless in your nakedness, demon! You will not tempt me into losing my soul. I have forsworn the lusts of this vile body."

He was too far gone with cold to know reason, that was her mistake. She should depart, hide from view, wait for him to collapse. Then she might save him.

But he might cling to his crucifix even unconscious, preventing any rescue. She could not risk that.

As she knelt in the stinging wind, uncertain of her course, another coughing fit took him, wracking his body until he fell to the ground curled into a tight knot. His coughs sounded weak and hollow, and she smelled blood.

"I beg you, Jimeno Iñiguez, accept my aid." Safiyya wished she had the power to bend mortal wills. Without it, she could only throw all the fire of her heart into her voice, and hope he heard. "Confess your supposed sins later to your priest if you must, but taking life from my hands is surely better than eternity in Jehenna. Die now, unshriven and with your penitential pilgrimage undone, and you will be doubly damned."

"Mistress of lies." His voice was faint, as if he spoke from the far side of the Virgen de la Peña, and he slurred his words. "Satan twists Holy Writ to steal men's souls."

She burned cold. "And the soul of such a holy man as you is so great a prize."

"I am the worst of sinners," he rasped. "But even the sparrow is precious to the Lord."

Safiyya hunched in on herself, resigned to the end. As she listened to him stumble through his prayers, she realized she could never have won his cooperation. He trusted nothing outside his narrow boundaries, blinding himself to the wonders of Creation all around him. If she could not be an angel, she must be a demon. He killed and raped, and scourged himself only for his Christian victims.

"Aldonza," he whispered. Another saint? His wife? His flame guttered lower, then faded away.

Safiyya surged up from the mountainside, suddenly cold, and aimed for the healing stars that waited above the storm. Distance damped the power in the crucifix in rigid hands below, slowly covered by drifting snow.

Corvus Nation

Scott E. Green

35 million
years ago an army of
black-winged soldiers came out of
Australia, a
mighty empire of flight.

Crows and ravens,
rooks and magpies,
chattering jays.

With avian eyes
they watch the rise of humans.
With avian genius they
plot establishment
of dominion of Corvus.

Corvus Empire.

But then the rats
start keeping their
own thoughtful watch.

"The Nature of the Beast" originally appeared in Mars Dust and Magic Shows (Scorpius Digital Publishing, 2001), and is reprinted here in a revised version with the author's permission.

The Nature of the Beast

Mark Bourne

"Film director John Huston said, 'Hollywood has always been a cage ... a cage to catch our dreams.' Mr. Huston didn't direct the movie in this story, but it's got Hollywood in it, and bigger cages and dreams than even he might have imagined."

T HE BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN stands lashed spread-eagle between twin stone pillars. Her torn dress hangs from her body. She screams and writhes. The monster comes. It removes her bonds and takes her away. This has happened to her exactly the same way, again and again uncountable times, for more than seventy years.

The unrepentantly old woman sat in the audience, watching digitally restored black-and-white images in the darkness. Some scenes up on the screen didn't match her memories. Others matched too well. The dinosaurs had been there, of course. But more of them. In real life the pterosaur had simply threatened her on that jungle precipice, snapping and screeching but not clutching her in its claws--how ridiculous--to carry her off. The tyrannosaur stank of rotted meat before it was killed, but a movie can't make you smell that. Nor can it recreate the torment of men dying half-way around the world--the sound a spine makes when snapped between a saurian's jaws, or the cries men make when tossed into a chasm alive with moving horrors. Or the feel of a giant black hand surrounding you. The cold wind at the top of the world's tallest man-made summit. Roaring aeroplanes and machine guns. The colors of a final dawn reflected in vast, wet eyes. Eyes reflecting greater rage and pain and sadness than any mere person could know.

She watched, disturbed at the depictions of all those Negroes, and Charlie, the freighter Venture's Chinese cook. They didn't fit how she recalled them. But these enactments were devised in an even more racist time, by men with the power to diminish what we said disturbed us. Even the white men up there only clumsily mimicked what she knew to be the truth. Any two-dimensional image reduces its subject to an immeasurably thin slice of reality. She was up there too, and as she sat there in the darkness she felt sliced, reduced to mere light and shadow. Flattened, as if in a cartoon.

In the darkness she smiled at the irony: the only character on that screen manifesting any human depth and dimension, the only one who seemed real in every way that was important, was a promethean being fashioned from an 18-inch metal skeleton padded with foam rubber and cotton and covered with rabbit skins for fur. The reality was too grand, too magnificent, too disturbingly real to resurrect any other way. That matched her memories precisely.

The motion picture ended. The screen ascended into the ceiling above the stage, and the old woman, white-haired and ancient-faced yet straight-backed and poised ("handsome" was the word The New Yorker used), squinted into the spotlights aimed at her podium. She stood motionless as the applause from the standing ovation fell away to echoing scattered claps, like twigs snapping in that dense, primordial island jungle seventy years ago. Or seventy million. Out there in that darkness of the Columbia University auditorium sat a thousand people in suits and evening dresses and whatever students wore these days. Each had paid a ridiculous amount of money to sit there and hear her. She could see no farther than the first few rows, though she felt the eyes focused on her from every part of the hall. To her left, a camera flash exploded, its owner disregarding the rules she had specified before agreeing to speak here, her first public appearance in seven decades. A security guard ushered the photographer out a side door. Only when the door had closed behind the photographer did she begin.

"Thank you," she said. Who would have thought that she would be standing here, back in Manhattan after all these years? Last year, when the invitations and entreaties from the university began arriving at her mansion in Brazil, she threw them out. Neither a "commemorative retrospective" nor an honorary doctorate sparked enough interest within her to end a lifetime of intensely guarded privacy. Why she later retrieved one letter from the trash bin, then answered it: that's a mystery she still pondered. She had begun writing a speech for this event in an attempt to address that mystery for herself. But after page one it had rambled into meaningless ruminations about change and time and the alleged value of human conscience and guilt and--She tore it up and didn't begin another.

Perhaps the article in the Times had been correct: she simply wished to re-introduce herself to a world she had forsaken long ago, and to do so before it was too late.

She delivered a brief speech, which the audience absorbed with expected deference. She paused to wipe her brow with a tissue and sip from the glass of water provided by the eager graduate student assigned to dog her heels for the duration of her visit. That was her cue to the university's president, who announced that it was now time for a brief Q&A session. The lights came up on the audience.

She pointed to a young woman, possibly one of the paleontology students, standing in the tenth row. "Ms. Darrow?" said the girl. "Is it true that this is the first time you've seen the film King Kong? And does it dramatize the reality of the events well, in your opinion?"

Reality does not come with an orchestral score. Or convenient jump cuts to avoid scenes that tell too much of the story. That final long night in Manhattan had been amputated to twenty minutes of screen time. The movie's final line of dialogue, perhaps the most contemptible ever spoken in the history of moving pictures, had made the old woman shut her eyes and tighten her hands into fists. "It was beauty killed the beast." But she had expected it. Everyone knew how this picture ended. Few knew what had not been allowed onto the screen. Not that it made a difference in the end. Few things ever do, really.

Her voice resonated clearly from the speaker system. "Yes, this is the first time I've viewed this motion picture. I saw no point in doing so before now. As to how well it matches my own recollections: in my mind I still see the island jungle as horrifying and alien, and as the most vibrant, colorful place on Earth, full of exotic smells and ten thousand other things now lost to us. New York City I'll always think of as what you just saw: rapid images in shades of gray."

By Autumn 1931, the Great Depression had grayed out the world utterly. Ash-gray streets walled in ghost-gray people who stood without cheer or pride or hope in long bread lines. For an unimaginable $20 a week, the remaining elite could enjoy the privileges of a room at the Barbizon-Plaza and look down on the ghetto Hooverville shanties cobbled up in Central Park. The newly opened Empire State Building remained half-empty, yet it towered above the geometric jungle of granite buildings and hard, sharp angles. Except for her coat--holes at its elbows and its hem fraying more every day--Ann had acquired no clothing since the night she finally sneaked away from the dark, cold family house, the tyrannical danger of her father, and the docile impotence of her mother. The coat was a gift from a melancholy reverend, the only man who had demanded nothing in return for his charity. Gray like the sheet of newspaper blowing across the sidewalk the first time she got caught stealing days-old fruit from a sidewalk vendor. A defeated, starving, failed thief at 18, Ann had already learned what the world was: flat and colorless and not at all sympathetic. Like pictures in a movie.

"Of course I recognize the need for--" Something in her throat made her pause. She blinked and it was gone. "--artistic license. I lived those events, after all. Besides, since then I've learned that real life is too…realistic to sell sufficient numbers of tickets on its own." She fooled them with a grin, and the audience laughed with her. "Next question." She pointed into the forest of raised hands. "You, sir, with the yellow tie."

The man stood. "What do you think of Fay Wray's portrayal of you?"

I hate it. "Well, I must say that the dear girl screamed more eloquently than I ever could." A smattering of applause. They were in the palm of her hand.

She pointed to a portly older man raising his hand from the expensive-ticket section. "Yes, Mr. Burns."

The man stood, smiled. "Why is it, Ann," he said, "that you became a recluse shortly after your discoverer, Carl Denham, went to jail? And why did you leave your fiancé, Ship's Mate Jack Driscoll, standing at the altar?"

By the audience's reaction, the man had just shat on the Vatican floor.

She was alone near the 21st Street Mission when the Carl Denham of Hollywood found her, fed her, and became her savior. His clean and pressed suit made her clothes look all the more shabby and unworthy. He was attractive and spoke well. And much older, maybe even 40, but not slow and soggy like other older men. There was no doubt that he was well-fed; still, he was as smart and crisp as a tall stack of new ten-dollar bills. He smelled of fresh sheets and good aftershave.

"You're a little thing," he said. They chatted, just chat, harmless conversation, for a few minutes. He seemed to listen hard to how she talked. After a while that made her uncomfortable so she shut up. He hailed a taxi cab and guided her into it. She didn't know where he was taking her, but she had a good idea what would be coming next. So she'd fallen this far. But even that was better than starving to death in some alley. "You're a looker," he said. "There's something about you I like." He didn't say another word until the taxi took them to a restaurant he said was one of his favorites. There a man in a nice suit greeted him by name and ushered them to a small table. Mr. Denham looked her over like a jeweler appraising a rough stone. "You're like…like a little animal. That's it! A scared, meek animal lost in a world too big for her. That's what I need for my next picture! Have you ever wanted to be an actress?"

"Oh, yes," she said. It was awfully easy to talk to him somehow. "I once did some work as an extra out on Long Island for a picture." It wasn't quite a lie. The producer had run out of money so the picture never finished. The last movie she'd seen was a Marx Brothers that took place on a cruise ship. It was the funniest picture she had ever seen, and the idea of an ocean cruise stayed with her ever since.

Mr. Denham nodded. "That's good. Can you read a script?"

She turned away from him, chewed the restaurant steak he was paying for, and placed the fork on the table. Which side, left or right, was it supposed to go on? Not knowing that embarrassed her. "A little. I wanted to finish school. My parents didn't--"

"Your parents? Do you have family who need to give you permission?"

She hadn't thought of them as "family" since she was twelve. "I have an uncle. Somewhere. I've never met him." Father's older brother. Supposed to be a lot like the hateful bastard. As a boy he taught Father how to castrate farm animals, something Father talked about with sickening relish. "No. No one."

"So will you do it?"

Ann looked at her shoes beneath the nice table. They were almost worn through, so she crossed her ankles to hide them. He promised her clothes. New clothes she didn't have to accept from charity. Probably the sort of clothes Father would not approve of. She mumbled. "I don't know."

Denham gestured with effortless authority, and a waiter brought her chocolate mousse in a tall, beautiful glass goblet. She looked away from it. This man had money. And influence. Control over his life. Things she'd only fantasized about. He made pictures about far-away places, with big game hunters and ferocious animals. He owned, they said, the most famous trophy room in Hollywood, full of wonderful, scary animal heads and other things. California was a free and sunny place, that's what they said. A place to escape, to get what she wanted most: freedom from poverty and the powerlessness that comes with it. Control. And he was very nice, not like men in this city. His promises sure did sound sincere. He really liked her and didn't even try to touch her.

"Think about it, Ann!" His voice was a first-class train speeding west. "Money, adventure, fame! And a long sea voyage that begins at six in the morning! If there's one thing I've learned in this life, Ann, it's this: face your fears. It's the only way to conquer them." Then he said the words that finished opening her to him. "You can trust me."

She did. Completely and willingly. It was the first truly impulsive thing she ever did, and that scared her and thrilled her at the same time. Beneath the table, she uncrossed her ankles. Mrs. Carl Denham of Hollywood. Wouldn't that show the hateful bastard?

"I suggest, Mr. Burns," said Ms. Ann Darrow, the most famous witness to the October 1931 incidents that had changed--or ended--so many lives, "that you rent the video of your own retrospective documentary covering the events. Catching King Kong ran three nights on PBS, I believe. In 1991. Pay particular attention to part three, which you cheekily titled 'The Girl in the Hairy Palm.' You hounded, harassed, and interviewed all the key survivors--excuse me, participants."

"All except you, Ms. Darrow. You refused."

"Yes, I did. And I'll thank you, Mr. Burns, to never again describe that irresponsible, opportunistic, sexually repressed impresario as my 'discoverer.'" She directed her attention to the opposite side of the hall. "Next question. You."

"Um, thank you, Ma'am," chirped a poorly attired young man who gave her a rabbit-in-the-headlights gaze when she pointed at him. "I'm a big admirer of your work with indigenous religions and peoples. Um. In the movie, the script cuts directly from the island capture to the public unveiling on Broadway and then the escape and, uh, rampage. I was wondering, could you tell us your version of what happened between that night the, um, the ape was secretly brought ashore and the night of the premiere. The night--um, what you feel about that--" The boy's voice trailed off, his hands fluttering like paper before him. It was as if he'd accidentally asked her to describe her first fuck.

For more than seventy years Ms. Ann Darrow had never said anything on record about that controversial span between the afternoon the Denham Expedition and its cargo left the creature's ancient island domain, up to that final night in Manhattan. About the night dozens of innocent people died or were injured. Even her testimony at Denham's trial had been sparse. The presiding judge was convinced that the shock of recent events had been too devastating for "this pretty young lady." Her performance in the courtroom had secured her silence as well as Denham's conviction on a dozen charges ranging from illegal possession of explosives to reckless endangerment to property damage. Charges of enslavement, dismemberment, and murder were, unfortunately, never even raised.

"Young man, if you're asking me if there's anything that should be added to the history books at this point in time, the answer is--" She stopped. The next word from her mouth surprised her more than it surprised anyone else. "Yes."

It was a thin crescent moon hanging low over the Atlantic, throwing a rippling glow onto the sea beyond the starboard rail. A moon as crisp and fine-lined as a fingernail clipping. She'd never seen the moon look like that. Maybe crescent moons didn't happen in Great Neck, Long Island, where she had lived until running away one night with only one small bag and bruises hidden beneath her thin cloth coat. She took the train to Manhattan hoping for--what? Dreams of a man to rescue her, answer her prayers, take care of her forever and ever? She couldn't remember. She couldn't even remember ever looking up at the sky back then. Now, months later and hundreds of miles from anything remotely resembling solid earth, the moon for the first time looked like a place, a dry, spherical continent in the sky, not an abstract disc easily ignored or lost in the glare of street lights and the pale luminous wash that passes for night in the city they were returning to now.

During the voyage outbound from New York, the night sea's darkness had frightened her on a bone-deep level. She had tried to hide that fear from the sailors. Walking the deck alone at night, she kept one hand always touching the solid security of the ship's cold metal. Who knew there were so many stars? One of the sailors had brought a book on board, a long story by some Englishman named Mr. Wells, about people going inside the moon. Ann borrowed it to relieve the boredom when Mr. Denham wasn't making her pose and strut in front of his big moving picture cameras. She gave it up after the first chapter. Its talk was peculiar, the story confusing, and she had never read a book before, so she grew frustrated and angry, which was worse than the boredom. Maybe she would meet this Mr. Wells one day. Mr. Denham could arrange it. If it pleased him to do so. He could do anything as long as it pleased him. He was, after all, a man. A man with money. Surely nothing in the world could be more powerful or attractive.

But soon after that outbound voyage, fear had become the moon, a thing real and solid, a tangible object like this ship or the skull-shaped island where no charts said an island should be. Or a black, breathing thing clutching her in a dark jungle where no white man had ever before set foot. Compared to that, even the surface of the moon felt close and familiar and touchable.

Now, straight ahead somewhere in all that darkness sat New York City. The freighter Venture steamed north with its lights out and at a speed faster than regulations or its heavy-laden engines typically permitted. Far, far behind them, the island hell still pierced her dreams. Although half-a-planet astern, below the equator, farther south than Borneo or Sumatra, deep in the bathhouse-hot Indian Ocean, it could never be too far behind. Every night, the nightmares woke her. She kept the lamp burning in her berth, but the reek of fetid meat and the screaming, primal, bestial visions filled her sleep anyway. The tyrannosaur's head, lunging to devour her. The giant cave serpent's fangs darting toward her. A black mountain-face with its bloated mockery of human features. In her sleep, the changing rumble of the ship's engines became a giant monster's colossal body battling and defeating monsters even more horrible than itself. Her hammock: an enclosing fist like hot, hairy leather. Waking up shaking and sweating, she tried to force the nightmares from her mind by walking the deck.

"Ahoy, shipmate," said the deep voice behind her. She didn't turn to look, but smiled all the same. Jack always knew where to find her long after she was supposed to be asleep.

Ann reached out, held tight to First Mate Jack Driscoll's left arm. As they had on other nights lately, they strolled on the Venture's forward deck beneath the Atlantic's clear night sky. The sea crested against the bow while cold wind and spray tugged Ann's hair. Each night the near-winter wind from the east grew colder. Jack wrapped his long seaman's coat around her. He didn't seem to mind the cold. He looked like Charles Lindbergh.

After awkward moments of idle chat and empty pauses, he continued a lesson begun the night before.

"Remember what I told you about Polaris, the North Star? It's higher tonight. See?" He pointed into the incredible spray of stars. "That's how we can tell our latitude is changing."

So many. Jack's stories about the stars made her want to know more. She asked how he could tell which star out of all of those was the North Star.

"Easy. See those two pointer stars at the Big Dipper's front?" He took her hand and pointed it skyward. "Some folks call it the Big Bear, though I ain't never seen a bear with a long tail." He laughed. What a pleasure it was to be with him. She clenched his hand tight and let him guide hers among the stars. "Now draw a line between 'em, and keep going to that star right there. See it? The only bright star in its neighborhood. That's Polaris, the Pole Star. It'll always steer you true, you can always rely on it. It's how we know we're headin' north. Well, that and the compass. And the way Charlie's Stinky Chinky fish stew is tastin' more like the Atlantic and less like Chinese dirty laundry." A sense of humor--that's something Carl Denham couldn't buy with all his money.

Eventually, Jack returned to another topic begun the night before.

"So, whaddaya say? How many times does a guy gotta say &'Will you marry me'?"

Ann paced alongside the bow railing. She tugged Jack's hand, pulling him along. "I don't know."

"Well, you love me, don't you?"

He was plenty good-looking, and she marveled at the sense of well-being she felt when near him. "You know I do. But we hardly know each other, and after what happened on--" She stopped. Sea wind gusted against her face, making it wet and salty and blowing her hair into her eyes.

He released her hand. "You're not still carrying a torch for Mr. Denham, are you?"

Coals of disappointment smoldered within her, though they had faded since she got to know Jack.

"Come on, sweetheart," he said. It was nice when he called her that. "Don't make me compete against a book-talkin' Hollywood fella with loads of dough."

Since that first day in the restaurant, the wealthy movie-maker had proved time and again that his only interest in her was professional.

"You're not." Ann rested her head on Jack's broad chest. That made it easier to change the subject. "You promised you'd finally show me the hold."

The captured monster was down below. The creature that had carried her off before Jack saved her.

"Shhh, pipe down," he said. "I don't like that idea. That thing is a killer. Are you sure you want to see it again?"

She wasn't. But the nightmares had to stop. She had to put the night-terrors behind her. She wanted to see the evil savages' god chained. Drugged, trapped, defeated. But throughout the return voyage neither Denham nor the captain allowed her near the immense hollow of the cargo hold. Too dangerous for the poor girl, Denham said.

Yet since leaving the island, the nightmares had also conjured new sensations. Or perhaps stirred her experiences on the island into a new revelation: sometimes, something forbidden and dangerous is all the more exhilarating for it. Face your fears, the rich man had told her.

Black ocean roared past them. The Pole Star brightened into a comforting, steady lighthouse. "If you take me there," she kittened, pulling him closer, "will you stay with me?"

"Sure. Later. If you're quiet about it."

"Tonight. Right now."

"Forget it, doll. Mr. Denham says--"

"Captain Engelhorn says we'll be in New York by dawn. I want to see before we get there."

Ann looked into Jack's face and pouted the way she'd seen actresses do in the movies. "You promised."

He grumbled. "All right. Let's go. Dames."

Dear, sweet Jack. You could tell he knew a lot about women. Certain types of women, anyway. But around her, he was unsure of himself, almost boyishly vulnerable. That was utterly foreign to her, a surprise exhilarating in its newness. She wanted to discover what he knew. She wanted the man inside that handsome skin. And he had rescued her from the monster's high jungle plateau, from certain death. Or worse. That's the way the press was going to hear it, anyway. She didn't remember it quite that way, but Mr. Denham knew about show business.

He led her down metal stairs and a narrow, dark corridor. They stopped at a plate iron door to the ship's oversized hold. Jack nodded to the crewman on guard. The crewman released latch bolts and pulled open the door. Its huge hinges screeched, metal against metal. Inside, three bare bulbs flickered in a cavernous, rectangular space. Ann stepped in and bumped into a man with an elephant rifle. Though fresh air flowed through vented ducts, the flat gun-colored walls glistened with damp and mildew. The chamber stank of mold, decaying fruit, and shit. Its metal floor sloped gently down to a drainage grate that had been recently hosed.

At the far side of the hold, filling the darkest corner, it sat. Even here, conquered, its head turned out of view, the beast was mythic, Olympian. Its body too grand and super-natural even for Bible stories. There were giants on the earth in those days. The remnants of three dozen tranquilizer darts as big as coffee cans littered the floor nearby. Its labored breathing thundered. This thing had taken her from the savages' sacrificial altar, carried her into a jungle world that violated everything she knew and believed in, and for one horrifying day it had kept her. Now its right hand lay lashed to the floor by short, thick chains. That was the hand that had clutched her, before Denham's gas bombs stilled it.

Ann walked the hold's length toward the giant. It appeared to be sleeping. Fitful, rasping breaths pulsed from its mouth and the twin caves of its nostrils. Beneath the massive brow ridge, eyelids spasmed, like a man dreaming. What dreams boiled inside that head? Visions of a lost island paradise? Of an existence punctuated with victorious battles fought against beasts like itself--brutal, unchained, natural? Or confused, uncomprehending awareness of…what? Defeat, failure, humiliation, loneliness? That was something Ann understood. All her life it had dictated her existence, defined who she was.

The head lifted, slow and heavy. The beast grunted, scratched its chest with its unchained hand. It cocked its head to one side and turned, searching. Nostrils bellowed wide. Ann heard the clack-clack of an elephant rifle being readied. She stepped backward until the steel wall pressed damp and warm against her back.

The man with the gun yanked a knife-switch on the wall. A spotlight, the kind used in movie-making, shone directly into the face of the beast. Eyes clenched shut, the immense body huddled tighter into a corner. It sniffed the air, then turned its face toward Ann. Fighting to open its eyes, it pulled at the chains. The great being writhed half in darkness, half in light.

It was trying to find her. Its free arm reached vainly out for her. Ann took a step forward.

It could have torn her apart at any time on its island. Instead, it had defeated monsters to protect her. Kept her safe while a dozen strong men died.

She stepped closer.

"Ann, stop," Jack said. "It'll kill you."

She took another step.

The great beast's body shifted as much as the chains allowed. It sniffed the air again, and a yearning, animal sound filled the chamber. Its erection, wide and tall and towering from thick, black fur, was free, unchained. It was beautiful.

Jack stepped behind her, took her hair and chin into his hands, and forced her to turn away. "Don't look there, Ann. Jesus."

"I want to see." She twisted away from him. The unashamed animal power manifesting before her drew her in. Something opened inside her: strength, courage, confidence. The certainty of control. It was a new sensation. She liked it.

Jack's voice, distant and small: "Don't be disgusting. No wife of mine--" She didn't hear him finish, his words shattered by a rifle shot. A needled projectile buried itself in an enormous black thigh. The beast shook its head and pounded a fist against the floor. After a moment, Jack grabbed Ann by both elbows and hurled her out of the hold. The door's metal-on-metal yell didn't cover the lost-soul howl that pushed air through the corridor.

Well after midnight, New York became a growing smear of light on the horizon. Ann stepped onto the deck to watch the skyline's boxy silhouettes form against the ash-colored sky. When she recognized the obelisk shaft of the Empire State Building, she fell to the deck and cried with relief. They'd made it home at last, after ten thousand miles and a hundred million years. She couldn't see any stars up in that sky above the city. She looked for the Big Dipper and the reliable guiding star it pointed to, and couldn't find them.

Mr. Denham insisted that Capt. Engelhorn bring the ship--at night and under radio silence--to an industrial dock pre-arranged before the voyage. The captain, whom Ann weeks before had dubbed a "dear old lamb" before realizing that he was as corrupt as any pirate, gave no protest. There could be no witnesses when the surviving crew offloaded the cargo that strained his ship's engines and taxed the specialized equipment installed before the voyage.

Ann sprawled on an enormous white bed, relishing the clean hotel sheets against her naked skin. They were the most luxurious, expensive, and sensuous things she had ever touched. Immediately after the Venture docked in New York, Mr. Denham took Ann to this hotel suite next-door to the Palace Theater on Broadway. Exhausted in more ways than she thought possible, she slept for most of three days. The sheets must have slipped into her dreams. Several times she awoke flushed and feeling trapped, confined, yet also freed and untethered for the first time ever. Stripped truly naked in every way, she ran, chasing something she couldn't see through a green world, its hot air moist against her body. Wicked dreams, her father would have said. By the third day they mortified her so much that she took unnecessary showers and made sure room service replaced the sheets in the morning. Throughout the three days, Jack visited and brought her flowers and chocolates and kisses and made sure she was all right. She didn't remember Jack in those dreams, though he must have been there.

Sometime during the third day, she asked Jack, "What's happened to it?"

He watched her for a long moment before replying. "Don't worry your pretty head about that overgrown monkey." He kissed her forehead and stroked her blonde hair. "Mr. Denham's still got him drugged and caged good and tight. I told you he'll never hurt you again. Before long the big ape'll be too afraid of us to do anything we don't want him to. Mr. Denham says we're all going to be rich, so the only monsters you'll have to worry about will be our own kids. Whaddaya think, Ann? Let's name our first boy Carl Denham Driscoll. Got a nice ring to it, don't it?"

She didn't remember saying yes to his proposal, but Mr. Denham had talked about their engagement being the kind of publicity you couldn't buy with all the money in Hollywood. She enclosed his hand between hers. "Baby Carl Driscoll. So what are we going to name our first little girl?"

"Aw, don't get too many female notions now," he said. "Last thing I need is another dame in my life." He laughed and, because he was looking at her, she made her smile wider than it would have been otherwise.

Late on the third night, she was sitting up in bed reading and drinking Coca-Cola when Jack came to visit.

"You're looking your old self again," he said. He pulled the book from her hands. "Where'd you get this?"

"Mr. Denham told the hotel to get me anything I asked for. So I had them do some shopping for me, and I asked for something to read while I'm cooped up in here."

"The Good Earth?" Jack said. "A woman writer? What is this, some sort of romance story?"

"It's a best-seller. It's about China."

Jack put the book atop the empty dinner tray on the nightstand. He replaced it with a bouquet of flowers. "You don't have to be cooped up here any more, doll. Soon as you're ready, we have somewhere to go."

She pulled the sheet up around her neck. "Where's that?"

"Mr. Denham wants to shoot some photos of you with the monkey. For the magazines. It's completely harmless, he says."

"I'll be ready in fifteen minutes."

"I'll wait downstairs." She didn't move until the door closed behind him.

Twelve minutes later she found him pacing beneath the lobby chandelier.

His welcoming grin disappeared, and his lips pulled tight and horizontal. He waited for her to explain herself. Instead, she seemed to be challenging him to speak first. He gave her a questioning look, like an explorer facing his first unexplainable phenomenon. "You're wearing a man's shirt," he said.

"So are you, sailor."

He frowned. "Just that I never saw you in anything other than those movie duds Mr. Denham dresses you in."

"That's right. All the more reason for you to stop calling me 'doll'."

Jack guided her through nighttime streets to the East River industrial docks. City lights reflecting off the low cloud ceiling gave everything a soft-shadowed, reddish cast. The river lapped against piers, which creaked to the slow breathing movements of the water. The midnight air carried city odors. She tasted automobile exhaust, iron, soot, and wet concrete. Funny, she'd never noticed that about the city before. Now she couldn't get it out of her nose or off her clothes.

"Here we are," Jack said. He pointed to a huge building like an abandoned aircraft hangar. The Venture was the only ship moored nearby. Its empty cargo hold gaped open to the building's closed dockside portals--gates as tall and wide as the Great Wall that had kept a primitive village's god in his savage jungle domain. Men she had never seen before stood guard on the ship and at the building's tiny, human-sized doorway. The guards had guns. Jack escorted her into the secret dockside stronghold.

Jack placed his arm around her shoulders. "The chimp's been taken care of like he was the king of England. Mr. Denham says this is one investment worth protecting no matter how much it costs." Jack led her through a corridor sectioned by three steel doors, each sealed with massive bolt locks. After the final door, Ann squinted against the brilliance of a hundred electric arc lamps illuminating a space as wide and high as Grand Central Station.

Ann took in the scene a piece at a time. It was the only way her mind could accept what she saw.

In the center of the space: a cage, big as a rich man's house. Thick chrome beams and latticework gleamed, bright and polished. About half-way up, some were scarred and askew as if something had tried to pull them from their mountings.

In the cage: Denham's "Eighth Wonder of the World" lay on a great steel T, wrists shackled to the crossbeam. Thick chains secured the metal band around his waist, and more chains anchored the feet to an iron wall ten feet tall, easy. Giving the air a heavy taste of gas and metal, behind the wall men with welding equipment labored at a scaffold framework. It was vast enough, Ann presumed, to support the entire structure, Kong and all, when it was hoisted upright to a standing position. Kong's mountainous torso of black flesh and hair, supine, was taller than any man in the room. It expanded and contracted in irregular, volcanic breaths. His incredible head faced the ceiling, eyes closed, mouth open. Every few seconds, the hand nearest Ann twitched.

She stood unmoving despite two memories: Father's detailed descriptions of crucifixion, and the island natives lashing her between twin stone pillars.

Denham's white shoes clacked against the floor as he approached, striding near the cage. A jeweled ring on his right hand tapped the bars--ding, ding, ding--like bells. He smiled at his trophy.

"There he is, kids. Feast your eyes upon the mighty Kong. He was king in his world. A deity. Now we've brought him to our world a captive, a show to gratify our curiosity. Thirty-eight tons of public fascination bound in chromium and manacled with the same combination lock mechanisms the Navy uses to secure dirigibles. That's raw nature, my friends. Look upon him and see what we deny about our innermost selves. Conquer him, and prove that we can conquer what we fear most.

"Not even the press knows about him yet, and we're going to keep it that way until the curtain goes up at the Palace one week from tonight. It's all arranged. With top tickets at $20 a head, we'll be millionaires in a month. Ann, you're going to be the pretty wife of a rich man, with the biggest wedding the society columns and newsreels ever saw."

Jack pulled Ann against him, enclosing her with an arm around her shoulders. "Maybe that fella--" He arced a thumb toward Kong. "--ought to be our best man. You think you can make a tuxedo for him, Mr. Denham?"

"Well, it'd need a chest seventeen feet across and a size nine-foot neck, but I'll put the best tailors on it right away." He laughed. Ann couldn't tell if he was serious or not.

Jack squeezed Ann's shoulder. "Just think, sweetheart: if we teach him to cook and clean, that's a whole staff we won't have to hire. All you got to do is feed him a banana twice a day." Jack and Denham yowled laughter. "He can help you take care of all our kids."

Ann pushed herself out of his grasp. She stepped forward and gazed at Kong's body. Her eyes stopped at the groin. A tarpaulin covered it, like an apron. The floor nearby: wet from a recent hosing.

"Is he sick?" Ann asked.

Jack took her hands. "No. We're just keeping him gassed." He pointed to hose nozzles mounted inside the cage and connected to a row of tanks. "Takes the fire out of him. Lost one man already when a dose wore off sooner than we expected."

Denham said, "Don't worry, Ann. His constitution is like nothing I've seen before. Plus, I have the best animal doctors working on him. He hasn't eaten, but that can't last forever. If we have to, we'll spoon-feed him to get him ready for his Broadway debut."

Denham shouted to a man near an office door. "Frank, fetch my camera!" He hurried to Ann's side. "What a great photo shoot this will be! Ann, I want you and Jack to pose next to the cage. The first photos of the monster and his captors, and the brave girl who captured its heart! 'Beauty and the Beast'! That's what it'll say on the next cover of Life magazine!"

Kong stirred. The titan body jerked, suddenly awake. Chains big enough to anchor a ship jangled. The eyes opened with a sticky sound, nostrils flared wide, and his breath came in loud, hot gusts. Ann pressed against the cage. The bars were cool through her clothes. Warm and moist and redolent of another world, the breath washed across her face in waves.

A distant voice shouted. "Ann. Be careful."

"Shut up, Jack." She said it out loud and liked the way that felt.

Denham took the camera, mounted its tripod into position, and peered through the eyepiece. "Beautiful," he murmured.

Kong strained to sit up, his eyes focusing, his face like a child's waking in an unfamiliar room. That head moved in deliberate spasms, searching. The nostrils flared, grasping at a scent. He saw Ann.

Denham moved the camera to a new position. "It's you, Ann! He smells you! Don't worry, he can't break those chains and we have more gas ready to pump in there. Stand near the bars. Jack, look up at Kong and hold Ann as if you're protecting her! Beauty and the Beast! Beauty and the Beast!"

Flashbulbs exploded.

"No, Ann!" Denham shouted. "Look at Jack. You're happy he saved you from that monstrous terror. You're delighted that he's going to be your husband! No, no! "

He stomped toward her, white shoes slapping the floor. He yanked her hands from the cage and forced her head against Jack's chest. Kong pulled his wrist chains taut. Muscles moved behind his vast brow as his concentration focused on her, his eyes Pole Star bright, his face a Rushmore of anger and sorrow and protectiveness--with the remnants of a defiant nobility Ann had never seen before, not in any man.

"He's shaking it off," Jack said.

"Just a few more shots," Denham said. Flashbulbs popped. Ann pulled away from Jack and wrapped her hands around the bars again.

"No," Denham yelled. "Goddamn you, girl."

This time Jack grabbed Ann by the shoulders and yanked her back. "Pay attention or Mr. Denham won't get his pictures."

Flash!

Kong arched his back. The tarp fell away. Ann saw. Across the groin, a smaller tarp strapped to Kong's legs acted as a bloody bandage. It failed to hide a ravaged mound of limp flesh in the cavity between Kong's legs. Red-matted fur surrounded it.

"You cut him!"

"We took the fire out of him," Jack said.

"You mutilated him!" She locked eyes with Jack.

"Ann, be reasonable--"

Denham's ring went ding! against a cage bar. "Let me tell you, they'll make one hell of a display in my trophy room back home."

A scream of rage and pain and humiliation exploded out of her. Jack slapped her, hard, and she collapsed to the floor. Kong roared to bring down the cave enclosing him, to collapse the entire universe with the sound of his voice. Fists that had pounded down the centuries-old Wall became red as the manacles cut into fur and flesh. The chains and locks held.

"He'll damage himself!" Denham snapped. He ran to the row of tanks and turned a wheel valve. "Everybody get back." Acrid clouds firehosed into Kong's face. Something metallic and bitter stung Ann's eyes and throat. Someone, she didn't notice who, grabbed her by an arm and dragged her away from the cage. Within seconds Kong lay still again. Until the next day her arm bore the off-color impressions of someone's fingers.

"So, obviously--" said Ms. Ann Darrow, the famous author of a dozen books and organization charters that forced half a world to hold a mirror up to its own nature. "--there was more to the story." She looked out over the stunned audience. Even the Nobel Prize had not been so satisfying. Camera flashes popped, but Security paid no attention. That's all right. She didn't blame them.

"The rest is worth a footnote too, in case Mr. Burns there wishes to add another episode to his little documentary.

"The night before the opening at the Palace, I bedded Jack Driscoll. I don't remember if he was any good or not. But I got what I wanted from him: the combination to Kong's manacle lock devices. Then on opening night, before Denham brought up the Palace's curtain, before Kong was hoisted to a standing position for all the audience to see, I planned my first ever act of sabotage."

Denham had walled off the Palace's church-sized backstage area. Ann approached the two armed men guarding its entrance. She told them that Mr. Denham wanted her to wait for him inside the protected space, inside with the star attraction. For one last roll of newsreel footage, she said. The truth was, Denham and Jack were in the theater office counting the incoming receipts and toasting their success. They believed she was alone in her dressing room. Twenty minutes until curtain.

From inside, Ann heard the stage manager's voice, muffled by the walls, as he shouted at his assistants, worrying over the enormous electric winches ready to slide away the audience-facing wall and lift Kong's steel cruciform and its base to a vertical position. At any moment the stage manager might burst in to check the manacles securing the drugged Kong's wrists to the crossbeam, or the dockyard chains attached near Kong's wrist locks and ascending taut into the galleries high above the stage. If he caught Ann here, alone…

The crossbeam was a polished wall before her. On it, just above her head, rested Kong's right hand, palm up. It had not moved since she arrived. She found a stepstool and climbed to the metal surface. A short length of chrome chain attached the wrist manacle to the bar. Where the chain met the manacle, she found the lock and its four-inch-thick, foot-long, grooved bolt that locked the manacle closed. Though large and mechanically advanced, within two minutes Jack's combination sequence sprang free the bolt with a hammering clang. Thick springs secured the manacle's hinged halves in place, but those springs couldn't be nearly as strong as the bolt. She removed one of two blue silk scarves from her shoulders and tied it in a neat bow around the mechanism, hiding the retracted bolt. Earlier that afternoon, she'd made sure that everyone concerned, including the guards, knew she wanted to add a "woman's touch" to the formidable devices. Denham had said it was a swell idea. The press guys would love it.

She stepped off the stool and crossed the span to the opposite wrist, slowing a little when Kong's head formed a roof above her own. She repeated the unlocking procedure, tied the other scarf. Now, maybe, Kong had something approaching a fair chance. With luck, they both did.

Something watched her. She felt it. Panicked, she felt her knees go weak and she almost tumbled from the stool. She clasped a handful of thick, black fur near his thumb for support. Then again panic spiked--what if Kong suddenly awoke? She didn't know what he would do--bellow and roar, alerting Denham and the men with guns? Crush her in blind fury? She remained still, feeling her heart drum in her chest and the sweat sticking to her expensive formal gown. What was she doing here at all? Was she a stupid, sinful girl, just like Father always said?

A low huffing breath heated the air from above. She turned her head and looked up. Kong was looking at her. Twisting his neck as far as possible, he gazed down with eyes big enough and dark enough to mirror her entire body in their surfaces. She saw herself there, small and distorted and translucent, one hand on the lock, the other clutching his fur. In the jungle, a lifetime ago, Ann had looked into those eyes with terror as they stared back with desire and controlled supremacy. Once bright and intensely alive like some force as fundamental as weather or fire or sex, Kong's eyes now were dry and dull, their intensity faded. The drugs--and more--had taken their toll.

Kong turned his eyes just enough to focus on the manacle lock at Ann's tiny, tiny fingers. A heaving rumble, perhaps intentionally low and inaudible to anyone but Ann, wafted from that great, huge throat. Ann did not release her hold on his fur. The two of them looked at and penetrated each other. Without sound or touch or physicality, something passed between them, a shared comprehension that bridged the chasm that had separated them. Two wounded animals: one that had known only freedom and mastery; another who, until now, had barely dared hope for either of those.

Perhaps it was the electric lights, perhaps only the moisture in her own eyes--whatever it was, for a moment Kong's eyes seemed to re-ignite with a volition and understanding stronger than (or maybe merely different from) any human expression she'd ever known. But before she could see for sure, Kong turned his head back toward the ceiling, released a rumbling breath, and closed his eyes. Electric winches roared into action. The keening strain of overhead pulleys vibrated down from the ceiling through the chains. In the distance Denham barked orders. Someone pounded on the door.

"With the rush to hoist Kong and raise the curtain on time," Ann Darrow told her silent audience, "no one bothered to check the locks. So that, my dears, is how King Kong escaped so quickly."

Somewhere deep in the auditorium, a pen dropped.

"Later, after the much-analyzed climb to the top of the Empire State Building, after the planes, after what had become of Kong on Fifth Avenue twelve hundred feet below-- After all that and the lawsuits and criminal charges, I saw to it that Denham was ruined. The judicial system being so goddamn patronizing back then, the court awarded me a great deal of Denham's money. They didn't convict Jack, who was only following orders, evidently, though he never understood why I never spoke to him again. According to what I saw in Mr. Burns' little film, my almost-husband tried to get into the movie business. Then later tried to drink himself to death, but failed at that too, the pathetic dear."

She focused her attention on the poorly attired young man who had given her the rabbitty gaze when she pointed at him earlier.

"As to my feelings regarding the fact that dozens of innocent people were killed or injured--"

What did she think about all those lost or damaged lives? After all, human beings had suffered and died because of her; their pain and loss should have been placed in her hands, the same hands that had released those bolts. She had known that since the day Carl Denham went to jail.

"Do I have a guilty conscience? Do I regret giving Kong the only freedom he could have? On his terms?" She closed her eyes and reviewed a life that, she was certain, to every person in the audience represented a crushing weight of years, of authority, of fiercely protected solitude bound by chrome chains of control and responsibility. More than anyone else in this room, she knew that wounds heal but scars remain. She long ago accepted hers and chose to not let them mark her in any way that did not serve her own ends. All those years rewound now and there she was again, reflected in Kong's eyes that final time--far, far above the world, up there in a cold, pigeon-colored sky veined with first morning light, in the warm black cavern of a palm--when she knew with the certainty of a shared soul that he understood what was happening to him.

Ann drew in a sharp breath, opened her eyes. For the first time in--she couldn't remember how long--her chest ached and her voice threatened to break. She expertly blinked back tears. The boy who had asked the question was sweating and biting his lip, unaware of how foolish he looked. The answer that came surprised her not at all. "Not today."

She stood straight and looked into that audience with a face clear, sharp, and unapologetic. "All those years ago, Carl Denham said to me, 'There's one thing I've learned in this life.' Well, I can outdo him by two. One: 'monster' is a relative term. Two: you either take control of your life--your power, your dignity, doing everything within that power to keep it--or the monsters take it from you. And three: If keeping the monsters away means letting go of the innocence that can be so familiar and comforting, well, then, that goes for girls as well as gods.

"It wasn't Beauty that killed the Beast. If you ask me, it was quite the other way around. Thank you. That's all."

EXT: Close-up. Dawn.

Green

Jay Lake

"Identity and role are so intertwined for human beings, but sometimes those are split apart, splintered. How anyone finds their way out of the forests of loss and longing is fascinating. To do that amid high politics and low sexuality can be terrific drama."

T HE FIRST THING I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. The ox's wooden bell clicked in an echo of the slow clops of his hooves on the dusty track. The sun was warm on my face. My mother must have carried me, for she was alive then too, but all I remember is the clicking ox bell and the jangling silver bells of my grandmother's shroud. She had died that morning and now took her last ride astride Endurance's back.

The women of our village are given a swath of silk at birth, though mine is lost. It is usually two arm spans wide, and as long as the family can afford. Wisdom says that the longer the silk, the longer the life. The first skill a girl-child learns is to sew a tiny bell to her silk each day so that when she marries she will dance with the music of five thousand bells. Every day she sews a tiny bell so that when she dies, her soul will be carried out of this life on the music of twenty thousand bells.

None of this lore is in my memory of course, only the mournful echo of Endurance's heavy wooden bell and the gentle shaking of my grandmother's shroud, like rain on a temple roof to cry her soul away. That and my father flicking his lash and singing a death song for his mother.

And of course it was hot.

A bit later in my life, Endurance stood watch over me as my father worked. I remember hiding in the shade of his belly, staring up at the fringe where the fur of each side met. The white of his back shaded to gray there, like the line of a storm off the sea. Endurance's great brown eyes watched me unblinking as I ran in the rice paddies, climbed the swaying palms and bougainvilleas, hunted snakes in the stinking ditches.

If I strayed too far, his bell clopped as he shook his head and snorted to warn me back.

At night I sat before the fire in front of our hut and stitched another tiny bell to my silk under the watchful eye of my father. My mother was already gone, though I cannot remember her death. Endurance's breath whuffled from the dark of his pen. If I stared into the shadows, I could see the fire's fetch dance gleaming in the depths of his brown eyes.

One day my father came into the field where Endurance watched over me and called my name. Laughing, I ran from a stand of banana trees, a hard green crescent in each hand. My hair trailed behind me, tugged by sun and wind, and there was warm mud caked upon my feet.

He had a man with him, pale as a maggot and taller than a gatepost with hair like straw and eyes the color of a lime. Father bent and said some words to me that I can no longer recall. Then he placed my hand in the maggot man's hand, kissed my forehead, and walked quickly away.

The last thing I remember of that time in my life, like the first, is the clop of Endurance's wooden bell as the ox shook his head and snorted to warn me back.

"You are coming to Copper Downs," the maggot man told me. After spending a day walking together, we were in a little house on a giant boat upon the sea. His words were thick and muddled, as if he had only just learned to talk. He smiled to make up for his poor mouth.

"Don't want to go to Copper Downs." I knew I was supposed to be nice, but that was difficult. "Want to go home."

His smile shrank. "Copper Downs is your home now."

I considered this. We had not brought my silk with my thousand bells. "Papa will be there, and Endurance, and my aunties?"

"Your new home."

At that lie I ran, ducking between his legs and out the door of the little house. I was fast, for a girl, and more strong than the maggot man knew. The floor of the boat was big, covered with ropes and boxes and tall trees hung with great white cloths, and most of all, shouting men. I raced through everything heading for the edge.

We could not be too far from my home.

But when I vaulted the little wall at the edge of the floor and dove for the sea, I saw there was no land nearby. Water was water, I could swim here as well as in a ditch at home, but the other side was too far to reach.

Then I was in the sea. It was colder than I had thought, and stung my mouth terribly. The water was dark and gray. I found the surface and began to swim away from the boat.

Behind me they shouted. I rolled to my back and looked as I swam. Angry men lined the little wall at the side of the boat, pointing and yelling. I smiled at their discomfort even as one raised a great spear and aimed it at me.

It flashed and a silver arrow sped toward me. I started to scream as it passed above me. I turned again, almost slipping beneath the water, to see the dart fly into a great, toothed mouth that was open just behind me.

There was a blue spark, and a shriek like a woman in pain. Then the mouth closed and sank beneath the water, dragging a rough gray head larger than Endurance with it. A dead black eye, ringed with flesh as pale as the maggot man's skin, glared at me. It lacked the wisdom of Endurance's brown eyes, but still I felt the sea-beast take my name among its secret hatreds.

The boat turned and came back for me. I was afraid to be on board again, but I was more afraid of the sea. At home, the water had held only snakes and turtles with knife-sharp beaks. The sea held every kind of throat to swallow me whole.

Fortune's Flight, as they called the ship, had bells too. After weeks of sailing we came near land again at Copper Downs with all of them ringing. Bells floating in the water and more bells on the shore answered, as if a whole parade of women were on their way to the next world.

Copper Downs was greater than a thousand of my villages. Its buildings were taller than the burial platforms of home--those pillars are the highest things we make, in order to carry souls closer to the freedom of the sky. Copper Downs was, as Federo the maggot man said, a city. A city spread along the shore for an hour's walk or more in each direction. Temple roofs glinted with the metal that gave the place its name, and huge buildings by the docks took in men and cargo from the ships.

I had learned so much already on the voyage.

"You are too smart," Federo had said with a little smile. This was his true smile, not his talking-to-children smile. "The Factor will like you for it, but the women will not. Mark me," and he waggled his finger, "play the dullard a bit and you will live a happier life."

But despite his advice, he spoke to me and read to me and taught me letters and even showed me what a map was. I became used to his muddy speech, and learned some of his own words, which sounded sharp and harsh to my ears. By the time we had landed, I felt almost like I belonged in Copper Downs even though that city's people were pale with fat red cheeks and hard blue eyes.

At the docks we were met by a carriage, a high-sided cart with windows like a little rolling room. Federo pushed me inside and told me to stay while the sailors loaded his gear from Fortune's Flight. I picked at useless little buttons set deep in the leather seats and smelled the oils someone had polished the carriage with--lemon, maybe, and the pressings of some vegetable I didn't know--until he returned.

Then we were away through the streets of Copper Downs in a ride rougher than any storm-tossed buffet of the ship. Should I have leapt into the sea as we arrived here, I wondered? There had been nowhere for me to swim to in the harbor. Even less so the street. Federo had told me of cobbles, but I had never seen a stone road before.

Despite the marvels, I still wanted to go home.

The Factor's house had high walls of blue stone, with streets around it on all sides. My village could have fit within those walls with room for rice and soy to grow. We passed through a main gate, then a second gate, to an inner court. The carriage stopped and Federo brought me out.

"From here you are among women," he said, kneeling to meet my eyes at a level. "I am the only man you will speak with, except for the Factor himself. Use your head, little one."

"I have a name," I whispered, thinking of Endurance's bell. Federo had never used it on the ship, not once, though I'd said it to him a hundred times.

He ruffled my hair. "Not until the Factor gives you a name."

Then the carriage rattled away and I stood alone next to a pomegranate tree that reminded me of my home. The inner court was cobbled like the streets outside, with the tree growing from a little round-walled patch of soil. The house around the court had a low porch, with a screened upper balcony topped by a copper roof with the blue walls towering beyond. I could see other trees above the copper, as if there were more courts around me.

Though I saw no one, I heard throaty laughter.

"I am here," I called out in my own words. Then I said it again in Federo's words.

After a while a woman not much taller than I, but fat as any house duck with broad lips to match, waddled out from the shadowed porch. She was swathed in coarse black cloth, which covered even her head. "So you're the new one," she said, in Federo's words. "I'll have no more…"

I did not understand the rest. When I tried to ask what she meant, she slapped me hard upon the ear. I knew then that she intended me not to speak my own words.

I resolved to learn her words so well that eventually this duck woman could never order me about again.

Years passed without me having a name. I sat in little rooms with fat, glowering women, all pale as Federo, who variously shouted and whispered at me. I learned to spin, weave and sew in ways that no one at home had ever imagined. I learned to cook, and to select good jewels from among cheap glass, and how a lady mounted a horse. They even taught me reading and mathematics, giving me old books of lore and treatises on natural science, though nothing that ever told me anything of Copper Downs or the Factor or what was to become of my life. A narrow-bodied woman of some completely different race, with silver-furred skin and slanted golden eyes, came once a week and taught me dance. After a while, she showed me other movements that she hinted could be used against people who might hurt me. She often made me dance on the backs of chairs and the edges of tables turned sideways, and made sure I knew how to throw all my strength into a kick or a leap.

Or a blow.

All the time they called me "Girl." If I said any of my own words, they beat me with sand-filled silk tubes that left no marks. If I was late, or thought to be disrespectful, or simply forgetful, they beat me for that as well.

Though I learned from my dance teacher how to hit back hard, I held my hands in check. Federo had taken me from my father with words, not fists. I would take myself from these maggot women with words, not fists.

The only constant was the duck woman, whom I was instructed to call "Mistress Tirelle." Though Endurance had first taught me patience, Mistress Tirelle made that lesson my way of life. The slap of her sandals on the wooden floors of my rooms was like the bell of the white ox. Her coarse, labored breathing was Endurance's snorting to call me home.

Federo came now and again to see me. He was the reason they beat me with silk, I realized, because he often checked my skin for blemishes. "How do you like it here?" he would always ask, as if I had a choice.

"The rain is cold, and the sun is too small in the sky," I would always answer. It was as close as I could come to saying I wished to go home without earning a beating from Mistress Tirelle who listened from the doorways.

Then we would talk of small things, and what I had learned. Federo would sample my cooking, or feel the texture of my weaving, or watch me dance, then leave again for a month or a season, and once, almost an entire year.

There were other girls. I knew there had to be. The Factor's blue-walled house had many pomegranate trees above the roofs, which meant many inner courts. The women who taught me, and beat me, came and went to other errands that implied they had responsibilities, schedules, things required of them. Their careless bits of gossip told me more of these other girls who must be my rivals, how one was a mistress of spice and flame in the kitchen, while another had calligraphy to match the angels of heaven.

If they had good to say of me, I never heard it.

In my first year, I tried to make another belled silk, to count the days of my life and ring me into womanhood, but Mistress Tirelle caught me at it and beat me senseless with a wool spindle from the sewing room. The second time I tried, using pomegranate seeds for bells, she found the silk hidden in the rafters of the dancing hall and made me burn it under a full moon before she fed me a stew of the ashes.

Still I held my fists. Free as they were with their punishments, these maggot people lived and died by words. I could do no less. Every night in my hard, narrow bed, I told myself stories in my own words, mouthing silently the language of my birth for which I had no name, always remembering Endurance and the sound of bells.

One morning when my bones were aching from sleep itself--because I was growing, the silver-furred woman had told me--Mistress Tirelle swept into my room, her rounded face the color of a pomegranate and sheened with sweat.

"Up, you lazy girl," she shouted, slapping the covers away from me. "The Factor will be here within minutes. You must present yourself to him!"

I kept calm against her fear. "Then I will wear the green silk shift," I said. It was the color of Federo's eyes, which would lend me comfort, and set off my dark brown skin to great advantage.

"I'll not have you play the slut with him," Mistress Tirelle breathed, her fat face close to mine, though she now had to look up to meet my eye.

"This will not be so different from Federo's visits." My voice held more confidence than my heart.

She pinched my cheek between her callused fingers. "You listen, Girl. The Factor is very different from that fop. We would none of us have food to eat or shelter to sleep if not for him. His word is your life. Federo…" She snorted, as close as I'd ever heard her come to laughing. "A peacock who flies the world bargaining for future beauty."

Then we were in a flurry of dressing, oiling of my hair, the lightest touch of paint pots on my face, smelling of herbs and dyes. Though I had not yet grown into my womanhood, that time would be soon according to my teachers. The green silk shift was tailored with a hint of bodice to signal the coming change. My face would lead me where my body had still to go.

Working to ready me, I realized that through the hard words and the unkindnesses and the beatings, Mistress Tirelle and I were as family to each other. I tried to imagine her wrapped in bells, atop Endurance's back for the slow, hot trip to the temple platforms and the union of her soul with the wide world.

The image would not come, though a smile slipped unbidden to my lips.

"Do not smirk at the Factor," she hissed, then pushed me out into the court before hiding in the shadows of the porch to spy.

I stood beside the pomegranate, distressed to find I could not remember what I had worn on my arrival here. I had come nearly the full circle round. Perhaps the Factor would take me to the harbor, and we would board Fortune's Flight for a trip across the sea to the hot land of my birth. Clad in white, picking up bells as I walked down the road, I would return to my father and Endurance.

Though I could remember the brown eyes of the ox as clearly as if he stood before me, the only image I could bring to mind of my father was a dark-haired man with skin the color of my own hurrying away through the rice paddies as Federo tugged at my hand.

Then there was a clattering of arms and men. Horses snorted as soldiers swirled into the court followed by a coach. I was astonished to see that each rider was blindfolded, though they had swords and spears aplenty in their hands.

Federo had said that of men only he and the Factor would lay eyes upon me.

The coach creaked to a stop, swaying slightly on the leather straps of its suspension. I noted the bridlework on the horses, the silver leaf and chasings on the carriage's lacquered body, the blindfolded coachman whose whip trembled in his hand.

The man within owned me, owned my life. It was by his will that Federo had taken me from the hot lands of the sun and brought me here. My hands tensed as the dancing mistress had taught me, but I forced them to loosen.

Surely I deserved a word from this man.

When he stepped from the coach, I was first struck by how ordinary he appeared. The Factor was of middling height, with brown hair and ruddy skin and gold-flecked gray eyes. He'd run to fat in the middle and in his cheeks, and there was a spill of tobacco on his ruffled silk shirt.

Even so, he possessed a presence I had never imagined a person could have. The breeze stilled and the birds on the rooftops fell quiet. For a moment, the sun seemed to stutter in its passage through the sky.

Then the Factor took my chin in his hand and tilted my head back and forth. He swept my hair from my ears and inspected them. He spread my fingers and examined each nail. He walked around me twice, then stopped behind me. I was just wondering what the Factor was about when there was a tearing noise as he cut my shift away.

He never spoke. He just looked a while, then his fingers tested the softness of my waist, the firmness of my buttocks. Finally he walked around me once more and nodded toward Mistress Tirelle standing in the shadows. As he stepped into his coach, the Factor turned back to meet my eyes.

I stood cold, the morning air pimpling my bare skin, torn between anger and a deep embarrassment, but hiding both. As he looked at me, I returned the stare, thinking of the dead gray eye of the ocean leviathan that had nearly taken me off the shores of my home.

That was what had bothered me. The Factor's eyes were no more alive than the sea monster's had been--filmy, quiescent. Dead.

"Emerald," he said, clearly and distinctly.

Then he was gone in a swirl of men and horses and clattering weapons.

After a while Mistress Tirelle waddled out to me. She almost looked pleased. "Well, Emerald, you passed."

"Emerald." I did not know the word for emerald in the language of my birth, so instead I would use that tongue to call myself Green in my innermost thoughts. "What becomes of me now?"

"That depends on whether the Duke fancies a consort in a couple of years." She poked me in the chest, her rough nail snagging at the skin. "Otherwise you'll fetch a spice trader's ransom anywhere in these fair kingdoms."

Somehow I had thought myself in waiting for the Factor. Factor of what I had never understood, but now I did.

The blue-walled house manufactured women fit for thrones.

I should always have known this.

Federo did not buy me for a man. He bought me for a market. My father… my father… he sold me for a whore.

Words, I thought. They were all words. Emerald marked me as a jewel in the Factor's case. Blinking away a sting of some emotion I dared not name, I followed Mistress Tirelle back to the rooms that boxed my life.

Late that night I made my way to the kitchen where I had learned to cook with saffron and vanilla and other spices worth more than their weight in gold. There was salt there too, and nutmeg, and other common additions to the pot, along with a drawer full of knives.

I found the small, sharp cutter I used to separate meat from bone. It was already honed, so I needed not risk a noise to set an edge. Instead I went outside to sit beneath the pomegranate tree in the failing moonlight and stare at the blade in my hand.

Now I was Emerald, marked by beauty, trained to grace. This place, this blue-walled prison, was far more comfortable than the hut of my youth. But I missed my belled silk and my father's white ox. I missed the water snakes and the hot winds and the silly lizards pushing themselves always closer to the brassy sun with their forelegs, as if they could ever reach it.

I could no more throw away the training of the Factor's house than I could throw away time itself. With this blade, however, I could throw away beauty.

Endurance's brown eye glinted in the dark as I reached to slash my right cheek. The pain was sharp and terrible, but I had stood through many beatings without crying out. Then my left, echoing and balancing the hurt I had done myself. Then I reached back and cut a single notch in the cartilage of each ear.

"I am Green," I shouted at the moon in the language of my birth. Blood coursed hot down my face as I sobbed, until Mistress Tirelle came following the fuss and found me bleeding down the white cotton of my sleep shift.

When she began to scream I broke her neck with a kick the dancing mistress had taught me. I cursed myself for failing to master her with words, but words would not have shut her up so fast. Though I hated Mistress Tirelle, I had not meant to kill her.

Or had I?

My dancing mistress had taught me the blows, and I had accepted her lessons. The responsibility was mine.

No time now, I told myself, except to keep moving. I climbed the posts of the balcony to the copper roof of our courtyard, and from there made my way to the blue stone walls. There was already shouting and the crashing of gongs behind me when I dove tumbling from the parapet to the cobbled street below.

Weak from my cuts and the climbing, I missed my fall and landed hard on my back. I lay there winded until a silver-furred face leaned close.

"Come with me now," my dancing mistress said, "and you might live to see dawn."

I rose and stumbled after her, grumbling in my own language, though I knew Endurance and my grandmother's ghost would both be ashamed of me.

"You are a fool," Federo told me the next afternoon.

We sat in the loft of a dusty warehouse near the docks. Federo, the dancing mistress and I were gathered around a makeshift table of several old crates. Odd bits of looms and other mechanical devices bulked around us, covered with dust and grime. The ceiling was low, with a shallow angle to the distant eaves. There was only some small light that struggled through the round window at the end of the attic, though it was eclipsed with generations of filth.

My cheeks itched terribly. I wanted to rub them, but the scabs were better than fresh blood. "She was a cow," I said in my language.

He sounded tired. "In two more years we could have had you inside the Duke's palace."

The dancing mistress sighed. "We should have known."

"Known what?"

Federo stared at me. "Stop talking like a barbarian. This is Copper Downs."

"You are the…" I didn't have a word for barbarian in my language. I settled on, "Animals."

“That could have been changed," he said. “With your help."

The dancing mistress gave me a long look. “Please, Emerald, speak so I can understand you. Or we won't get far."

I begrudged her the words, but I realized this probably wasn't her language either. “My name is not 'Emerald.' You may call me Green."

“Well, Green," the dancing mistress said, “Federo thought you might have the heart-fire to hold your own against the Factor's training. You--"

“And you did," Federo interrupted.

“Too much heart, perhaps," the dancing mistress went on.

“What of it? Was I to be your tool instead of the Factor's?"

“You read nothing more recent than Lacodemus' Commentaries," Federo said.

“Correct." Lacodemus had been fascinated with men risen from the grave and people who lived on their heads, speaking by the motions of their feet. I hadn't taken him seriously.

“Then know this little bit of recent history here in Copper Downs." He leaned forward and laid his hands flat upon the splintered tabletop. “There has not been a Ducal succession in over three centuries."

I thought of the Factor's dead eye, sullen and fatal as that sea creature's. Lacodemus had been right, in a sense. “This city is ruled by immortals."

The dancing mistress laughed. “Immortal, no. Undying? Well… so far."

“You meant me to kill the Duke," I breathed, barely sounding the words.

“That was one hope, yes," said Federo. “There were other hopes."

“And now?"

They both stared me down. Dust flecks floated between us. Eventually Federo grimaced. “If you can survive the patrols and the substantial bounty that has been placed upon your head," he said, “you are free to flee the city and find a life of your own."

The dancing mistress brushed a finger across her own furred cheek. “But you have made yourself distinctive, I fear."

I thought of Endurance's brown eyes, and my grandmother's bells ringing for the last time in the hot sun. What had she wanted? What had my father wanted?

What did I want?

Never to see a child sold to these terrible people again.

I did not know who was more guilty, Federo or my father, but it was the Duke and the Factor who had set the machinery of their guilt in motion. I had been mistaken to flee, when I could have stood and fought, my beauty as my weapon.

“There must be another way," I said. “Or we would not be speaking now."

“Allow yourself to be captured," said Federo, his words in a rush as if he did not quite believe them himself. “Tell them of a plot against the Duke. Tell them of us. You will most likely be taken before him for a hearing. There, if you can…"

“Kill him?" I asked. “I am but a girl," I added in my own language. Then, once more in their tongue: “I can kick old women to death, but not a man on a throne surrounded by guards."

The dancing mistress shifted her weight. I knew her well enough to see that she was measuring words, so I watched her in open-eyed silence.

Finally she spoke. “There is another way."

“It was you who taught me to kill."

“His, well, agelessness, is bound by spells wrested from my people," she said slowly. “There are other spells that release those bindings, things that need to be said to him in close confidence to have their power. But they cannot be spoken in this tongue. The Duke has bound the very words to himself, as well."

“Can they be spoken in my language?" I asked. “Like this?"

She looked unhappy. “I do not know if the forces will heed you. This is not my soulpath, to understand spells. Since the Duke took his power, my people have folded away their own power like an old cloak. I can teach you some words, by writing them in the dust, though neither of us can say them. If you say them in your tongue…who knows?"

My decision was easy. Where else would I go? I could not swim the seas to home. “I will do this thing," I said. “Teach me the words." I looked at Federo. “Bring me seven yards of silk, needle and thread, and four thousand tiny bells like those used for dancing shoes."

My grandmother would approve, as would the ox.

The dancing mistress drew certain words in the dust of the tabletop, then covered them again after I had seen them. They were simple words, almost a conversation with the powers of the land, but they were--or should be--the ravel that would unweave the spells that bound the Duke to life and his throne.

It took the three of us two days to sew the bells to the silk. I had lost the number of the days of my life after crossing the sea with Federo, but I knew I was about twelve years old. Old enough to marry in my village at home, if my monthly bleeding had come. Old enough here, in two more years, to serve as consort to the Duke. Monthlies or no monthlies, I suspected.

The needle pricked my finger over and over as the fear pricked my heart. Even with all her cruelty, I realized that Mistress Tirelle had always prepared me for some kind of greatness. I had been spared the jaws of the leviathan. Endurance had watched over me with a purpose.

But I was still afraid.

Everybody died. That was fearsome, too, but this was more. Everybody hurt. This fear I felt was still more than that.

I finally decided I was afraid for my soul.

“Do your people," I asked the dancing mistress, “have souls?" Maybe her answer would tell me about mine.

She thought for a while, glancing at me as she worked. A candle guttered between us, Federo having gone out in darkness for food and water. Finally she spoke. “We bind the soul with flowers and food when a child is born. And the community feasts to share the soul. That way it is not lost if there is an accident, or disease, but kept alive within the hearts of many."

“What about your names?" The dancing mistress had never told me hers.

She smiled. “Those are for our hearts alone." Then she shook the silk at me, which jingled with the hundreds of bells we had already sewn onto it. “Here is your soul, Green."

Then it pained me terribly that I could not remember my own name in the language of my birth. In all the stories I'd told myself in the Factor's house, somehow I had forgotten to use it.

I walked down Coronation Avenue between the olive trees, wrapped in my cloak of bells. Beneath I wore dark tights and shirt as if I had planned to go dancing. I carried no weapon and held my head high.

Look at me, I thought. Here is your bounty. The Duke's Emerald comes.

The Ducal Palace loomed before me. The building's face was an enormous sweep of marble, with more windows that I could have imagined any building having. There was a great copper dome in the center, and smaller copper domes on each wing.

I was not sure of the distance, having spent my life behind walls, but it did not seem a long walk. Carts and carriages clattered by. Tradesmen and servants stared. A pair of mounted guardsmen did not even glance at me.

Where was the hue and cry Federo and the dancing mistress had implied?

As I approached the palace, the street became emptier. Quieter. My bells rang louder. What could have been my wedding, in a sense, was going to be my funeral.

From one moment to the next I was surrounded by guardsmen with swords drawn and angry faces. They forced me to my knees, then down on the pavement, kicked me a few times, before someone leaned against my neck with a sword's point while a runner sprinted away.

“May's well be comfy, chit," he whispered in my ear, his hot breath prickly on the scabbed-over notch. “You ain't got much left to live for."

“Conspiracy," I said to the cobbles. “Against the Duke."

“Sun rose in the east, dinn't't?" he asked, laughing. “Course there's conspiracy."

Then, except for the sword in my neck, they were almost normal, telling jokes about someone's wife and asking after a sick horse.

After a while the runner came back, there was a whispered conference, they tied one of their dusty cloaks over my head, threw me over an armored shoulder and hauled me away.

The Palace, I hoped. So far, this was according to plan.

When they set me down, they were almost gentle. Someone took my hand and led me stumbling along hallways of stone, always to the ringing of my bells. Soon my feet were on carpet. I smelled furniture oil and incense, and the distant scent of baking. Doors opened and closed around me.

No one said a word.

Finally, I was stopped. I smelled more incense, and something musty. The cloak was removed.

The Factor sat in a small wooden chair behind a wide table. Two other dead-eyed men stood behind him, to his left. There was no sign of the Duke.

My shoulders slumped as the breath left me. Our plan was lost, the game blown.

“Emerald." The Factor's voice was calm, quiet, ordinary as his face except for those eyes.

“Green," I said. “You may call me Green."

A tiny smile flickered across his mouth. “Emerald. A valuable servant is dead. An extremely valuable possession mutilated. You may make a statement before we cast you from the rim of the dome."

His voice was as dead as his eyes.

I wasn't bound. I wasn't restrained in any way. Whoever had walked me through the halls to this place had vanished with the cloak. I shifted my weight, testing the balls of my feet. The Duke was not here, but three of his fellow immortals were.

I could do something. I tensed my muscles to kick, my cloak jingling as I moved.

The Factor raised a hand, not toward me, but at his two companions. “She may try it," he said, “but she will not succeed."

“If you are, certain, Your Grace," one of them answered.

Your Grace. How many dead men could there be in this city? I had found the Duke after all.

I did not think he bluffed, either. I relaxed. What of the words of power? The dancing mistress had been uncertain, almost afraid of them. I did not know if their power would hold.

“You were wrong," I said.

“Wrong?" His smile flickered again. “To lift you from poverty, raise you in privilege, teach you every skill of womanhood. Perhaps you would prefer picking rice in the tropics, bound in marriage to some sweaty farmer with little sense and less ambition? You were more than that."

He was right, I realized, at least to a point.

The bells of my cloak jingled again.

Words, I thought in the language of my birth. He wins once more through words.

What would my grandmother do? What would Endurance do? I could hear the snorting breath of the ox as he warned me back.

I flipped the cloak of bells from me to fling it at the Factor's companions even while I danced to my left, away from them.

He threw the table over as he jumped to his feet, roaring words I did not--or could not--understand.

I jumped to balance on the edge of the table as I had been taught and practiced for so long. I swung into a kick from which the Factor ducked, then leaped to grab him around the neck.

“The life that is shared," I whispered in his ear in the language of my birth, “goes on forever. The life that is hoarded is never lived at all."

It was as close as I could come to the dancing mistress's words.

Then he bore me down under his far greater weight, and his two companions grabbed me by the wrists.

“You," said the Factor, but he couldn't seem to find his next thought.

I watched as his hair began to twist. Ripples of gray, then white, shot through it.

“You…" He looked surprised.

“You may call me Green," I said. “Green."

There was a great eruption of wind and dust. After a short time I was alone in the room.

The hallways were empty. Many doors stood open. Papers and small things were scattered on the floor.

People had fled the palace quickly, I realized.

It took a little while, but I found my way to an exit. I gathered coins and other small valuables as I went, in case I survived long enough to need money. I did not know the name of the street outside, but it was full of people. They seemed to be a mob rather than a waiting Ducal army, so I stepped out the door and ran into the crowd.

A man grabbed me. My heart skipped, chilled. “Is it still happening in there?" he shouted.

“I… I don't know."

“The Duke is dead," he said. “Long live the Duke. Go home, girl."

“Green," I whispered.

I had done it.

I headed for the docks to take his advice, though. There was nothing more for me here. Perhaps I could return to what I had been--not a girl under the belly of her father's ox, certainly, but to what that girl might have become.

By the time I found the ships, there was smoke rising from the center of Copper Downs, and rumors of riot.

Luckily for me, home was the other way. Telling myself stories in the language of my birth, I went to find a captain who would know a port from which I could hear the sound of Endurance's wooden bell.

Our Authors

Mark Bourne (“The Nature of the Beast") has published short fiction in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and assorted anthologies such as Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, Full Spectrum 5, the Chicks in Chainmail series, and a university textbook of world literature. An erstwhile astronomy and English teacher with a theater background, he has also written and produced work for video, science museums, and multimedia planetariums nationwide. The first collection of his short fiction, Mars Dust & Magic Shows, is available as an eBook from Scorpius Digital Publishing. With his wife Elizabeth, he lives in Seattle, Washington, and at

http://www.markbourne.com/.

Craig English (“Tribes")is the co-author (with James Rapson) of the self-help book, Anxious to Please, 7 Revolutionary Practices to Overcome Chronic Niceness, which will be released by Sourcebooks, Inc. in the Spring of 2006. He is currently working on a fantasy novel, The Orb. His short story "Chesapeake Fred" has been bought by the online magazine Frigg, and another story, "Knots," appeared in the Winter 2005 edition of Talebones Magazine.

For twenty-five years Craig worked as a professional actor. He has done more than 50 television and radio commercials, CD ROM game voice-overs, and has acted in more than 20 productions of Shakespeare.

Visit Craig's website at http://www.craig-english.com

Dr. Rob Furey (“Parallax") 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.

Scott E. Green (“Corvus Nation") has been active as a poet in the sf/f/h genres for over 20 years. His work has appeared in newsstand and small press publications. He is the author of a reference work on genre poetry: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Poetry: a Resource Guide and Biographical Directory (Greenwood, 1989). He currently writes market columns for the web page of the National Writers Union/UAW 1981 and Star*Line the newsletter of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He is also a past president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

Howard V. Hendrix (“Waiting for Citizen Gödel", Aeon Two) is the author of Lightpaths (1997), Standing Wave (1998), Better Angels (1999), Empty Cities of the Full Moon (2001) (all published by Ace Science Fiction); and The Labyrinth Key, published in 2004 by Del Rey. His sixth novel, Spears of God, will be published by Del Rey in Fall 2006. Howard's short fiction has appeared in many major markets, and an upcoming story will appear in Lou Anders' Future Shocks anthology (Roc, January 2006). His collection Möbius Highway is published by Scorpius Digital Publishing. Hendrix holds a BS in Biology as well as MA and PhD in English literature, which means he is at times able to manage fish hatcheries or teach literature classes at the nearby state university. He and his wife Laurel go for long backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada Mountains every summer, which is their avowedly masochistic idea of fun.

Howard's short story “The Self-Healing Sky" appeared in Æon Two.

Visit Howard's website at http://www.howardvhendrix.com

Jay Lake (“Green" ) 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 the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards for the same year.

Jay's short story “A Mythic Fear of the Sea" appeared in Æon One, “Genre is Dead, Long Live Genre" in Æon Two and “You Will Go On" in Æon Three.

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

Jaime Lee Moyer (“Asha") lives next to a river in the wilds of Ohio. She writes books and stories as well as poetry, assisted by two warrior kittens who help her chase the Muse. In her spare time she is an Associate Editor for Ideomancer Speculative Fiction. On most days, she can honestly say life is good.

Jaime's poetry has appeared in Kenoma, Between Kisses, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Strong Verse and Raven Electrick, and she has work forthcoming in Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares and Illumen.

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

Dana's short story “The Buddha Lectures on Cosmology" appeared in Æon Two.

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

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

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

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

Full-time rancher, part-time snowplow driver, occasional musician and struggling writer, Justin Stanchfield's fiction has appeared in more than seventy magazines and anthologies including Boys' Life, Cicada, OnSpec and Black Gate. He lives with his wife and two kids, plus their ever growing menagerie of creatures, on a Montana cattle ranch a stone's throw from the Continental Divide. Among his various bad habits he holds a private pilot's license, and is considered by many to be the world's worst snowboarder. He is currently serving his second term as Treasurer of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Renee Stern (“Fire and Ice")is a former newspaper reporter turned free-lance writer, writing for trade publications on topics ranging from growing apples to building custom furniture. Her short story, “Nuevo Shine," appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Oceans of the Mind. A member of Seattle's Fairwood Writers Group, she is working on a historical fantasy novel.

Our Advertisers

American Sorrows, by Jay Lake

Anxious to Please, by James Rapson & Craig English

Crow Street Press

Electric Story

Fairwood Press/Darkwood

The Labyrinth Key, by Howard V. Hendrix

Neuron Tango, by Dana William Paxson

MirrorMask

New Albion Press

The Paint in my Blood, by Alan M Clark

Thriller Doctor

The Retrieval Artists series, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Scorpius Digital Publishing

Talebones Magazine

Wheatland Press/Polyphony

G rab a box of chocolates and/or your special valentine this coming February, and settle in with Æon Six, an issue devoted to the many faces of love.

Lavie Tidhar leads off the issue with a wild ride through a London of the heart and mind in “Midnight Folk."

Richard Parks serves up “Another Kind of Glamour," as two worlds threaten to intersect with dire results.

Marissa Lingen displays a cabinet of lovely curiosities in “Things We Sell to Tourists."

DJ Cockburn's “Virulence" examines a pandemic of hate and fear in the jungles of human emotion.

And to wrap it all up, Ken Scholes lets us in on a bit of secret biblical history in “East of Eden and Just a Bit South."

We're also serving up a lover's bouquet of poetry next issue, with poems by Rhysling Award-winner Greg Beatty, Mikal Trimm, Jennifer Schwabach, and Marcie Tentchoff.

See you in the future.