Magazine - Aeon Authors - 2006 - Issue 07

Æon Seven is copyright © 2006, Scorpius Digital Publishing, all rights reserved. Individual columns, articles, and stories are copyright © the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.

Cover art by Alan M. Clark
Poxanthic Conostasis (detail)
www.alanmclark.com

Seven

S cience fiction has had a greater impact on modern society than those of us who work in the field realize. Let me give you a few examples:

From an excellent article by John Foyston in The Oregonian newspaper (published January 16, 2006):

Foyston's isn't the only complaint about the "future" (i.e. the present) that I've encountered this year. I've even been invited to write a short story for an anthology tentatively titled: The Future We Wish We Had.

Last week, I overheard some non-sf reading friends lament that we don't have flying cars yet. While they were complaining, one of them paused to answer his cell phone. The other took a moment to check his messages on his phone. It all looked very futuristic to me.

We don't have the Jetson's future. I don't have a flip-do that looks like it's been glued on. Kids don't wear little pointy hats. But we do have roads that roll, just like the Jetsons do (first thought up by Heinlein, of course). In fact, the best road that rolls is in O'Hare airport, complete with neon lights and androgynous-voiced warnings about where to sit, stand, or walk.

Our devices are more sophisticated than anything found in the first Star Trek TV show except (perhaps) the tricorder. Maybe we can't just monitor everyone's heartbeat and health with the touch of a button, but I have a hunch we're not very far away from that. We certainly can talk to each other as easily as Kirk, Spock and McCoy did when they were on planet. Except, of course, they never would pause and say, "Can you hear me now?"

Nor did we expect the weird inconvenience of listening to other people's private conversations in public places. I can't tell you how many women answer their cell phones in the ladies' room. Even more women make calls from inside the stalls--business calls, asking an assistant to do something or (ick!) talking to their boss about shipping labels. My male friends say it's less common in the men's room, but it still happens.

Cell phones have become an annoying fact of modern life, so annoying that a recent Paul Harvey report (on February 15, 2006) recounts an incident in a movie theater where patrons beat up another patron who made the mistake of answering his phone. Stephen King apparently has such an aversion to cell phones that he used them as the device that ends the world in his most recent novel, Cell.

Okay, so maybe cell phones aren't the best example of the wonderful science fiction future. But medicine is going there. Every day, it seems, news reports tell us about nanosized robots that can clear arteries or view problems in some poor patient's colon. I had gall bladder surgery in 2004 and to show for it, I have three small scars that look like cat scratches. My sister, who had the same surgery in 1974, has one long, mean-looking gash that covers most of her stomach. I have a hunch my surgery was safer too, not because my doctor was more competent, but because medical techniques have evolved astronomically in the past thirty years.

So have computers. I type this essay on a computer that has more power than NASA could imagine in 1969, when we landed on the Moon. Hell, my i-Pod has more power than the Apollo 11 space capsule did.

And i-Pods. How did we survive without downloadable music, podcasts (my fav), and video? I adapted quite fast to having any entertainment I want when I want it in my little Nano. When my first MP3 player (not an i-Pod) died, I had to get a new one that week. Not because I usually replace technology quickly--I'm the person who still uses her stove for most things in lieu of her microwave--but because I can't exercise without it.

So yeah, we didn't get the flying cars or the moonbase (although I hear that some private companies are working to change that). We're not ready to take a shuttle to Mars, but I'm told I can leave the atmosphere as a tourist by the end of this decade.

Maybe we haven't gotten the future we were promised, but we've gotten some mighty good things.

And I know, from talking to scientists and from the design of my flip phone, that a lot of the gadgetry we now take for granted was inspired by classic science fiction.

I really would rather walk down the sidewalk than stand and let the road roll. I'm glad we're still eating food rather than popping little nutritional pills. And I'm really glad that we're not wearing the futuristic clothing that appeared in all the SF drawings and movies from the late 1950s and 1960s.

Yeah, we didn't get the future we were promised. But we got one that's just as cool. And personally, I think I like it better.

Seven

Lies, Damned Lies, and Stories

W hy is "story" a euphemism for "lie?" "Mommy, Lucy's telling stories again!" "Oh, nobody believes that--it's just an old story." "No, dear, of course it's not real. It's a story."

Humans are perpetual learning machines. We are hardwired to learn every minute of our lives, because if we were to do otherwise in a more natural state--out on the veldt, say, armed with sharpened sticks, hoping to be hunter rather than hunted--we would be very quickly dead. So the individual must learn constantly. Assuming you already know everything is a shortcut to becoming lunch, and because we avoid lunch status more effectively by living in groups, learning is enhanced when spread around and passed on. Group survival is improved if what we know about the world can be boiled down to its essential parts and presented to others in a form they will accept. One of the earliest and most successful means of transmitting knowledge of the world was stories. The telling of stories has probably been a socially-important artform for a million years, and the development of written language, radio, and visual media hasn't hindered storytellers (or their readers, listeners, or viewers) in the slightest. The main difference seems to be that whereas now a lot of people look down their noses at anything that smacks of fiction, a million years ago storytellers were respected, elevated, and believed.

Storytellers are hypnotists. No fooling. The good ones use voice, phrasing, and word choices to put listeners in a receptive and suggestive state. The best stories, told well, are full of hypnotic commands, and--well-tooled learning machines that we are--we hook up, jack in, enter the reality of the story, and believe. When we listen, or watch, or read, we are transported to a separate reality, and much as when we dream, we forget there's another reality we occupied only recently, and it's always just the slightest shock to return there when the story is over.

Besides being hypnotic, stories are engaging and non-threatening. They bypass resistance to change, and model flexibility by illustrating various approaches to situations. They encourage self-initiated conclusions. They can reframe a familiar problem, bringing about a shift in parallax, a revelation, an epiphany. They entertain, yes, but what is entertainment, exactly and why should it be intrinsically inferior to the reality to which we return when the entertainment ends?

To entertain is to hold someone's attention, and when you have a listener's or reader's attention you have them in something that can only be called a trance. There's nothing sinister or disturbing about this--people pop in and out of trance states dozens of times every day. When we focus on something--give it our rapt attention for ten seconds or a minute or an hour--we're effectively if momentarily entranced, and that's the state we're in when we're entertained. Not surprisingly, it's also the state in which we learn.

Stories educate, and that is no more a bad thing now than when Neanderthal tots sat rapt in front of some old person by the fire, absorbing knowledge and wisdom through an appeal to emotions as well as intellect. But sadly, much as stories equate to lies and entertainment to time-wasting in our modern way of thought, education equates to mind-rending boredom; yet they were once all the same thing, and all vital to our survival. Stories are still the most effective way to teach anyone anything aside from the strictly technical (chipping flint, building robots…), yet education--reduced to an attempt to force content into a container according to a curriculum--has grown increasingly technical and increasingly hateful to its victims, to the point where many people physically cringe from the thought of learning anything.

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, and of rational thought as superior kind of thinking to any other (think of it: the alternative is to be irrational!). But there's nothing especially rational about creativity, which probably explains why, in many circles, it no longer has the exalted status enjoyed by logic and reason. Dreams are especially irrational, so much so that many believe them to have no meaning at all that a rational person would credit. And stories are lies.

In fact, we "modern" humans wear a somewhat threadbare layer of rationality over minds composed of much older modes of thought. In those ancient minds we run and dance and fly through our dream landscapes without a thought for Aristotle, and stories are as real and true as the world outside our windows. Indeed, given that as observers of the quantum field our perceived universe probably is little more "real" than a story we're telling ourselves every moment, stories can be--and are--as true as anything.

We have seven wonderful examples of the storyteller's hypnotic art for you in this issue, along with our usual columns, an interview, and two entrancing poems. First, Jay Lake makes his fourth fiction appearance in Æon with the story of two "Whyte Boyz," each destined to be lost and found in his own way. Joe Murphy appears for the first time between our electronic covers with a real Texas fish story, "The Doom That Came to Smallmouth." Rita Oakes also debuts here with "Lupercalia," the story of an ancient Rome that might have been, and Stephen Couch contributes his first Æon story: "N+1," coming any second now to a singularity near you. Nebula Award-winner Bruce McAllister spins a fable of sacrifice and redemption at the movies: "The Passion: a Western." And Ken Rand returns us to the universe of "The Henry and the Martha" (Æon Three) with a tale of a dangerous and subversive species in "Here There Be Humans."

Columnist Kristine Kathryn Rusch reminds us of futures promised in the past in this issue's "Signals," and Dr. Rob Furey sends "Postcards From the Monkey Trial" from a seat in the historic Dover, PA courtroom for "Parallax." Returning poets Greg Beatty and Jaime Lee Moyer round out this issue with poems of an ancient but familiar past and a cold but plausible future, and don't miss Michael Lohr's multi-faceted interview with the multi-faceted Bruce McAllister, "California Daydreaming." Herewith: Æon Seven

Whyte Boyz

Jay Lake

"Steve Barnes once said that science fiction is about white people and their imaginary friends. That struck me very funny, very true, and rather sad all at once. This story came to me as a voice, really, implying a tale, and somehow that got twisted into Steve's comment. In a very real sense, it's also been influenced by John McLoughlin's long-neglected novel The Helix and the Sword, which deserves far more attention than it ever got. At its heart, like most of what I write, it's a story about a boy."

Blood arcs, the flight of a gutshot bird. Obsidian-weighted piano wire sings a bright-mad death song as the boyz dance through the flails of one another's arms, threshing and harvesting the cullz. Smartroad bounces beneath their feet, so much foam now that the wits and money have departed for warmer, darker climes beyond high orbit. There is little left for these boyz save the dance which is in and upon their blood.

Somewhere the Darkman laughs, thunder rolling off his lips in an echo of pristine granite valleys lost to both access and imagination. Somewhere the Darkman's eyes glimmer beetle-winged and shadowed, pools of power set with rolling bounds of epicanthic fat. Somewhere the Darkman thinks a wish and his wish is brought to truth in the electron rush of a gleaming moment, his steel-honed and mirror-sharp world bent to the devices of his desire.

Somewhere trees shiver with the wind of his passage and the very soil fountains forth. Somewhere is peace, the simple architecture of contentment, even perhaps justice.

Gayan would be a scavenger, he thinks, save for the larger, older, paler ones that push him to the margins. His is an ancient resentment, festering in the hearts of generations of the poor, a universal virus of need and deprivation. Even the ragged must have someone to hate, to hurt, to turn away from in disgust--that would be Gayan.

He does not mind. He knows nothing better than the delight of crisp, new rinds rescued from the top of a camp midden. Even the scantiest curl of melon can be sucked for juice and sugar, and makes the walking better for holding between tongue and cheek.

Gayan slinks along now, hidden in the rhododendrons and dripping ferns behind an embankment that once served some iron leviathan of another age, bedding its wheels like the motherz bed the boyz. That's the story, anyway, and Gayan hasn't made the age yet where he stops believing stories. He imagines the metal beast, some great brass-bound worm inching through the cold forests, spindly arms waving outward to strip leaves and branches like a deer damned for its faunal sins, shitting out an endless berm of clay and gravel and rotting spike-bound wood.

He also suffers from an excess of vocabulary, most of it bereft of context, beneficiary of a thousand stories told at a hundred campfires while the Darkstars glimmered in the mountain nights.

But now the embankment is his friend, shield and armor from the noisy party of boyz and girlz--future motherz, those, even Gayan is wise enough to note, though he doesn't quite understand why yet--who scavenge and frolic through the firs and pines to practice mothering to shouts of encouragement and laughing advice. It is not that they will beat him, or worse. It is that Gayan does not wish to be swept up into the brittle passage of their days. He has too recently fled the casual oppression of his own camp, the tyranny of the same against the different.

So Gayan conceals himself behind the ghost tracks of an old roadrail and listens to the laughter and tries to imagine where their food is. Have they dropped a sack or package in their careless ramble? For this is his talent:

The Darkman himself would reach down from orbit for such powers to be inside his head instead of subrogated to flocks of machines.

Gayan, unknown and unknowing one of the most powerful boyz in the world, sees a sack of precious naranjas off some Hispano boat from the distant south, memory of the sun still warm upon the fruits' bright skin, and he imagines their sweet, sharp juices in his throat stinging like blood, cloying like honey, flowing like a better kind of wine than anyone lets slip to children.

The boyz dance harder now, an abrogato of violent motion mimicking the larger rhythms of weather, climate, continent, the very spheres of Heaven. Eyes hidden and hooded watch, placing bets in smoky gaming parlors under one sixth of the gravity understood by evolution and biology. Boyz bleed themselves and one another in celebration of rites for which they have no comprehension, in which they play no meaningful part, for which they die to no purpose.

Whyte is the color of expendability, a casually roiling reservoir of potential, wild genes in wild dances recombining outside the bounds of taste, breeding, and predictability. Lines of dark heredity in orbit are managed across a dozen generations to the ensure the right hair, the most noble brow, the perfect beauty, but nothing can substitute for the brimming, boiling caldera of the race upon its own land--wild, fast life and bloody, swift death pushing the genes and their meat-wrappers ever closer to an edge of reality, competition, a hairsbreadth further away from failure, death, and species-crash.

So the Darkman and his folk celebrate, carousing away their undying centuries while down the gravity well the pot boils. Sometimes something crawls out of the pot, lifts its head, and looks like more potential than trouble.

Here is the Darkman's agent: Wire, a whyte long recovered from the festering pit of the high-gee surface and retooled to live a life of near-acceptability in the dark, glittering places where deep-toned melanin and brown eyes ensure longevity and successful breeding. Wire is a mule, a thing made and remade half a hundred times by the Darkman's machine-flocks as purposes shift, tastes change, fashions blanch and burn through their cycles of fancy.

Wire, who understands nothing, not even himself, but can kill with a casual ease that should frighten even his master, and call lightning from the summer sky when the need is upon him.

(They'd long since taken his genes, up there in orbit, for Wire had no more need of them. He was repaid with his life, which should have been enough for any pale-haired savage.)

So now he falls screaming from orbit, because it pleases the Darkman that Wire should do so, spinning starfished out through the upper atmosphere, leaving trails of ionized particles and flickering flame, his none-too-precious self protected by the vaguest, half-remembered skin borrowed from the Darkman's machine-flocks, though they made no wrapper for his mind and in the smoky halls of Luna nuzzling couples and triples and clusters paused to chuckle at the pale distress of a courageless, craven savage who couldn't even stand the sight of heights.

The naranjas were right where Gayan had seen them, of course. He was never wrong. It had yet to occur to him that anyone could not know where something was--when he thought about such things at all, he just assumed folk had their reasons for holding back. Gayan slithered through the blackberries, a painful process at best but nearly invisible to the capering boyz and girlz, until he found the bright-netted bag with the glittering trade tag. Smell promised, rising above even the vague, pervasive green-brown rank of the forest.

With a scoot and a snatch he was off, his routes and paths visible before him like so many brilliant futures, pursued by laughter and shouts and few paces' worth of thumping feet before skin games and the smell of damp pubic hair drew Gayan's pursuers back to their own ends.

Though his pursuers did not care, in his hand Gayan knew he held more value than he'd ever touched before. Naranjas were a feast of gold in their own right, but they also bought pot-meat and mother-nights and even small tools when offered in trade. Gayan craved the crowding taste and sweet flowing juices more than he craved those things that could be bought with his treasure. So he found himself an old deer wallow, ferns and stems trampled to a soft nest invisible from just steps away, and curled there to rip pebbly rinds free from fleshy gold and eat everything, every wisp and fiber and scrap of skin to boot, to make the naranjas one with him, until his gut screamed with the pleasured pain of the feast and the sugars made his bowels rumble.

Somewhere in the long fall, Wire had passed from terror to senselessness. He was surprised, then, to find himself lying facedown on the stretched, livid surface of a decaying smartroad. The copper-meat tang of blood filled his nostrils, but he was pretty sure it wasn't his own.

Despite the blood-and-meat reek that filled the air, nothing moved nearby. His sensorium picked up no electronics or traces of machined metals. So he was safe enough. And Wire knew why he was there. Nothing was wrong with his memory.

Bones. Everywhere were bones. Recently used bones, from the pink-stained, flesh-scraped, tooth-gnawed look of them.

He sprang to his feet, circling rapidly in case of subtle enemies, but in fact Wire shared this place only with the freshly-butchered. The failed smartroad stretched away through a towering forest of mossy firs, losing itself in green shadow in both directions though he was in a pool of sunlight, some old clearing guaranteed by long-ago fire or perhaps soil toxins.

The pattern of the bones was clear to him now, arrayed in a fractal spiral from knucklebones and the miscellanea of the foot all the way up to femurs and pelvises. He estimated twelve to fifteen dead.

He realized after a moment's thought that the boyz had recently been dancing here. The bones were scored with the slash of wireknives, gnawed with hunger of the rite-starved survivors.

Even beneath all his programming, Wire felt a stir against the Darkman. Not disloyalty, for that was no longer possible for him, but something more akin to distaste. It was such rebellion as was permitted by his redesigners.

Why had the Darkman chosen to land him here, Wire wondered. Directional clue? Warning? Reminder?

He'd been one of the boyz once, back when his personal world was young. He literally could not count the years which had passed since, so many of them spent in vats, comas, or varying states of medically-induced death, but Wire knew that lifetimes upon lifetimes had passed since last he danced with a wireknife.

He knew none of these boyz. Could not have known them. Would never know them. But Wire was something of an ecologist, as any long-term habitat dweller must needs be. The waste gnawed at his spacer's thrift. The suffering disturbed his long ago memories, of his first life.

"I am sorry," Wire told the bones, though he had no idea what he was apologizing for.

Maps flickered into his consciousness, directions distorted according to probabilities assigned by quantum intelligences lurking in high orbit. Called back to his tasks, Wire set out following the strongest bulge, downhill, where verdant valleys dozed in the mist-wrapped western distance. His feet scattered the careful array of bones like so many clods of clay.

He barely registered their disturbed clatter, though with no thought at all, he scooped up an abandoned wireknife to carry with him into the world.

Gayan woke to a clenching in his gut and a sour taste in his mouth. Even as he crouched around the misery, he laughed--silent, shaking, body vibrating like a power drill, until his breath came in frightening whoops.

"I done gone ate all the naranjas," he finally whispered to the broken ferns of his deer wallow.

Then he realized that he could not see the next path. Or rather, all paths were open to him, each future equally weak, equally strong.

With that thought, he became frightened. He tried to imagine what to do next, where to go now. He was vaguely aware that somewhere people had commerce. Somebody unloaded the boats that came from the south. Somebody went mining for the metals and plastics that turned up for trade. Somebody tracked the value of the trade tags passed back and forth.

But he had no idea who. And there was only one place to find out: Up in the sky.

Gayan smiled at the light-mottled branches above him. That was where oth the secrets and the power lay. He had a path now, too. He could see where to go.

Gayan stood, brushed the dirt from his leather leggings and his linen shirt, then headed east toward the mountains--up--watchful for a stream or pool at which to pause. He would never have to run from anyone again, he promised himself.

Wire strode through the viridian woodlands, contemplating rebellion. Not his, of course, for he could not rebel. But the idea of rebellion. A gedanken experiment. How a machine bound by the strictures of programming, logic and the Darkman's law could possibly rebel.

Familiar birds flitted through the brush around him, feathered similars to those that had haunted the woodlands of Wire's long ago youth. Tiny flowers bloomed in the moss he crushed beneath his feet, barely registering in his sensorium as smears of color at the periphery of his defenses. Bounding deer, the wailing bugle of a distant elk, the rustle of the fox--Wire walked through the sounds and scents of nature, everything the habitats above sought to imitate wrought in the endless fractal imperfection of reality.

The Darkman's world was a continuum of planes and angles and seals and secured hatchways, always braced and coiled by vacuum. Wire moved among those strictures, an electromechanical spider sent out to prey and stun and kill at its master's bidding. But here, here was the random veining of leaves and the ghostly drip of mist on twigs and the churn of mud and the curl of sand in the stream.

The biosphere wrought its own changes in any man. Deep inside, Wire was still a man. A machine might not rebel, but a man always harbored secret thoughts.

The flickering maps in his head strengthened, satellite intelligences driving him onward. Wire's stride lengthened as he moved preternaturally fast, as mighty and mechanical in his way as the roadrails of ancient days with their screaming steam and clattering computers.

Gayan's path was broad as a river now, bright as the morning sun. He scrambled up the ruined road he'd found peeking from beneath the moss roses and the clumped ferns. The naranjas still sat sour in his stomach, though he remembered the taste as a sip of colored glory.

He'd never seen so great a path, not in his life. All the world was calling him forward. All the future, every hidden thing peeking out at him, so many frogs in the pond of his life. Every buzz of bees, every colored flight of butterflies, every circling hawk, urged Gayan on. The very ground at his feet rippled forward, pushing him. He couldn't yet see what was hidden. It was like looking for himself.

Gayan scrambled up the rotting curve of a shattered Douglas fir, nurse log now to an entire narrow, horizontal forest of its own, blocking the road in a green-tinged bark wall. He balanced at the top, looking into an old fire-scarred clearing punctuated by a temple of blackened trunks. The ancient smartroad ran between the scorched trees, and coming toward Gayan was a preternaturally tall man, thin as a skinning knife, glowing with the power of found things and the strength of time.

When the newcomer shot him, Gayan collapsed forward in shock at the impossible betrayal of his gift.

Climbing out of a gravity well was ever a different problem than dropping into one. The energy gradients ran entirely the wrong way. Wire had access to at least three forms of retrieval courtesy of the Darkman, but as a loyal servant--or faithful machine--he also had considerable latitude for judgment.

His objective, this boy, had entrained decades of gedanken experiments. Thin. Ragged. Wild-eyed.

It took no imagination to see this boy gene-sampled, cored out and retrofitted, cortex remapped and augmented. A made thing like Wire. No imagination at all. Just reasonable knowledge of the future.

That the surface was a massive gene reservoir was no mystery to anyone with a functional intelligence. But Wire had not been sent down the well to retrieve an individual in decades. Perhaps a century or more. Wire himself had become too valuable to spend on such trivial harvesting.

Even now, this shadow-echo from the distant path breathed, ragged and pained, his face twisted in some emotion Wire could not quite recall any more. The child's eyes darted beneath half-closed lids, while his feet twitched.

Of what, Wire wondered. What was this child's value? Somewhere distant a wolf yipped, breaking into full cry. Wire looked up to see dusk staining the sky. It was past time he called for orbital pickup.

Somewhere distant a machine rebelled. Wire gathered the boy into his arms and walked into the woods, thinking on the experiments of the Darkman.

What had he come here for? Not merely to claim another pale-skinned life, worth less than a bar chit in the warrens of Luna.

I am not dead, Gayan thought. Mostly he was surprised. There were no paths leading into the future. No possibilities. Just a dark sky with slivers of moonlight through the treetops, and a thin face with an edged nose and shadowed eyes.

Were there no paths because he was not walking? He was lost, Gayan realized, lost. Tears started in his eyes, that would have earned laughter or a beating in any camp he'd ever lived at.

The man who had shot him. With what? Something that had glowed ghostlike and painful as best as his memory could report.

Gayan tried to turn his face away, but found only his captor's chest. He looked back up instead to see the shadowed eyes each glowing with a pinprick of brilliant green.

With that word, paths branched out, filled with things he did not understand, yet--puffs of fog under black skies and machines fighting in narrow metal halls; forests burning across miles and mountaintops: a road paved with pink-stained bones--but Gayan was no longer afraid.

Slivers of identity shoaled beneath Wire's constructed personality, anonymous silver fish moving through deeper, darker waters. The child was pulling them from the matrices embedded deep within his skull, wetware ghosts of the long ago human past, multiple erasures and reprogrammings and reformattings and edited restorations.

A machine might not rebel, but the genius of any locus could drive a piezomechanical heart surely as any hormone surge in a graysponge brain.

"Up to the sky," the boy said with the complete confidence of the sanctified. Or the insane.

One of the anonymous silver fish breached for a moment, impinging on constructed consciousness.

Sometimes, thought Wire, the greatest rebellion is obedience. He looked into the pale-skinned, gray-eyed face--the face of a slave, a gene-breeder, the garbage from which the civilized human world had turned its handsome dark regard--and considered what the Darkman would do with this child. Without this child.

Social simulations stirred within the matrices of Wire's personality. "Of course."

"No. You don't get it. You've been lost for…for…a long time. I see things that are lost."

"I am never lost," his simulations replied, aware as always of mean sidereal time, universal coordinated time, the solar year, the lunar year, orbital precisions to a confidence of thirty five decimal places, surface and ecliptic coordinates and a thousand other forms of locational awareness.

Above them, though there were no clouds in the dusk, thunder rumbled as sparks followed the two through the dripping forests, dropping one blazing finger at a time from the clear sky.

"Man" was not quite the word, but tall and strange as he was, the newcomer had arms and legs and eyes and a mouth.

He wasn't afraid any more. Not since he'd seen inside. He didn't usually look for paths within people, though a few times he'd seen someone dying. But Old Maria had been old, and coughing blood. Everyone saw that future. Finnagail had tumbled into a pit hours later, that no one had known of, and Gayan wondered for weeks why the older boy hadn't seen the path for himself.

But this one. This man. He was a future and a past and a lost treasure, all at once, all on two feet.

Gayan was entranced. He wondered if this stranger were his father. In time they came to a tree-bald hill, shattered dark stone interspersed with grass and bushes. The tall man climbed it by moonlight, his eyes still gleaming that cold green, continuing to cradle Gayan close as any broken-backed hunting dog. The night air was still, heavy with pine sap and pollen and the musk of distant deer, while the moon and her sisters sailed fat and lazy over the mountains towering to the east.

He stopped there, in the cup of rocks that was more or less the peak, and set Gayan down.

The words came in that same creaking voice, an old hinge long past oiling. Not just the voice, but the sentence itself, seemed strange to this man.

"Tell me now." The long, narrow face contorted, a mummery of careful thought, silver moonshadows chasing with the shifting curves of cheek and jaw. "What are you?"

The tall man stared a moment, as if summoning new words from some distant armory. "What are you, that someone else should want you?"

And of course that was true. It had always been true, he'd just never thought it through. "I see…paths. Sir."

"Into choices. Into the future. Where the lost things are. Who might die tomorrow."

The tall man tilted his head back impossibly far, his neck creaking, until the plane of his face was level with the endless night sky. His jaw cracked open and a scream leaped out, sharp, quick, vanishing so high that Gayan barely heard it at all, save for the buzzing in his bones and joints.

"Now we wait," the tall man said as his head returned to a normal state. His voice seemed ordinary too, in that moment. "They come."

"You may call me Wire," said the tall man, and a flicker of an expression chased across his face, a shadow lost among the shadows of the moon.

"…evolutionary equivalent of a fish trap. High orbit, cis-lunar space and beyond are too harsh for long-term genetic stability…"

Wire realized one of his social simulations had taken over his voicebox. It seemed to have gone into teaching mode, responsive to the boy Gayan's generally inquisitive nature, or perhaps his politeness.

"…drift turns into something more analogous to a crevasse, uncrossable ruptures between populations too small to…"

Gayan nodded, eyes large with moonlight and fatigue, but engrossed in Wire's words.

"…by the time of the Second WHEN THEY COME STAY WITH ME over two million died…"

How does a machine rebel?, he thought, almost smiling for the first time in over a century. It does not, but the man within might.

His lecture nattered on a while before being overtaken by the nerve-grinding whine of a Higgs-inert Fermionic matter drive. Wire looked up into the night sky, but saw nothing until he'd shifted his vision to tap the Darkman's private nöosphere. There was an atmosphere flyer almost directly over them, the pilot working a surveillance pattern before dropping his stealth and landing.

Wire gathered Gayan once more into his arms, and clutching the future tight stepped atop the highest of the little crown of rocks to be lifted into the night to meet the Darkman.

"Consider," said the fish, "the problem of perfect knowledge." It was an abstract shape, slipped from some gnostic flag of the ancient Orient, pale blue veined with throbbing red. It flicked back and forth in an invisible, imperceptible space. "One cannot measure both position and momentum. One cannot hold on to both the future and the past. One cannot know both where one is going and where one has been."

"What profit it a man to know the location of every credit in the solar system if he cannot project their trendlines?" Quantum mechanics is not macroeconomics, they told themselves smugly.

"A man sits in high orbit, grotesque as any orb spider raised in microgravity, his tentacle tendrils reaching into every life, every hull, every habitat, every mind." The fish flickered into and out of phase, a stuttering trail of piscine probability. "His knowledge is perfect. Almost." Another stutter, a blazing smear of identity. "If only he could see the future."

We know nothing, thought one of the boyz, but see everything. We know everything, the other one thought, but see nothing. As halves we are whole.

Omnipresence wasn't a literal sort of vastness, but a wide-ranging intrusion of telepresence, surveillance, independent micro- and macro-agents, avatars--extension of consciousness, knowledge, awareness, into a nöosphere enveloping both old, broken Earth and the shiny colonies and habitats that ranged from Mercury's dark obverse to the amino ice rings of Niburu.

Yet there were times when the Darkman wished to grasp for his own something of great value. Usually that was an outpouring of sentiment. Sometimes it was a deeper motive.

"I have fetched the prize up from the Earth-well," Wire told an ancient mesh-balled microphone. It pleased the Darkman to have his archaic jokes, here among foam-panelled hallways with drifting fogs of smart security and self-cleaning floors that squinted at passing feet as if they were the enemy. Wire and Gayan stood before an oval door painted in an abstracted pattern of vines.

A clattering mechanical eyeball on an articulated stalk emerged from an iris-hatch to poke at Wire, then at Gayan standing next to him. Servos whirred.

"Pass," said a mechanical voice, though Wire had been authenticated long before he ever set foot in this corridor, this habitat, this orbital path. Gayan was simply cargo.

The oval door slid into its own rim, solid panel going to some gas-plasma state with a hiss of pumps. Wire stepped through into the Darkman's waiting room, the boy Gayan close at his side.

Gayan had accepted the ride into the sky as a sort of giant rope, lowered from above. His path had blazed in the head of Wire, the lost man. Their little soft-walled room was just a step on the way, as were the mysterious series of doors and passages and unquiet spaces, until they passed the oval door and he found himself in the presence of the entire future in one blazing halo around a man seated at a desk.

The Darkman was slim, narrow shoulders, narrow body behind the dark, lacquered wood of his desk. Naked, his skin was a deeper brown even than forest loam. His head seemed slightly larger than ordinary, face fleshy with heavy folds of skin around the eyes, which blazed almost as bright as Wire's, but with an inner energy alone.

The space around him was, well, space. Though Gayan and Wire stood on a small square of carpet, and the Darkman sat at a desk that could have come out of almost any era of history past the invention of paperwork, everything else was Luna and Earth and distant Mars and the outer planets, their distances foreshortened to a perspective-challenged visibility. Swarms of motile lights moved everywhere, fireflies on a summer night, connecting the worlds and the bright habitats that drifted between and among them.

Gayan was surprised to hear a voice ordinary as rainwater. Wire shifted, unspeaking. Something passed between him and the Darkman as the Darkman turned to stare at Gayan with narrowing eyes.

With the Darkman's words, the halo of future paths twisted. Gayan had never seen anyone like this. His every breath seemed to shift the fate of thousands.

The Darkman finally spoke again. "You see…things." Light exploded over his head, the paths falling as if in coruscating battle.

Where am I going, Gayan wondered. He stayed with Wire, trusted the lost boy he'd seen deep within Wire's head. But the Darkman's power dwarfed Wire the same way Wire's power dwarfed Gayan.

With that thought, memories cascaded into Gayan's head. The uncertainty of perfect knowledge. Two halves of a whole. A fish of light, lecturing in some timeless space or spaceless time between Earth and here. "Paths, sir," he said, baiting the trap Wire had not quite intended to set. "I see paths into the future."

"Ah." The Darkman steepled his fingers, nodding slowly. "What lies upon those paths, little man?"

Gayan looked into the light and spoke the truth. "Attack ships, burning off the shoulder of Mars. Pale men running through metal hallways, blood on their tongues and teeth. Vacant cities deserted as a dead man's heart."

He could see it then, beneath the Darkman's chair, bright as an ember in a woodland night. "Under your left buttock, sir," Gayan told the Darkman. "And in your head," he added softly, reporting what he really saw.

"Stupid," said the Darkman. Wire stiffened. A smile ghosted on the Darkman's face, then he leaned forward. "Where is the solar machine code key?"

Gayan could see that, whatever it was, as a bright, coiled spark glowing inside the heart of nearby Mars. "There." He pointed.

"I don't know." Gayan shrugged. "But…" Two halves, he thought. It was time for Wire's plan, whatever that was. "I can…I can…" His voice slowed with the lie, to this man of all people. "I can give it to you."

Perfect knowledge, he told himself, reaching a hand all unknowing toward the Darkman.

But they were boyz, he and Wire, and in the Darkman's world the whyte niggaz dance. Even as he reached, Wire spun his wireknife and they danced.

Then Gayan knew how to give his power to the Darkman. He could pick Wire's path and his own, even as hidden weapons began to fire and energies crackled in the infinite yet small space of the Darkman's office.

The Doom That Came to Smallmouth

Joe Murphy

"I grew up in Texas, in a town not much larger (or stranger) than Smallmouth. It was there, as a high school student, that I got my first taste of H.P. Lovecraft. But Texas puts its own spin on things, especially when fishing is involved."

T HERE IS IN MNAR COUNTY a vast still lake fed by no stream, from which no stream flows. At least, that's what Old Man Ackerman had told Rusty's pa. Rusty had heard the old fart rambling about the tournament, and watched the gleam harden in Pa's eyes.

"You know," Rusty said the next day as he and Pa sat in their old pickup, staring out at the water beyond. "That Ackerman is a lying sack of shit."

"Language, boy. Don't talk about him that way." A frown creased his father's face, another deeply seamed wrinkle added to a thousand others. He reached across the ice chest and flicked Rusty's ear with thumb and forefinger. "That old guy's a serious fisherman."

Rusty shrugged, then squinted in the bright Texas sunlight and studied what was supposed to be Smallmouth Lake. "Vast" was hardly the word, even for a nearsighted old cuss like Ackerman. Five skips of a stone would cross the whole damn thing. He could run clear around it and barely break a sweat.

But then again, "still" was an understatement. As they pulled up on the muddy shore beside an ancient hovel of a boathouse and a rotting pier that wouldn't support his baby sister, Rusty cocked his head and stared. The lake, a perfect mirror, reflected the high thin clouds, washed-out blue sky, and a fireball July sun. Low-growing mesquite trees doubled into the water on the far shore. Even the dilapidated silhouette of Smallmouth proper, Mnar County's only town, stood out near the western edge.

"That thing's like glass," Rusty said as Pa pulled the truck up next to two others.

"Like Ackerman said." Pa turned off the engine and wiped the sweat from his forehead beneath a battered Stetson. "Let's go check on the tournament."

Pa turned and gazed at him with the eyes of a sad old hound. "Looky here, son. I know you hate fishing, but there's things you need to learn."

"This here's the only way I know to do it." Pa shook his head and got out. Rusty followed. A blue Dodge 4X4 with a pair of boots stuck out the window, the driver fast asleep, sat beside them. The other truck, a late model Chevy with a Bassmaster on the trailer, looked deserted. He followed Pa towards the battered boathouse. A faded sign above the door proclaimed "Smallmouth Lake Resort.&rdsquo;

A rusted screen door squeaked closed behind them. Cooler inside, the sweat on the back of Rusty's neck and beneath his thick red hair grew clammy. The small room they entered lay deep in shadow, the only light through a dirty window. A cowbell on the door clunked.

A shadow shifted on the counter. Rusty stopped in his tracks. The man behind the counter wasn't so much fat as droopy. Loose folds could have been either skin or cloth in the dimness, eyes that didn't catch the light but drank it down and held it prisoner.

"We're here for the tournament." Pa stepped up to the counter. "Guess we must be early."

"But they's only two other boats out there," Rusty blurted. "How can it be full?"

"Sign-up starts at moonrise. Stops when the moon goes down." The shadow turned to Rusty, who could now make out the doughy face beneath a worn ball cap. "See a moon out there?"

"Language, son." But Pa turned, leaned his elbows on the counter, and clasped his hands. Weathered face as blank as a mask, he studied the other man. "Ain't no way to make an exception?"

"That's a shame," Pa said. "Drove here all the way from Nacogdoches. Drove all night."

"Thing is," Pa reached into the front pocket of his work shirt. "Got this brand new lure I was hopin' to try. Pretty thing too. Three prong hook, and did you ever see such a shiny spoon?" He twiddled the lure; even in the close dimness its spoon caught the light, reflecting it back onto the other's face.

Mud-colored eyes bulged softly in its glow, a gentle rhythmic flickering that matched the tempo of Pa's words. "Wouldn't anyone wanna try a lure like this? Wouldn't anyone wanna try this tournament? Surely, surely there's something you can do."

"Surely." The man's eyes seemed to sink into drooping folds of flesh rather than blink. His voice turned soft and dreamy. "Surely there's something I can do…"

A thick stubby hand appeared on the counter, the man offering a clipboard with dirty yellow paper.

As they left the musty boathouse and returned to the summer sun, Rusty let loose a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"That was wrong." he looked up at Pa. The sun haloed his father's head, leaving his face an impassive shadow. "You always said using Lure Light on another person was a bad thing."

"True enough." Pa put his hand on Rusty's shoulder and sighed. "But a fishing tournament, even small as this one, is a serious thing. Sometimes, when you're in a strange county, it's the only way to handle the locals."

Rusty shrugged. He gazed at the shamble of a pier, the impossibly round and still lake. Mnar was a different county, a lost place hidden in the dry West Texas dust. People might be different here, but like most folks they didn't cotton to outsiders.

"After awhile." Pa turned to inspect their boat. "We got things to do first." Rusty scowled and shoved his hands in his pocket. Another weekend sacrificed to endless waiting, smelly old fish, and soul-deadening boredom. Fishing sucked, but it was the most serious thing in the world--especially for a luremancer.

All sixteen of the Mnar All-School Band stood in a line beside the pier, tooting and banging their way through the most god awful rendition of "Texas Our Texas" Rusty'd ever suffered. Stuffed in uniforms that two thousand years ago might have been black, but now matched the shit brown of lakeshore mud, the band cackled and brayed into the last stanza, while a droopy collection of townspeople tried to clap in time.

"Where the hell'd they get them horns?" Rusty whispered as he stood beside Pa. "Ancient Babylon or someplace? Never seen the like of them."

"Hush, boy," Pa hissed. They both stood at attention, their hats over their hearts.

The band finished, or at least some did, and the rest just gave up. A drum majorette in a spangled costume made a last desperate effort to catch her baton, missed, and froze, pudgy hands on her plump cheeks as the baton bounced end over end and stuck itself in the lake. One rounded tip dripped green slime, its image perfectly mirrored in the water.

"Well don't just stand there." Pa slipped his hat back in place. "Get it for her."

"I'll tend the boat." Pa gripped his shoulder, brought his mouth close to Rusty's ear, "Find out what the locals know about the fishin' here, if you can."

Muttering under his breath, Rusty slouched forward. He kicked the sneakers off his sockless feet and squished into the mud. A noise between a cry and a sigh breathed through the crowd as he eased into the blood-warm water. Feels like wading in grease, he thought. His fingers closed on the baton and he waded back, face burning from the multi-eyed gaze of the crowd. Two or three people clapped.

"Here you go." He offered the baton to the majorette, a girl perhaps a year or so older than his fifteen years. She smiled with a wide, flat mouth, tossed her dark hair, and came to meet him.

"That's right nice of you," she said, wiping sweat from a low-sloping forehead. She jiggled when she moved and Rusty appreciated that. The girl didn't have as much of a weight or posture problem as the other locals--almost attractive in a trailer park sort of way.

The townspeople had spread along the shore, hunkering down on blankets and tarps. Picnic fixings appeared. A charcoal stench tainted the air.

Murmured voices rose, the words somehow escaping Rusty as the first boat oozed into the water. Pa had backed the truck down to the shore. With a well- practiced jerk, their boat slid into the lake on its own.

"Can't say as I blame you." A shiver shuddered through the majorette's chubby torso. "That fishing stuff gives me the creeps." Her sky blue, slightly bulging eyes, took in the lake and she shuddered again. "It sucks, don't it?"

"My name's Nya." The majorette glanced around, then cocked her head towards him. "You want a smoke?"

A thrill tingled through Rusty. Maybe this trip wouldn't be so bad after all. He glanced towards their boat; Pa had his back to them, fiddling with the poles and knee deep in the lake.

Nya took his hand and squeezed it. "Bet he's like all the rest. Once he gets a hook in the water he'll forget about you." She pulled on him. "Let's go."

Another glance and Rusty shrugged. Damn it all, he hadn't wanted to come. Maybe Pa wouldn't really care.

Nya pulled his arm again. "Come on, boy. I got half a pack and no one to share with. No one to share…anything." Her giggle sounded sweet with mischief.

Nya grinned and led him away from the picnickers, past a clump of mesquite, towards a weathered outhouse half hidden by thick stalks of wild sorghum.

Deep in the weeds, Rusty turned. Pa stood by the boat, staring at the picnickers, a hand extended past the brim of his old Stetson to shade his eyes as he searched the crowd.

For a heartbeat, Pa's gaze seemed to zero in; Rusty flinched, his father's sad disappointment thick and heavy as the summer heat. Then his old man shook his head and his gaze moved on. He climbed into the boat and started the motor. Without another glance, Pa gunned the old Evinrude and with a whoosh of spray, headed out.

Stupid old fart, Rusty thought. Fishing ain't everything. But he waited until the boat vanished into the lake's blinding glare before standing. They rustled further into the weeds and had just reached a weak shadow from a sickly knotted pecan tree when a soft cry rose from the folks on the shore.

"There goes the first one." Nya eased a crumpled cigarette pack from between her breasts. It took Rusty a moment to follow her gaze.

Nya lit up, sucked in a ragged breath, and offered him a sweat-stained cigarette. "The first boat," she coughed.

Rusty took a puff and damned near choked. He stared at the lake. Only two boats remained. He squinted, just able to make out the Bassmaster and Pa's old flat-bottomed skiff. The air grew suddenly colder, the shadows deeper. "B…but where'd it go?"

Nya's words came distantly, through a sudden roaring as blood pulsed in his ears. He jammed his hands in his pocket so Nya wouldn't see the shakes.

"Some call it The Lurker, others Deep Feeder," Nya said. "But in the Elder's Church we still call it Smallmouth. It's the big one, what they's trying to catch. But it's always the other way around."

Rusty stared at Pa, way out there, the lake impossibly huge now, his father only a dark speck on an endless mirror. With a breathless curse he started for the shore.

"Hey hold on!" Nya called, but then her voice faded into the laughter of those who watched and waited.

"Damn that Ackerman. Damn him a thousand times." Rusty stood beneath the afternoon sun, muddy toes barely beyond the lake's reach. He squinted, trying to shade his eyes against the terrible glare that burned his face. He fought to keep sight of Pa, eyes stinging, sweat dripping. He shivered.

If I can just focus my will, Rusty thought. Like a true luremancer--watch Pa--guard him with my eyes, maybe nothing'll happen to him…to us. Rusty's fingers clenched until they ached. His legs hurt and he had to pee like a racehorse. Still he stood.

The lake glowed like molten gold, a dazzling light that hid the far shore, shrouded and engulfed the tiny boats, trapping them like flies in cloudy amber. Caught in that horrible brightness, Rusty realized, Pa wouldn't see anything, let alone the other boat. He'd never know, never see the danger.

"I thought you'd be different," Nya said behind him, her voice sullen. "Thought you weren't like the others. You didn't care nothing about fishing."

"It's important to him." But what if she was right? All Rusty's life he'd been dragged from one tournament to another: The Great Dallas Bass-off, The Conroe Catfish Roundup, The Galveston Grouper Grab, and even from fishin' hole to cow pond as Pa delved deeper into luremancy. He enchanted hooks, raised undead worms for endless bait, sought ancient secrets that endowed jigs with a fish's every desire. Rusty'd often tried to stay put with Ma at her gas station in Lufkin. Then Pa would appear from the summer mists, secrets gleaming in his eyes, with some fish story just as crazy as Ackerman's wild tale. Somehow, Rusty always gave in. Somehow, he always ended up hating every moment.

"You know, when I invited you for a smoke, I had a little more in mind." Nya softly touched his shoulder and then stroked his backbone. "You're a lot prettier than the boys round here."

A soft strange cry breathed through the crowd again. Somewhere a child cheered. The heat thickened, grew still as death.

Rusty blinked--couldn't help himself. His glance slipped from Pa's speck of a boat to search the lake. The Bassmaster had vanished. Desperately, he forced his gaze back to Pa.

"Won't be long now." Nya took his hand. "Then Smallmouth will go back to sleep and our town will be blessed for another year."

"Blessed?" He had to fight to keep from going blind in the glare. Rusty's head ached now, but that was nothing compared to the terrible emptiness in his gut.

"You know, prosperity and such. The wheat will grow, the cotton'll be thick and the farmers will get a good price." She took his arm, her breath soft and sort of fishy upon his cheek. "Hey maybe my Ma will take you in. You could live with us. Would you like that?"

Rusty swallowed. He couldn't bring himself to answer. After a moment Nya put her head on his shoulder, her arm snaking round his waist. It felt good. Even in the heat it felt good. He'd never had a girlfriend before. He couldn't help it when his mind drifted to the possibilities. What he and Nya could do, how they'd do it, all the little secret things that might happen if they slept in the same house.

Rusty swallowed and nodded. The tiny speck of Pa's boat wavered and blurred lost in the glare.

"Course, you'll need to fight a boy or two." Nya leaned closer, her left breast brushing against his chest. "I'm the best looking girl in town. Everybody says so. Why, at the Elder's Church, Parson Ib swears I look just like--"

Unable to stop himself, Rusty glanced down at her deep divided cleavage thrust tight in her sequined costume.

That long strange cry breathed through the crowd. Too late, he realized what had happened. He pushed Nya away, rushing into the water's grasp. His gaze searched the terrible empty lake.

"That's our cue." Nya's voice grew hard behind him. Rusty damn near jumped when she shrilled a whistle.

"I'm not going anywhere!" Rusty shouted. He whirled, fists balled. But already the band had reformed their line. Three sharp blasts of Nya's whistle and they warbled into ‘Happy Trails.'

The townspeople stirred, gathering up their blankets and tarps, the picnic over. They ignored Rusty as he stood there, rubbing his eyes. His fingers came away salty and wet. The shimmering glare grew duller, the lake smaller, the far side suddenly a few rock skips away. Rusty choked back a sob and turned. Some of the younger men had gathered round the pickups.

"Hey!" he shouted when a dumpy kid in a straw Stetson leaned in through the window of Pa's truck, as if searching for keys. "Hey that ain't yours."

Rusty shoved his way into the group. A man just looked past him, sagging grin beneath droopy eyelids, and brushed him out of the way. Rusty tried to fight, but it weren't no fight. They didn't talk to him, didn't look at him, but just knocked him away as they hot-wired the trucks and drove off. Rusty fell to his knees, smacking the mud with his fists and bawling like a baby.

After awhile a battered station wagon, the last in a long line of cars, pulled up beside him. Rusty looked up at the mostly red wagon with a white door and green hood.

Nya leaned around a heavy set woman with droopy grey- blue hair and grinned at him through the side window. "Ready now? You want a ride into town?"

Slowly Rusty stood, fighting to choke down the sobs. He wiped his nose on his arm and then shook his head.

"Language, girl." The woman pushed Nya back in the seat, turned to him, a smile crawling across her saggy lips. "You come to town when you're good and ready, honey. We're the brown house on First Street. Nya's told me all about you." The woman blinked, eyes receding into their sockets. "Won't be the first outsider I've taken in."

"Ma?" Nya's mouth opened, a look of astonishment on her face. The car ground its gears and rattled on. Dust clouded around its rear wheels and covered him.

Alone in the sudden silence, he turned back to the lake, watched the line of cars as they snaked towards the town reflected in the motionless water. Alone, with nothing--hell he couldn't even find his shoes. Pa was gone forever and ever.

For the longest moment in his life, Rusty stared at the lake. Why not walk into it and surrender? Let Old Whiskers take him down to Pa. He took a step, heard the sullen squish of mud. Things might be better this way, better for everyone.

"Owww! Shit!" Rusty squawked and stared down at his foot. He'd stubbed his toe. A little tuft of skin, already bloody, had peeled off. The sun glinted on a battered metal box--Pa's tackle box.

Ignoring the pain, Rusty squatted down, picked up the box, and hugged it to his chest.

He opened the box carefully, realizing as he tugged at the latch that it didn't feel right. Like any true luremancer's, Pa's tackle box weighed a ton; now it felt, well, light. He pulled back the lid, focused on the slots and little square trays. Instead of the Seven Sinkers of Cibola and Apache Ghost Bobbers the trays lay empty--all empty.

As he folded back the trays his breath caught in his throat. A single can of unopened soda, the cheap store brand that was all they could afford. A shudder wracked him and the tears started up again. His soda, that Pa had saved for him.

"Damn!" Rusty dropped the soda. The box fell and landed on his foot. But the real pain, the true pain throbbed through his bleeding finger. A hook had snagged him, and attached to the hook by a silver threader, a lure.

No, not a lure, he reminded himself. A jig, one he'd never seen before. The thing blurred, but not from his tears. The jig looked like some strange critter, something with tentacles, but neither squid nor octopus. Even as he studied it, the shape changed, blurred, and grew tentacles again.

A full moon, twice silver dollar size, cast greenish light over Rusty's shoulder. He held his breath, took careful aim, and let the rock fly. The boathouse window shattered into a million full moons. Mindful of his bare feet and knees, Rusty hauled himself through the window and cautiously lowered his legs into a black abyss.

The place seemed brighter inside than when he and Pa had first arrived. Empty too, and locked up since everyone had returned to town. Rusty crept softly anyways, round the counter.

"Damn straight," he whispered, grinning. Like every boathouse, the place stocked some fishing stuff. No poles, but he'd already found a good stout branch that would do the trick. Rusty picked up a spool of hundred pound test line and dropped it in his pocket. He climbed back through the window.

Rusty sucked in a gasp, fists still ready, and then recognized the shadow. "Nya?"

"That ain't no way to treat a lady." She grinned. "Course, I didn't come out here to be a lady." Her hand lifted.

Rusty reached out took hold of her soft, soft fingers and helped her up. "You damn near scared the piss out of me."

"Serves you right." Nya brushed herself off. No longer in uniform she'd jammed herself into shorts and a halter top that showed more skin, more cleavage than a truck-stop calendar girl. "Why didn't you come by the house before dark?"

Rusty caught himself admiring the view, then forced a frown, and turned away. "Got things to do." He found his fishing stick and started for the pier.

The pier groaned as Nya followed him out on it. Rusty reached for the fishing line but stopped. His mouth fell open. He stared at the lake, a lake so huge the far shore lay shrouded in green mist. A lake so still a moon the size of a pickup lay trapped beneath the surface. A lake that caught the reflection of a vast city, towers and turrets of onyx and deep azure, walls that jutted at strange angles which made his eyes hurt.

Nya took his arm, lay her head on his shoulder, her hair caressing his sunburned skin like a cool breeze. "Parson said that's how our town really looks, but then Smallmouth trapped us here."

"Us?" Rusty pulled his gaze from the unearthly reflection and stared at her. Nya's wide mouth flattened, her eyes lowered.

"We ain't really from around here." Her head shook and she sniffed. "And I ain't a real Texan."

"I'm sorry," Rusty said. Then because it just seemed right, he touched her chin with his free hand, tilted her lips, and kissed her. She kissed back and he dropped the fishing stick, pulled her closer.

"Damn sure did." Rusty touched the sharp pain in his chest, discovered his shirt pocket. He reached in, gingerly brought out Pa's jig. Two of the three prongs on the hook glinted bright with blood. The jig itself glowed green, blurred and insubstantial as the mist on the far shore.

Rusty's mouth opened. He started to tell her the truth, that it was just Pa's jig, although admittedly a strange one. But that didn't sound impressive enough, powerful enough.

"That's Doom," he said, setting his mouth hard. "The doom that's coming to Smallmouth."

Rusty couldn't help himself. He snickered, shrugged, but then thought of Pa. "Hell yeah," the laugh came low and mean. He brought out the line, tied a good length of it to his pole, and started to attach the jig. His fingers felt thick and clumsy, but even as they worked, Pa's voice came to his ears, calming, patient, guiding him through the Nine Knots of Nineveh.

"You're crazy." Hands on her hips, Nya stared at him. "I can't believe you're gonna--"

"It'll take you, too," Nya said in a sad quiet voice. "That's how it always ends."

"I ain't in no boat." Rusty shook his head. "And if Smallmouth tries to swallow this pier, he'll get a mess a boards and nails that'll stick in his craw." He turned to her one last time. "Now go on, get outa here. This is serious."

Nya looked longingly back at the shore, then gazed at him. Finally, she moved beside him, biting her lower lip with slightly protruding teeth. "Nuh-uh. I'm serious too, serious as a heart attack."

Rusty grinned, braced his feet, and cast the line. The jig glowed, wavering and blinking like a lightning bug gone mad as it arced over the water. It hit the lake with a hiss and a plop, and vanished.

Rusty tugged softly, almost without thinking. He knew what to do, how to play the jig. Pa's patient teachings on the holy art of jig retrieval came back. A ripple appeared where the jig had hit.

The ripple widened, circles on circles spreading out. A soft wave lapped the pier. The ripples swelled, growing into restless waves that shook the pier even harder.

"Careful there," Rusty played the lure again, his hand growing surer as he tugged. The pier shuddered and he spread his feet, bracing his balance. Nya latched hold of his arm.

The waves rose higher still. A god-awful bellow echoed as the waters seethed, rising up into a swirl of green mist and mirrors. Again the water roared, a terrible metallic howling that put every Godzilla movie Rusty'd ever seen to shame.

"Shit fire!" Nya shouted. They staggered as the pier lurched. Boards snapped. "Shit fire in the Apocalypse of the Unholy!"

The line snapped tight with a whip crack. The pole yanked Rusty to his knees. Splinters cut his shins. The lake loomed above them, whirling into a conical silhouette that, as moonlight thickened, formed a terrible whiskery head, like some nameless abomination of a mutated catfish.

The pole jerked hard, dragging Rusty forward. The line, glowing in the moonlight, led straight into the tiniest pucker of a fanged and bristly mouth. Eyes like pinpricks into Hell glared down at him.

"Set the hook, boy. Set the god damned hook!" Pa's voice? Nya's? Maybe even his own; Rusty no longer knew. His arms jerked nearly out of their sockets. He thought his bones would snap, that his knees would plunge clean through the rotten pier. All his strength, all his seriousness, the will of a luremancer, and Pa grinning to beat the band inside his head. He yanked, sensed the obscenely soft giving as the hook snagged deep.

Nya's hands clawed his shoulders, dragging him up till his feet got leverage, till splinters lashed at his toes and his very soles. Together they pulled, harder this time. Smallmouth reeled over them, its vast tentacled head careening as they fought it back towards shore. One final surge; Rusty's foot sank ankle deep into muddy ground.

Smallmouth towered above, and then in a vast ponderous arc, its mirrored misty bulk hurtled down, as terrible and implacable as a tidal wave.

Rusty pulled hard on the pole and braced his feet a final time. His eyes jammed shut. Smallmouth would crush them, kill them both, but only in its death throes.

Wind rumbled and roared. The line slackened. He flinched, ready to join Pa. Silence! Rusty opened his eyes.

Full moon, cloudless sky all spangled with stars, and Smallmouth the horror, Smallmouth the lake, even Smallmouth the town, had vanished. Rusty stared out at a wide, flat expanse of nothing more than mesquite and sage.

He blinked, dropped the pole, then his knees gave out and he hit butt first on the dusty ground. "Pa," he whispered. "I got him, Pa."

Rusty turned but it was only Nya who smiled weakly, just now sitting up on a patch of dry grass. Sweat shining in the moonlight, glazing her exceptional cleavage; she looked good--thinner, longer legs than he remembered.

Nya gazed down at herself, studied her hands, and then peered at her legs. "Hot damn! Ma was telling the truth about that Evinrude salesman from Dallas." Her grin broadened. "Guess I'm at least half Texan."

"Where'd they go?" Rusty crawled over to her, took her hand. "I mean, they didn't just die, did they?"

Nya gazed at him and slowly smiled. "Course not. Parson Ib said we'd return to our own spatial firmament, the whole town and everything." Her eyes widened and she gripped his fingers. "But there's a way to get there. Parson said there's another trans-dimensional lake up north."

A cicada buzzed softly from a nearby mesquite. After a while Nya snuggled up against him. "It might be what you want to do. There's a goodly chance your pa will be there."

Her giggle was music to his ears as she playfully pushed him back. "Smallmouth doesn't kill its captives for a full lunar cycle. The moon hadn't set when you destroyed it, so your pa probably washed up near the city." Her smile flattened into a thoughtful frown. "Be warned though. This other lake--Parson said they got a tournament too."

Was he truly a luremancer now? Would Pa say so? One thing was certain; he'd use every trick in the tackle box to find his father. Her words hit him then; the stars, the mesquite changed subtly before his eyes. Truly he'd become a luremancer. He knew what Pa had tried to show him, what had been in front of his face all along.

Rusty shook his head. He settled his arms around Nya. "Another lake, another tournament. Does that mean…?"

"Another incarnation of Smallmouth," Nya replied, her voice grave in the darkness. "It won't rest until all land is sea, all men become fish. So Parson Ib was told by the Prophet Ackerman himself."

"Hell, boy," she grinned and ran fingers through her hair. "Don't I look serious?"

"Better than serious." Rusty figured on kissing her, but curiosity got the better of him. "So where up north?"

A nthropologists studying asteroidal
natives find us a curious mix:
our answers thwart their questions.
Dolts. Or rather, we don't mean to.
Chafed by our exoskeletons
that allow us to withstand
our mother planet's embrace,
we're short of breath, fumbling
for words bereft of context.
Finally, wheezing, one of us
manages, "Don't ask. Look."
Look to the stars.
Look to the stone
and iron iceballs that house us.
Look to the countless dolls
of Mother Ceres, each distinct,
but stylistically of a species:
iron ore welded roughly human
by a belt laser wielded roughly
by a roughly human shape
in a space suit, cheap electronics
sutured to the metal with nanoneedles
to anchor lost dolls in dead space.
Once sublimating sockets
filled with comet head material
to bluster for children's laughter
now empty and emotionless,
like us, the folk craftsman
far from home, stuck here
in a gravity well, living
Smithsonian exhibits, longing
for the airy dark between war and
god you call the asteroid belt
and we call simply home.
Look to our dolls;
they'll answer your questions.

Lupercalia

Rita Oakes

"‘Lupercalia' has been simmering in the dark cauldron of my mind for so long I can no longer point to one inspiration for the tale. Myth. History. Gossip. Too many sword and sandal movies seen at an impressionable age. Every antiquities exhibit of every museum I've ever visited. Romulus and Remus. All diced, sauteed in olive oil, occasionally stirred, and seasoned with a splash of Stockholm Syndrome."

A FTER THEY SKINNED HIM, Marcus shifted back to man-shape. He lay limp upon the grass in the peristyle garden, the stench of his own blood, pain, and urine thick in his nostrils. The moon bathed him with healing light. The agony of his stripped muscles diminished, from fire to a sting, and then to a shuddersome itch, like a million ants crawling over bare flesh. New skin covered him, blessedly cool.

The men drew close again. Marcus tensed. Perhaps they wanted his man-pelt, too, though it would never be as warm as the fur of his wolf-shape. Why had the Mistress ordered him punished? Perhaps the wine he had spilled when the scent of a rabbit in the garden distracted him? A gift of Caligula, and costly.

Marcus resolved not be so clumsy again. The Mistress would forgive him, wouldn't she? Even though she had another Mutaro to play with now?

The new Mutaro, Julius, had only hatred for the Human masters, and contempt for Marcus. Why did they not strip Julius of his pelt? Julius never tried to please, but had to be drugged and beaten before submitting.

Marcus shuddered. When no knife touched him again, he opened his eyes. The play of moonlight and shadow on the leaves of the fig trees drew him from the memory of pain. Sweet-scented roses twined about the colonnade. Grapes hung heavy, so ripe they nearly burst their skins. Ivy trailed from the central fountain and its image of Venus. The plash of water was pleasant, and the grass cool beneath him. Above, the dark rectangle of sky sparkled with stars and a moon three-quarters full.

Hands upon him, though not so rough as before. They stroked his private parts until he felt himself spurt.

Hands again. Too soon. It hurt. Yet the moon lent him strength. He felt himself stiffen and spurt as before. He bared his teeth. A low rumble vibrated in his chest. The men laughed, ruffled his hair. This could not be on orders of the Mistress. Mutari seed was too precious to waste on slaves. She would be angry, if he told. She only shared her Mutari with special guests. The Emperor once. Marcus had not enjoyed that, for Caligula smelled of madness.

He felt strength returning, gift of moonlight and the rare absence of the silver-lined collar.

The collar bound Mutari to one shape only, and cut off the moon's power. Wearing the collar, he had the strength of any mortal Human. Without it…. He shook his head, imagined running in wolf shape through the olive groves. Sometimes he dreamed of running.

They locked the collar once again about his neck. Footsteps retreated. Human scents faded, except where their touch lingered on him. Tarquin bore the bloody pelt away to the Mistress.

Under the blank stone stare of the goddess, Marcus scooped a palmful of water from the fountain, drank. Then he retreated to the small room he shared with Julius.

The chamber was dark, for only Severian, the steward, or the Mistress had authority to order the oil lamps lit. Marcus did not mind the shadows. Mutari eyes were more keen than Human ones. And moonlight spilled in through the narrow window overlooking the courtyard.

He curled into a ball upon the floor and pulled a thin wool blanket close. He did not usually notice cold, but his new skin felt icy. He lay still, unable to sleep.

Julius returned, smelling of sex and hate. Marcus curled into a tighter ball, new fear wafting from his pores. If he were small enough, and still enough, perhaps Julius would take no notice of him. Julius had never hurt him, but tonight the scent of the older Mutaro held the bitterness of barely controlled rage. Who knew if it might not spill out?

"Filthy creature," Julius said. The breath sounded harsh between his teeth. A growl rumbled deep from the chest.

A new scent. Astonishment. His voice held a gentleness Marcus had never heard in Julius before. "I didn't mean you."

Julius paced the narrow room as he might a cage. The air of suppressed violence lingered. Tension in the broad shoulders. Veins corded in the neck. Teeth bared.

Marcus flinched beneath the golden stare. Julius regarded him as if he beheld a half-wit. "That slut Lyvia. Who else?"

Julius should not speak so of the Mistress. She would be angry, if she heard. Marcus thought he should caution Julius, but his courage had not progressed quite so far.

"Wanted to play the Mother of Rome," Julius said. "Wearing your skin." Julius swallowed hard. A new scent intruded, like spoiled meat.

Julius retched into the chamber pot. Marcus smelled bile and the remnant of the priapic potion Lyvia always dosed Julius with, something bitter and sweet.

The odor of anger faded, replaced by a sour scent of despair. "I'll never get her stench off me," Julius said, staring out the narrow window into the courtyard.

Moonlight silvered him. He was compact, leanly muscled. Marcus imagined Julius would be large and powerful in wolf shape. A Mutaro in his prime, he moved with a stealthy grace that always made Marcus feel young and awkward. His golden eyes usually held too much arrogance for a slave, though tonight they had a soft, distant look.

"Do you not long to leave the sewer of Rome, Marcus? To race with your grex at the hunt? To return to the dark pine forests of Gaul, and run shoulder to shoulder with your chosen mate while the wind ruffles your fur?"

Astonishment again. Julius left the window, crouched beside him. "What do you remember?"

"She ordered you flayed alive! So she could fornicate in your bloody pelt! Will you be her lapdog? Lick her hand and fawn over her?"

Marcus squeezed his eyes closed, concentrated on not letting his bladder go. I don't know anything else. He huddled in silence, wishing Julius would use the gentle voice again, wishing that his own sweat and fear-stink did not betray panic so easily. What would it be like to run with others of his kind, racing to bring down stag or ibex? To have a life-mate and be free of the constriction of the silver collar?

Imagination failed. He'd been too young when the soldiers seized him. He doubted he would make a successful hunter. His nose was keen enough, but his legs always seemed to tangle together. He would starve without the Mistress. He didn't mind her games. Not usually. Though he hoped one pelt was all she would require of him.

Severian ordered Marcus and Julius to pick fruit in the garden. A pleasant task, for the day was warm. Bees droned. The wind freshened. Julius turned his face into the breeze, inhaled deeply. "It's raining in the north," he said. His nostrils flared again. He closed his eyes. "A herd of deer are grazing at the edge of the east vineyard." Julius went very still, his muscles taut.

He dropped a fig into their basket, bent one of the higher branches so Marcus could reach.

Julius released the branch, which swished abruptly upwards. He moved to the next tree. Marcus stayed where he was.

The Mistress sent for Marcus and Julius. Strato, a grim former gladiator who had won the wooden rudis of freedom, bound Julius' wrists behind the back with silver shackles. Lyvia reclined upon the wolf pelt.

Marcus' nose twitched in recognition of his own scent. He felt vaguely ill, as if he existed in more than one place at the same time. He was here, in the center of Lyvia's bedroom, and there, underneath Lyvia's naked form like a rug or trophy.

Knives. So sharp. Hands. A pulling away of skin from muscle. Scraping of a thin cushion of fat. Blood. Fire as air rushed over exposed muscle. Hands clamped firmly over his muzzle so he could neither bite nor howl in pain.

He could no more defy Lyvia than he could remove the silver collar locked about his neck. She was the Mistress.

Julius was a fool in his stubbornness. Wild. Uncivilized. If Julius learned obedience, he would not have to suffer the silver shackles, nor taste the bitter potion that distorted senses. If he surrendered to her will, he would learn the Mistress could be kind.

Marcus breathed through his mouth to keep the scent of his dead pelt at a distance. He snuggled at Lyvia's side. The fur felt coarse and strange beneath his bare skin. Cold sweat broke upon his flesh.

Lyvia rested her hand upon his flank. He tensed. Though her touch was light, in his mind he felt stripped, raw. She pressed his face to her bosom and he drew in her scent of sweat, brine, attar of roses, other men. Cloying. Overpowering. But better than the madness of his own scent in two places.

She toyed idly with his hair as he tried to forget the fur beneath them. She could be kind. She did not know the very act of resting upon his flayed pelt was making him ill.

His breath came fast and shallow. She rolled over on him, covered him, rubbed herself against him. Her hair cascaded against his chest. Pleasant. It should be pleasant.

His stolen fur prickled at his buttocks. His stomach roiled. The new scent rising from him held sickness, not desire. He turned his head, saw Julius watching them. Anger smoldered in the older Mutaro's eyes.

Lyvia moved lower. She moistened a finger with her tongue and rubbed it between his legs. He closed his eyes as she caressed the sensitive spot between scrotum and anus. His body began at last to respond as trained. He felt her mouth upon him, wet heat as she drank him down. He shuddered.

Lyvia drew away from him. Marcus rolled off the pelt. He crouched, taking fast and shallow breaths through his mouth. He dared not vomit, dared not ask for leave to quit the chamber.

He imagined himself running, running. A forest. Cool air. Wind. A large, hot-blooded something fleeing before him. Stag.

Lyvia advanced upon the bound Julius with a cup. Strato and another former gladiator, a Nubian named Kanu, gripped Julius at each elbow, preventing retreat.

Marcus knew what was in the cup. He could smell the contents. Lyvia's special drink.

Lyvia had made a study of Mutari. She knew they lived long lives. Centuries, she told Marcus once when feeling particularly expansive. Perhaps millennia. She believed, as did many Romans, that Mutari seed conferred youth and vitality. She mixed it in potions, perfumes, and cosmetics. Shared it with special, much-favored guests.

Julius never gave his seed willingly. Lyvia, after many trials, had developed a potion that enflamed Mutari senses. With her priapic philter, she could milk Julius for hours.

"No," said Julius, muscles rigid, jaw tight. Hatred in the eyes. Hatred in the sudden scent of his sweat. Always he resisted. Always Lyvia, assisted by Strato and Kanu, prevailed.

Kanu swept Julius' feet from under him. Julius went heavily to his knees upon the mosaic tile. Strato pressed a knee hard into the Mutaro's spine, pulled his head back by the hair.

Julius' muscles bulged in a vain attempt to break the silver bonds. Kanu pinched Julius' nostrils shut. Julius kept his jaws clenched tight. His face darkened for lack of air. His chest heaved.

At last, desperate for breath, he gasped. Lyvia tipped part of the contents of the cup between his teeth. Julius spluttered. More of the drink spilled than went in. Lyvia swore.

Kanu dug his fingers into the hinges of Julius' jaw. Lyvia emptied the rest of the drink into the Mutaro's mouth. She clamped her hand over Julius' lips, smoothed his throat.

Kanu still blocked Julius' nostrils. Julius must swallow or choke. He swallowed. Kanu released him.

Julius knelt, drawing air into starved lungs. He closed his eyes. His shoulders slumped. Strato hauled him upright.

"That's my good wolf," Lyvia said, smoothing her hand over Julius' chest. He tried to step back from her, but Strato blocked him.

Julius shook his head as if to clear it. Marcus could smell the rising musk. Julius growled.

Marcus began to study the mosaic floor intently. Neptune with trident. Strange creatures of the sea. Marcus forgot his own nausea while watching Lyvia with Julius. Now he did not want to watch Julius' further humiliation. He'd seen it many times before.

The sound of a blow made Marcus look up. Lyvia sprawled upon her backside, holding one hand to her brow. Julius slipped free of Strato's grasp, launched a kick at Kanu's knee. There was a soft pop as the Nubian' s knee bent in a direction knees were not meant to go. Kanu grunted, fell.

Strato seized Julius by the elbows, bore him down, pounded his head repeatedly against the hard tiles. Swearing, he dragged Julius from the floor.

Stunned from Strato's blows, and now in the full grip of the drug, Julius did not resist. Blood poured from his nose. Strato unlocked one manacle, drew Julius' arms up, and refastened both wrists onto a ring set high upon a decorative column.

Julius rested his cheek against the pillar. Sweat ran from him freely. His skin flushed all over. He smelled of pain and despair. The tip of his erect penis brushed against stone. He groaned.

Marcus rose, helped Lyvia to her feet. "Mistress?" A bruise was already beginning where Julius butted her. She jerked free. "Severian!"

Marcus felt his nausea return. She must mean the special whip. Multiple strips of leather tipped in barbs coated with silver. Marcus had never felt its sting, though Lyvia had teased him with it once, had drawn the strands playfully over his skin.

The moon would not heal any wound made by silver. Time might heal such a wound, if slight. If deep enough, the silver would poison and kill.

Nicanor and Tarquin supported Kanu between them. Severian presented the whip to Lyvia.

He swallowed hard. The whip felt unclean in his hands. Defy her, Julius had said. He wanted to. But he had proof before him of what defiance meant.

Lyvia had been to a party on the Palatine. Her fair skin was flushed with too much wine. Her sun-colored hair, usually elaborately curled, hung disordered about her shoulders.

Strato attended her. He had put aside leather armor and gladius, stood clad only in a short woolen tunic.

At a nod from Lyvia, Marcus removed his own plain tunic. Strato took him without violence, but without tenderness, and the Mistress caught the answering spurt of Mutaro semen in a golden chalice. This she mixed with wine and drank, offering a mouthful to Strato as a sign of favor. When she had drained the contents of the cup, she drew them both down beside her.

Marcus missed the unique odor of spice and musk that Julius had, the radiant heat of him as he slept, the companionable rumble of his breathing. He dimly remembered a similar scent, and a comforting press of bodies snug against him. A shadowy recollection of childhood, perhaps. Before the Humans. Before Rome.

Still, it was pleasant squeezed between Lyvia and Strato. Only the reek drifting up from the wine cellar, where Julius remained caged these many weeks since the flogging, spoiled his contentment.

Marcus woke with his face burrowed in the hollow of Strato's collarbone. Lyvia lay on Marcus' other side, all softness and warmth. Her hand lay curled over Marcus' hip.

Marcus studied Strato's hard face. Strato, awake, looked at him through half lidded eyes. Marcus nuzzled into Strato's throat, licked the skin there. Salt, sweat, a careless spill of honeyed wine, the rasp of beard in need of the morning's razor.

Her face was swollen, dissolute, creased with marks from the cushions. Her hair spread out in golden tangles. She traced a fingernail down Marcus' ribs, smiled. "Once again, my golden-eyed wolf," she said. Her fingers moved to his member, caressed him, squeezed his testicles gently. He closed his eyes as she toyed with him. He enjoyed the touch, but could not rise. "I am sorry, Mistress," he said, "I am awake, but my loins are yet asleep."

He tumbled away from her, over Strato, who swore. Marcus hit the floor, hard. Lyvia rolled into Strato's arms.

The rest of the household was dark, Severian and the others yet abed. Marcus paused at his room, but did not enter. Instead, he crept down the stairs to the wine cellar without aid of a lamp. He was glad of the darkness. He would not be able to see the full extent of Julius' hurts.

Chains clinked softly as Julius moved a fraction. Shackled with his hands behind him, wrist to ankle, his bonds bent him into an awkward half crouch.

The welts from the lash smelled of silver and pus. He'd fouled the cage. No one had been ordered to clean it. Pain, fever, hate, merged with the other odors into a rank miasma of despair.

Teeth flashed white in the darkness. The golden eyes burned. "Come to gloat, pup?"

Julius laughed. "Fangs at last. There may be hope for you. Have you come to extol the virtues of your Mistress?"

"You are a mad thing. They will crucify you. If you try to harm the Mistress again, they might crucify all of us."

Marcus had seen crucifixions. A hundred years had not dulled the memory. Thousands of slaves lined the road from Capua to Rome as the cart that imprisoned him and his brother trundled to market. Crows grew fat upon the stinking dead.

Marcus' stomach clenched. He shivered. He fled up the stairs, Julius' laughter echoing in his ears.

In the garden, his nausea receded. He looked up at the sky, growing light as dawn approached. Scents of rosemary and lavender purged his nose, calmed him. Stumbling with weariness, he crawled beneath drooping branches of wisteria.

He dreamed of his brother. The two of them raced in wolf form. His brother nipped him playfully and Marcus tumbled, rolled in a patch of wildflowers. He rose, flanks heaving, and the other barreled into him, grinning. They both shifted and wrestled in man form. No longer his brother, it was Julius who easily pinned him. Marcus tilted his chin up, offering his throat. Pollen dusted Julius' bare shoulders like a sprinkling of gold. The eyes held no madness, only mischief.

Someone kicked Marcus awake. Severian. Marcus stirred reluctantly, tried to hold the dream. Julius had been about to kiss him. He was sure of it.

"Who gave you leave to sleep in the garden?" Severian asked. "Get up, you lazy wretch."

Marcus crawled from the wisteria. The sun felt warm on his back and shoulders. The sky was a brilliant blue above, framed by the curved terra cotta tiles of the roof. Bees hummed and flitted over the roses. Butterflies settled on spears of fragrant lavender.

"Get cleaned up and dressed. Meet me in the kitchen." Severian stomped away, grumbling.

Marcus splashed water from the fountain over himself. In his chamber, he drew on a simple woolen tunic. He would have preferred to go nude, but Severian insisted he wear clothing when not entertaining Lyvia.

"Stinks worse than the beast pits below the arena," Strato said. "Never saw so stubborn a slave."

"The smell begins to permeate the entire villa. He has refused food altogether these four days past. I think the Mistress made a poor bargain in him."

"Don't turn your back on him, Severian. He's still a wild beast, even if his fangs are drawn."

"You're wrong, Strato. There's no aggression in him. And he's loyal to the Mistress."

Marcus entered the kitchen and Severian started. Strato twitched his hand toward the gladius he wore.

"Make some noise when you enter a room, boy," Strato said, removing his hand from the sword. "Don't skulk about."

Severian pushed a clay bowl of diced liver toward him. "Light a lamp and take this to that fool downstairs."

The oil lamp flickered. Marcus breathed through his mouth to avoid the worst of the stench. By lamplight, he saw what shadows had concealed last night.

Julius looked dead. Only the sound of a stubborn heartbeat and the slightest flaring of nostrils betrayed life. His eyes were closed. The face had grown gaunt. Dried blood still crusted beneath a broken nose. A fine sheen of sweat covered him. Some of the more shallow lash marks had scabbed over. The deeper ones were puffy and leaking yellow pus. Bound and unable to move more than an inch or two, blood pooled in his hands and feet, leaving them purplish and so swollen the bonds bit into flesh.

Marcus held a bit of diced calf's liver through the bars, to Julius' mouth. Julius ignored him.

Julius would choose death over continued captivity, as his brother had done. Leaving Marcus alone. Again.

"Tell me about your grex. Tell me about the hunt. Tell me of your mate. What is her name?"

Julius opened his eyes, blinked at the light. "Mathilde," he said, his voice a hoarse croak.

Marcus sighed. He put the bowl down. He crouched to wait, a few steps from the cage. When he could bear the silence no longer, he said, "Remember when you spoke of running with Mathilde? In Gaul?"

"You must live. For her sake. Human lives are short. Perhaps the Mistress will free us in her will."

He did not believe his own words. Human slaves were often manumitted in such a fashion, but Mutari slaves were too prized. Marcus had already passed through three Human owners. He and Julius would be willed from generation to generation, like bits of jewelry or costly furniture. Marcus felt his chest grow tight with grief and hopelessness.

Julius banged the back of his head against the bars. "I don't remember," he said. "First, her face faded from me. Now I cannot even recall her scent." The heavy smell of despair overlay the rest of the stinking chamber.

Julius' chin sank onto his chest. "No. How could I go to her, polluted as I am? Go upstairs. Walk in the sunlight. Leave me."

Strato and the Mistress smelled of rut and drowsy contentment. Marcus felt only emptiness, longing. He nuzzled gently at Lyvia's milkless dugs, was rewarded by her slight smile, and a soft caress at the nape of his neck. At her other side, Strato snored softly.

"Mistress?" Marcus said, scarce believing he dared speak to her unbidden. But she smelled happy, and was pleasantly drunk besides.

"Forgive me," Marcus said. He tensed in anticipation of a blow from either of them.

Instead Lyvia sighed, rose from her rumpled bed. "Let's have a look at the wretch. I shall be cross if he dies."

Strato and Marcus donned their tunics. Strato buckled on his gladius. Lyvia took considerably more time arranging the folds of her stola.

Strato unsheathed his short sword, inserted it between the bars of the cage, and prodded gently. A trickle of blood ran from the slight wound, but Julius did not flinch or cry out. He might have been a corpse already, Marcus thought, except a corpse would not bleed.

"All right," Lyvia said, removing keys from a chain about her neck. She handed the keys to Strato. "Get him out of there."

Strato opened the cage, and the locks upon the chains binding Julius. He gestured to Marcus.

Marcus dragged Julius from the cage. The limbs, though unbound, remained locked in the same position. The golden eyes, though open, appeared unseeing. Julius might have been carved of wood.

Lyvia knelt beside Julius, put her hand to his bare chest. Marcus could hear the Mutaro's heartbeat, more sluggish now than earlier. It stuttered a moment, then quickened.

An expression of sorrow flickered over Lyvia's face, and was gone. "Fool," she said to Julius. She glanced at Marcus with a trace of impatience. "Take him to the garden. Clean him up. Moonlight should restore him to himself."

"Yes, Mistress," Marcus said. Strato had to help him, for he could not carry Julius up the narrow stairs alone.

Strato grunted and dropped his share of the burden at the edge of the courtyard. Marcus, who gripped Julius by the shoulders, dragged him to the center of the garden, where moonlight might fall upon him more fully. He lowered Julius gently to the grass. Fetching a bucket of water from the cistern, and a bit of cloth, he began to bathe Julius' face. The emptiness in the unblinking eyes frightened him.

The cheeks were hollow, and covered with a tangle of beard. Marcus washed the throat, avoiding the collar that gleamed so brightly in the moonlight. Carefully he laved the chest, and the unhealed welts curving about pronounced ribs. The flesh was hot and puffy where the lash had bitten. Next he washed the limbs. Dropping the cloth in the bucket, Marcus rubbed Julius' broad hands between his smaller ones.

Julius might have been a statue. His arms, so long bound in the same unmoveable position, felt heavy and dead beneath Marcus' touch. A vaguely rotten smell rose from the flesh. The eyes remained vacant. Moonlight could restore circulation to the long-cramped limbs, and flesh lost to the long fast. It could mend the broken nose. Could it restore sanity to a disordered mind?

"How is he?" Lyvia asked, kneeling unsteadily beside Marcus on the damp grass. Marcus smelled sour wine upon her breath, saw the brimming cup in her hand.

"I do not know, Mistress. He is very sick . The moon will not heal the whip marks, but perhaps . . ."

"If the Mistress removed his collar? Just for a little while? The moon might better heal the rest of him."

Strato flushed. "I meant no disrespect, Mistress. A Mutaro uncollared is dangerous."

Lyvia rose. Marcus smelled her anger. Wine sloshed in her cup. "Do you mean to defy me, Strato? You can always return to the arena."

"I'll get the shackles," Marcus said. He disappeared for a few moments. Lyvia's wits were dulled with wine and simmering anger. Strato's also. In the darkness would they notice he brought iron manacles, not silver?

Strato locked the bands about Julius' wrists. Lyvia unfastened the silver-lined collar.

For long moments, Julius remained motionless, eyes still open, empty. Then he blinked, stirred a little. Marcus smelled puzzlement on him. Julius raised his arms, stared at the irons about his wrists. He touched his throat briefly. His nostrils flared.

Julius rolled to a crouch. He bared his teeth. A rumble sounded, deep, from the chest. Marcus took a step back. Rage and hatred filled Julius' golden eyes.

The air about Julius shimmered, like the air above a lamp's flame. Marcus blinked. Julius shifted. The shackles clinked as they fell empty to the grass.

In wolf form, Julius was larger even than Marcus had imagined. At the shoulder he stood more than twice the height of a true wolf. His pelt was the dark gray of a thundercloud, and tipped at the ends in black. The marks from the lash remained, stripes of angry red over back and ribs.

Marcus held his breath as Julius brushed by him. His scent now was earth and musk and rage. He circled Strato. The former gladiator turned with him, sword ready to thrust.

Lyvia flung her wine cup at Julius, darted behind one of the pillars. She fled inside, shouting for her guards.

Julius' teeth gleamed very white in the moonlight. His hackles bristled. His eyes, like lit amber, held madness. He sprang upon Strato.

Marcus closed his eyes, not wanting to see Julius spitted upon the sword. He heard a ripping of cloth, and then a ripping of something more substantial. Something fell to the grass.

Marcus opened his eyes. Strato's severed arm lay upon the ground, still gripping the gladius. Julius had the man's throat now, wrenched free a mouthful of meat. A gout of blood fountained. Julius lifted his blood-spattered muzzle. The lips drew back from his teeth. He growled a warning, then padded off after Lyvia.

Marcus' nostrils flared as the harsh, metallic smell of blood crept to him. Inside the villa, he heard a man scream. Marcus walked without haste. He heard the click click of Julius' paws upon the mosaic floor before him.

Tarquin lay face down upon the floor, the white of his spine exposed. Blood pooled upon the tiles. Marcus shook himself. He stepped over Tarquin, careful not to step in the spreading red.

Julius had cornered Lyvia in her bedroom. She had the silver-tipped whip in her hand. Julius watched her, ears flat. He kept out of range of the lash. Marcus paused in the doorway. "Marcus! Stop him. He has gone mad. He'll kill us all."

Marcus took a step forward. Julius growled. Marcus froze. His eyes strayed to the bed. His pelt still lay upon it. Marcus crossed to it, brushed his knuckles lightly against the coarse outercoat. He studied the interplay of light and shadow cast by the lamps, the mix of tawny brown, gray, and black hairs.

Part of him wanted to go to her. Protect her. She was the Mistress. She should be obeyed. "Julius," Marcus said.

The ears flicked once, but Julius did not take his attention from Lyvia or the whip. The lash marks had broken open. Blood glistened, matting his fur. Marcus closed his eyes. He had made those wounds. On the orders of the Mistress, yes, but his hand wielded the whip. He hadn't wanted to. Julius knew that. He hoped Julius knew that.

Marcus turned his hand, rested his palm upon the pelt, then worked his fingers into the softer undercoat. "No," he said, softly, tentatively. The word felt strange in his mouth. He said it again. Experimentally. "No." He smiled, pleased.

Julius ripped her belly. Ribs splintered with a sick cracking sound. The stench of blood and death filled the room.

Julius broke his long fast, bolted bits of Lyvia's soft insides. Alive, Lyvia was wielder of life and death, happiness and misery. Her elegant fingers lay upcurled like the petals of a flower.

Dead, she was only meat. He felt his stomach rumble. A sudden wash of saliva made his jaws ache. He swallowed convulsively.

Julius growled. Severian entered the room, a flaming torch in his hand, his fear smell strong.

"Don't block his path," Marcus said. "And don't crowd him. No one else has to die. Tell everyone to keep to their rooms."

Severian retreated. Marcus approached Lyvia's torn body. He bent and took the chain with the keys from her. Julius' claws clicked upon the tiles as he stalked from the room, hackles still raised. Marcus followed, chain dangling from his fingers.

In the peristyle garden, Julius paused a moment to leave his mark near Strato's body. Then he lapped water from the fountain. No Humans interfered.

Stars gleamed brightly over the low roof. Julius stretched. His tongue lolled. The lashes would be slow to heal, Marcus thought. They would scar.

Julius began a slow lope the length of the garden. His muscles bunched, and he leapt to the roof. His claws scrabbled for purchase. Broken tiles slid and shattered, but Julius did not pause. He achieved the summit and then disappeared over the other side.

The keys felt cool in Marcus' hand. He fit one into the lock of his collar, turned it until the hated thing sprang free. He studied the gleaming circlet a moment, touched his throat. Strange.

He picked up Strato's body, and the severed arm. He carried them to Lyvia's bedroom. He lay Strato beside Lyvia, face down. He covered both with his pelt, and tossed the collar on top. Seizing the lamps, he doused the bodies with oil, lit them.

Without haste he made his way through the house, passing frescoes of Diana at the hunt, Bacchanalian revels, the labors of Hercules.

At the vestibule, he drew a deep breath, tasted smoke and roasting meat. He went on, past the shrine to the household gods, the lares and penates. He opened the door, ducking beneath the bronze tintinnabulum, a winged phallus hung with bells. Fortune and fertility had left this house, in spite of gods. He felt little triumph in Lyvia's death, but no sadness. One should not expect to play with wild things and escape a mauling.

Marcus tightened one hand upon the door frame, was surprised when the wood gave beneath his fingers like a sponge. He glanced at his hand as if he had never seen it before. Once again he brushed his fingers against his bare throat.

Flames roared as the fire spread. Perhaps the other slaves would run. Perhaps not. They could blame Lyvia's death upon the fire and perhaps escape the fate of Spartacus.

Marcus threw off his tunic. Outside the villa, the oily, unpleasant scent of roasting meat and burning hair seemed stronger.

He shifted. Joy not to be bound to a single, weak shape. Ecstasy to be free of silver. He began to run. Paving stones hard against paws unaccustomed to them. Muscles loosened. He veered from the road onto fragrant grass. The wind felt like a caress. It brought Julius' scent to him. Near. Very near. Waiting.

Stephen Couch

In prison, you find yourself existing day by day. Then you get out and enter a world where all the days seem to be happening at once.

I hadn't seen a computer for the last twenty years, not since the Feds locked me away for hacking into the NORAD network. (Well, they shouldn't make claims like "intrusion-proof" if they don't want intruders, right?) I came out of prison to find the world got along just fine without me; tech evolution continued on its merry way, and what greeted me upon my release was something I'd heard about non-stop in stir, but had never been in contact with: the Internet.

A far cry from the chain of isolated BBS islands I had left behind; let me tell you. This was a continent, a world--a solar system of data. A universe, if you bought the hype.

I bought it; what I'd seen of technology in the couple of days since my release made me believe every claim about the Internet I'd heard. But I couldn't experience it for myself. Conditions of my release stipulated that I not use a computer for another five-year probationary period.

In a world like this 21st Century I found myself in, where computers seemed integrated with every aspect of life, they should have just kept me behind bars. They even used computers behind the counter at fast food restaurants now. According to my probation officer, there was a rewarding career in the assembly-line field in my future.

First day on the new job: specifically, the section of the assembly line where Widget A gets plugged into Widget B and sent on to its fate.

The other assemblers--my fellow hunchbacked, fallen-arched sweat factories--up and down the line were ex-cons like me, which I guess meant our product was untouched by human hands. We came to find out we all had the same parole officer as well, which suggested to my mind kickbacks from the plant owner. Still, it beat starving.

I couldn't allow myself to focus too much on my task. The more brainpower I applied to it, the more I had to come up with games and systems to take my mind off the tedium. Counting widgets, for example, or seeing how many I could plug together in an hour or a minute. And counting led to mathematics, and math led to thoughts of coding and hacking.

I caught myself counting successfully assembled units in hexadecimal and comparing those values to memorized NYNEX switching sequences for the third time that day when I decided to take my smoke break. I slapped down the red button on the console over my head and a buzzer sounded. My super came up, okayed me to stop, and re-shuffled the other men on the line to keep up the run while I wondered if I could squeeze an extra minute from the break clock, to make it a nice, even sixteen. Base sixteen, just like hex code.

The break room was fluorescent light, white tile, and a collection of shiny dispenser machines. I ripped open my pack, lipped out a cigarette, and lit up. The first drag went a long way toward making it a better day.

Didn't they know? Hadn't my probe told them I wasn't supposed to get within sighting distance of one of the damned things?

There was a sign over its desk: EMPLOYEE BREAK USE ONLY. LIMIT TIME TO FIVE MINUTES, PLEASE!

I took another hit, sucking half the cigarette into ash with a single draw, staring at the computer from across the room the whole time.

When did they start making them so small? How could something so tiny be as powerful as I'd been hearing?

I took a step towards it, feeling invisible ceiling cameras burning holes in my head.

No. It didn't make any sense. This couldn't be some elaborate sting for my benefit. Nevertheless, I didn't take another step.

But someone else did. I turned to hear shoes squeaking on the floor and saw a guy from the conveyor belt that ran parallel to mine. He looked at the computer, and at me.

"Cool," he said. He walked to the corner, seated himself, and began rattling away on the keyboard.

No one ever said I couldn't watch someone use a computer. I stepped over to him, trying not to look like I was peeking.

He glanced up at me, and back at the computer, sort-of-smiling. "You look like you've never seen one of these things before."

"I hear you," he said. He scratched his neck, and I could see the tattoo that his collar barely covered. "I had some training sessions, so I can use them a little bit: e-mail, websites, you know."

He laughed. "Damn, you have been out of circulation." Grinning, he waved his hand in front of the screen. "Yeah, this is it. Instant communication, a world of shopping, and all the porn you can handle." He pointed at the keyboard. "You want to try it?"

I felt those invisible cameras burning my scalp again. "No, I'd better get back."

"Well, hey," he said. "They have free Internet at the library, if you're interested. They don't clamp down on you after five minutes either. You should check it out; you really can't get along in the world without it."

You've never seen anyone so nervous in their life as me walking up the steps of the library. I'm surprised someone didn't call the cops on me, as furtive and paranoid as I was being.

The rest of the day, the widgets had just flown. My super said he was "pleased" with my performance, implying I was way ahead of the curve.

I think I shook his hand and thanked him, but I couldn't promise it. My mind was elsewhere; the same place it had been since my break.

I rehearsed saying, "No, officer, I was just here to check out some books," in my head as I wandered the stacks. Periodicals, maps, microfiche…

…And there they were. A dozen of them, lined up back to back in sets of six. If there had been only one seat empty, I might have been able to tell myself, "There's probably someone here who needs it more than you. Better come back later."

I had seen computer screens on TV, so I wasn't a complete spaz. Graphical interface, user-controlled interaction points…easy enough.

I doped it out in less than an hour: the Internet was all about linking--connections forming connections forming connections. If you needed to get somewhere, you could pretty much find it by following trails of synonymous concepts and symbols.

It was incredible. Intuitive, all-encompassing…you could find anything, if you just looked. "A universe of data" wasn't far off the mark. And self-regulating, as well--but then, any sufficiently complex system will become self-sustaining as a matter of course.

The bored expressions of the people who came and went, sitting down to deliver a few listless mouse clicks, suggested that, having lived with this miracle over the last few years, they could have cared less about the wonder of it all. And seeing the general public's apathy, I began looking instead for members of my tribe. Not phone phreaks like myself, we were all but extinct; but hackers: those people who knew how to exploit whatever computer paradigm might be in vogue. They'd share my fascination, at least.

I found them with little effort, squirreled away in the places you'd expect them to hide from the world; the same social patterns, the same ‘we don't want people to know about us but damn check us out" posing.

I checked some message boards to see what was going on, to read about the latest exploits and voyages of discovery. But despite the surface similarities I realized the hackers of this day and age weren't the same anymore, not even a little bit.

As far as I could tell, hacking wasn't about learning or puzzle-solving any longer. It wasn't about the joy of finding things out, of figuring out how things worked. Programs did all that for you. You could download a handful of applications that, by repetitive brute force, gained you access to anywhere you wanted to go. All you had to do was click.

And what did they do once they got there? Not explore, not deduce, that was for damn sure. Vandalism: that was the name of the game now. Go to a website, trash it, and brag about it afterwards.

I sat there, stunned, as I went through page after page, domain after domain, seeing nothing but salted cultural earth and wasted talent.

I turned in my chair, my vision blurred after staring at a monitor for so long. A librarian stood there, wringing her hands, wearing the expression of a reluctant disciplinarian.

"I'm sorry," she said. "We have a sign-in sheet for Internet users; I was away from my desk, and I guess you missed it." She pointed at a small table over by the furthest computer.

Of course I'd missed it--it didn't have anything to do with what I was looking for.

I got up from my seat and went to the sign-in. Name, address, phone number, driver's license…I faked them all and turned to get back to surfing. The librarian was blocking my way.

"Could I see your ID, please?" she asked. "We have to check, sorry. One of those Homeland Security things."

I blanked, patting my pockets for something I didn't have. "I guess I forgot it," I said. "I took the bus."

She didn't quite believe me, but was too polite to call me out. "Well…next time, be sure you bring it, okay?"

I left, feeling her suspicious eyes on me the whole way, managing to stroll calmly through the front doors without breaking into a dead run.

They say crack and crystal meth are instantly addictive; one hit, and you get the hunger for life. And while I saw enough addicts of both during my time in jail, I have to say that no matter how addictive they may be, they're nothing compared to the Internet.

God, how I itched to get back on it. I couldn't think of another way to get back to the library, though…no way to circumvent the paltry security without drawing the attention of the librarian. I supposed I could get a fake ID, but I was such a social disconnect I had no contacts, no one to approach about such a thing.

My probe made regular inspections of my apartment, so I couldn't hide a computer there. The library was out, and we weren't a metropolitan enough town to have one of those Internet cafes.

All of which led me back to the break room computer at the plant, with its crippling five-minute time limit. I stuck with it, thoughts of surveillance cameras banished from my mind, but it was like reading a book at a rate of one word a day. So much information, so much virtual architecture to explore, and I was traveling it by inches.

Plus, I was pissing off my co-workers by hogging the machine during break time. Even the guy who told me about the library was giving me the cold shoulder.

To hell with them. They didn't--couldn't--appreciate it as much as I could. Just like these so-called &ldsquo;hackers", committing the sociological equivalent of shitting where they ate. The greatest technological wonder of my lifetime, and people treated it as if it were as humdrum as a telephone.

I stretched my breaks as best I could, a minute here, two minutes there…anything I could do to spend more time online. Even when I wasn't on the computer, I thought about the structure of the Internet. I imagined the connections made between widgets as connections between web sites, and more than once I let pieces go down the line unassembled because they didn't "fit" according to the organizational rules in my head.

Things came to a head at the end of the week when I was so intent on my surfing I didn't hear my supervisor telling me break time was over fifteen minutes ago. I heard him when he came up close and yelled, though.

He called me into his office to let me know they were making me redundant. I hate to admit I didn't know what that particular buzzword meant.

He explained it to me, and what it would mean both to me and to my probation officer.

As I rode the bus home, I began formulating a plan. A plan for the biggest, ballsiest hack ever performed: a plan that would show the wannabe phreaks and Joe Averages of the world how a grandmaster played the game.

First I had to complete my understanding of it, in all its complexity. That meant I needed some way to put down, in a permanent form and in lieu of having access to a computer, all the theoretical stuff flying around in my skull.

Back in the day, we plotted things out with graph paper and pen, visually displaying linkages, connections, and routes of passage. And in the absence of modern conveniences, all of us will backtrack in time until reaching a methodology within our means.

I had my one-week paycheck from the plant and, eschewing things like food and toiletries, I hit the office supply store, returning to my ratty apartment with a double armload of stuff.

Again, everything boiled down to connections. Connections between concepts and similar things on the micro level, connections between individual computers and networks made of computers on the macro.

And as I worked, sketching diagrams and drawing links, filling my floor with taped-together sheets of paper, I realized that two dimensions weren't going to be enough.

I went back to the store and picked up toothpicks, Popsicle sticks, and pipe cleaners. One further reflection, I hit a craft store and bought a few skeins of yarn, too.

Back in the apartment, I began work on the second story, punching toothpicks through to link levels of illustrated data. Popsicle sticks linked the outer structure, while pipe cleaners bent and flexed across multiple layers, conveying meaning between even the most disparate points. And yarn wove everywhere, touching everything.

I carried on with my diagram well into the night, a fact I realized when I suddenly came to myself in a pitch-black room, having been toiling away in darkness for who knew how long. With a jolt of worry, I switched on the lights in my front room, afraid that I had reduced my work to scribbles and knots while in my fugue in the blackness.

The structure was perfect. It reached up to the ceiling, and was easily four foot square. I'd incorporated some changes I hadn't been aware of--origami-like bends and folds to increase surface area but minimize volume. It looked like a skyscraper designed by a kindergarten class. That is, until one studied the surface of the paper to see the myriad geometric patterns and formulae written in a script nearly too tiny to read. The different colors of ink I'd used seemed to shimmer in the dim light.

Likewise, the intricate patterns carved onto the surfaces of the Popsicle sticks. I had begun working on them with a penknife, frustrated by my inability to carve on the toothpicks. I fancied I'd need a jeweler's loop for that, else a pair of tiny tweezers to pluck out individual hairs on the surfaces of the pipe cleaners, to likewise describe patterns on their surfaces.

I yawned, then, my accumulated fatigue catching up with me. I stretched, not feeling sore despite spending many hours stuck in one awkward pose after another. If anything, I felt invigorated.

I was finally coming to grips with the nature of the Internet via this Map I had begun creating.

I sacked out on the floor, in case inspiration woke me. As I drifted off, I was lulled to sleep by the sound of the air conditioning rustling through the various levels of the Map.

And as the AC kicked off, just as sleep claimed me I could have sworn I still heard the rustling.

Inspiration didn't wake me, but fear did. Fear in part from knowing that I only had this Sunday left to work on the Map before my probe came to try and line me up another job. But mostly fear from the sudden knowledge that it was a new day, and all that that implied where my work was concerned.

The Internet was in a state of permanent mutation and evolution. Websites were springing up and dying off in the hundreds of thousands every day. Connections were routing and re-routing, improving and degrading.

I would have to work on expanding the Map while simultaneously building a copy reflecting the changes wrought by a single day's activity. And the next day, I would need to create two copies, each interconnecting to that day's version of the Map. Three copies the next day, and on and on, expanding and incrementing with the passage of time.

I hocked my clock radio to buy more construction supplies. I wished I hadn't spent my prison pay on it in the first place: I didn't get back as much as I'd spent on it.

If only I could sell the food in the refrigerator. I wondered if I could sell the refrigerator itself. Doubtful--the place wouldn't pass probation inspection, not to mention selling a furnished appliance would get me evicted. I couldn't move the Map--it was already too unwieldy after a single day's work.

Giving blood? Panhandling? Those things would take me away from the Map and its ever-increasing time demands.

What was I going to do when I had to choose between starting a new job and going back to prison?

Scribble, scribble, scribble. Tape, tape, tape. And damned if I didn't run out of pipe cleaners.

I improvised rather than lose another hour-long round trip by bus to the art store, gluing yarn into rigid shapes to approximate the weird angles I'd have needed the cleaners to occupy.

By the time I snapped back to the real world in total darkness yet again, I had finished the day's work, completed the changes in yesterday's copy, and begun initial projected structural work on tomorrow's Map.

The work might never be completed, but when I finally got my hands on a computer again, my intimate knowledge of the Web would make me unstoppable.

That thought warmed me as I retired for the evening, the susurrus of the Map lulling me to sleep once more.

A knock on the door awakened me. I wasn't sure what time it was, but the sun was up.

My probation officer was at the door. She wore the same expression as always--mild surprise that I hadn't backslid yet, mild annoyance that she still had to deal with me.

"How are we today?" she asked, breezing inside, packed briefcase swinging at her side. 'She looked around the apartment as though preparing to put on white gloves and sweep a fingertip along some surfaces. Then she saw the Map.

"It's…an art project," I said. I moved myself so it didn't look too much like I was ready to leap between her and it.

Luckily, the air conditioner was running, which covered up any unexpected rustling noises the Map might be making.

"I thought I might exhibit it--when it's finished, of course," I said. "You know, like that guy that got out of prison and became a big-time artist."

'She nodded as she studied the Map, like she didn' t know if there was such a person, but didn' t want to appear stupid.

"Well," she said, turning so quickly I thought she'd knock over the Map, "we need to talk about your job situation. I met with your supervisor at the plant, and he mentioned that you seemed to have your head in the clouds a lot, that you were taking a lot of long breaks." She glanced back over at the Map.

"This isn't as big a problem as it might seem," she said. She sat down on the futon, opened her briefcase on my second-hand coffee table. "Re-adjustment is always hard, especially when coming out of prison life."

"Usually a simple, repetitive job is a good way to re-enter," she said. "Nothing too demanding; after all, you've got the whole world to get used to in addition to regular employment." Her eyes kept being drawn back to the Map. She rifled through some papers. "Did you do any art while incarcerated?"

"It's really very unusual," she said. "Maybe you're on to something there. You know, I used to--" She blinked, shook her head, and turned back to her briefcase. "Regardless, we need to get you some steady employment; the judge won't accept "starving artist". Here," and she handed me a paper with some directions on it, "is another lead. They're looking for people to do filing--old-fashioned paper-and-cabinet filing, of course."

She snapped shut her case and stood, shaking my hand. "They'll need you in tomorrow, first thing. Also, I've booked an appointment with a counselor for you the day after tomorrow. He's a former inmate himself, who got his psych degree while in prison. He helps people who are having trouble re-adjusting to the outside."

"He works free," she said. "Don't worry about it. Just concentrate on doing the best job you can." As she spoke, she walked over to the Map again, running her hands over one of its planes.

"It really is extraordinary," she said. "The more you look at it, the more detail you see." After a moment, she blinked again, shook my hand, and left, leaving me staring at the Map. After a while, I picked up my materials and got back to work.

The filing job barely lasted a single day. I overslept, and it was all down hill from there. By the time I had completely re-structured their filing system top to bottom (it didn't make any sense the way they had it set up, dammit, not like the Map did), I had been called into the boss's office and told I was being downsized.

As I got home from the bus ride, I opened the door and found that all of it--losing another job, disappointing my probation officer again, getting one step closer to prison, wasting a day with that idiotic filing when I could have been here doing worthwhile work--all of it paled in comparison to what I found once I stepped through my front door.

Beyond messing with it, actually--they had been rebuilding sections of it wholesale, reconfiguring it in toto.

And as I surveyed what I thought was damage, the realization swept over me: the mystery person had actually made the Map better. The architectural logic didn't go step-to-step anymore; it flowed.

As I studied the remade Map, looking for any defects, fully aware that those defects would require me to start the whole process over again, I could hear the rustling noises again.

And as I peered in close to check some tiny, sketched-in equations, I could see their source.

Miniscule ink lines spread through the paper, re-writing diagrams on the fly. Small tendrils of yarn branched off from the main strands, weaving new connections micrometers-long. The toothpicks and Popsicle sticks were sprouting like Bonsai.

With a proud parent's grin on my face, I left the Map to its work and went to bed, to the first full night's restful sleep I'd had in years.

It had grown to fill half of the living area by the time I woke up. I gave it a friendly pat as I walked by, feeling the pure mathematics of it quivering under my hand.

I spent most of the day sitting, watching it self-construct. The light seemed to take longer passing through the windows, longer for the sun to set overall.

As the shadows of the day settled, there was a knock at the door. I stood, knowing it was my probation officer, but unafraid of that fact. I could return to prison. The Map would endure, just as a child lives on after its parents die.

An unfamiliar man stood in the doorway, his expression going from impatience to fake-smile in a second.

"I'm Banks," he said, shaking my hand. "The psychologist? I was expecting you at my office, but I know how tough it can be to get across town sometimes--thought I'd make a house call instead."

"Come in," I said out of reflex. There was barely enough room for me to maneuver inside now.

"Thanks. I tell you, today felt like it went on forev-- Geez, you've got one of those things too?" He pointed at the Map, staring.

"Your probation officer! I went by to pick up your file from her, and she was building one of these things. I could barely tear her away from it." He stepped closer. "What is it, some kind of feng shui thing?"

"Riiiight," Banks said. "Well," and he looked in vain for somewhere to put his briefcase, "I'd like to start tonight by talking about your job--why you think you might have been let go."

"Okay," he said, nodding. "And did you talk to your supervisor about the system? Was it something about" and he referred to a file, "the assembly line you didn't understand?"

"Not the assembly line," I said, not looking at him. "I mean the filing job I lost yesterday."

His eyes widened. "You've lost a second job? Your probate didn't tell me about that; she was too busy fooling around with…" He trailed off, looking at the Map, and then at me.

"Look," he said. "I don't really know you, but I know displacement when I see it. This thing gives you comfort, right?"

"That's from the regimentation of prison--the repetitive routines. But as much as this helps you, as therapeutic as it might be, you can't let it affect your job. You have to find a balance."

"This is my job now," I said. "And it balances me perfectly." I smiled at him. "You should try it yourself."

"Golf takes up enough of my time," he said, trying to sound light and jovial but failing. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a little portable phone, punching at its surface.

"Who are you calling?" I asked, and his expression gave me my answer. I slapped the phone to the ground, seeing three numbers on its display: 911.

I grabbed Banks and marched him over to the Map, ignoring his shouts of protest. I had a foot and a hundred pounds of prison exercise-yard muscle on him; he wasn't going anywhere.

I held his head nose-close to the Map and watched his eyes. They went from fear to confusion to fascination within seconds.

I gave Banks my extra building materials for his own project seed. As he left, he turned and gave me the smile I'd been wearing the previous night.

And as I leaned in to study the latest developments, I saw what he was talking about:

Miniature pixels, flickering phosphor-dots, flowed in-between the spaces of the Map, making adjustments, correcting flaws. As I watched, they moved as though alive.

The day--if it was a day--seemed even longer than the last one, stretching and distorting itself to match the increasingly non-Euclidian interior of the Map. It was a day that lasted for weeks.

The colors, the shapes inhabiting the Map, continued to maintain and build the structure which contained them, their very interaction changing their environment around them.

And at some point in that endless day, we ran out of room. The Map had built itself around me as I sat, Buddha-like, in the middle of the floor. The inhabitants fell back on themselves, colors streaking with black discordance, their dance of construction stalemated. Their infinite universe had suddenly developed a nasty case of limitations.

They burrowed small holes in the adjoining wall, threading themselves and some strands of yarn through to the next apartment over.

Shortly after, I could hear his encouraging murmurs as he answered his own question.

Buddha-like. It reminded me of twenty years ago, when a friend of mine, equally into computers as he was transcendentalism, pointed out that a map of the UNIX kernel resembled nothing so much as a mandala design.

I wondered if, somewhere within the depths of this new reality being born, forms and hues were beginning to cohere into something like a tiny figure--a figure that was learning to build its own Map.

Or perhaps the larger reality around me existed in some once-aimless ex-con's cosmically huge fleabag apartment.

The day continued stretching, and I could see the Map brushing the walls of my apartment, eating a clock that had added hours--thirteen, fourteen--to its face in a vain attempt to continue existing. The Map then moved to consume a calendar that had germinated an extra day, all to cling to an outmoded system of measurement of time, of space.

The doors and windows had burst open at some point, and through them I could see not a world being taken by the Map, but a world of Maps spreading from other locales to mesh with this one, to share, to evolve in concert. To connect.

My skin is paper; my prison tattoos lines of data and mathematical import. My veins are yarn, my tongue a tongue depressor.

Tomorrow, we leave behind archaic days and months and seconds and years to achieve something that works: something right.

Tomorrow, the Map and everything in it will grow, will increase, will expand and spread, re-building its unknowable self over again, past, present, and future all in one.

Postcards From the Monkey Trial

M uch of the country and a big chunk of the world have followed the most recent attack on the Theory of Evolution. Yet again, the forces that oppose have directed their attention to the children. Where are minds most vulnerable? Where they are most malleable. What is the easiest way to turn opinions? By building false dichotomies.

Over the course of several nail-biting weeks, my students and I were frequent attendees at the federal courthouse in Harrisburg, PA, where the Dover School Board fought to thrust biblical concepts of creationism into science curricula. Folks interested in such things know already that it didn' t happen. They lost. The front page of Harrisburg's Patriot-News pronounced "NOT SCIENCE" in the biggest headline font since Dewey won the Presidency.

With an 80 year gap, Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. recapitulated the Scopes Monkey Trial with one exception. In the Scopes Trial, John Scopes was prosecuted for including a discussion of evolution in his high school biology class, which was, at the time, illegal. Here in Pennsylvania the Dover School Board attempted to force a discussion of creationism into the high school biology classroom, which is, as it happens, illegal.

In 1925 Mr. Scopes was found guilty. He was fined $100. Ok--he did break the law. But it was a law that the country found ludicrous and the world found laughable. The high profile position of the case led to the repeal of the anti-evolution statutes and enlightenment sidled into high school science class – a good thing even if it did take 42 years for it to happen. Here at the federal courthouse in Harrisburg, PA, anno Domini nostri Iesu Christi 2005 the law prevented a theocratic skew from overshadowing scientific reason. But they' ll be back. They always come back. Always.

The history of religious control is a long one. Discussions of the nature and origin of the firmament hold particular import. The creation myth has driven numerous judicial atrocities from the well-known house arrest of Galileo to the lesser-known burning of Giordano Bruno who, among other things, maintained the heresy of a universe containing an infinity of worlds and civilizations. Given the number of folks who would openly agree with Giordano today, they would need one big bonfire.

The problem is that many that have achieved some modicum of authority today hold the same convictions as those good torch-bearers who lit the kindling piled about Giordano's bound feet. Rumor on the street is that a ranking member of our state government here in Pennsylvania recently pontificated on the origin of the Grand Canyon. The rumor asserts he claimed that the gorge formed when the Great Waters of Noah's flood were in the process of receding and the Ark didn' t have enough depth to float. Noah's boat scraped over the south-western section of North America digging out what was to become one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

In 1654 Archbishop Usher of Ireland data-mined his source material and worked out the moment of creation. He did this by counting out all the begets and begats and begorrahs as listed in the Old Testament. Employing the specificity of genealogy, he announced the Earth's birth to be 26 October 4004 BC at 9:00 AM. As I write this, following the good bishop's calculations, the Earth is 6008 years, 94 days, zero hours and 38 minutes old. If so inclined, you can get out your calculators and follow in the footsteps of the church elder to figure out exactly when I sat typing this missive to you.

As my students and I watched the Harrisburg trial unfold, two questions seemed to dominate. First, what should be considered evidence for evolution, and what should not. Anything that was complex or poorly understood was used by the Dover School Board to "disprove" evolution -- such an incorrect way to build an argument that it's hardly worth while to discuss why. Second, what is the basic premise behind "intelligent design"? Here the school board insisted that religion played no role in the development of their convictions. But how do you remove God from Christianity? You can' t.

I must admit to an almost perverse enjoyment of hypocrisy. It doesn' t always solve problems or disagreements, but it sure does throw light on the players. The Christians who tag-teamed on the witness stand all discussed their desire to be open minded concerning issues. Yet all seemed to claim their viewpoint -- advocating the introduction of intelligent design into the biology curriculum -- had no basis in religious belief. None. They affected confusion at the very implication that it was. Judge John E. Jones III called them on this point in his written opinion. He expressed his disappointment at the level of dishonesty in a group of people promoting Christian values. Judge Jones is a mensch with a doctorate in jurisprudence and a Bush-appointed seat on the federal bench to boot!

Conversations I had with one of the plaintiffs' lawyers outside the courtroom addressed the hypocrisy. Considerations for charges of perjury were bantered about during recess periods that seem to have been forgotten.

And what of the good people of Dover, PA? How did they deal with these school board members? They voted the scoundrels out. Every one of them. There was some whining: "It's not fair!" But they're gone. You have undoubtedly heard that Pat Robertson weighed in declaring the town of Dover, PA "godless" and promising them that God will not help them when disaster strikes. Of course God will protect this bloviator who sees himself free to declare a Christian fatwa on a Venezuelan politician or call down a curse on an American town nestled in the Pennsylvanian heartland.

So listen carefully to the smallest noises emanating from the people trying to "take care" of you. Keep your eyes open for these folks. Protect your children. Protect yourselves. The creationists are insidious and active. They have no use for knowledge that is not directly in line with their indoctrinated view of the world and netherworld. And only through constant vigilance can we be sure to keep reason in the schools. Watch, listen and most of all vote! Because if you don't, you may be making the acquaintance of Giordano Bruno before you're quite ready.

S et came to her chamber
When darkness fell
Over endless sands beside
The life-giving river,
A young Queen, naïve,
Unschooled and beautiful.

She could not refuse a God,
Couldn't know the Mask he wore
Was not the one Caesar saw,
Nor Anthony when his time came,
Or that the words he whispered
While teaching a man's pleasures,
How to bend them to her will,
Condemned her to a twisted path
Leading to a moonless night
When he would visit one last time,
Place a small basket in her hands,
Smile, and walk away.

The Passion: a Western

Bruce McAllister

"This story, whatever its virtues and vices, has been thirty years in the making--beginning with a tropical-storm, lightning-strike bus accident in Mexico in l974. In the 80's the story went through a number of incarnations--all of them bloody--but not until Mel Gibson's movie appeared did the blood finally make sense. I'm grateful to Mel, and hope that Clint--whom I do admire--will forgive me."

C LINT STARES OUT THE WINDOW at a town of red dust and adobe. He's seventy-five years old, for God's sake, and hasn't made a western in years, but it's a western. He's younger--he can feel it in his bones--and though he can't see Leone's bright blue chair or hear Morricone's score, it's a western. It's got to be.

This is Mantos, a voice says suddenly. It's the script, of course. They never used voice-over in films like this.

It's a quaint but somehow disturbing town, the voice adds. How pretentious. It's got to be Sergio's. Who else would write like this?

He's waiting for someone. He can feel it. They're in this town on a mission. The script doesn't have to tell him. But what mission?

He'll have to wait for clarification--and his partner. Is it Paul? Bob? Hank? Lee? John? Someone new? He squints--it's one of his trademarks--but he can't remember.

Figures in loose white garments cross and re-cross the street, like dogs in a John Ford flick, and he knows this pattern should probably mean something, too, but what?

The figures disappear, and now, behind his eyes, in their place, float immense white flowers like the dogwood blossoms of his own country's capital, so far away now.

It's Easter, the script says, and it's true. The evidence is everywhere: The little parade of people coming toward him up the dusty street, the stiff white Christs on crosses held upright and swaying in dark hands, and, leading the parade, the homemade figures of Our Lady strapped tightly to mules and burros.

He's got to go to church. Whether it's the script or just his conscience doesn't matter. He's got to do it. If he doesn't, he'll never know what's happening here.

He can remember going to church with his family when he was a kid, the Sundays, the blue-eyed Jesuses in their white robes on all those posters in the Sunday School room. He hasn't been to church in fifty years, and he feels it now: the guilt.

When the mission starts, there will be no time, the voice says. It's true. It has to be. The script is always right.

It won't have his partner's name on it because he doesn't know what the hell it is.

He chooses a church on the narrow, anxious highway between Mantos and the industrial sprawl of San Tomas. He recognizes the road, but nothing else.

He‘s barely aware of the long mountainous ride in the bus, but that's okay. He's here now--at the church he's chosen--and that's what matters.

The bus has stopped beside two others at a grassless plaza where a single bench sits in the shade of an ancient pepper tree. The bench is empty. The little plaza is flanked on two sides by walls of a converted mission. The walls are topped with broken glass and the windows in those walls have bars. On one wall the words "COMMUNITY PRISON"--written in the language of this country, which he somehow knows--are flaking away.

He crosses the street, wondering how the land can be so dry and hostile this near the ocean, this close to the unpruned lushness of San Tomas.

To reach the church, he's got to cross the corner of an open-air market filled with ramshackle stalls. As he nears the low wall that surrounds the church and starts through it with four other tourists, it happens.

A man wearing a dirty poncho--one with a garish Our Lady of Guadalupe painted on it--jumps from the shadows of a stall and begins shouting.

The man's pronunciation is strange. The r's are German. The man can barely get the words out. There's German blood everywhere south of the border, Irish too, but you don't hear it in the language like this, he remembers.

He shouldn't stop, but the shouting holds onto him. The figure painted on the poncho isn't Guadalupe at all, he sees, but a whore in a satin robe with cleavage and a halo. He's got the feeling, the presentiment, that this dark man knows something--that he may even know, when the actor doesn't, what the mission is going to be.

When the actor doesn't move, the man reaches out like lightning to pluck at his sleeve. The actor doesn't pull away. He lets the poor man do it, the voice says. He's got to. It's his nature. His destiny. It's familiar, this plucking. His mother plucked at him like this when he was a kid; and her mother, too, his grandmother, who shared their green-stucco home for years. It made him feel ashamed. You're a bad boy, the plucking said.

"You think you can, motherfucker," the man is saying suddenly in English, the r's just as guttural. This man, an indigena but clearly a bilingual one, is drunk and angry. Saliva gathers at the corners of his mouth like milk--like the palest blood.

"You always do," the man babbles on. "Why? Why do you?" The man waits for an answer, and the actor doesn't have one. He has no idea what the man is talking about.

"We are not so stupid!" He grabs the actor's sleeve again, hangs on and pulls him up to his sweaty face, to the bristles and alien breath.

This man, the actor sees now, doesn't know anything about the mission. He's just drunk, angry with his wife for some reason he won't even remember when the liquor fades.

The actor breaks the man's grip, steps quickly through the low wall and hurries toward the church, the one he's chosen on his own, without his partner's help, maybe even without the script's.

He looks back once. The indigena is there in his dirty poncho, open-mouthed, waiting.

The little church is disappointing. It can't be what Sergio wants. It doesn't remind him of the churches he attended as a kid, the Sunday School room, the adults in their Sunday best and he in his tight little suit.

He thinks the floor is solid dirt, but when it sounds hollowly under his boots, he sees it's wood covered by lifetimes of dust. This isn't the really disappointing thing, though. What's pathetic is the decor. The religious paintings of this saint and that, Our Lady of the Crosses, Our Lady of the Bougainvillea, other Ladies, other saints--all of them crude and far too "busy." If this is what the director chose, it's another director. It must be Michael or Bob. Sergio hated "busy." He'd shout, "Ingombro! Too busy!" He liked it clean as a samurai sword, he'd say, and everyone would nod.

The place is a wreck. The pews are black enamel and flaking. The arches are so uneven he feels vertigo. The walls are a nightmare of unpatched cracks--like chasms--and the material of the walls is doughy, like a thigh dimpled with fat.

It's frontier craftsmanship, he knows--a poor imitation of continental, Iberian work. He's read enough to know this. It can't be part of their mission. It's like an aside, a joke. One of Cobb's maybe.

The church is empty except for two old women in black peasant dresses seated at the front, bereaved. Both are hunchbacks. Why?

Their presence has meaning, the voice says. What meaning? And where are the other tourists? They were heading into the church, weren't they?

When he catches sight at last of a head, pale and still as if dead, it's in an alcove and he hurries toward it. It's in the script, so he's got to do it.

As he steps into the alcove, he sees the blood. It covers everything. The alcove is small and windowless, and the blood fills it.

In each of the four corners a life-size plaster figure stands on a little black stand. Each is covered with blood.

He goes to the nearest figure. It has an ax imbedded in its shoulder, cleaving it down through the plaster ribs. Blood covers it like a robe. The head tips against the uncleaved shoulder and the eyes, cast imploringly up, bulge, as if the suffering of an entire people were behind them. The whites of the eyes are without blemish. The pupils are darkest night and the irises rings of perfect Della Robbia blue, the color of the plump porcelain sparrows his first wife kept for years on a mahogany tea service they never used.

The figure's slick flesh fills him with nausea as he tries to get it. The face is childlike. The figure looks like a child bleeding to death. Is that what the director wants?

The saint's hands are contorted in prayer, and in front of the figure--in front of each of the four saints in their corners--sits a dark box on a metal stand. Each box has a coin slot. On the cracked wall behind each saint hangs a little bulletin board--a milagro board of red satin pinned with little hearts, medallions, other charms of tin and flaking paint. The satin is faded, yet here and there it isn't. Hearts and charms have been removed, and where they once were the satin is as red as it must've been at the beginning. Why are they missing? This doesn't make any sense either.

Nothing here makes sense, he tells himself, but that's just not true. If he could just read the script, he'd know.

As he moves to the next figure, he recognizes it--the saint standing in front of him--even with all the blood covering it. The two dozen arrows in its chest, stomach and groin are sunk to within an inch of their feathers. He knows the saint's name, in fact; and he can feel, because any good actor would, what it would be like to have the arrows in him.

Any man hated for his goodness by those less good is a saint. Would Sergio put it this way? He's not sure.

He gets it now. He gets, as if in a burst of delirious light, what the sameness means--

It's a miracle, he knows--that he has seen this, this meaning that may or may not be in the script.

The litany goes on and on, moving and miraculous, but a little tedious; and when he tries, he can't get it to stop.

When it does, he's exhausted and alone. Even the hunchbacks are gone from the pews.

He feels the misgivings once more, but goes ahead and steps up to the third saint.

The eyes have been gouged out. Black blood drains from the sockets to the figure's naked feet.

Black blood? The metaphoric darkness of our blindness? The true color of our suffering and lack of grace?

He's not sure about it, but they're all good possibilities, aren't they? Auteur directors aren't the only ones who can see.

The fourth saint has no visible wounds, but the blood is just as copious. It flows from the open mouth, from under the fingernails and from the nose in streams thick as ropes. It won't, of course, stop.

The actor understands now--in the kind of epiphany he never ever felt in the old movies--the very purpose of this room:

To show us more blood than the West has ever seen and by this to show us how generous and inhuman anything holy is, bleeding forever, world without end.

As he turns to leave, what needs to happen whether it's in the script or not does indeed happen:

He sees the mission at last, and now that he does, who his partner is doesn't matter.

It's his mission, he sees now--and his alone. It was his job all along, no one else's.

He rushes from the church and makes his way to the open-air market where he buys a thick, short-handled shovel whose blade has been welded from old coffee cans.

Back in the alcove, he grasps the shovel tightly in his right hand--knuckles turning white as plaster--and draws the fleshy base of his thumb across a jagged corner of the metal.

It takes two attempts to produce blood, and he adds a third for the sake of symbolism, the kind Sergio or Bob would love--trivial though it may be in the face of everything else that is about to happen.

But the cut is messy. The blood is slow in coming. It's not at all as generous and holy as he hoped it would be.

The Man With No Name stands there patiently, hand over the coin slot of the nearest box. The blood isn't going to drop. Even when he shakes his hand, it won't fall.

He shakes his hand so hard the fingers snap, but instead of falling, the blood flies to the milagro board, anointing the charms and bright silhouettes.

His hand hurts like hell now, but what can he do? He hears a sound and looks around. He has two companions in the alcove--not the hunchbacks, but two young women in trendy clothes, sitting in chairs he didn't notice before, watching him as so many women have before, thinking him handsome, boyish but rugged. He doesn't look seventy-five, that's for sure.

In tears he steps to the saint behind the box--whatever its name--smears its face with the blood on his hand, and sees the final symbolism:

Outside in the sunlight, he knows he should be happy with how he's handled this part of the mission, but he's not. He wonders what his partner is doing. It shouldn't matter---it's his mission, no one else's--but he's feeling the old doubt again.

It's tempting, this doubt, the voice says suddenly, and he smiles. The script is back. Things will be clear in a moment.

When he is back in Mantos--unable to remember the return bus ride--he wants very much to leave the bus, but he can't. The script says he can't, so he sits there.

He sits in the bus staring at his hands, both of them pale and free of wounds and any trace of blood now.

That's wrong. He isn't sitting on a bus looking at his hands at all. What was he thinking? He's just left the church and is moving like a bat out of hell to an open-air market near the dead-grass plaza, the zocalo, where he buys two dented cans and fills them with gasoline from a rusty pump near the buses. No one tries to stop him.

In the center of the plaza he sets fire to himself, starting with the blue windbreaker his first wife gave him. He wonders how long it will take his boots, the ones she also gave him, to burn.

The indigenas, mestizos and turistas look on dully, but he hears the whistling now, Morricone's score, so it's got to be right.

He leaves the church, yes, but when he reaches the front steps, he stops instead and begins to urinate on them.

The drunk who shouted at him earlier stands by the low wall, smiling in approval. He walks toward the actor and in a moment has joined him. They're able to wet down three steps before the policia stop them.

The drunk dies of chest wounds. The actor takes a round below the ribs, but lives.

He leaves the alcove of the church. The indigena who shouted at him earlier stands at the opening in the low wall. When the actor looks at him, the man makes a series of frantic, obscene gestures with his hands, all of which the actor understands and does forgive.

"You are wrong about her," the actor says, loudly enough that the man can hear him out in the murderous sunlight and wind. "You know not what you've done. She loved you more than you will ever know, yet you turned away from her. Culpa tua, my son."

The drunk flips him off, screams something about his puta wife, and the actor turns away.

He walks on toward the zocalo, which is now on a high gray hill, the thunderheads of a storm hanging over it like a dirty sock.

Behind him the drunk is screaming in fury, the German r's sputtering like a machine pistol and the words sounding strangely Latin. Lupa vilis est! the drunk seems to be shouting. A vile whore she is!

None of them understands me, the actor tells himself, forgiving himself this moment of self-pity and in any case having no trouble feeling the necessary mercy and love for others.

He's got to try again. This mission--whether he's got a partner or not--demands it. It's in the script. Whether he can hear the voice or not, it's all as clear to him now as a cloudless Sunday in childhood.

Walking back to the drunk, he says gently, "You're the man your father should have been, and the man your sister should have married. This will be clear to you in time, but for now take this gun--the one in the dust at our feet--and use it for justice, for your people."

The drunk, spittle hanging from the corners of his mouth like a blessing, a charm, picks up the gun and fires.

The shot rings out like a hammer on a Roman helmet, like a lone son's cry in the wilderness, and the actor lies dying on the earth of this distant country so much like any other.

As the actor gets up, returns to the church and steps from the doorway again--because he must, because the script demands it--it's the last take, he realizes, and understands in the kind of epiphany few actors ever have that Paul or Hank or John or whoever his partner happens to be will not be at the rendezvous point. That he, the Man With No Name, will indeed have to carry out the mission by himself. That on his own he will have to do what the director in his insanity wants: Start the epidemic of Pasteurella pestis, the Black Death, which this country needs if it is going to be free.

It's simple enough. He's the vector. He'll crack the hollow tooth in his jaw of perfect teeth, and the bacilli will spread. The plague will destabilize the corrupt, racist, fascist oligarchy of this country and the regime that has cursed this country for so many generations will fall in a symphony of justice--

He's immune, of course. He's an asymptomatic carrier. The script says so. He won't die of lymphatic buboes or toxin damage to kidneys, brain and lungs, like so many will, guilty and innocent alike. Yet he will indeed die before the mission is through, and it will be an old, rusty revolver that takes him.

Everything is sepia-toned, like an old photograph---and behind his eyes he sees a stagecoach slowing, two young men jumping from a cliff, another young man chewing on a cigar, many many things--but none of them matters. He can move now, with or without the voice telling him what to do, and he'll keep moving until it's over. He'll take the same damn bus. He'll take it toward the capital of dark-skinned people where he will, before it is over, find a woman dark, passionate and different enough from the pale women he has known that he can die for her, at her hand, the gun going off as they roll on the bed, and by doing so die for us all.

I f your thing is reading well-written literary science fiction, you may already have read Bruce McAllister's works. If you haven't yet heard of Mr. McAllister, then I'd like to make the introduction. His publishing credits include stories in Asimov's, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the legendary Omni magazine, as well as The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies, and the Joyce Carol Oates anthology American Gothic Tales. He has edited anthologies with one of sf's luminaries, Harry Harrison, and has been nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. His novel Dream Baby (Tor/St.Martin's) laid bare the horror of the Vietnam War through the eyes of the fantastic. He has also written on popular science and sports topics for such magazines as Life and International Wildlife. He was away from the fantasy and science fiction field for over a decade and is, he reports, very happy to be back.

Bruce is a multi-faceted person. In addition to being a writer and a former professor, he's also a screenplay consultant, public relations specialist, lay archeologist and marine biologist, poet, and father--a renaissance man for these troubling times.

ML: You have an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, and taught creative writing at the University of Redlands for twenty years. Do you believe that a degree in Creative Writing is essential for a science fiction writer?

BM: Thanks for the very kind introduction, Michael, and for a great set of questions. I'm red-faced; but, actually, now that I think about it, I do think being a father takes being a "renaissance man" at times. As far as your MFA question goes: Absolutely not. That is, until MFA programs-- the majority and the best--become receptive to genre fiction--which I doubt will ever happen and which I'm not sure is necessary or even a good thing. MFA programs are part of academe and the literary community; they're attached officially or by spirit to Literature departments; they reflect a literary-"canonical" way of thinking--which is important to literary art, sure--but that way of thinking just doesn't include genre fiction. There are a few MFA exceptions to this these days, but they're the less influential and less prestigious programs. The main reasons to get an MFA are (l) to be able, if you want this experience, to work with other literary -fiction-minded writers for two years in a workshop-intensive program and (2) to come away with a graduate degree that allows you, if you have publications, to teach in a national college and university system that ranges from community colleges to private and public four-year institutions. But very few science fiction and genre-fantasy writers want or need this kind of experience, and that's as it should be.

However: science fiction is the only genre of genre writing that has ever wanted to be "literary" or experimental (see the New Wave of the 60s and 70s); and it also shares its soul with three literary traditions that have been blessed by academe and the literary community: The utopian/dystopian novel, the gothic novel, and, more recently, magical realism. This makes sf the only genre of genre fiction that ranges from highly genre storytelling (storytelling that wouldn't be of any interest whatsoever to the leading MFA programs) through quite literary, character-driven, realistic, magical, gothic or political-satirical fiction that academe and the literary community do bless. Have I written in my career sf or fantasy that I might use in an MFA workshop? Yes. Like Michael Bishop, John Kessel, Karen Joy Fowler, Barry Malzberg and countless others in our field (not to mention those New Wave writers of the 60s and 70s), I've written f&sf stories that could sneak their way i nto an MFA workshop and, depending on the program, get away with it. But I wrote those stories simply to write them--as a writer, and as one not aware until afterward that I'd written something that might be "literary." All of those stories in my case, in fact, would, yes, be classified as "magical realism."

The strange thing about literary fiction--and we're talking here about MFA programs and literary quarterlies and the mindset of the literary community--is that you can have the same story, and I mean literally the same story (this has happened to me recently); and if you use the word "witch&rdsquo; in it in only four places, the literary community considers it a genre story; but if you remove the four instances of the word witch (while of course keeping the witch's behavior the same), it's now a literary story. That's pretty silly if you think about it, and speaks more of publishing categories and sub-cultural schools of thinking than it does literature or storytelling; and to make the entire either/or duality even sillier, literary fiction that is new and attracts readers these days often is fiction that borrows from genre motifs and ways of thinking. At the same time, highly genre storytelling is just that--storytelling in which the goal is to tell very directly (with a transparent style that serves story and doesn't call "artistic" attention to itself, and with characterization that is sufficient for reader engagement but would never claim to be a full exploration of the human condition) a story that engages and continues to engage the reader in an entertaining but also often educational way. That kind of fiction has no place in current MFA programs; and that's okay. That kind of fiction is glorious enough because it's got a much, much larger readership and its ancestral roots are in the most powerful storytelling of all--myth, legend, fable, fairytale, Gilgamesh, Homer, metaphysical and scientific speculation, on and on. The literary novel as we know it has been around for less than five hundred years.

All of this is terribly academic, I realize, and for a little more excitement here's fodder for those who wish to bash MFA programs and the literary community (as I did when I was younger and saw things a littler less contextually): The first night of my MFA workshop in l969, as a young sf writer, I sensed something I'd never felt in the f&sf field, namely, that the enemy wasn't outside that room but inside it. In the f&sf world I'd grown up in editors like Fred Pohl, Ed Ferman, Terry Carr, David Gerrold (yes, David Gerrold), and Judy Merrill (and later, after the MFA, Harry Harrison and Barry Malzberg; and much much later, Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois) had been incredibly generous, caring and supportive; readers had been too; and in fact the entire field, because of that be-loyal-to-your-own attitude of the often-mentioned "ghetto" roots of the field, felt like family. The "enemy," if there was one, was outside. But that night I sensed something different. I also sensed an incredibly dismissive attitude from some of my classmates--one of them who would go on to win a Pulitzer for minimalist fiction--toward genre fiction, if not downright contempt and antagonism. So I took two of my published sf stories--stories that had not only been published in sf magazines and reprinted in anthologies, but also reprinted in college textbooks--typed them out as new stories, and workshopped them; and, as I'd predicted, they were royally trashed by the more influential of my workshop peers. I knew then what I needed to know, and I spent the rest of my two years in the program writing experimental "literary" fiction (with the exception of my master's thesis, which was indeed an sf novel and the first ever used for an MFA degree, I'm told--but how that was pulled off is another story).

Besides, we've got Clarion if we want workshops that take both (a) artfulness of fiction (character, style, etc.) and (2) genre elements seriously--which no prestigious MFA program anywhere in the nation does.

ML: As a literary academic what is your opinion of the once-termed dime store science fiction or fantasy novel, i.e., the Dungeons & Dragons-influenced trilogies, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels, X-Files novels, the Star Wars and Star Trek novels et al? Do they have cultural validity beyond frivolous pop culture fodder?

BM: My mother was an underdog-championing cultural anthropologist who also taught sociology and psychology. She was without snobbery or pretension, and she was half of the parental influence on my brother and me as we traveled in a Navy family whose head was an apolitical, totally non-jingoistic gentle Cold War warrior. That means that I was raised in the behavioral sciences with a real sense of diversity and democratic embrace. Which means that I have always had a great interest in popular culture. Which means that it's impossible for me not to be interested in what you call the "dime-store" product. I enjoy it, but in addition, like literary critic Leslie Fiedler (more about him in a moment), I'm also mesmerized by it intellectually--by what it is as a product and relic of our wonderful evolutionary wet-wiring and as dynamic elements in culture and society. Sure, I got tired of Buffy the TV Show after watching a couple of episodes, but that's fine; and I've never been a D&D fan; but I was a Star Wars fan. I wish I liked the new Battlestar Galactica more than I do, but I don't; but I can watch any low-budget creature feature and watch it again and again while those around me go numb and leave for more beer and pizza. But because I'm a %ldquo;jaws & claws & paws" addict, low-budget creature features--because their craft (yes, they have craft) is so transparent--have taught me a lot about storytelling; and one of my idols anyway is fiction writer and filmmaker John Sayles--who not only has won O. Henry Prize awards for his fiction, but also made films as varied (genre through family through character-driven "art") as Alligator, The Secret of Roan Inish and The Return of the Secaucus Seven. He too knows no snobberies and is interested in storytelling more than anything else: its craft, its human heart; my kind of guy.

So, yes, I take all the pop culture stuff seriously as a lay sociologist and anthropologist. Not taking it seriously in that way is like going to the Calico Early Man site in the Mojave Desert--where the surface of the alluvial fan is covered with at least thirty thousand years of tool-workshop artifacts and 60 feet below that with at least 150,000 years of artifacts) --and ignoring a crudely done tool (yes, some of those guys were more talented than others, while some never got out of midlist with their tool publishers) simply because it's crudely done by high-tool-art standards. Hierarchical canonical artistic thinking--a relic of the humanities--has little place in the sciences, as we know; but if we didn't want to create beautiful things we wouldn't be human; and as Joseph Campbell once said (for those of a transcendental bent), "We create the most beautiful things we can in order to touch the face of God." (I confess, I have a mystic's transcendental bent and always have. In fact, I'm one of those people who in any argument over whether sf is mainly "theological"/transcendental or secular/rational/atheistic--and there have been such arguments--argues on the side of sense-of-wonder's being transcendental and of Einstein's "cosmic religious feeling," i.e., "As a scientist I have spent my life discovering that what I thought I knew I didn't know, that there is always something beyond." The use of reason to achieve the mystical. Anyway, my own f&sf over the decades shouldn't leave anyone surprised by this confession.)

Leslie Fiedler, by the way--a guy whose spirit I've always liked--was a literary critic but a social scientist at heart, too. He viewed anything produced by popular culture as worth looking at and taking seriously from a cultural-product point of view even it didn't meet the hierarchical paradigmatic standards of high art or high literature. I'm congenitally unable not to share this view of things. Does it mean that I don't like high art? Of course I like high art--because aesthetics when they're met in sophisticated ways are wonderful things. It's just that, like Fiedler, I'm also fascinated by society, culture and the human psyche. I also can't imagine that most science fiction writers, given their interdisciplinary reflexes and sense of wonder and everything else, aren't more Fiedlerian than Hierarchical Scholar-Critic. It's in the nature of the genre, I think. Which is not to say you have to like TV's Buffy or X-Files or comics or graphic novels or The Animatrix (which I do--since it was created by very bright, very creative people who love Japanese comic art as art; and many of the best popular-cultural products are indeed produced by people like that, e.g. Lucas and Jackson). Within science fiction we have our tastes and standards. There are sf and fantasy writers I just can't read, but that's more about me than about them. Some f&sf writers I loved when I was very young I just can't read now; but I love knowing that 16-year-olds fall in love with them again in each new generation. There are first kisses in life, first boyfriends and girlfriends, but also first senses-of-wonder. If we're not impressionable early in life, life doesn't take, as the feral raised-in-the-Black-Forest children of history could certainly tell you (if they could speak or interact socially, which of course they can't).

ML: One reviewer of your seminal work Dream Baby called it an "Apocalypse Now meets X-Files" novel. Do you feel that analogy is a fair assessment, or does it unfairly trivialize the novel?

BM: I work with new screenwriters a lot, and with a few more established ones, and Hollywood pitching is part of it, whether it's in meeting or in query letter. The reviewer you're quoting is simply doing the "Jaws meets dogs" kind of pitch and description Hollywood is both famous and infamous for. He is trying economically to convey to his own readers a sense of the novel; and that phrase is probably going to make readers more excited than "a novel that is a mixture of horror, sf, fantasy, war novel and psychological thriller" would. Dream Baby is a novel written by that kid from the MFA program who, after getting that MFA and writing both experimental fiction and poetry for a while to find a place in academe and the literary community, couldn't get f&sf (and horror and thrillers) out of his system; so he brought it all to bear, as writers do, on and in a novel years later. That novel was reviewed in the media as horror, war novel, sf, fantasy and psychological thriller--all of those genres and separately--and that's all I needed to hear to know it was the book I'd hoped it would be. Also, I was indeed an X-Files fan--how could I not be (thriller genre, gothic claustrophobia, government-conspiracy paranoia, f&sf elements)? ----but I have been known to complain that actually I beat both China Beach and X-Files to their territory with DB in 1988--but Hollywood failed to notice. Sigh….

Since it may be of interest to young writers if not older and wiser readers, I'm going to say a few words about Dream Baby: DB was a l5-year project. I started it for two reasons: (l) survivors guilt--the feeling that others had gone in my place to the Vietnam conflict while I had creatively avoided it; and (2) a desire to really learn what that war--which I'd avoided--had been about. While #2 remained for a long time, #1 disappeared pretty quickly as the Vietnam vets I began to interview (200 in all by the time everything was done, with 30 of them serving as fully involved consultants on the novel--after all, I hadn't gone, so I couldn't write a one-man's-war novel, could I? --and I needed them--and they kindly obliged. They had no problem accepting my 60s young-man's politics. As journalists discover all of the time, and as George in Winesburg, Ohio made famous, people want their stories told, and politics just don't matter when someone comes along who really wants to hear them. Before long I was counting among my best friends a one-armed former Green Beret captain who'd buried gold leaf in the mountains of Laos, a 101st Airborne light weapons specialist who'd come back mysteriously untouched from six major battles (read a used copy of the novel to find out why), a former Air Force intel captain who'd briefed the Oval Office and gotten into trouble for telling the truth, a CIA nurse (yes, there were CIA nurses), and others who wanted, as I did, to get at the Truth--to put it in a novel that was on the one hand about the perceived paranormal experiences that had kept soldiers alive in Vietnam and, on the other, the strategic and tactical realities of that conflict. But that's not really why I'm taking this tangent.

What I want to say to new writers and to any other curious readers is this: The story behind that novel is as interesting and fantastic as the novel itself. It got to a point where if I needed a character, that character would call. I invented a main character for it--Army nurse/Vietnam vet Mary Damico--then found her a few years later. To a "t." When I sent her the short story version, which was first-person narration, too, she wrote back, "Yes, this is me. And by the way, I'm an f&sf fan. Would you like me to be a consultant on the novel?" And when I couldn't get information about Hanoi's Red Dikes in North Vietnam from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, let alone my intel informants, another consultant (a rice expert no less) somehow ended up on the Red Dikes taking pictures and asking the soldiers questions for the novel--something that should have been impossible--just when I needed it. The moral of this--and this is just the tip of the 15-year-iceberg--is that if you write a novel that is "true" to you in the right way, it will make magic. Always. There's a reason that two atheist writer friends have both told me independently, "When I write, I feel closest to God. I know that sounds crazy, Bruce--I don't believe in God--but that's how it feels when odd things begin to occur to help, all of them good." When we're writing truest to ourselves--and this goes back to a young man writing the fiction he needed to write to get where he needed to get thirty years later--miraculous things do happen. Einstein would have no trouble with this idea. Particle physicists don't seem to either. You can put it as simply as Bradbury's or Campbell's "Follow your bliss," but in its dynamics it's closer to Jung's "synchronicity." In any case, it's very real and a wonder to behold when it happens. You may think you're in charge of your novel, but the best novel is one that drags you and itself kicking and screaming to your shared destiny. Just make sure it's a profoundly right and true novel for you.

ML: Do you believe literary critical analysis is applicable to genre fiction? How does one critically approach a Western or Romance paperback?

BM: Beautiful question, Michael; and one that should be asked more often by the literary community. I remember reading an article years ago in which a literary scholar assessed the "failure" of Arthur C. Clarke's classic, Childhood's End, to be "good literature." What the article actually proved--if you knew that novel well and also knew the literary paradigm the scholar was using--was that while conventional literary paradigms (what makes good literary fiction) could point to failures of a certain kind in that novel (e.g., characterization in a traditional literary sense) those paradigms actually failed to explain what was good and successful about that novel in science fiction terms. One of Clarke's goals, while he attends to other goals, is clearly to show the Big-Picture insignificance of mankind in the universe and of mankind's current human form. Such a goal flies in the face of the Nobel Prize's criteria, namely, humanity's importance. Literary fiction must be about the human condition, about what it means to be human; and in Faulkner's terms (his Nobel acceptance speech) how human beings will not only endure but prevail. In Childhood's End human beings evolve spiritually so that they're no longer human (those weird children!) and we're left (this is brilliant craft--truly brilliant craft) clinging at the end emotionally--out of our own humanity and our need to have it reflected back to us--to the flawed Overlord alien who is at least more like us than the damned weird evolved children are.

To my mind Clarke's success in this novel--in the points he's making, in his portrayal of humanity in both its familiar and alien forms, in his Einsteinian and de Chardinian reconciliation of science and spirit, and in his brilliant psychological manipulation of the reader in terms of identification/empathy/humanity--is worth any five hundred critically acclaimed contemporary literary novels. Yes, Clarke's style isn't artful by literary-artistic standards; his characterization can't compare with those literary giants we look to for great characterization; but those were not virtues he was after. He was after other things; and that's often the crucial point of science fiction, but one we often don't talk about: What is science fiction after, and how does that differ from what literary fiction is after? In one sense Clarke's novel is a form of "narrative metaphysics," rather than "fiction" in the literary sense of the word. Much science fiction, when it's good and brave and willing to relinquish the comforts of our human condition (even in its suffering it can be comfortable in a mirroring sense), might be called that as well.

On the other hand, those of us who grew up with a sense of alienation from the majority and the mainstream--those with a great sense of "Otherness" --those who at 14 wanted to be the kid in the sf novel who was a mutant and understood by no one, but with a great destiny before him--can more easily embrace the alien and even the idea that we're by our flesh and creations (though certainly not spirit) insignificant in the universe (even if the great patterns of oral and written storytelling want human beings, at least their heroes, to play center stage in a universe of cosmic stakes and human meaning). In other words, how could a kid like the one I was--who, in his elementary-school file probably was described as "identifying with amphibians" --not appreciate Clarke's novel over so many literary novels with their artful styles and vaguely satirical tones storylines recounting the mere social interactions of familiar people? Bottom line: As I said before, it's a silly polarity and duality-- "literary" versus "genre." Dualistic thinking is what gets humanity into trouble and always has. Writers write what they want to write, are driven to write, and writing because of that refuses to accommodate those dualities, polarities and silly either-or's.

BM: I seem to be a better first-person writer than a third-person writer. Both of my novels were first-person; and as I think my editors would agree, much if not most of my best short fiction has been first-person. I know this sounds arcane and is probably boring to 2 out of 3 of the people reading this interview; but this kind of thing does matter to writers. On the one hand you're supposed to learn to do what you don't already do well; on the other, to exploit (use) what you already do well. For whatever reason, though I've tried for years to write third-person, first-person comes out of me more naturally and more effectively than third. An exception would be the fable-like third-person stories I've been writing over the last couple of years. But those stories depend on an author's "voice" --an older author speaking on behalf of children--and in that sense they are, like first-person, more "voice" than a conventional third-person style would be for me. First person is voice, and without first-person voice, a highly colloquial one, Dream Baby would be nothing; and that first-person influence came from the oral histories of the Vietnam War I read during those 15 years of research. Those oral histories--edited tape-transcription voices mainly--hit me harder (often because their language "failed" in literary ways to capture what they were trying to say and therefore "succeeded" better in a shock-of-recognition human way) than all of the nicely done, traditional-literary-paradigm third-person (or literary-first-person) Vietnam novels I read at the time. But again, this is taste, personal preference, how we're individually wired. The mystic, the kid raised in the soft and hard sciences, the lover of ldquo;voices" on the page--all the things that make one particular writer what he is. Like any writer, I do what I do and am happy doing so, and couldn't not do it anyway.

ML: Do you believe the popularity of the sub genre of military science fiction has diminished in recent years? What is your favorite military science fiction novel?

BM: That's a tricky, dangerous and too-inclusive term, I'm afraid. If you mean very- genre military-adventure sf, I don't know; it comes and goes, I think. I'm reminded of the Great Depression, when heroic genre fiction soared in sales because, social scientists tell us, the American male felt so emasculated, so powerless. Maybe we don't have as much military sf right now because we've actually got a war…and it's not doing so well. My favorite military science fiction novel? Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, but I'd also list with it a novella and a novel like Barry Malzberg's Final War and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough's Healer's War. Science fiction novels that use war, even if they don't use it for the adventures of hale-and-hearty heroes, will always be around because war is always around, and is both fact and powerful metaphor for the darkness against which the light shines brightest.

BM: Sure do. Not only because I happen to love it (how much darkness does one need to make the light show up?); but because I also agree with Brian Aldiss (Billion Year Spree) that just as strong a case for sf's roots can be made in the gothic novel (The Monk, Frankenstein) as in social-scientific extrapolation (H. G. Wells) or the adventure novel with technological extrapolation (Jules Verne).

Horror fiction, then, has literary credentials. And so does utopian/dystopian fiction (l984, Anthem, Brave New World). Horror fiction and utopian/dystopian fiction have been around with literary respectability for so long, in fact, that the literary community tends to want to hold on to them and not cede them to f&sf's genre domain. Which is silly, too. Homer was a great writer, but also entertained. Shakespeare was Shakespeare, but also wrote fantasy…and entertained. Some of the novels of Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing are pure sf even if written in the way that Anglophile writers of literary bent would write them. To label as sf only sf that has American "pulp era" or "Golden Age of SF" roots makes no sense. Taxonomical thinking is crucial to being human--and to Mind and Reason--but past a certain point it can become insane, lose its usefulness and even be misleading as hell since it distracts from larger truths.

BM: Impossible to answer--partly because I can't possibly choose, but also because in some strange cosmic way it makes no sense to choose, and may in fact be a violation of Goodness in the universe to do so. And besides, what I'd choose now wouldn't be what I'd have chosen (and did for teaching purposes) twenty years ago. Lots of major science fiction novels--ones that have influenced me, ones that I'd teach, ones that I'm grateful for, ones that I think are brave and worth remembering for a long time--have better ideas than they have styles or characterization; and some of the more critically acclaimed "literary" sf novels have better characterization and styles than what'd call extrapolation or cosmic courage. Eon-spanning Homerian storytelling versus the literary novel again. Childhood's End versus the Nobel Committee. It would be a strange mix of apples and oranges, but my short list of twenty would probably include The Left hand of Darkness and A Canticle for Leibowitz, if that's any help, which I doubt it is.

ML: Being an academic with an interest in cultural anthropology and archaeology, what is your take on the alternative archaeology movement created by writers such as Graham Hancock, Dr. Robert Schlock or John Anthony West? Do you think there is validity to the claims for the existence of a "first civilization" an Atlantis or Mu, as it where?

BM: Years ago I had a good friend, a physicist in the field of aerospace, who had no trouble believing in wormholes and extraterrestrial life, even civilizations; and I think he was also willing to accept Bigfoot; but he had trouble with Roswell, the Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, and others. I, on the other hand--probably because I'd liked dinosaurs so much at age 10, but also because as a lay archeologist and lay zoologist I'd discovered three species that had never previously been "discovered" and also had in my garage the oldest (confirmed, yes) portable art in North America (20-30K BP) --was willing to accept Nessie (maybe) and, yes, Bigfoot, and certainly, after Dream Baby's fifteen years of research, ESP, but had more troubles with wormholes and alien civilizations. One man's Nessie is another man's Roswell. Atlantis for whatever reason just doesn't resonate with me as "true" in any way; but I've said the same thing about matters that have indeed turned out to be true. What rings false to me about Atlantis, I guess, is the perfection of it, the beauty; it's just too nice. The same way government conspiracies are just too pretty in a scientist's model sense, politics aside. They speak more of the elegance of the human imagination than they do of actual, stuttering, stammering, staggering government enterprise. As (l) the son of a Cold War antisubmarine warfare Navy officer with a degree in electronics who helped run antisubmarine warfare labs in two countries (secret projects!), (2) someone who's interviewed and hung out with all sorts of covert types for Dream Baby's sake for fifteen years, and (3) a writer, of course, I like the idea of things like government conspiracies and Atlantis, but reason and experience tell me they're just too…pretty. Within my experience anyway governments, especially democracies, aren't quite so neat, so competent at conspiracies (ask MI-6 and the Israelis why they've had to save our covert asses so many times); and lost civilizations weren't in reality usually lost in such a wonderfully romantic way. (Check the disappearance, for example, of the Anasazi and the Hohokam. Computer models of their demises are pretty complicated and messy, though I suppose elegant in their own way, as all things natural tend to be.) Now, having said this, I'm sure that Atlantis will rise from the Bermuda Triangle in a few weeks, even as more evidence appears to debunk poor Nessie, to whom I cling at least in my young-adult imagination and plan to write about. Every time I consider dismissing something like Atlantis, I simply walk to my shed where the crudely flaked figurine of a reclining Upper Paleolithic bison sits, or I look at the very orange carpenter bee, pink katydid, and tiny pecten from Florida which hadn't "existed" until I found them. Mind, after all, is always more arrogant than the surprises of the universe can possibly justify.

ML: There is a precedent for cognate flood myths around the world. I believe the Atlantis and Mu myths are a shared cultural experience, a remnant memory from when the Ice Age ended and the oceans around the world rose rapidly. There could have been a thousand so-called Atlantises that disappeared under the waves at that time.

BM: This I can buy into much more easily. Racial memory. I'm a great fan of--and believer in--hero patterns and other archetypes and patterns wetwired into us for all sorts of wonderful reasons, some of which we have yet to discover. But I've also learned in life that what is metaphorical (a flood myth, say) is often also literal (an actual flood). Why might this be so? Why shouldn't it be? We're of this universe and what lies within us should reflect what lies without. Were we able to model the universe as a chemist models a molecule, wouldn't we find the same elegance--symmetries, reflections--in it? When at a professional conference the rather mystic psychologist Carl Jung was asked what he thought of the notion of a "God gene" --the idea that human beings believe in gods only because they've evolved to--he answered, words to the effect, "Yes, and were I God I would have engineered it that way. Wouldn't you?" A mentor of mine, the amazing Faulkner scholar Rebecca Rio-Jelliffe, has discovered that William Faulkner's sentences are constructed in exactly the same way as his scenes, his scenes as his chapters, and his chapters as his novels--much of it unconscious on his part, of course (despite his genius) in a way that we might call "Faulkner's fractals" --and she's discovering the same kinds of micro/macro-structure elegances in other great literary works, just as she is finding chaos theory at work in those same works, too. But of course she is. Why wouldn't the universe reflect itself in all things?

ML: What writing projects, both short story and novel are you currently working on? Any chance will see a Bruce McAllister short story collection any time soon?

BM: Thanks for asking. My agent and I are waiting to hear on a collection right now, but a novel needs to be done and soon. I'm fifteen years overdue on a contracted novel, bless my publisher's patient soul; and though people assure me that if I die before I deliver, they'll simply write it off, I'd really rather not do that for a couple of reasons (among them, posthumous vanity). The novel that's reaching me through a somewhat altered state right now--a chapter every once in a while--is a very strange, religious-iconographic maybe young-adult/maybe not novel called The Dragons of Como; but I'm anxious to get, thanks to unceasing encouragement from Ellen Datlow throughout the 90's, to a novel based on the "Ark" stories ("The Ark," "The Girl Who Loved Animals," "Sister Moon") I wrote for Omni back in the day; and to an animal-bioengineering novel based on a pitch that producer Gale Anne Hurd and others have liked. With health, all things are possible, and I don't see why I can't get all three of these done--along with a pod or covey of short f&sf stories--over the next five years. As long as the aliens, looking like Nessie, don't arrive through a wormhole to take me to better things.

ML: I want to thank Bruce for taking the time to be interviewed and for putting up with my prying and prodding. When next we meet up with Bruce McAllister we'll be trudging in the California backcountry hunting for Sasquatch up on Whisker Tit Mountain.

BM: I'll carry the net and you can interview him. Thanks for a great set of questions. I'm sure you're now sorry you asked them--given how long-winded and pontificating this has been--but that's what happens when you ask questions of a writer who was in academe way too long…and who, poor guy, hasn't been interviewed in an awfully long time.

Also do yourself a favor and go pick up a copy of Dream Baby. It's one of the best war novels set to a backdrop of magical realism ever written.

The Ile of Dogges

Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

"In 2004, Elizabeth Bear published a story about Christopher Marlowe on Scifiction: "This Tragic Glass" (http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/bear/bear1.html). After Wiscon that year, we were sitting around a table in one of Madison's more psychedelic delis, talking about Marlowe and the Elizabethan theatrical scene and, inevitably, the Master of Revels, Sir Edmund Tylney. Elizabeth's state censor. And we imagined how frustrated he must have been by playwrights who persisted in writing things that had to be cut, rewritten, turned down flat. And we imagined his reaction to the great lost scandalous play of Jonson and Nashe, The Ile of Dogges. And this story was born."

Sir Edmund Tylney, in pain and reeking from rotting teeth, stood before the sideboard and crumbled sugar into his sack, causing a sandy yellowish grit to settle at the bottom of the cup. He swirled the drink to sweeten it, then bore it back to his reading table where an unruly stack of quarto pages waited, slit along the folds with a pen-knife.

He set the cup on the table in the sunlight and drew up his stool, its short legs rasping over the rush mats as he squared it and sat. He reached left-handed for the wine, right-handed for the playscript, drawing both to him over the pegged tabletop. And then he riffled the sheets of Speilman's cheapest laid with his nail.

Bending into the light, wincing as the sweetened wine ached across his teeth with every sip, he read.

He turned over the last leaf, part-covered in secretary's script, as he drank the last gritty swallow in his cup, the square of sun spilling over the table-edge to spot the floor. Tylney drew out his own pen knife, cut a new point on a quill, and--on a fresh quarter-sheet--began to write the necessary document. The Jonson fellow was inexperienced, it was true. But Tom Nashe should have known better.

Tylney gulped another cup of sack before he set his seal to the denial, drinking fast, before his teeth began to hurt. He knew himself, without vanity, to be a clever man--intelligent, well-read. He had to be, to do his job as Master of Revels and censor for the queen, for the playmakers, too, were clever, and they cloaked their satires under layers of witty language and misdirection. The better the playmaker, the better the play, and the more careful Tylney had to be.

The Ile of Dogges was a good play. Lively, witty. Very clever, as one would expect from Tom Nashe and the newcomer Jonson. And Tylney's long-practiced and discerning eye saw the satire on every page, making mock of--among a host of other, lesser targets--Elizabeth, her Privy Council, and the Lord Chamberlain.

RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

Why is't named Ile of Dogges?

WITWORTH:

Because here are men like wild dogges. Haue they numbers, they will sauage a lyon: but if the lyon come vpon one by himselfe, he will grouel and showe his belye. And if the lyon but ask it, he will sauage his friends.

RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

But is that not right? For surely a dogge should honour a lyon.

WITWORTH:

But on this island, even the lyon is a dogge. ¹

It could never be performed, but it was. A few days later, despite the denial, Jonson and the Earl of Pembroke's Men staged The Ile of Dogges at the Swan. Within the day, Jonson and the principal actors were in chains at the Marshalsea, under gentle questioning by the Queen's own torturer, Topcliffe himself. The other playwright, Thomas Nashe, fled the city to elude arrest. And The Theatre, The Curtain, The Swan--all of London's great playhouses languished, performances forbidden.

The Ile of Dogges languished, likewise, in a pile on the corner of Tylney's desk, weighted by his pen-knife (between sharpenings). It lay face down, cup-ringed pages adorned with the scratch of more than one pen. The dull black oakgall ink had not yet begun to fade, nor the summer's heat to wane, when Tylney, predictably, was graced by a visit from Master Jonson.

Flea bites and shackle gall still reddened the playwright's thick wrists, counterpoint to the whitework of older scars across massive hands. Unfashionably short hair curled above his plain, pitted face. He topped six feet, Ben Jonson. He had been a soldier in the Low Countries.

He ducked to come through the doorway, but stood straight within, stepping to one side after he closed the door so that the wall was at his back. "You burned Tom's papers."

"All of them?" For all his rough bravado, Jonson's youth showed in how easily he revealed surprise. "'Tis but a play."

"Master Jonson," Tylney said, steepling his hands before him, "it mocks the Queen. More than that, it might encourage others to mock the Queen. 'Tis sedition."

Recovering himself, Jonson snorted. He paced, short quick steps, and turned, and paced back again. "And the spies Parrot and Poley as were jailed in with me? Thought you I'd aught to tell them?"

"No spies of mine," Tylney said. "Perhaps Topcliffe's. Mayhap he thought you had somewhat of interest to him to impart. No Popist sympathies, Master Jonson? No Scottish loyalties?"

Jonson stopped at the furthest swing of his line and stared at the coffered paneling. That wandering puddle of sun warmed his boots this time. He reached out, laid four blunt fingertips and a thumb on the wall--his hand bridged between them--and dropped his head so his arm hid the most of his face. His other hand, Tylney noticed, brushed the surface of the sideboard and left something behind, half-concealed beside the inkpot. "No point in pleading for the return of the manuscript, I take it?"

"Destroyed," Tylney said, without letting his eyes drop to the pages on his desk. And, as if that were all the restraint he could ask of himself, the question burst out of him: "Why do it, Master Jonson? Why write it?"

Useless to ask for sense from a poet. One might as well converse with a tabby cat. Tylney lifted the bell, on the other corner of his desk from the play that ought already to be destroyed, and rang it, a summons to his clerk. "Go home, Master Jonson."

"You've not seen the last of me, Sir Edmund," Jonson said, as the door swung open--not a threat, just a fact.

It wasn't the usual clerk, but a tall soft-bellied fellow with wavy black hair, sweet-breathed, with fine white teeth.

"No," Tylney said. He waited until the click of the latch before he added, "I don't imagine I have."

ANGELL:
Hast sheared the sheep, Groat?

GROAT:

Aye, though their fleece be but siluer.

he handeth Angell a purse

ANGELL:

Then thou must be Iason and find the golden fleece: or mayhap needs merely shear a little closer to the skin.

GROAT:

Will not the sheep grow cold, without their wool?

ANGELL:

They can grow more. And, loyal Groat, wouldst prefer thy sheep grow cold, or thy master grow hot?

GROAT:

The sheep may shiuer for all I care.

Tylney waited until Jonson's footsteps retreated into silence, then waited a little more. When he was certain neither the clerk nor the playmaker were returning, he came around his table on the balls of his feet and scooped up the clinking pouch that Jonson had left behind. He bounced it on his hand, a professional gesture, and frowned at its weight. Heavy.

He replaced it where Jonson had laid it, and went to chip sugar from the loaf and mix himself another cup of sack, to drink while he re-read the play. He read faster this time, standing up where the light was better, the cup resting on the sideboard by the inkpot and Jonson's bribe. He shuffled each leaf to the back as he finished. When he was done, so was the sack.

He weighed the playscript in his hand, frowning at it, sucking his aching teeth.

He dropped the playscript on the sideboard, weighted it with the bribe, locked the door behind him, and went to tell the clerk--the cousin, he said, of the usual boy, who was abed with an ague--that he could go.

WITWORTH:

That's Moll Tuppence. They call her Queene of Dogges.

RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

For why?

WITWORTH:

For that if a man says aught about her which he ought not, she sets her curres to make him say naught in sooth.

Sir Edmund Tylney lay awake in the night. His teeth pained him, and if he'd any sense, he'd have had them pulled that winter. No sense, he thought. No more sense than a tabby cat. Or a poet. And he lay abed and couldn't sleep, haunted by the image of the papers on the sideboard, weighted under Jonson's pouch. He should have burned them that afternoon.

He would go and burn them now. Perhaps read them one more time, just to be certain there was no salvaging this play. Sometimes he would make suggestions, corrections, find ways--through cuts or additions--that a play could be made safe for performance. Sometimes the playmakers acquiesced, and the play was saved.

Though Jonson was a newcomer, Tylney knew already that he did not take kindly to editing. But it was a good play.

Tylney roused himself and paced in the night, in his slippers and shirt, and found himself with candle in hand at the door of his office again. He unlocked it--the tumblers moving silently in the well-oiled catch--and pushed it before him without bothering to lift the candle or, in fact, look up from freeing key from lock.

The brilliant flash that blinded him came like lightning, like the spark of powder in the pan, and he shouted and threw a warding hand before his eyes, remembering even in his panic not to tip the candle. Someone cursed in a foreign tongue; a heavy hand closed on Tylney's wrist and dragged him into his office, shouldering the door shut behind before he could cry out again.

Whoever clutched him had a powerful grip. Was a big man, young, with soft uncallused hands. "Jonson," he gasped, still half-blinded by the silent lightning, pink spots swimming before his eyes. "You'll hang for this!"

Too gentle to be Jonson, just as those hands, big as they were, were too soft for a soldier's. Not Jonson. The replacement clerk. Tylney shook his head side to side, trying to rattle the dots out of his vision. He blinked, and could almost see, his candle casting a dim glow around the office. If he looked through the edges of his sight, he could make out the lay of the room--and what was disarrayed. The Ile of Dogges had been taken from the sideboard, the drapes drawn close across the windows and weighted at the bottom with Jonson's bribe. Perhaps a quarter of the pages were turned.

"You have already," the clerk said. He released Tylney's wrist once Tylney had steadied himself on the edge of the table, and turned back to the playscript.

"There's only one door out of this room." And Tylney had his back to it. He could hear people moving, a voice calling out, seeking the source of that cry.

"Sir Edmund, shield your eyes." The clerk raised something to his own eye, a flat piece of metal no bigger than a lockplate, and rather like a lockplate, with a round hole in the middle.

Tylney stepped forward instead and grabbed the clerk's arm. "What are you doing?"

The man paused, obviously on the verge of shoving Tylney to the floor, and stared at him. "Damn it to hell," he said. "All right, look. I'm trying to save this play."

"From oblivion," he said. He dropped his arm and turned the plate so Tylney could see the back of it. His thumb passed over a couple of small nubs marked with red sigils, and Tylney gasped. As if through a camera obscura, the image of a page of The Ile of Dogges floated on a bit of glass imbedded in the back of the plate, as crisp and brightly lit as if by brilliant day. It wasn't the page to which the play lay open. "My name's Baldassare," the clerk--the sorcerer--said. "I'm here to preserve this play. It was lost."

"Jonson's summoned demons," Tylney whispered, as someone pounded on the office door. It rattled, and did not open. Baldassare must have claimed the keys when he dragged Tylney inside, and fastened the lock while Tylney was still bedazzled. The light of the candle would show under the door, though. The servants would know he was here.

It was his private office, and Tylney had one of only two keys. Someone would have to wake the steward for the other.

He could shout. But Baldassare could kill him before the household could break down the door. And the sorcerer was staring at him, one eyebrow lifted, as if to see what he would do.

Tylney held his tongue, and the door rattled once more before footsteps retreated.

"Just a historian," Baldassare answered, when the silence had stretched a minute or two.

Baldessare shook his head. "Where I come from, it's far older. And it's--" He hesitated, seeming to search for a word. "It's dead. No one has ever read it, or seen it performed. Most people don't even know it once existed." He laid fingertips on the papers, caressing. "Let me take it. Let me give it life."

"It's sedition." Tylney grasped the edge of the script, greatly daring, and pulled it from under Baldassare's hand.

"It's brilliant," Baldassare said, and Tylney couldn't argue, though he bundled the papers close to his chest. The sorcerer had been strangely gentle with him, as a younger man with an older. Perhaps he could gamble on that. Perhaps. It was his duty to protect the queen.

Baldassare continued, "None will know, no one shall read it, not until you and Elizabeth and Jonson and Nashe are long in your graves. It will do no harm. I swear it."

"A sorcerer's word," Tylney said. He stepped back, came up hard against the door. The keys weren't in the lock. They must be in Baldassare's hand.

"Would you have it lost forever? Truly?" Baldassare reached and Tylney crowded away. Into the corner, the last place he could retreat. "Sir Edmund!" someone shouted from the hall.

From outside the door, Tylney heard the jangle of keys, their rattle in the lock. "You'll hang," he said to Baldassare.

"Maybe," Baldassare said, with a sudden grin that showed his perfect, white teeth. "But not today." One lingering, regretful look at the papers crumpled to Tylney's chest, and he dropped the keys on the floor, touched something on the wrist of the hand that held the metal plate, and vanished in a shimmer of air as Tylney gaped after him.

"Sir Edmund?" The man came forward, a candle in one hand, the keys in the other. "Are you well?"

"Well enough," Tylney answered, forcing himself not to crane his neck after the vanished man. He could claim a demon had appeared in his work room, right enough. He could claim it, but who would believe?

He swallowed, and eased his grip on the play clutched to his chest. "I dropped the keys."

"I stumbled only," Tylney said. "I feared for the candle. But all is well." He laid the playscript on the table and smoothed the pages as his steward squatted to retrieve the fallen keys. "I thank you your concern."

The keys were cool and heavy, and clinked against each other like debased coins when the steward handed them over. Tylney laid them on the table beside the candle and the play. He lifted the coin purse from the window ledge, flicked the drapes back, and weighted the pages with the money once more before throwing wide the shutters, heedless of the night air. It was a still summer night, the stink of London rising from the gutters, but a draft could always surprise you, and he didn't feel like chasing paper into corners.

Silently, the steward withdrew, taking his candle and his own keys with him. He left the door yawning open on darkness. Tylney stood at his table for a moment, watching the empty space.

He and John had the only keys. Baldassare had come and gone like a devil stepping back and forth from Hell. Without the stink of brimstone, though. Perhaps more like an angel. Or memory, which could walk through every room in Tylney's house, through every playhouse in London, and leave no sign.

Tylney bent on creaking knees and laid kindling on the hearth. He stood, and looked at the playscript, one-quarter of the pages turned where it rested on the edge of his writing table, the other three-fourths crumpled and crudely smoothed. He turned another page, read a line in Jonson's hand, and one in Nashe's. His lips stretched over his aching teeth, and he chuckled into his beard.

He laid the pages down. No more sense than a tabby cat. It was late for making a fire. He could burn the play in the morning. Before he returned Jonson's bribe. He'd lock the door behind him, so no one could come in or out. There were only two sets of keys.

Sir Edmund Tylney blew the candle out, and trudged upstairs through the customary dark.

¹ All quotations are from the Poet Emeritus Series edition of The Ile of Dogges, edited by Anthony Baldassare (Las Vegas, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2206).

Here There Be Humans

Ken Rand

"As with ‘The Henry and the Martha' (Aeon Three), this story is told in an alien point of view. Curiosity must be a universal conceit, maybe the dominant motive for going to the stars. What if aliens come to Earth and find humans extinct? An alien, endowed with a surfeit of all-too-human curiosity, might face a challenge when confronted with evidence that humans may still be Out There. Somewhere. Waiting."

W HEN ADMINISTRATOR FIRST SLON M'LAY disappeared, his comrades blamed extinct humans. A joke, of course. "Maybe he ruptured his throat pouch calling one in his dreams," they said, laughing.

Two days later, M'lay was still missing in the jungle, the Bureau sent investigators from orbital, and the laughter stopped.

"No nestlings' tale," Chief Detective Sula A'com said. "Whatever happened to your First, it wasn't phantom humans."

Everyone had heard stories about escaped convicts out there in the dense, alien Brazilian jungle, using stolen and makeshift breathers, no exosuits, existing like savages. Gone native. If they could kidnap the Administrator then they were near, and they could take anybody from the Bureau's South America main research base on the Amazon River. Anybody. Any time.

Security at the base was cursory. Perimeter smartwire kept undergrowth, insects, pests, and the infrequent carnivore out. Other threats--outlaws bent on murder?--had been ill considered. But M'lay had gone afield, past the wire.

Reading the First's personnel record, A'com learned the First had spent more time on his hobby--finding live humans--than on his real job. Admin Second Julas D'fif had been defacto Admin First for months, handling daily business while the First looked for signs of the extinct species.

He went afield often, but always with proximity monitors and med implants active, standard procedure. Two days ago, both went suddenly silent.

A'com looked around the conference room at D'fif and the dozen managers and techs gathered for the emergency meeting. He saw it in their eyes and quivering pouches: if the First can be kidnapped or murdered--what about us? What about the field teams? The outposts upriver and in the Andes? The plantations scattered around the continent where convicts outnumber people ten to one?

"Then there'll be a ransom demand," Admin Second, now Acting Admin First, Julas D'fif said, "will there not, milord?" His throat pouch quivered and he drummed inner thumbs on the table. An annoying habit, that drumming, A'com thought.

A'com glared and puffed his throat pouch in mute threat and D'fif plopped back in his seat, blinking, drumming, quivering. D'fif's neckfins had extended, dissipating nervous body heat.

Base atmosphere conditioning seemed normal. A'com's neckfins lay flaccid on his shoulders and he breathed the filtered air easily. Alarm gauges read colorless and the cooled air was toxin-free.

He felt comfortable, despite having just arrived from orbital with his team, but the dozen others in the room, all downwell vets, seemed tense. A'com saw furtive glances exchanged among the twitchy bunch.

What in L'hoc's name is going on? Are they just nervous about the potential threat to them, or am I seeing conspiracy?

"Security's being puffed up." A'com hoped his smile and full color might ease tensions. "There's no cause for alarm."

Curiosity piqued, he shifted color, adopted a different tact. He sat still, face neutral, pouch slack, and waited for somebody to break the heavy silence. After a moment, a female began to weep in muted sobs, saggy pouch a livid purple. Her comrades studied the walls, the floors, their thumbs. Neckfins sprouted and the conditioner whined.

A'com sighed, stood, and ended the meeting. "My people will interview each of you, and your techs. Separately."

"They're worried about outlaws, Sula," tech Dor K'rou said. He waved a hand slate, his enhancer-probe interview transcripts, just finished.

A'com nodded as he sipped a bulb of fresh ground thusea, savoring the bitter tang. He sat in the Admin First's private office, at the First's desk in his cushy, high-backed chair. Search headquarters now. With him sat or stood his team chiefs making their first report and conducting their first strategy session since planetfall.

On the walls and around the room, glass cases displayed artifacts from the local flora and fauna. A stuffed bird here, an odd-shaped rock there, a colorful pelt from a furred creature in another case. Detritus all lovingly preserved and labeled. A private museum.

A'com had heard of the artifact on the First's desk, a thumb-sized flat stone, pointed at one end with sharp, serrated edges. A human hunting implement. Proof, M'lay had written in a report, of recent human activity in the area. Maybe human, but recent? M'lay couldn't prove it.

A'com barely listened, turned away from his people, staring out the huge window in the wall behind the desk.

Jungle dominated the view. A wall of slender trees rose into thick leafy canopies from tangled vines and dense, bushy undergrowth. Birds, insects and odd small creatures flittered among the varied foliage. Deep green shades dominated lesser greens, speckled by bright many-hued flowers.

"Petty theft, falsified maintenance logs, a little graft and a puffy sexual dalliance, but no kidnap or murder suspects."

The others laughed. A'com liked his team casual. No titles or rank on the job. It made for good morale, efficiency. Better working conditions, better results, but the casualness never extended outside the tight-knit group into the less tolerant bureaucracy at large.

"Not our business," A'com waved a dismissive thumb. "What about D'fif? Jealousy?"

"Negative," prime tech Dev F'rar said. F'rar was assigned to question D'fif for such an intrigue. "He's loyal to M'lay and the Bureau. Believe it or not, Sula, he really likes Earth."

"Ashamed." Dev barked a cynical laugh. "What would they think in orbital if they found he likes Earth?" Others joined his light chuckle. A'com did not.

"Nothing," search chief Car Y'lor said. "Orbital and hover can't penetrate the foliage and our search mechs can't handle the terrain. We've sent teams on foot, but we've found no more than the base security staff did before we came down."

M'lay had left two days ago with breather and shielded exosuit on another walkabout, his on-going and fruitless search for humans. Tracks led along a narrow trail to a point five hundred meters into the jungle where his proximity monitor and med implants shut down.

As well as keeping animals and insects out, smartwire twenty meters out kept the intense foliage from engulfing the base. Still, seeds drifted through the invisible energy wall somehow, and A'com saw green stalks near the compound.

"Implants are hard to remove. Painful, even fatal. If he'd taken it out somehow, it would still signal. We'd have found it. Even if it had been pulverized, say in a fall, we'd have still found it. You can't fragment the device so it can't signal." He shrugged. "But we keep finding new life forms--"

Agent Ryal O'lai cleared her throat pouch. "In the two generations we've been on Earth, there've been a hundred and five reports of escaped or disappeared convicts. In South America. I didn't check other reserves."

"The Bureau tracks population diligently. Prox monitors and implants are hard to lose. Less than three thousand people live in the South America reserve, mostly convicts. Accounted for. The only way a disappearance could be unofficial is if, if--"

"I suppose it could happen. Sir, the outlaw myth is nothing more than--a myth. It's possible to live out there with a makeshift breather and no exosuit, but who'd want to try?"

The scene beyond the window made A'com dizzy and he swiveled in the chair to face his team. "Theory. Ryal, Check it. See if you can find record of downwell officials hiding disappearance numbers. Check for sightings of escaped cons or encounters with them. Maybe it's more than a myth. Maybe a few went native and got organized. Maybe there're more outlaws than we've been led to believe."

"If there are escaped cons, why would officials lie about it and risk dismissal? They'd still have to meet quotas but with fewer workers. Everyone would have to pick up the load and they'd resent it. No, Sula, I see no incentive for a cover-up."

"More," Dev F'rar said. "Administrators who lose staff in accident and error get reassigned. And disappearances? Even cons, that's a trip to a Homeworld gulag."

"A prison cell on Homeworld," Dor said, "is better than a shift downwell on Earth."

Something nagged at A'com and he held up a thumb for silence as he thought aloud. "Julas D'fif skips offworld rotation because he's loyal to his First and the Bureau. Slon M'lay refuses reassignment after two local years' duty downwell because he's obsessed with finding humans. The techs and managers we interviewed are all on extended tours. They seem nervous."

"Yes, the questions must be literal for quantifiable results, but I'm trained to extrapolate."

"I asked if they liked their First, or if they resented--wait a minute. What are you saying? You think M'lay's gone native?"

A'com stood. "No matter. Check it all. Dor, re-examine everyone. If you find some like it here, we may have to conclude the First may have had similar thoughts--"

"Assume he found a way. Same for the prox box. Put your people on it. Dismissed. Report back at sunset local."

Dev looked through the big window and blinked, pouch fluttering. "You mean--out there?"

They walked away from the base on the same trail Slon M'lay had walked on when he disappeared. They wore breathers and shielded exosuits, proximity monitors active. They walked single file on the narrow, muddy trail, A'com in front, brushing aside tendrils of undergrowth.

"Radioactivity is tolerable here. It's concentrated in the old human cities up north. Toxins are filtered. So's the air."

"If you stay suited all the time. Or inside. It's--it's too much, Sula, all this growth. Makes me dizzy."

If First M'lay had gone native, then M'lay haddn't thought it was too much. He had the window made; not standard issue. He liked the view. Why did D'fif and the local staff and techs renew their tours?

"Don't flash false color at me, Sula. In two generations, we've found few resources, scarce. Too toxic to colonize, the gravity well's too deep, tourism is nil. All you see are rich types who can afford to travel this far outsystem and who like to rough it. Few of those. All this planet's good for is a prison colony. Or do you like the native food the farms send up to orbital to supplement hydroponics?"

"Right, don't forget your romantic archaeologists who get fluttery over fused metal lumps and cryptic symbols in stone and city-sized radioactive slag heaps and--"

"They destroyed it all. A dead end. I don't understand M'lay's obsession." He added quietly: "Or yours."

They arrived at the point in the jungle where M'lay's last signal had come from. A'com knelt, tried to see past the evidence markers Y'lor's forensics people had placed. Markers stood between footprints, a flag marked the last footprint, and a thin string extended into the undergrowth in the direction M'lay would have gone had he taken another step--which he hadn't.

"He just disappeared," A'com said. "How could he just--" his pouch fluttered in frustration, "--disappear?"

"Don't go mystical, Sula. Fey-winged Greids didn't whisk him off to the Cosmic Nest. I favor Car's idea."

A'com stood and contemplated the twisted branches of at least four tree types, all within an arms reach. Gnarled vines snaked up into the dark canopy that blotted out the sun. The narrow muddy trail took footprints well, but the jungle floor around it, composed of mosses, grasses, dead leaves and mulch, would hide tracks easily.

"--and the jungle grows so fast and thick," A'com finished, "any ground tracks are covered. I see your point."

"They find new species every day. Nobody knows what's out here. An animal got M'lay, knew how to sneak up on him."

"L'hoc's sake, Sula, look at this mess. Could be anything out here. We finally found a species that can digest a prox box, signal and all."

A'com didn't hear. His eyes grew unfocused looking at the dense, living panorama.

He shut his eyes, fought dizziness, and listened. In the cacophonous din he picked out a melodic hoot overhead echoed by another from deeper in the thick treescape. A staccato chutter interrupted itself as if the animal making it stopped to listen for response. On a nearby branch, two tiny blood-yellow birds sat side by side, chattering. Around the birds, bulbous purple fruit hung in clusters.

"Sula, what are you doing?" Dev grabbed A'com's extended arm, thumbs pinching the tender scales inside the elbow. A'com turned to him and blinked as if coming out of a drunken stupor.

Dev released his arm. "You took off your breather." He frowned concern as he adjusted the breather back over A'com's nose. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, I--" A'com hesitated. What happened? "I wanted to taste--" He looked at the fruit, the birds. "--to eat--"

"Prox monitors function, milord," a thin, disembodied voice replied. "We're recording."

"We're coming back. I want diagnostic on Detective A'com's exosuit and breather."

Wordless and grim-pouched, Dev led A'com back inside. A'com frowned, deep in thought, but followed meekly.

"Not the plants," A'com told his staff in the afternoon meeting, thumbing the report on the slate before him. "My breather and exosuit test on-color, and we've checked the entire system. No malfunctions."

"We don't have M'lay's breather or suit to test," Y'lor said. "The others test out, but maybe his was defective."

"We learned how to disable a prox box," he said. "Simple. No wonder it's been overlooked. After all, who'd want to do it?"

Y'lor shook his pouch. "I've got teams out--I've gone out myself, but the jungle's so dense--it looks hopeless. Still, I'd like to continue."

"I don't know." A shrug. "Outlaws out there, no exosuits, living off the land? I need time. May I go to the plantations and prison camps, do some on-site?"

"I don't like hovers, but this is important, and I--I want to supervise and it must be on-site, because, well--"

"Do as you think best, Ryal." O'lai's flustered demeanor puzzled A'com. Her colors are erratic. Nerves?

"Anything else?" A'com looked around the room. Everyone seemed--what? Tense, yes, but there was something else he couldn't quite put his thumb on. What's going on?

"With your permission, Sula," K'rou said, "I'd like to accompany some the locals into the field."

"They've sucked in their pouches. Evasive. I need to learn more. Maybe something about being outside, something in the air, I don't know--but if I can study them in the environment--" he ended with a shrug.

Dev F'rar cleared his throat pouch. "I have an idea." He didn't meet Sula's eyes. "I'd rather not discuss it yet."

A'com nodded, mute, and dismissed the meeting. Is Dev comparing my psyche profile with M'lay's? My lapse out there. Does he think M'lay may have had a similar lapse? Something in the psyche makeup predisposes insanity?

A'com shook his pouch to dismiss the thought. Just a guess. Dev is a good detective, bright, if stiff-finned. If he's on to something, so be it. Initiative counts. Sycophants make poor investigators.

A'com felt excited too, certain an answer to Administrator First Slon M'lay's mysterious disappearance would be found soon. Smiling, pouch yellow, he swiveled the First's chair to face the jungle view behind the base.

He froze, sat forward. A movement. For an eye blink, A'com thought he saw, deep in the shifting, vibrant undergrowth, a human face. Then it disappeared.

"We've been recalled." A'com pointed thumbs upward, toward orbital. Fifteen days had passed since the First disappeared. "I asked for an extension. Denied. Budget. I'm to file a final report tonight. We leave tomorrow."

His people's disappointment was palpable. Fins stiffened, pouches fluttered and colored dismay.

O'lai slapped thumbs on the table. "I need to get to the Playa plantation. There are rumors of a band of convicts--a band, organized--down there."

K'rou started to speak. Instead, he pursed thin lips and shook his head. Sadness colored his drooped pouch.

"Have your reports to me by mid-day. I'll take it from there. Pack up. Dismissed."

They shuffled out. Their discontent reinforced for A'com the theory he'd harbored since his walk in the jungle with Dev F'rar, when he'd taken off his breather to smell and taste the fruit near where M'lay had vanished.

The downwell locals feared the investigation might force them to be transferred. They liked Earth.

Car Y'lor had become fanatical, leading search parties afield. He got lots of volunteers. Ryal O'lai forgot her fear of hovers in her continent-wide search for runaways. Dor K'rou found excuses to go outside often.

Dev looked surprised, then nodded. A relieved sigh. "You knew I'd check your file. You're you."

"Hm. Some are so adapted to routine, they daren't do what they want to. They're afraid M'lay's defection will upset the thusea cart, jeopardize their jobs, yet they don't want to leave Earth. And the outlaws? Maybe hundreds out there, helped by those inside the base too afraid to join them or who chose to stay in to keep up the subterfuge?"

"The truth won't do, Dev. Think. Earth is marginal. A problem like this--could it prompt the Bureau to pull out? What would it do to those who like it here? However bizarre--and given our own people's attraction to the place, it's not so bizarre--it's not our place to ruin their lives."

"Think, Dev. To betray our own? Ryal likes it here, as does Car and Dor. You've seen. It could ruin careers."

"I won't lie. I'll report we've found no evidence of what happened to M'lay. I'll suggest theories. Wild animals, chemical dementia, equipment failure, the ‘gone-native' idea, outlaws. No stress on anything in particular. No conclusions."

"I'll take it in the pouch. My responsibility, my fall. Does that answer your concern?"

"Your own report, Dev, on my behavior out there, even inconclusive, will help focus away from the team."

Dev nodded again and stood. "It'll be a hard report to write. I don't envy you." He left.

Alone again, A'com swiveled the chair around and looked out the window into the jungle. The face he'd seen--or thought he'd seen--hadn't returned, though he'd looked for it.

He sighed and, with reluctance, turned away from the view, back to face the desk. Automatically, he reached for M'lay's human hunting artifact. Gone, of course. Someone took it four days ago. A'com hadn't asked about it since. He understood.

Rather than begin his final report on the failed search for Administrator First Slon M'lay, he opened his own file. Time left till retirement. Reserved assets. Off-duty time accrued.

He shut off the slate, distracted again, and turned to look out the window. He put thumbs in his pocket, fondling the human-worked stone he'd found in the jungle the day before. He hadn't told anyone about it. He didn't intend to.

Our Authors

Elizabeth Bear ("The Ile of Dogges,") shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. This, coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary as a child, doomed her early to penury, intransigence, friendlessness, and the writing of speculative fiction. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in central Connecticut with the exception of two years (which she was too young to remember very well) spent in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. She is the recipient of the 2005 John W. Campbell Award and the author of several published novels, a short story collection, a number of other short stories, and a general sense of confusion.

Greg Beatty ("The Dolls of Mother Ceres") is recently married. He and his wife live in Bellingham Washington. Greg has a BA from University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Iowa, both in English, and attended Clarion West 2000. His work has appeared in 3SF, Absolute Magnitude, Abyss & Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Asimov's, Fortean Bureau, HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, Ideomancer, Oceans of the Mind, Paradox, SciFiction, Shadowed Realms, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and The New York Review of Science Fiction, among other venues. In 2005 Greg won the Rhysling Award in the short poem category, and, more recently, two of his poems won first and second place in the Bay Area Writers League Princess of Mars Poetry Contest..

Stephen Couch ("N+1") is a computer programmer, an award-winning audio drama producer, and a lifelong Texan. He has sold short fiction to such magazines as Neo-Opsis and Fictitious Force.

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.

Jay Lake ("Whyte Boyz" ) lives in Portland, Oregon with his books and two inept cats, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press. Current projects include Rocket Science and TEL : Stories. His next novel, Trial of Flowers, will be available fall, 2006 from Night Shade Books, while Mainspring will be released summer, 2007 from Tor. Jay is the winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

Jay's short story "A Mythic Fear of the Sea" appeared in Æon One, "Genre is Dead, Long Live Genre" in Æon Two, "You Will Go On" in Æon Three, and "Green" in Æon Five.

Michael J. Lohr ("California Daydreaming") is a writer, university researcher and folklorist. He has published nonfiction, fiction and poetry in over 28 countries. His writings have been translated into 23 languages, including Icelandic, Welsh, Hebrew, Romanian, Croat, Latvian, Estonian, Malay and Tamil. His work has appeared in such diverse places as Rolling Stone, The Economist, Outside Magazine, Outdoor Life, Brutarian Quarterly, Cemetery Dance, Marsdust, Albedo One, Interzone, The Third Alternative, and Midnight Street.

Michael's interview with Bruce Boston, "Language and Music in the City of the Trees" appeared in Æon Four.

Bruce McAllister ("The Passion: a Western") began publishing f&sf in another lifetime, his first story, written at 16, appearing in l963 in Fred Pohl's IF magazine and Judith Merrill's "Year's Best." Since then, seventy stories, two novels Humanity Prime and Dream Baby), twenty years teaching creative writing in university, and most recently, when not writing, coaching and consulting for new and established fiction and screenplay writers. He was out of the f&sf field for over a decade--the reasons too bizarre to synopsize--and is very happy to be back. Stories most recently in Aeon, Asimov's, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fiction Magazine, Lady Churchill''s Rosebud Wristlet and SciFiction.

Sarah Monette ("The Ile of Dogges") was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. Having completed her Ph.D. in Renaissance English drama, she now lives and writes in a 99-year-old house in the Upper Midwest. Her first novel, Melusine, was published by Ace Books in August 2005; the sequel, The Virtu, is scheduled for July 2006, with two more novels to follow: The Mirador (2007) and Summerdown (2008). Her short fiction has appeared in many places, including Strange Horizons, Alchemy, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and has received four Honorable Mentions from The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.

Jaime Lee Moyer ("Asp") 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 poem "Asha" appeared in Æon Five. Her poetry has also 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

Joe Murphy ("The Doom That Came to Smallmouth") lives, writes, works, and dreams in Fairbanks Alaska. He's fifty-two and been married to the ever amazing Veleta Murphy for thirty-three years. Together, they are owned by two Airedale terriers, Bailey and Chandu, and three cats, Kafka, Plato, and Sagan.

Joe has sold fiction to Age of Wonders, Altair, A Horror A Day: 365 Scary Stories, Bones of the World, Book of All Flesh, Book of Final Flesh, Chizine, Clean Sheets, Crafty Cat Crimes, Cthulhu's Heirs, Dark Terrors 6, Demon Sex, Dreaming of Angels, Gothic.net, Ideomancer.com, Legends of the Pendragon, Lenox Avenue, Low Port, Nemonymous, Northwest Passages: A Cascadian Odyssey, Oceans of the Mind, On Spec, Path of the Bold, Realms of Fantasy, and many others. He's a member of SFWA, HWA, and a graduate of Clarion.

Rita Oakes ("Lupercalia") experiences great difficulty answering the question, "So, where are you from?" A former Air Force brat, she writes horror, fantasy, and historical fiction. When she's not writing, she works as a librarian in southern New Jersey. She enjoys history, travel, and Belgian beer, sometimes at the same time. She has previously sold to Paradox, The Many Faces of Van Helsing, and Dogtown Review.

Ken Rand ("Here There Be Humans") has sold short stories to four dozen magazines and anthologies, including Weird Tales, On Spec, HP Lovecraft, Talebones, and Faeries. He's sold a lot of nonfiction, including interviews for Talebones and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Books: (so far) The 10% Solution: Self-editing for the Modern Writer (Fairwood Press), Tales of the Lucky Nickel Saloon, The Golems of Laramie County and Through Wyoming Eyes, (Yard Dog Press), Fairy BrewHaHa at the Lucky Nickel Saloon (Five Star), Bad News From Orbit (Silver Lake), Soul Taster: Four Dark Tales (Notorious Press), The Editor Is IN and From Idea To Story in 90 Seconds (Media Man! Productions), and Phoenix (Zumaya). Full bio, bibliography and sample chapters on his website, below. His writing and living philosophy: Lighten up.

Ken's story "The Henry and the Martha", set in the same universe as "Here There Be Humans", appeared in Æon Three.

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.

Seven

Seven

Lies, Damned Lies, and Stories

Whyte Boyz

Jay Lake

The Doom That Came to Smallmouth

Joe Murphy

Lupercalia

Rita Oakes

Stephen Couch

Postcards From the Monkey Trial

The Passion: a Western

Bruce McAllister

The Ile of Dogges

Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

Here There Be Humans

Ken Rand

Our Authors

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