Æon Eight 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.

Author's Note: I wrote this in early 2006 shortly after Robert Sheckley died, then set the essay aside. I was too upset to think clearly, and I worried that the essay made no sense. In the months that followed, we've lost Octavia Butler, David Feintuch, John Morressy, and so many others. Octavia is the only one who made the New York Times because she “transcended” genre (what does that mean, anyway?) with her novel Kindred, and because she was the first science fiction writer (maybe even the first genre writer) to win the McArthur Genius Grant. Not because of her spectacular body of work, although I must say that the Times obit did at least mention what she wrote (because there wasn't enough of it! Dammit, she went too young). The others, Feintuch, Morressy, folks who've had an impact on the sf field, and by extension, literature, didn't even deserve a passing mention.

So I'm going to let this column stand. See it as a cry from the heart—a view of the ironies of hidden in the snobby side of modern America.

—KKR

Have you ever noticed that the New York Times obituary column only recognizes genre writers who have had their written work turned into mass media—primarily movies or television? Unless said writer has repeatedly made the bestseller list, or has ventured outside the genre with a critically acclaimed book (and then all the genre work will be ignored), the Times gives no acknowledgement of that writer's death.

And what does that say about the so-called newspaper of record? Remember now, this is the newspaper that publishes The New York Times Book Review every Sunday, the one that still strives for “literary” values. The Times is so influential that its secretive bestseller list (secretive because it only uses “select” bookstores to compile it, and you can't for love or money get the list of those stores [although you can bet they're probably not the chain bookstores]) often becomes a part of a publishing contract—in other words, a writer gets a bonus on his advance if his book happens to hit the Times list, not the USA Today list, or the Wall Street Journal list, or something generic like “national bestseller lists.” Just the Times. The New York Times. The paper that was so snobby, that back when I was a lowly reporter, it didn't deign to publish sports news. Nor did it cover television, unless there was something “worthy.” (In the 1980s, it bowed to public pressure—quickly on sports, establishing something too small to be a section, but large enough to include important news, and more slowly on television, adding coverage so that the reader didn't realize the Times television section had grown.)

Why is this important? Newspapers are, after all, passé. The Times's publisher went on Charlie Rose late last year and tried to defend the paper version of his paper, but even he acknowledged the handwriting on the computer screen—young people get their news digitally, if they get it at all.

So why am I talking about the Times? Because it still leads the way culturally. If the Times publishes an obit of a famous science fiction writer, CNN, FOX, and all their kith and kin pick up that obit and place it in crawl or give it a brief mention in their longer news programs. Odes to these writers appear in other publications because the paper of record mentioned them. And, ghoulishly, the publishing community will see this as a sign of interest in that now-late writer and will often reissue that writer's work.

And what irritates me is that the newspaper of record, the holder of our cultural consciousness, that icon of literary snobbery doesn't value genre writers for their words, their characters or their stories. This paper values writers for the very things it mocks: selling a lot of copies of the book (repeatedly hitting the bestseller lists) or for the translation someone else has made of those writers’ works for the large or small screen.

Perhaps this is becoming more and more important to me because I am losing so many friends to the vagaries of time. I write this at the beginning of 2006, reflecting on a year that took several writer friends, including Robert Sheckley (Times obit [thank you Freejack]), and longtime acquaintances, like J.N. Williamson whom I never met, but corresponded with for years.

Both Williamson and Sheckley edited. Both of them wrote volumes of work. Both of them had decades-long careers. In their respective fields (science fiction for Sheckley, horror for Williamson), they had great influence both in terms of style and in terms of discovery. Writers emulated them, and they in turn discovered new writers.

Both men had a large, though differing, impact on literature. Only Sheck made the Times and then, it seemed, not just on the strength of his work, but also because of Freejack, a rather abysmal movie starring Mick Jagger. And that got me thinking of the Times obits I'd read in the past year.

Mystery writer Ed McBain—amazing, towering figure, spectacular writer, and (from what I hear; I was never lucky enough to meet him) a really nice man. His Times obit prominently mentions The Birds whose screenplay he wrote (as Evan Hunter, his literary pen name) and Hill Street Blues, which he did not write for, but which was shamelessly modeled on his 87th Precinct series.

Inside the genre, writers like Sheckley and McBain receive excellent treatment as well—marvelous overviews of their careers (see, for example, www.locusmag.com or www.mysteryscene.com). But so do the J.N. Williamsons of the genre. Essayists explore the influences these writers have had on our reading lives and laud these people for the work they've done in changing literature forever.

If someone is already covering these lives, why do I go back to the Times? Guess I'm just getting tired of the hypocrisy. If we're going to discuss literary values, and good writing, and long-lasting storytelling, if we're going to laud certain writers and doom others to obscurity, it should be based on the work the writers have done (and the work the editors/reviewers have had the courtesy to read), not on some poorly remembered movie or an obscure connection to television.

I'm happy that the Times noticed Robert Sheckley. They should have. Bob was a good man, and a great writer, who did a lot for literature.

I just wish that, along with the socialites and the obscure Wall Street traders, the Times would also notice the J.N. Williamsons of the writing world, who weren't lucky enough to have someone in Hollywood buy their work, but were lucky enough to have an influential life-long career.

If we're going to discuss literature, folks, let's discuss all of it, not just the stuff that someone noticed as they read the credit lines on late night TV. And if you're going to call yourself the paper of record, then you should truly be a record, and not a reflection of the prejudices of the obituary writers manning what is colloquially known as “the morgue."

Writers should be known for more than “influencing” Hill Street Blues. They should also be known for the work they actually did, the stories they wrote, and the characters they created.

They should be known, in other words, for their life's work.

When we started buying stories for Æon Eight we began to see a theme arising from our first few choices. “It's about authenticity,” we said of one story, then noticed that the others we had scheduled for this issue dealt with the same concept.

We don't plan these things.

Only a few weeks out from our projected publication date, we fit the last story into the table of contents, and it too told of the importance—to yourself and to the world—of being exactly who you are, and following your dream to whatever destiny awaits you. Another theme issue was born, but it's my guess you wouldn't be able to tell from reading the stories, which are as wide in their style, approach, and subject matter as any batch of fiction we've put between Æon's covers yet. More about each of them later, but first a few words about our theme.

We don't originate our biological lives; for that we can thank our parents, and we should. It's an amazing universe, and I'm personally glad I showed up to be part of it. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. As children, we're subject to the authority of others, and our lives are not our own. Who can pinpoint the day that changes? But it does change. The child who's been the hostage to parents and educators and a barrage of other influences has an “aha!” moment, or more likely several thousand of them whose accumulated mass becomes a singularity by the time he's 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 (age doesn't matter, for until he begins this journey he will remain a child in some ways), and he begins to go his own way. He packs a lunch and journeys into the dark forest, picking a place where there is no path, for a path is the way someone else has already been.

It won't be easy. There'll be an arsenal of social weapons pointed at his heart, and signs saying “Go back!” and “Proceed no Further!” and “Don't say I didn't warn you.... “His parents will weep and curse on one side of him, and all that comforting familiarity of the expectations of others will beckon from the other side. He may long for the reassurance of the known: all the things it's assumed he will do and believe and become for the sake of someone else. That path is nearby at first, and clearly marked, and not nearly as dark and scary. He couldn't be blamed for stepping over to it, eating his lunch, and following it back home.

But if he does not—if he continues creating his own path—he will become the author of his life, and that life will reflect the truth of his being. He'll find and follow his bliss; not his father's, not his mother's, not anyone's but his. Along the way he'll find that all the things he did to impress others with the fine qualities he hoped he had were drapes he had drawn across the faults and inadequacies he feared he had ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"). When he finds the courage to confront and dispel those fears, he'll discover an authentic person underneath them who is at least as wonderful as the person he pretended to be, and not afraid.

Seven authors and two poets have illuminated parts of that journey for us in this issue of Æon. Daniel Marcus leads the way into the dark forest with a story about a man who takes the plunge into his own life from the end of the world in “Echo Beach.” A physicist looks for his destiny in the wrong corner of the multiverse in Ron Savage's “Playing Dice.” Liz Holliday introduces us to a young woman who's more than the sum of her parts, but who needs the help of a strange visitor to find “All of Me.” Two men with very different visions for saving humanity meet at the crossroads of the world in Martin McGrath's “Palaces of Force.” Stephanie Burgis shows us a man discovering his true self where he would never have looked for it in “Foxwoman.” And rounding out our tales of destiny lost and found is a welcome return appearance by Lawrence M. Schoen ("The Game of Leaf and Smile,” Æon Four) with a look at what happens to the established order of things when we start “Thinking."

Marci Tentchoff and Amanda Downum confront the light and the dark sides of transformation in two wonderful poems, and our regular columnists grace our pages once again. Kristine Kathryn Rusch asks some hard questions of the “newspaper of record,” and Dr. Rob Furey reveals the mysteries of distance at the large end of the cosmic scale.

Bringing you this issue has been a genuine journey of self-discovery. We're authentically pleased as punch to present Æon Eight.

"One of my favorite 70's bands is Martha and the Muffins, noteworthy for great hooks, tight musicianship, and an appealing, intelligent weirdness. “Echo Beach” was their breakout single. I loved the song (I can still hear the refrain, “Echo Beach, far away in time” in my head), but I could never figure out exactly what or where Echo Beach was. I had to write this story to find out. It should also be noted that this story owes a debt of gratitude to the Silverberg classic, ‘When We Went to See the End of the World.’”

IT'S ALWAYS THE LAST DAY OF THE WORLD at Echo Beach. From fifteen miles up, the horizon is visibly bowed. The sun hangs swollen above an oily sea. The coastal range ripples up from the water's edge, bunching together in wattles like the neck of a lizard. Scintilla flash from the ruins of a port city half engulfed.

The lounge is quiet, but it will start filling up soon. At a table in the middle of the room, an old man plays chess with an automaton. Every now and then, he reaches across the table and slaps the thing on the side of its metal head.

Near one of the large windows, a lanky, barrel-chested man drinks alone. Coal black skin, melanin-enhanced, tangle of blonde dreads. Circa 22C, a mod from one of the Martian arcologies. Clearly pre-Plague. Close enough to home for me that I want to say something to him, warn him. But what could I say?

A couple sits at the bar leaning toward one another, their heads touching. It's difficult to say whether they are accelerated canines or regressed humans, but there is something very dog-like in their focused attention to one another. An aura of benign stupidity hangs about them like sweet incense.

The digital clock above the holo fireplace reads 4:22:00. As I watch, the numbers dissolve and re-form: 4:21:59.

I check my console, pour a shot of absinthe and a pony of pomegranate juice, set them on a tray, and send it floating toward the Martian.

I walk down the length of the bar to the couple.

"Get you anything else?"

The man looks up at me with watery eyes.

"No, thank you,” he says.

"I don't think so,” the woman says at the same time. They look at each other and bark soft laughter. They lean their heads together again

I decide to leave the old man and the bot alone. As I turn my back I hear a thump as he smacks it again.

I wipe down the bar, check my stock. Vodka from Ganymede, gin from Hotpoint, malts from Scotland. Scotland. I remember jagged green hills, black rock thrusting into a gray sky, mounds of rubble dotting a fractal coastline testament to the mercurial nature of power. I stood amidst the ruins of the Castle Duncan as a piper wailed defiance and loss to the cradle of the ocean. There was a small suitcase open in front of him. Tourists threw coins.

I wonder if there's anything left of Scotland now, here at the end of Time. It's a stupid thought, of course. The continents have shifted, the seas have climbed and receded a dozen times. North America is an archipelago stretching from pole to equator; Fiji is the leading edge of a megacontinent; the treasures of continental Europe lie beneath a cold, green sea.

The world-face changes, the abstract constructions of Man linger ghostlike. If I were to travel to the global coordinates occupied by Castle Duncan circa 20C, could I still hear the echoes of pipes in the salt air? Does Gaia remember?

The Gate hums quietly. Laughter echoes up from the Foyer. Heads emerge from the spiral staircase set in the floor at the far end of the lounge away from the windows. Party of four; two men, two women. Definitely post-Diaspora; I can't place them on the Continuum. Definitely wealthy. They wear their entitlement like a badge.

One of them men catches sight of me, nudges his companions, and they all drift in my direction.

He says something to me in a liquid trill. A voice whispers in my ear: Give us your best table.

Arrogant bastard. I gesture at the nearly empty room.

"Have your finest pleasure,” I say, hoping that the odd phrasing will confuse his chip.

He gives me a strange look and gestures his companions toward the windows. They are selectively polarized; you can look directly at the sun's disk. Structures writhe across its face. Precursor flares erupt like Medusa tangles from its troubled edge.

After a few minutes they sit down. I pretend to be busy with something behind the bar. The man clears his throat several times, finally gestures me over.

I grab a very dirty rag from the bin under the bar and carry it conspicuously as I walk over to them. I wipe down their table, leaving a greasy film.

"What can I get for you?” I ask. His companions ignore me.

His voice is water running over smooth stones. There is a sibilant whisper in my ear.

Do you have beer?

Moron. This is a bar, for Christ's sake.

"Beer. Let me think.” I cup my chin in my fist, scratch my head. “I don't ... no, wait. Beer. Yes, I think so. Four beers?"

"You're very rude,” the man says, in halting System Anglo.

"It's the end of the world, Holmes. You can sue me."

I go back to the bar, pour a pitcher and set it on a tray with four glasses. I send it toward them a little too quickly and a foamy tongue spills down the side of the pitcher.

The Gate hums again. It's almost inaudible, a subsonic rumble I feel in my feet. Business is picking up. The clock reads 3:37.

By 1:30 Echo Beach is packed. Ice-miners from the Belt, circa 24C, very heavy drinkers. A clutch of avian poets from Deneb IV, post-Diaspora. An accelerated goat with a bell around his neck. He doesn't smell accelerated. Even though the place is S.R.O., there are empty seats on either side of him at the bar. He's guzzling buttermilk and eating pickled onions like jelly beans.

It's almost time for a visit from the Lhosa. I send a couple of bus trays weaving between the tables and wipe down the bar. Everything looks pretty good. At 1:05, the air next to me crackles like old paper and a humaniform outline begins to gather substance.

But it doesn't quite coalesce. It never does. The Lhosa projects in as a hologram from some other place and time. Never in person, never via the Gate. Its manifestation is always a translucent cartoon-like rendering of a 20C Hollywood B.E.M.—bulbous forehead cradled by a delicate tracery of bone, veiny tributaries branching beneath the skin. Huge eyes, black pupils surrounded by bloody sclera. It's wearing a jumpsuit with thin, pointy lapels. An elaborate raygun hangs holstered at its side.

I suspect that its appearance in this form is a concession to my kitschy 20C notion of alienness. I have no idea what the Lhosa actually looks like, whether it is a singular entity of unimaginable power, a representative of a vastly superior race of beings, or the fin-de-monde equivalent of a street punk working a three card Monty hustle on Lenox Avenue.

"How's business?” it asks. Its voice is a raspy white-noise hiss, like a radio between stations.

I gesture at the crowded room. “The place is hoppin'."

"Good. Good.” A pulse throbs in its domed forehead.

What the Lhosa means by “business” is by no means clear to me. Customers come and go by a pre-arrangement from which I am excluded. No currency changes hands at Echo Beach; indeed, here at the nexus of centuries of recorded time and millennia unrecorded the very notion of currency has long ago crumbled to dust.

We stand there together for a moment without speaking, a twentieth century human and a cartoonish holographic chimera, behind a battered rosewood bar in a structure that looks like an inverted kitchen whisk suspended by invisible forces fifteen miles above the doomed Earth

"I'll be going, then,” the Lhosa says.

"Later,” I say, but the alien is already gone, leaving behind a faint whiff of ozone—an olfactory Cheshire smile.

I wonder if he has other stops to make, if Echo Beach is an instance of some kind of franchise operation, hundreds of McRagnaroks stacked a microsecond apart here at the end of Time.

God, what hubris. What solipsism. It's hardly the end of Time. Just another planet recycling its heavy elements back into the corpus of the mother star. By a Cosmic metric, not that big a deal.

1:02. In two minutes, the stasis field will kick in. Nobody gets in or out after that. Already, I know, an invisible sleet of heavy particles batters against the walls and windows, a precursor to the main event. The integrity of the structure itself is sufficient to deal with that. But when the nova front washes over us, boiling away the seas and stripping the gauzy film of atmosphere from Gaia's tired body, we want to be in stasis. Oh, yes. We want to be in stasis.

With fifteen seconds to go, the Gate hums again. A young woman, dressed in black and silver, bright white hair cropped close.

She orders a whiskey, neat, walks with it to the windows. There's something about the way she carries herself that catches my eye, something that sets her apart from the usual run of sensation-starved Apocalypse hags that converge to this place like flies to the warm scent of Death.

0:58:00. Nothing appears changed, but we are now ensconced in the stasis field, kicked back a microsecond down the Continuum. Nothing can hurt us now, not even, ha-ha, a nova.

The crowd is getting loud and stupid and I'm scrambling to keep up with the drink orders. My eyes keep returning to the young woman. She stands there sipping her whiskey, gazing out the window and occasionally looking around the room with a slightly bemused expression on her face.

At around 05:00, the crowd starts to quiet down. People are sliding chairs and tables over toward the windows. The floor is tiered, so everybody gets a view. By 02:00, there's hardly a sound in the place except the rhythmic sighs of a hundred people breathing. Someone says something about toasting marshmallows, eliciting a weak ripple of laughter.

At 00:30, tension fills the air like smoke from an electrical fire. The silence hums. At ten seconds, somebody starts a countdown. By the time we're down to six, everybody in the room is chanting along, a dozen different languages braiding together in a rich Babel.

Five!

The dog couple look toward the windows, holding hands tightly.

Four!

The Martian sprawls across the table, head buried in his forearms.

Three!

The young woman looks around the room, catches my eye. She lifts her drink toward me in salute.

Two!

In spite of myself, I am chanting along with the crowd. My knuckles are white on the edge of the bar.

One!

The chess playing bot is staring straight ahead. Its compound eyes glitter in the light of the dying sun. The old man's king lies on its side, defeated.

The sun brightens and swells. Its surface is a scrabbled patchwork of bright honeycomb-like cells. Flares lick out from its edge. It seems to grow in slow motion, inflating like a balloon.

It's like standing in front of firing squad. You hear the crack of gunfire, see the puff of smoke from the rifles. The hail of bullets hangs in the air, moving toward you just below the threshold of perception, like the hands of a clock.

Conversation begins to pick up again. I take a few drink orders, but the crowd is subdued. Looking out at the spreading fire in the sky. Wondering why they came. The sun fills a quarter of the sky. I take advantage of the crowd's preoccupation to send out four busing trays. Spidery mechanical arms pluck empty glasses from crowded tables.

The Martian has awakened and he begins to cry in blubbering, alcoholic gasps. People move away, leaving him in the center of a small circle of emptiness.

The young woman steps into the circle, puts her hand on the top of his head. It seems to calm him. He takes her hand and holds it to his cheek.

The sun fills half the sky. The room is again silent. A few people crane their necks to make out details of the ruined city below. Fingers of ocean stretch across a sprawling geometric grid, the hard Cartesian lines blurred by time.

The shock front is almost upon us. It fills the sky, a wall of bright, hexagonal cells of light. Structures writhe within the cells; each of them could swallow Earth whole. Indeed, one of them will.

The ocean bursts into steam, obscuring the surface of the planet. In the blink of an eye, we are engulfed in flame.

It just stays like that, nothing out there but bright light subdued to a uniform gray by the window's polarization. Every now and then, an inhomogeneity ripples past, sending a corresponding ripple of comment through the crowd, but soon they lose interest. Conversation picks up again.

I love this part. The timing is crucial. You want to nail them just when the edge of novelty's worn off, just when they think the show's over.

The post-Diaspora fellow I'd had words with raises his hand in the air and snaps his fingers, calling to me in a high, melodic voice.

Whisper in my ear. Bartender, I—

I reach down under the bar and press the button. The entire station lurches and the bottom drops out of my stomach.

The transition is abrupt and complete. A moment ago, surrounded by the healing light of Apocalypse. Now, the sun hangs low over an oily sea. Streamers of cloud dusted with gold hug the land. The sky segues from light blue at the bowed horizon to deep blue-black overhead.

The crowd lets out a collective gasp. The clock over the holo fireplace reads 24:00:00. Someone starts to applaud and it catches like wildfire. The room fills with the sound of hands clapping together. Relief and regeneration! Alleviation and ease! The applause dies, conversation swells. In twos and threes the crowd drifts down to the Foyer. Some of them thank me on the way out, as if I were the architect of their deliverance. Of course, snapback would activate automatically if I didn't do anything. I smile and say nothing.

The Gate hums beneath my feet, scattering satisfied customers back to their appointed places on the Continuum. Soon the room is almost empty, just the young woman, the Martian, and the avian poets. The poets get up from their table and head toward the stairs. I wipe down the bar, re-stock, run a load of glasses through the dishwasher. The smell of bile tickles the air and I notice that someone has left a discreet puddle of vomit underneath a table near the holo fireplace. I go into the stockroom behind the bar for cleaning supplies. When I return the woman and the Martian are gone. Beneath my feet, the Gate hums one last time.

I complete my tasks and retire to my quarters adjacent to the Foyer—bedroom, living room, a small gym, a kitchenette with a well-stocked pantry. And my library, thousands of recordings in a dozen different media. It's something of a fetish of mine. I have disks and DATS, video and vinyl, beads, books, and baryon resonance chips. Playback devices occupy an entire wall of my living room. But today nothing catches my interest.

I undress and stand beneath the shower for a long time, letting the needle-spray of water beat against my head and neck. When I feel sufficiently empty of thought, I dry myself off, stagger into the bedroom, and throw myself onto the unmade bed.

I was hiking in Nepal, following the faint signature of a path as it hugged the edge of a mountain. To my left, a wall of rock, anchored deep within the Earth and rising far above me. The mountain seemed so massive that for a moment I imagined gravity turned sideways, the stony face of the cliff pulling me toward itself. To my right wash ... nothing; the cyan sky, the mosaic of browns and grays merging in distance haze were like the backdrop of an empty diorama.

I negotiated a particularly difficult section of path. My pack felt awkward and off-balance and I was hugging the cold rock wall. Suddenly, I heard a sound that didn't belong at twelve thousand feet—old paper crackling together. (How familiar that sound is now!) The air in front of me shimmered and sparked. Bright vertical lines winked in and out of existence. The sparks and lines coalesced into a humanoid shape. Bulbous brain-case in a veiny cradle, huge bloodshot eyes. I could see the jagged horizon through its white, narrow-lapeled lab coat.

"I am the Lhosa,” it said in a buzzing voice.

Oh man, I thought. Trouble, I'm in trouble up here. Oxygen deprivation, altitude sickness, hallucinating, got to stop and take it easy. But I knew what altitude sickness felt like, and I didn't have any of the other symptoms. No nausea, no weakness. I'd been feeling pretty good, actually.

"And I'm the Walrus,” I said. “Fuck off."

"In five steps, your foot is going to slip and you will fall nineteen hundred feet to your death."

"Yeah, right.” I couldn't believe I was actually arguing with a hallucination. I took a step forward. The Lhosa held its hand out, palm toward me.

"Stop. Please."

Please? That got me. A polite mirage. I stopped and waited.

"Do you want a job?” it asked.

I didn't need a job. I'd just sold my software company, Treadwater Business Solutions, to Microsoft for four million dollars. Petty cash for them, but it set me up for life. I was taking the vacation I'd always dreamed of. But what the hell, I thought. Play along. See what happens.

"What kind of job?"

"In approximately six hundred million years, your sun is going to go nova. We provide an opportunity for students, theologians, and the curious to view the—"

"Wait a minute. Old Sol is an uninteresting, middle-aged, main sequence star, right? It's got at least a couple of billion years left."

The Lhosa shrugged. It seemed vaguely annoyed that I'd interrupted its pitch.

"These things happen. We provide an opportunity for visitors to view the spectacle from within the safety of a temporal stasis field. The facility is largely automated, but the client interface requires intelligent presence."

Client interface. That sounded like greasing the public to me.

"So ... you want me to be some kind of P.R. flack for the end-of-the-world show?"

"A bartender, actually."

I did five years in food service before I got into the software business and transformed a time-wasting obsession into an honest living. Well, a living. For three of those years I managed a yuppie fern bar owned by the Vietnamese Mafia in Seattle. It had its moments, but by and large, it was not a time I looked back on fondly.

"I don't think so."

"Suit yourself."

The Lhosa didn't move so I walked through him. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and my skin felt cold. Electric specks swam before my eyes.

With a faint pop the Lhosa was gone.

I paused for a moment and looked around. The wind picked up, tugging at my jacket and whistling in my ears.

I shifted my pack and took a step forward. My foot slipped on some loose gravel. I reached out for support but there was nothing to grab onto, just the smooth rock wall. The blue dome of the sky spun about my head. I hung suspended on the edge of the path for what seemed like forever. My arms pinwheeled as I tried to shift my center of gravity back to safety, but it was hopeless.

It takes a long time to fall nineteen hundred feet, over ten seconds, and it's true what they say about your life passing before your eyes. I remembered the first girl I'd ever bedded, my thoughts a montage of skin and sweat and sighs. My parents, looking old and sad, sitting in the living room of the house I grew up in. My partner in Treadwater, who I'd screwed out of six hundred K in the buyout deal, on the deck of his sailboat, squinting into the sun.

It was as if I was in a bubble, sharing the close space with dozens of ghosts manifested from memory and it was the bubble that was rushing headlong toward the basalt floor of the valley, the bubble that would smash against the rock and release me to the shredding winds.

But in a desperate corner of my mind another voice scrabbled at the walls of reason. No! No! No!

Suddenly, my feet were resting on solid rock, the wind a feather's kiss on my cheeks. I opened my eyes.

The Lhosa stood before me on the path. Bright vertical lines flickered within its image, accompanied by bursts of static. The jagged horizon, visible through its chest, bisected the world.

"What do you say?” it asked.

I wake up groggy, with a coat of fur on my tongue and a sharp pain in the middle of my forehead that reminds me of a hangover, although I rarely drink. I make a pot of coffee and put on an Eric Dolphy bead. I de-polarize the window and the golden dawn of Earth's final day fills the room with light.

I feel restless. I've been reading Proust but I keep losing my place; the book rests face down on my sofa, a crippled bird with outstretched wings. I can't bring myself to start sifting through it again.

My mind keeps returning to the young woman in the lounge. I don't think I'll ever see her again—there isn't a lot of repeat business at Echo Beach.

But there was something about her that I can't shake. Maybe it was the way she comforted the Martian while everyone else was acting as if sodden grief were a communicable illness. I imagine us talking intimately together in quiet tones, perhaps sharing a glass of wine. She stays after snapback and we return to my quarters together, dim the windows, and make love for hours.

My loneliness here is usually something apart from me, a bright-eyed rodent with sleek greasy fur and needle-like teeth that comes out to nibble at the corners of the furniture when all the lights are out. But suddenly, now, it is almost more than I can bear. I consider for the thousandth time the alternative path I could have taken. A very short path—a few more seconds of free-fall, a bright flash of pain, then nothing. It doesn't seem so bad.

I put on more Dolphy, his “Last Date” recording, strip down to my shorts, and go to the gym. I cycle through my repertoire of mechanical torture, rushing headlong toward nowhere on treadmill, stationary bike, rowing machine. Then I work through the freeweights—pecs, lats, biceps. By the time I'm done I'm drenched with sweat but I've pushed back the borders of that darkness a bit.

I doze. I make a feeble attempt at the Proust, doze some more. At around six, I head into the Foyer and take a look around. The Gate itself, an oblong puddle of pearly phosphorescence that the eye slides across like oil on glass. It hurts to look at it directly, not an acute physical pain but a sense of “wrongness.” You start seeing things in that glowing blob of nothing, motion strange and quick.

Machines surround the Gate, gunmetal gray with readouts glowing in the skin of the metal itself, captioned in a looping script unknown to me. The machinery has a decidedly deco look to it and I wonder if it isn't window dressing. Like the appearance of the Lhosa, its alienness has a comforting familiarity.

Next to the spiral staircase leading up to the Lounge, a guest book bound in white leather rests on a marble table. I open it up and look over the entries from the previous day.

Lia. 23C, Ceres. The same era, roughly, as the Martian. I wonder if she went home with him.

I go upstairs. From this end of the Lounge opposite the windows, perspective gives the illusion of parallel lines converging toward infinity, floor and ceiling funneling the observer toward a distant focus.

I like this time. Quiet and fecund, like the hush that descends upon a Nebraska prairie before an electrical storm uncoils its fury.

I pour myself a club soda and walk to the windows. Gaia lies open below me, suppliant, the sea coppery-gold, the land in muted pastel. It's all so impossibly sad. I hate the Lhosa for this pointless exercise; I hate the wretched customers who flock to this place like paparazzi to a celebrity funeral; I hate myself for not having the courage to bow gracefully out of this life.

But what if Death is a singularity, a metaphysical black hole? As we approach its event horizon time takes greater and greater strides and our world-line stretches and groans under impossible tidal forces. If we ever reached it, we would encompass the Universe. If that is true, then in some sense I am still hurtling towards the basalt floor of the canyon, immortal and doomed.

The Gate hums.

Lia! But no, it is another clutch of avians from Deneb, four of them. They huddle together near the staircase, looking around and cooing nervously at one another. I let myself in behind the bar.

"Welcome to Echo Beach,” I say. “Plenty of seats, no waiting. What can I get for you?"

One of them turns to me. Its eyes are large and black with no discernible pupils. Its round face is covered with downy feathers. Its mouth is a chitinous beak. It chirps at me and my chip whispers softly in my ear:

Our ~FRIENDS~ recommended this experience highly. Much ... pain.

Fucking parasites. Pain. I smile stiffly. “Yes. Sit anywhere you like.” Maybe we'll get an accelerated feline or two this shift.

I put on a bead of early 21C industrial music—polyrhythmic loops of great machines tearing themselves apart. An unintelligible rap track weaves rage through the mechanical chaos. The avians don't like it much; their feathers are literally ruffled. I turn up the volume and pretend to be occupied at the bar.

Business begins to pick up. By two-thirty, the place is nearly full. I'm hustling trying to keep up with the orders and keep an eye on what my gut tells me is going to be trouble—two sheet-pale men from the Charon Habitat, circa 27C. They arrived separately, apparently as strangers, gravitated to one another, and started talking. They've been getting louder and louder and by this time they're screaming at each other. Their clipped accents are a little hard to understand, modulated to the threshold of unfamiliarity but not odd enough to kick in the chip. I can make out something about “Parliament” and “magma rights."

Suddenly, there is a flurry of arms and feet and one of them is on the floor holding his windpipe and gasping for air. The other circles, ready to deliver a coup de grace. The crowd mills stupidly about.

I turn off the music, grab my stunner, and leap over the bar.

"That's enough,” I say, holding the slim black tube in what I hope is a threatening manner.

The circling man stops, looks at me then down at stunner, and nods sharply. He picks his drink up from a nearby table and walks away.

The other man is sitting up, still holding his throat but apparently unharmed.

"You two stay away from each other. I don't want to have to use this.” I shake the stunner for emphasis and return to the bar. Music fills the room again; tension leaves the crowd like gas escaping from a balloon. The buzz of conversation swells.

"Very good,” a female voice says.

I look up. It's her, it's Lia, and I can't help but smile.

"Hey.” Stupidly, I pick up a rag and clutch it in my fist.

"I was here yesterday,” she says.

"Yesterday, huh?"

Her eyebrows furrow, but her eyes are smiling. “Yes, well. Yesterday. Whatever that means."

"Same day, different cast of characters. Except for me. Most people don't come back."

She nods. I notice her ears, sculpted to small points. “I can see why,” she says. “It's not a very nice place."

"Then what are you doing here?"

She bites her lower lip, looks off toward the sky-filled windows, looks back at me.

"Can I have a drink? A nice single-malt something, neat."

I pour the amber liquid into a glass and set it in front of her. She takes a sip.

"Do you ... live here?"

I nod. “Yeah."

"What a terrible job."

I nod again. “Yeah."

She takes another sip.

"You went home with the Martian?"

She nods. “I took him home."

My intention is to acknowledge her disclosure with a slight nod, a knowing tilt of the head. But something very different happens when I open my mouth.

"Ah,” I say. “A mercy fuck."

She gives me a look that manages to be both withering and sad, sets her drink gently down on the bar in front of me, and walks to the end of the room and down the spiral stairs. The Gate hums.

Here at the end of everything, I'm still an idiot.

I go through the motions of tending bar, sending out bus trays, pouring drinks. All the while I'm playing the loop of conversation over and over again in my head. So thoroughly human, so typically stupid, to welcome the object of one's desire by sending her packing.

At 1:05, I hear the sound of crackling paper and the Lhosa begins to materialize next to me. I am filled with hatred and rage and I wish that just once it would fully coalesce into flesh and substance so I could wrap my hands around its pencil neck.

"How's business?” it asks.

"Business,” I say. I look around the room. Heads bob in conversation; Babel hangs in the air like smoke. I turn back to the Lhosa. I want to ask it for the hundredth time: Why me? But that is a well worn path, the answer always the same, and I have long ago stopped asking. “You were available,” it would say.

The doomed sky fills the windows.

"Business is good."

Another day, another Gotterdamerung. I clean up the Lounge, like I always do, and head downstairs to my quarters. Today, however, will be different. I print up enough 23C currency to give myself a jump start, and I stand looking at the gate, staring into that gray blob of pearly nothing. I fiddle with the controls, step back again, stare some more. I expect any second to hear that crackling paper sound, the Lhosa showing up like Marley's ghost, but it doesn't happen. I step forward.

It wasn't easy to carve out a life for myself on 23C Mars, but I made a few investments, bootstrapped a small financial consulting firm specializing in antiviral nanotech. Picking up the pieces after the Plague. I kept a low profile, never got too greedy. I did all right.

I looked for Lia, of course, but I had no way to find her, nothing to go on except the memory of her face, that last look of withering pity. Eventually, I gave up. I even stopped listening for the sound of crackling paper. Because I know why the Lhosa never tracked me down here, why it never brought me back.

It doesn't have to.

I'm still there, at the threshold of the Singularity, wiping tables and serving drinks. But that's someone else, caught in that Sisyphean loop of doom and rebirth, doom and rebirth, trapped. Someone else.

I've beaten the Lhosa. I've redeemed my old self. I'm never going back.

Last month, I purchased an automaton to help me around the house. In addition to its usual domestic routines, it has a strong chess program, but when playing the Sicilian Dragon it always falls for a very aggressive, risky Queenside rook sacrifice. Every time, the same stupid blunder. It is as if its ability to reason, to learn from its mistakes, has completely fled. I was so frustrated today that I reached across the table and smacked it on the side of its head. There was a satisfying hollow sound. I did it again.

"I love the whole idea of a multiverse. And my thought was, wouldn't it be interesting to show Albert Einstein (who was not a multiverse kind of guy) doing well in one world and not doing well in the other. More, I wanted to use his theories to show his life."

THEOREM #1. Special Relativity. As an object moves faster, time passes more slowly. The object's length in the direction of the motion shrinks, and the object's mass increases. At the velocity of light, time stands still, length in the direction of the motion reduces to zero, and mass becomes infinite.

The man is having the usual night sweats over a theory issue. He ponders his own infinite mass. What if my body becomes too heavy for me? Do I lie here forever? Is there an end to it?

His wife nudges him and says: “Stop mumbling to yourself, Albert. How am I supposed to sleep with you and the mumbling?"

Albert would like to give her infinite sleep.

Mileva has never been an attractive person. Her features are thick and boxy, her once black hair mostly gray. He married the woman for her intellect. Over the years, along with everything else, this also is beginning to sag.

Now the midnight chime of the mantel clock intensifies his horrible weighty feeling. Their dark bedroom smells of the broiled swordfish she cooked for supper. He is fifty today. He has graying hair like his wife. He has a thick waist and ankles like her, too. They deserve each other. Fifty, Albert thinks, and what have I accomplished? He is a clerk in a patent office, technical expert second class, a title held for the last twenty-three years. Earlier in his career he tried publishing a few scientific papers on relative velocity and acceleration. The journal editors felt a patent clerk wasn't the person to discuss such matters. They sent him a polite, pre-written letter, saying his work simply did not suit their current editorial needs.

In 1901, when Albert and Mileva first came to Bern, a mind-numbingly provincial little town, everyone was talking about the new railway station. How the Swiss love their trains. By this year, 1929, the town's expanding businesses and population have changed Bern into a city. The southern part has become nothing but wealthy clutter, one mansion after another, and all that prosperity only accentuates Albert's failures. These homes taunt him with their opulence. He dreads leaving his three room apartment on 49 Kramgasse. Knowing he must face such affluence on the way to a job he can barely tolerate should be a hell best left until after his death.

He also must endure Mileva. Albert's thorn of thorns. Mileva the Perpetually Dissatisfied. For the past twenty-seven years she has deluded herself into thinking she is a better scientist than her husband.

"You can't get your name published in the phonebook, let alone a journal,” she enjoys saying. “I was the top woman in our physics class."

This is where Albert reminds her that she was the only woman in their physics class.

Mileva constantly nags him to do something significant, as if he hasn't tried, as if he doesn't want to. Does she think he enjoys being a failure? Chances dissipate. The older you become, the faster the world goes by you. But Albert has noticed a paradox.

Though his life goes by faster, each day seems an eternity. Perhaps it's the phenomenon of being in mind-numbing Bern and doing a meaningless job. Worse, he is also feeling smaller and smaller. Every year his self-esteem whittles further down to zero. Albert thinks, I'm my own infinite mass. Look at me: my body parts are becoming too heavy.

Theorem #2. General Relativity. An extension of Special Relativity designed to include gravity, which is defined as a curve in spacetime. A smaller object isn't drawn or attracted to a larger object. The smaller object simply travels through a space already warped by the larger one.

Here on a wood bench in a park on Kramgasse, Albert and the novelist Hesse sit beneath ancient trees. Leaves filter the afternoon sun into long bars of light. Hesse's face is narrow and serious. His round glasses perch on a nose that belongs to some tall, pale bird. Albert tells his friend how impossible Mileva has become since getting two of her papers published in Annalen der Physik, the leading German physics journal.

"We got letters from our boys yesterday,” Albert mutters, “Both are thrilled for her, of course."

Hesse pats the perspiration on his neck with a folded white handkerchief. He says, “And you, dear Albert, lie to me for awhile. Tell me that you're pleased, too.” Brightness cuts the shade along the cobblestone walkway.

Staying quiet a moment, Albert shrugs and finally says: “I married Mileva for her intellect. But whenever she's displeased with the progress of my career, she flaunts her academic successes."

Hesse grins; his teeth are small, dark about the edges. He says, “A woman's first conflict is her biology. Men, they're just surprised participants. Now that her children are grown and she's published, you'll get relief. Trust me."

Hesse is right, as always. How does the man know these things? Mileva's disposition has already improved. Albert suspects his wife will become a compelling voice in physics. She sticks to the current thought, supporting Newton's theories but with a clarity that is rare. She doesn't ruffle the profession's feathers. She gets along. Unlike me, Albert thinks. Not that I don't support Newton, I do. His vision is simply too limiting. A person needs to look past the everyday, the familiar.

Albert glances up at the trees, the sunlight glistening about summer foliage and dark branches.

Scribbled below one of his polite, pre-written rejections from Annalen der Physik, an editor had advised: Before attacking settled, established thought, you should consider the consequences of your changes and embellishments.

Hesse's eyes blink. The rounded spectacles have magnified lenses and add to his birdlike appearance as much as his pale hook of a nose.

"Dear Albert, you're a man looking for an avenue,” he says. “More, actually: an obsessed, brilliant man. What's more tragic than that? Perhaps in some other time, in some other world, yes?” And as an afterthought: “If you're truly discontented, why not divorce?"

Albert tells his friend that he has considered it, many times.

What he doesn't discuss is the comfort he feels with Mileva, even on the most monotonous days, the tiny fleeting islands of kindnesses amid her dissatisfactions, the sound of her steady breathing next to him at night. As Hesse says, perhaps in some other time, in some other world.

Since her publications, Albert hasn't thought about divorce. After all, she is the big news, the big fuss, a presence outshining him, and he follows the trail of her warped space.

Field Equations. These describe an interaction, A) how an object curves space, and B) how the curvature stretches or squeezes matter. Such equations can be used to explain, say, a collapsed star's transformation into a black hole.

"Albert, I'm leaving,” Mileva says this matter-of-factly, as if she is going to the store for bread or milk.

Then Albert realizes she means to erase her warp in spacetime. She wants him hanging there, wrapped by that cold darkness, lost to the infinite.

"How can you do this?” he wants to know. “We have children, we have years. Was it so bad?"

They are in the kitchen. Albert is at the small white lacquered table drinking after-dinner coffee while his wife stands by the sink washing dishes.

Mileva doesn't care for scenes. Emotional things don't sit well with her.

"I'm going to Zurich,” she tells him. “I've been accepted at the university.” Albert feels excitement sweep through his chest, and he says: “How absolutely wonderful, Mileva. Congratulations! How wonderful for you, for us. I don't understand, what does this have to do with our marriage? Can't we still be married and you go to the university?"

Mileva turns from the sink and stares at him. One hand grasps a sudsy white dish; the other, a damp towel.

"You have a job here, a life here,” she says. “I have nothing."

He can't believe her talk. Albert says, “You call that boredom I have a job? My life is you and I, Mileva, not the job."

Now he can't believe what he's saying. But it's true, and the excitement in his chest is becoming panic. He is too out of touch with what pleases him, with what makes the world right. She's the daily mooring of his life. Who would've guessed?

Mileva is gone in two days.

He watches her train leave the station. He goes back to an empty apartment. He lumbers from room to room, marveling how everything can change so quickly. Why did she leave on a Saturday? Albert thinks. I have nothing to occupy myself. I don't work on Saturday. What am I supposed to do?

He decides to have tea and read. The blue porcelain teapot isn't on the stove. An hour passes before he finds the pot and figures out how to make tea.

After the first week Albert notices his anxiety has become more of a dull heavy feeling. All acts now require concentration: rising from the bed, his shower and lavatory duties, tying his worn leather shoes, a breakfast of rye bread and soft cheese. Now there is solace in the boredom of his job.

Spacetime seems to expand, particularly the evenings. The three room apartment on 49 Kramgasse becomes infinite, warping in the direction of the refrigerator and bedroom.

There are lengthy pauses between the ticks of the mantel clock.

Mileva stands at the open door with her suitcase.

How many months has it been, six, eight, close to a year? Albert is amazed how time slowed to zero can escape his attention.

Mileva enters the apartment. Tears swell along the rims of her tired eyes. Annalen der Physik has rejected recent publications, calling them too uninspired. Her grades are not the best, either. “Terrible grades,” she says with quivered breath, settling onto the sofa. Albert slips his arm around her slumped shoulders, attempting to comfort her. This burned out star. This blackness slumped on velvet. He is also cautious. He is afraid he will be sucked into that blackness and disappear forever.

Quote: God doesn't play dice.

The old man has rowed to the center of the small lake. He withdraws the oars into the wooden boat, resting his arms on his knees. Time to sit and think, what he does best.

Students have gathered on the grassy shore in groups of threes and fours. They know his routines. They watch him, the old man in a gray sweatshirt and khaki pants. They have come to the university just to catch a glimpse of him, just to say hello. With his bush of a mustache and all that white hair, he's not a man you can easily miss.

God doesn't play dice, he thinks, which means there is one way to do business, only one, with nothing leftover for chance.

He has devoted a lifetime to finding these elusive consistencies. Recently, when he considers his life, he isn't sure about God, or what God does, or if God doesn't roll dice with the best of them. The old man mentors a graduate student whose dissertation is on parallel universes.

Others in his department whisper approval and discuss invisible worlds. What are the implications? What will this do to his own theories? Does God know?

The old man is also thinking about the past. His brief first marriage to Mileva. The seven years he worked as a patent office clerk in Bern. The doctorate he earned at Zurich. His publications in Annalen der Physik.

The glassy surface of the lake reflects the afternoon sunlight and turns it gold. He feels the sun warming his neck and back. It's a summer's day in Jersey, his twenty-first summer here. Beyond the lake and the students watching him, the spire of the Firestone Library hovers above the trees.

Who would have thought it? Even the old man couldn't have dreamed this life, the accolades, the fame. He also recalls his second marriage to Elsa, and how he had botched that one, too. He once wrote, “I can love humanity but when it comes to close relationships I'm a horse for a single harness."

There are always regrets, of course, no escaping them. Nobody leaves this life without regret. This is a life he wishes he could rearrange, redo. Then the old man remembers a saying he once read, or maybe he said it himself: “...perhaps in some other time, in some other world."

So she's on a train, right?

waiting for her stop and reading random pages of this kind of weird new scifi book, and wondering if her hair is holding or if she maybe should have used just one more gob of styling gel, when suddenly

she feels this kind of tingle in her neck, like when her boyfriend used to kiss her there, before she dumped him when she caught him smoking up with his best friend still in their bed, but anyway, the tingle spreads, and starts to

burn, and then she's screaming and some people kind of back away, but you know, can't, because the train is really full, and then her skin splits down the back, and all her clothes just fa away in tatters on the floor, and underneath are filmy wings

and not much else, so when the voice says, “Downtown,

Georgia station,” and the doors spread wide, it flies away, and all that's left are rags of clothes and hair, and one bright paperback, still mostly new, and people wondering where she hid her purse.

"I had the idea for this story when I was staying in a hotel/casino in Las Vegas. Every morning when I had breakfast the same young woman would come and clear my table and bring me iced water and ask if I wanted coffee. That was all she was allowed to do, because she had Down syndrome. And that's how the story of Jemmy Green began.... Incidentally, if you like the aliens in this story you can find them again in “This Is the Universe,” my story in The Ultimate Alien (Byron Preiss Publishing)."

I SURE HOPE THIS THING IS WORKING. I can see the tape going round and round, but I don't know for sure I pressed the right button. It would be a real shame if it don't come out good, when you promised to type it all up for me. I surely couldn't have writ it down myself.

Well anyways, I hope this is what you wanted to know about why I came here.

I clear the tables at the Aces High Restaurant. That's down at the Eureka Gold Strike Casino. When someone leaves, I wipe the table, good and clean. I take the dishes back to the kitchen for Ray to stack the washer. When someone comes in, I get over there quick, and make sure they got their ice water and ask if they want coffee, and then I tell a waitperson to go write down their order.

That's what I do. That's my job. I like it.

I do. Or anyways, I did.

Wasn't what I wanted though. I kind of remember that now. Seems strange to say it, but I remember when I was little, I wanted to do cartoons. Draw ‘em, I mean. Maybe write the words too, but mostly, I liked to draw. Always had a pencil in my hand then. Couldn't see a piece of paper without marking it up.

But that was then and this is now, and you know what? It ain't so bad.

I like talking to the people. We get them from all over. England. Europe. New York, even.

But I ain't never seen nothing like that fella who sat himself down that morning last April. He weren't by himself. There was Mr. Auerbach what runs everything, and that pretty little girl who brings the reporters and suchlike around, and a couple other folk I seen sometimes. I'm thinking maybe they work in the upstairs offices, though I couldn't say for sure.

And right in the middle of them, sitting there like a regular person, this space alien fella like one of them I saw on TV.

So, their table's cleared already. I made sure of that, because Mrs. Matthews (she's in charge) she told me they were coming down and be sure to get it done nice. Only when they came in, she looked real surprised, but then she's poking me in the back and telling me to get myself over there. Me, I can't hardly breathe. I'm thinking that alien fella, he likely don't want no coffee. Can't see for sure where he'd drink it down anyway, not with all them tentacles waving around on his face.

Then Mrs. Matthews pushes the pitcher of ice water in my hands, but they're sweating so hard it slips right through them. Makes one hell of a crash on the floor, if you'll pardon my language, and then everyone's looking at me and it's gone dead quiet and I just don't know where to put my face. Ray, he brings out the mop, and I try to take it off of him. I'm thinking then I won't have to take the pitcher on over to the table. But Mrs. Matthews, she just gives me another and says, Jemmy, you just take it over there like a good girl.

So, I take a good deep breath and by now I'm figuring that alien, he already got a good look at me so maybe he won't do much more looking. Not that I can see no eyes on him anyhow. Just these big coloured moving patches. Like a slick of oil on water, only I didn't think of that then. I just thought of it this second.

So I go on over. Didn't have no choice anyway, what with Mrs. Matthews scowling at me and poking me in the back.

I put the pitcher down on the table. I tell you, I was this close. I swear I could feel them tentacles touch my hand. But I put the water down right enough, and I only spilled a little. Then I'm trying to ask if they want coffee, but my mouth's gone dry and no amount of licking my lips will fix it.

And then that alien speaks. To me. His voice was weird. Like bells. And he said, The name of this one and task is?

Mr. Auerbach, he looked at me. And that pretty little office girl I said about, she goes, This is Jemmy, she—

Only then the alien, he says, This one is not allowed to speak?

And Miss Pretty, she says how she's sorry, and Mr. Auerbach says he's sorry, and then he tells me to introduce myself.

So I say I'm Jemmy Green, and the alien says, What is your function?

And it's like bells. Bells all ringing in my head, and I'm thinking how this space alien came all that way across space, like on some TV show, with a warp speed or jump gate or like that all just to ask me this one question, and how if I can't answer maybe he'll get mad and zap me with some laser-phaser-blaster gun.

Answer him, says Mr. Auerbach, and he didn't sound none too happy, and then I'm thinking maybe it ain't no zap gun I should be worrying myself about, because maybe when this is all over I ain't going to have a job no more.

So I say right quick, I'm Jemmy, sir, I wipe the tables and I fetch the water and the coffee and then I tell a waitperson to come get your order. And then, ‘cause I'm thinking maybe he won't ask no more questions, I ask if they'd like some coffee.

Alien ain't fooled. I should of known someone who could come across space and all like that would be harder than that to fool.

So he says, And that is all that your life, in being, is?

Well I'm really not sure what to make out of that. So I looks at Mr. Auerbach hoping he'll get me out of it. But he looks right back at me, all scowly, and I know he ain't about to help me none.

So I say, That's my job, sir. That's what I do.

And he says, And that is all? What of when you are not at job task? You have—And he stops, like he's thinking of the word. Maybe he don't know English so good.

You have spouse? he says.

Bells in my head like church on Sunday and I don't know what no spouse is, but Miss Pretty she tells me, He wants to know if you're married, Jemmy.

No, I say. No I ain't. And I can tell by the way she's looking at me she ain't surprised by that news. I feel like telling her about me and Ray and what we do in the supplies cupboard, but he's married and all. For all I know, he's married to her. Wouldn't that be something?

So now I'm thinking we're about done with questions. I'm about ready, I can tell you.

But that alien, he says, And what else, Jemmy Green? What else until I have found all of you?

Well, I didn't like the sound of that. Then I think it through some, and figure he ain't telling me he wants to poke around inside my head like everything I ever did is his own special tv show just for him. It's just him not knowing English so good. And then I think, Maybe he's just trying to be sociable, and what do you talk about when you came all that way across space?

So I say, I like to watch the people playing the slots. Used to play them myself, some, till I figured it was a mug's game. But I don't say that. Don't figure Mr. Auerbach would like to hear it right out loud in front of visitors. I watch TV, I say. I'm trying to be sociable myself now. I like Jerry Springer, I tell him, and Oprah, and Wheel of Fortune but I'm not too good at guessing the words.

And that's when things get real strange, because suddenly it's like I'm a little girl again. I mean, back before ... well, don't mind that. I can see it all around me, the people and the tables that ain't been cleaned in too long and then all around further away there's stores and lots of people and I ought to be looking over there, around behind me, but I'm doing my drawing. My brother-in-law, he always says I never was no good, but I can see what I'm drawing and it's okay. Really okay. Lots of faces, pictures of people. The boy sitting at the next table, with his dark hair all wavy and he looks fine but he doesn't know I was drawing him. A picture of a fat lady with a little dog. I remember I seen her walking by before. A picture of a cup with a stripy straw. Now, why in the world would I draw that? But I'm looking at my pictures and I can hear the way my pencil sounds on the paper but I ought to be looking around over there, and I know it now but I didn't know it then and I want to know it then so I would look around, but I know I won't look around but if I did the bad thing won't happen ... but I don't want to think about that and even the alien fella, he can't make me.... And then I'm back to now, and Mr. Auerbach he's staring at me and that Miss Pretty, she's kind of smiling only not like she's happy.

For what you have told, much thanks, the alien says, and them tentacles, they're moving around his face faster and faster. And he says, This interaction has been most instructive.

And then he don't say nothing else, and I don't know what he means, but Mr. Auerbach, he's frowning at me like I been rude to a customer, and I know that means trouble later, so I'm trying to get out of it, and I say, You're welcome, nice as I can.

Nobody says nothing, so I start to go. Just a step or two and I'd have been clear of the whole lot of them, but the alien, he sends one of them tentacles out to get me. And that is all of pleasure there is, he says. And then he says, There should be more.

Then the bells ringing in my head, ringing and ringing like Sunday-come-to-meeting a thousand times all at once, and it's like I can feel them tentacles creeping around all inside of my head.

And suddenly I'm telling him about my sister Susan's little girl Janie, and how I used to take her to the mall on a Saturday. Only one week she wandered off when I weren't watching close enough. But I ain't telling him that part, but he's watching me anyhow like I am. Don't know if that makes sense but it's true. And I'm thinking how Susan won't let me take her anymore. I never told anyone before, just cry about it sometimes at night, and I ain't about to start with that alien.

But he's watching me. Except he ain't got no eyes, so how can he be? I don't know, but I swear he was.

And I can feel myself going red and any second I'm going to be crying like a kid.

And Mr. Auerbach, he's saying that's enough, that's enough now Jemmy, and I realise that I was talking the whole time I just didn't know it.

And I'm shouting now, shouting because there are bells going off in my head. I'm shouting how my sister, she won't let me take Janie to the mall no more, and that day it happened my brother-in-law, he said I was a smart-mouthed brat who thought I was better than everyone else always drawing and making up stories and what kind of useless person does that anyhow? And he said I shouldn't be allowed out on my own let alone with Janie because I just was useless. And how I was crying and he was shaking me, shaking me real hard and my head's slamming against the wall, and Susan, she's yelling at him to stop but he don't stop and he's yelling at her, What were you thinking of and I ain't hurt her and anyway, she should have knowed better. And me, I'm real quiet now, sitting on the floor hoping they'll all just go away but my head hurts, it hurts real bad and I just want to go to sleep, go somewhere quiet. And then after that it does get quiet, only then there's all them bright lights and doctors saying things and shouting and I can't work out what they're saying, and Susan, she's real mad. And then later, they let me go to this special place where I don't have to do much of anything and sometimes momma and dad come to see me, and Susan too. Only not my brother-in-law. Janie, she came once and she just stood looking at me and when I said hello she stared at me like she never had seen me before. I put my hand out to stroke her hair like I used to but she cried and grabbed hold of my sister and wouldn't look at me no more. Sometimes they gave me pencils and things and said I could draw if I wanted to. I didn't really want to because it was too hard but one time I tried ‘cause I wanted to make them happy. I drawed Janie and me at the mall. It was hard ‘cause my hand was all shaky and I had to hold the pencil tight and sometimes it dug right through the paper. And then when momma saw what I did she just cried. I didn't know why she did that, because it looked just fine to me, but thinking back I can see it was just like a little kid would do. So anyway, then I knew that drawing was bad so I never wanted to do it again, and the nurses they just smiled at me and said never mind. And then one day they let me go home. I was scared. I was scared of seeing my brother-in-law, but he weren't there. So one day I asked if I could take Janie to the mall, but Susan got all upset. Then momma came and said no, I could not take Janie to the mall. But then we all went to the mall together, but it was full of people and lights and it was noisy, and I got scared. So we came home....

And then I stop talking because everyone's looking at me.

And then the alien, he says And is that what you think? Is this all of you? Someone scared?

And I'm looking at him, looking at those patches of colour moving. Oil on water. Church bells. He reaches out again, and I see them tentacles coming for me. Didn't much like it last time, so I try to move. I'm too slow. Like always.

They touch my face, and they're dry as sand. Light explodes in my head, like looking at the sun, and the bells are ringing, and then for a minute I think I can see the ringing, hear the light, taste his eyes, smell my head cracking against the floor where I fell, feel the alien saying, Much instruction has been gained, most thanks given.

When I wake up, Mrs. Matthews's looking down at me. I see her face, feel the damp rag she's dabbing on my head. She helps me sit up and gives me a glass of water. Tastes real good.

Shouldn't be allowed, what that thing did to you, she says.

Nothing, I say. I feel fine.

She looks at me funny and gives me the afternoon off. I go home. I try to watch TV, but I don't know the shows and anyways they're boring.

So that night I'm dreaming, and I hear the alien saying over and over, Is this all of you? Just someone scared?

And the next day, and the next, when I ain't too busy or I'm trying to watch TV, Is this all of you?

And then that night I dream of him and me. And I'm drawing him. I got my pencil in my hand and I'm holding it right. Not like a little kid would. Not too tight. And I'm drawing him so good you can like to see his tentacles start to wave, and then they do wave, kind of like they was coming out of the paper at me. Only this time before they touch me I reach out and touch them and then I can hear the sound of bells again, all golden in my head. Only this time I ain't scared. I want them, or anyways I want something even if I couldn't tell you what.

I woke up then. I lay there thinking about things. How I used to dream about my brother-in-law yelling I was just smart-mouthed brat and how maybe he was right and nothing I ever did was any good anyway. But mostly I thought about Janie. And Susan, and how my brother-in-law left her because of me. Because he hurt me real bad. And I think then that she must have loved me a lot to make him go away. Even though she made me cry when she said I couldn't take Janie to the mall no more.

And then I got up and I did something. I went and got a pencil and a scrap of paper. Wasn't special, like I used to have, but I sat on the bed and I drew. I drew me and Janie at the mall and it made me sad but it made me happy too, remembering.

The drawing was real bad. I could see that. The sizes were wrong and I couldn't get them to be right. But my hands weren't shaking and I could see it was wrong and somehow that let me know that if I tried real hard, I could maybe do it better one day.

So then I put it away and didn't tell nobody, because who'd think a no-brain gimp like me could draw a good picture?

Only I kept thinking. In my head, I was drawing, if that don't sound too crazy.

So then one day it's lunch time and I'm bored. Never been bored before, but all it is is clear the tables, wipe the tables, fetch the ice water, ask about the coffee, tell the waitperson. And I'm sitting there with nothing much to do, and there's a newspaper. Never been much of one for newspapers. Too many words, takes too long to figure them out. But I think what the hey, I ain't got nothing better to do. So I'm flicking through it, looking at the pictures and such, and suddenly I see this ad for classes for people who never made it through high school. Well, that's me all right. Never even went to no proper high school, just the special school. Should have called it by its right name, school for no-brain gimps, but no-one ever did.

So I'm thinking I can't do that. I can't go there. It's not for the likes of me. But then I'm thinking about my drawing and it's like I can hear the bells again and the alien fella asking if I'm just someone scared, and I want to tell him I'm scared all right but I ain't going to let that stop me.

I'm a person who can draw a good picture. Maybe one day I'll draw a better one.

Maybe one day I'll write down the words that goes with that picture too. Was a time I could have done it easy. That must have been something. A person who could write down words easy could do anything.

And I want it so bad. It's like a hole inside me. But that alien fella, he was right about one thing. I'm scared. Only question is if I'm more scared of staying like I am or of trying to be like I was.

I guess I know the answer to that my own self, or I wouldn't have come.

So I hope that's what you meant when you said to tell why we came so you could write it down for us. It's because I'm someone that's scared. But now that ain't all I am.

"A while ago I read an article by an editor that said that there were three types of stories he never wanted to see again—stories about Nazis, stories with unicorns, and stories where two famous people from the past meet in unusual circumstances. Clearly my subconscious took that as some form of perverse challenge, because in my next three stories one had a unicorn, one featured Albert Speer and this, the last, has Mohandas Gandhi and Roger Casement meeting in unusual circumstances. ‘Palaces of Force’ is the first of the trio to be published. Iif anyone out there would like a story with Nazis or unicorns in it, please let me know."

OUR JOURNEY TO PARIS and the Exposition Universelle de 1889 did not begin auspiciously. The trip required us to catch a train from Victoria Station, which is a terrible place. From Victoria Street the station appears to be nothing more than a shabby wooden shed, held together only by the many layers of paint that have been plastered on it over the years. The station's exterior, however, offers barely a hint of the horrors within. The inadequate walls conceal the most chaotic, the most crowded and, assuredly, the dirtiest place I have ever seen.

And I am from Calcutta.

Everything was stained black by the smoke and clouded by billowing steam. I felt certain that, if I could but find a moment's pause to contemplate it, I should be able to feel the station's grime smearing itself across my face.

But there was no pause. The crowd heaved back and forth between the great hissing beasts of the engines. Men pushed and grunted, women screeched and shoved, and the children scuttled like rats and bellowed like savages. In terms of both volume and shrillness the noise of the crowd was almost a match for the whistling, rumbling, rattling, and hissing of the great steam engines that loomed over us all.

Though I have lived here now for somewhat more than sixty years, I still find it impossible to reconcile England's conception of itself as the world's most civilised nation with the wolfish mob its people become when gathered together. It is as though the English, by constant repetition of their claim to an excess of refinement, hope that it will become reality. It is plainly a deception, though perhaps not without a certain admirable intent.

My companion and I struggled through the noise and press of the station to our appointed platform and the night train to Paris. The distinctive yellow-ochre of the Brighton and South Coast Line trains took on a sickly pallor in the dim light and smoke-laden air. A discreet display of coin caught the attention of a somewhat reluctant porter, and we made our way along the platform.

My companion, Mohandas, was a quiet man, shy and softly spoken even in his native Gujarati and more so when required to converse in English, though he was quite fluent. You will have heard of him of course, as he is now more than famous. Then, however, he was simply a student hoping to be called to the bar. Like many of the Indians who came to England to study at that time he affected to become, in appearance and behaviour, a more precise instance of the idealised English gentleman than any I have ever encountered amongst the native population. However, unlike the majority—including, I freely confess, myself—Mohandas maintained the proprieties of diet and religious observance. This religious bent and his somewhat serious manner had led some of our fellows to abandon him as a prig and a bore. I fear he pricked their consciences. For myself, having no conscience, I found him honest and intelligent, and we became regular companions.

He dressed in the most proper fashion, taking the utmost care with his appearance. Those who know him only from the newsreels may imagine that Mohandas only ever dressed in the simplest of clothing, but when I think of our youthful days together in London, I see him in the clothes he wore that day: a chimney-pot hat and suit bought in Bond Street, with a gold watch chain across his chest.

Assisted by the porter, we installed ourselves in a compartment in the first class carriage and settled down. We had, thanks to my habitual punctuality, arrived a little early and our train was quite empty so we were able to pick our compartment and arrange ourselves before the majority of passengers arrived. As the time of our departure neared, the train became quite full, crowded even, and I waited with interest to see who would share our compartment. I watched as several of our fellow travellers peered through the glass of the door, then turned away with expressions of distaste.

I dismissed it with a shrug, and if Mohandas noticed he gave no sign. As has always been his way, he spent any spare moment reading voraciously. He had galloped through the Daily News, The Daily Telegraph and The Pall Mall Gazette, and was absorbing The Times when there was a roar from the guard on the platform and a blast from the engine's whistle, and the train juddered forward. We were leaving at last. I stared out the window, watching the dark and crowded platforms slip away. And then we were out of the station and, for a moment, I was blinded by the early evening sun.

I blinked several times, and when I recovered the most handsome man I have ever seen was standing in the doorway to our compartment.

He was several inches taller than my own six feet, with beautiful deep-set blue eyes. Though he was obviously Caucasian, his skin was almost as deeply coloured as my own. His hair was black and, growing slightly longer than might everywhere be consider proper, it tangled into curls. His full beard was lightened by a faint, reddish touch. He was tall, but even through his fashionable pinstripe suit I determined a slender boyishness about his body.

I nodded and the stranger smiled. There was a shyness about his demeanour that only enhanced his physical beauty. He sat next to me, facing Mohandas.

"It seems you have offended some of your fellow travellers,” the man said.

Mohandas looked up sharply.

"But we spoke to no one,” I said.

"Some people need only the slightest of excuses to become offended,” he said. His accent was marked and I assumed he was Scottish, though I would later learn he had been born in Ireland.

"Such as?” It was Mohandas who had spoken. I was quite surprised for it was usual for him to require a lengthy courtship with a new acquaintance before overcoming his natural reserve to address them directly.

"Oh, the usual. The cut of your suit, the style of your shoes...” he paused, and looked around as though searching the cabin for examples of things that might offend a polite sensibility, then he smiled. “The colour of your skin?"

I grunted a laugh and even Mohandas grinned.

"Casement,” the young man thrust out an open hand and I shook it vigorously. “Roger Casement. Very pleased to make your acquaintance."

"Sanjit Kamath,” I introduced myself. “And this is my friend and colleague, Mohandas Ghandi."

"I believe I have heard of you, Mister Casement,” Mohandas said as they shook hands.

The young man cocked his head to one side.

"Really?"

"You have been in Africa? One of Stanley's men, in The Congo Free State?"

"I was, but how could you know?"

"Your friend, Henry Ward, has spoken most highly of you, at our meetings.” Mohandas pulled out a pamphlet on vegetarianism and I barely suppressed a groan.

"You know Henry?"

"I have attended meetings of the Vegetarian Society with him.” He waved the pamphlet at young Casement; Henry Ward's name was on the front. “Hearing your name, I could not fail to know you by his description."

Casement leant back in his seat, stretching his long legs. He seemed, suddenly, entirely at ease. “Well, if you're friends with Henry, then I am sure this trip will be most pleasurable."

Our eyes met for a moment and a smile curled my lips.

"Most pleasurable,” I said.

I have forgotten much of the conversation that passed between the three of us on that journey to Paris, but I do remember that we talked about Livingstone and the Congo, and about the prospects for establishing a genuine commonwealth in Africa that might serve as a beacon for the whole continent and perhaps the world. Casement was passionate and sincere in a way that only young men who have found a true cause can be. I found him immensely likable and attractive, and we chatted endlessly.

Mohandas spoke rarely, but one of his interventions sticks clearly in my mind, for it was my first insight into the political ideas that were coming to the boil inside his head.

I had asked young Casement what he hoped to achieve in Africa.

"Why, to end slavery, to ameliorate the most awful conditions that the natives must endure, and to spread enlightenment of the ways of the modern world.” Casement said. He spoke so straightforwardly and earnestly that it was impossible to doubt his sincerity and difficult to resist his beautifully simple vision.

Mohandas laid the book he was reading onto his lap.

"And what if the people there do not want your enlightenment, Mister Casement?"

Casement looked surprised. He stared at Mohandas for a moment, opened-mouthed. The idea had clearly never occurred to him.

"But you have not seen the terrible conditions in which they live,” he said. “Each new tribe we discover suffers an existence a civilised man would not wish upon a dog!"

Mohandas smoothed out his suit trousers. It was, I thought, a very lawyerly motion.

"I believe I have seen such conditions in my own homeland,” he said. “Are you to tell me that the poor natives of India or Africa are better off for the coming of the white men?"

"No,” Casement didn't hesitate. “Not yet. But that is because they are being exploited. We, that is those of us who support the Free State, wish to liberate the Africans from such exploitation and to establish them as a modern nation amongst the peoples of the world."

"And what if they do not wish to be modern in your ways?” Mohandas turned to look out the window as Kent, low and lush, rumbled past. “Has it occurred to you that their traditions and their way of life may be as valuable as yours?"

It clearly hadn't, for Casement fell silent.

After a moment I changed the subject and we talked of happier subjects, perhaps of cricket—my true love—or mutual acquaintances and our plans for our time in Paris.

Later, the young Mister Casement and I spent two hours together in his cabin on the steamer that carried us across The Channel. He was a strong and fierce lover. It is my clearest and most cherished memory of our time together.

I will not dwell on the details of the 1889 Exposition, except for those that impinge most pertinently on this tale. None who were not in Paris that summer can hope to comprehend the scale and opulent magnificence of the display that girdled the Seine. And, even these many years later, those who journeyed through its many wonders will not require my aid to recall the impression that the city and the Exposition made upon everyone who took in its sights.

Suffice it to say that those who consider these things, experts who have attended similar events all across the globe, judged the Paris Exhibition of 1889 to be the most extraordinary and comprehensive gathering of mankind's many achievements in the fields of art and science. Subsequent years may have witnessed mankind's increasing ingenuity and the blossoming fruits of many great minds, but there are still those who insist that the Paris Exposition has never been surpassed or even matched. All man's greatest achievements to that point were on display on the Champ de Mars that summer and the path that would lead us into the next century was set out for all to follow.

The once-controversial symbol of the exhibition, Mister Eiffel's great tower, remains in place—now synonymous with France herself—but the Exposition left a more subtle mark in the souls of the many millions of visitors lucky enough to have explored its wonders.

The planet span serenely at our feet. First, one noticed the vast white ice cap of the Arctic, then, as we circled slowly around and down past the equator, the great expanses of Asia were gradually dwarfed by the ungraspable hugeness of the Earth's oceans, until at last the Southern ice cap was above our heads, and we had passed below the planet.

It was a most disconcerting experience.

The globe, as high as a three-storey house, dominated the huge room, and a single walkway spiralled around it as the planet itself rotated. By some fluke we had entered the room when it was otherwise empty, and in the church-like silence I found myself deeply moved by this vision of our planet.

The sense that the globe represented something fundamental was profound. The immensity of the world on which we live, and our own smallness within it, was made plain. Its scale—one millionth of the planet's actual scope—staggered the mind. Only when faced with such a sight, the vast globe encompassed in a glance, can one comprehend how insignificant is humanity. But, more surprisingly, I was at the same moment struck by the fragility of the planet, a tiny haven of life in an unimaginably larger universe. We were insignificant specks on the face of a planet that, itself, seemed suddenly no more than a full stop in a lost volume on a forgotten shelf in some great library.

The great mountain ranges appeared as but wrinkles on an aged face. The greatest rivers seemed to be no more than trickles into oceans that were themselves made simple pools that a child might splash through. The portion of our planet that is habitable, squeezed between expanses of ocean and ice, driest desert and sterile mountains, seemed reduced to so small a sliver that the distances that divide race from race seemed meaningless.

I dare say that no man capable of reason could have gazed upon that globe and not been moved by the essential unity of humankind.

Casement was stroking his beard, looking up at the planet, his eyes followed the southernmost tip of South America as it passed across his field of vision. Mohandas had paused further up the walkway. I can still see him, in my mind's eye, standing just below equator, one hand slightly out-stretched as though he would scoop up the waters of the Pacific Ocean

In that moment the only sound was the gentle rumble of the machinery that drove the great globe.

Then the door above us opened and a group of giggling girls entered the chamber. The spell was broken.

"Shall we move on?” I said.

Our next steps took us into the future. From the chamber containing the globe we crossed to the Galerie des Machines.

This hall, dubbed the “Palace of Force” by one Parisian commentator, was itself a symbol of man's power over nature. One knew, logically, that innumerable tonnes of iron anchored the great vaulted roof that arced high above us, but under acres of glass and in the summer afternoon's sunlight that flooded everywhere, that mass of metal seemed to become attenuated. It was possible to imagine that the whole building could simply waft into the Parisian sky. We descended a wide staircase to a viewing platform dominated by a tall, skeletal clock tower. We paused there; we had entered through the western end of the Gallerie and stretching away below us was the first of two great wings that met beneath a glass dome that was larger, lighter, and more impressive than anything in Europe's ancient cathedrals. My own reaction was reflected in the gasps and exclamations of my fellow visitors. The torrent of people divided on the platform and swept downwards to the Gallerie's floor via two sweeping staircases.

There was a moment's respite then, as one recovered from the shock of this extraordinary building. We regrouped, sharing glances that, at least on the part of Casement and myself, revealed that we were almost awe-struck. That this temple of light and iron had made an impression on Mohandas was obvious, though whether it was favourable was not at all certain.

No sooner had we become accustomed to the magnificence of the great exhibition space than we began to become aware of the wonders it contained.

Looming over the entrance stood the engine of an ocean liner—a cathedral of steel and brass, dwarfing all who entered and impressing on everyone the power now in the hands of man. Elsewhere hundreds of smaller engines wheezed, slapped, and banged, illustrating the many tasks man's ingenuity had found for them.

For myself and Casement the Hall of Machines was a delight. We jigged from stand to stand, gasping at each toy or gadget, thrilled by the endless possibilities that opened up with each new discovery. Everywhere electric lamps flickered even in the sunshine, and the exhibition was filled with swarms of photographers who went about their task with a fervour, recording every miniscule detail. Moving pictures flickered in darkened booths. Recorded music blared from Berliner gramophones. Daimler motorcars trundled amongst the wide aisles between walls of machinery. Everything that we later took for granted—the whole future—was here.

In the centre of the hall, beneath the vast dome, two balloons were suspended. The smaller example was a model of the gaudy device that had first born the Mongolfier brothers aloft just a century before. Dwarfing that, however, as Jupiter does its many moons, was its modern equivalent—a great crimson orb below which was suspended a wicker basket.

We paused beneath it. Casement smiled to himself then signalled to the balloon's attendant.

"What are you doing?” I asked, but he ignored me and took the attendant to one side and began a whispered discussion that commenced with a regretful but firm shaking of the attendant's head and concluded with a handshake and a discreet exchange of francs.

"Come along.” Casement held aside a thick red rope and waved us towards the balloon's basket.

Mohandas stopped and looked toward the attendant who bowed respectfully.

"What have you done?"

"I told him Mohandas was the Rajah of Peshawar,” a huge boyish grin split Casement's face. “And that he was interested in buying a fleet of balloons to enable exploration of the Himalayas."

A look of outrage spread across Mohandas's face but we rushed to his side and Casement shuffled him into the basket before he could splutter a word. I distracted the attendant with a most elaborate namaste.

Once the wicker basket was raised above the floor of the hall of machines, Mohandas's outrage dissipated and his natural curiosity asserted itself. Casement stood alongside Mohandas, and the two of them could hardly have presented a greater contrast. Casement was tall and hale so that even standing still he seemed to vibrate with barely restrained energy. Dwarfed beside him, and fragile, Mohandas held himself so perfectly still that the world seemed to pivot about him. Even then I worried whether his slight frame could carry the burdens he took upon himself—yet he never buckled.

Casement seemed quite transported by the sights and sounds of the great machines now at man's bidding. “Impressive, isn't it? These engines are power incarnate. They are the way to the future."

"Certainly,” Mohandas did not look at him. “They are the way to a future."

Casement caught the barb; clearly he had not forgotten their brief exchange on the train. He swept his hand across the scene below them. “Do you really mean you believe that the people of Africa or India would be better off if we denied them all that this could offer?"

"What does it offer, my friend?"

"They'd have the strength to build, the ability to control their lands, the power to protect themselves against the predation of the white nations or their fellows.” Casement was counting off the obvious benefits on his fingers. “They could ensure comfort from want and safety from exploitation. And with ease from such fears comes the ability to devote time to art and science and the true fruits of civilisation."

"These machines could do that for the poor of India and Africa?” Mohandas was smiling.

"Of course! Look around this room. Think what they have done for Britain and France."

"So you believe that these great machines could make the poor of the rest of the world as fortunate as the poor of Limehouse or Manchester or Birmingham?” Mohandas shook his head. “How happy they will be that such luxury has only cost them their lands and their traditions."

Whatever response Casement was planning stuck fast. He stared out across the exhibition, gathering his thoughts.

"Of course, the present organisation of our society is far from perfect,” he said.

"I hadn't taken you for a communist."

"I am not,” Casement visibly bristled, pulling himself to his full height. “But I will concede that there are ways industrial society could better provide for its people."

"And who will care for the people when these great machines rust, when the land has been abandoned and the crops fail?” Mohandas's hand chopped the air. “When these machines become scrap, Mister Casement, how will your Empire feed our people then?"

"I have said that changes are necessary,” Casement met Mohandas gaze and held it, visibly trying to restrain his anger. “But I hardly think an Irishman needs a lecture from anyone on the consequences of famine."

There was silence then, for what seemed like a very long time. Even the sound of the machines in the exhibition hall and the thousands of people moving just a few dozens of feet below us seemed to fade away. I found myself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to intercede, for I felt certain some crucial struggle was taking place. But there was to be no victor in this struggle; after an eternity, it seemed, the two men reached some silent accord and smiled.

The mood immediately lightened and Mohandas, looking out over the Galerie des Machines, pointed to some stall that caught his eye.

I signalled to the attendant of the balloon, who set to winching us back to earth.

"You shouldn't have lied,” Mohandas said, nodding towards the attendant. Casement's face was a sudden mask of utter contrition.

"I did not mean to—"

Mohandas rested a hand on his arm, leaning close, smiling.

"I have never even been to Peshawar."

Casement's laughter rang out across the Palace of Force.

The next day we took a journey into the past. Our trip through time took us down a boulevard illustrating the history of human habitation presented in exquisitely detailed reconstructions or large models. We began in the familiarity of the present but quickly passed a delightful hostelry of the Renaissance, the rougher dwellings of the Dark Ages, the glory of Rome and the simpler elegance of Greece, back through the cruder dwellings of the stone ages and, ultimately, to the troglodyte beginnings of mankind in caves lit by guttering flame. Nor was only European history presented, for the display featured civilisations from across the globe, from the tepees of the modern Red Indian and the adobe homes of the Americas before the Europeans arrived, to the homes of ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians. Perhaps unsurprisingly Mohandas and I were particularly fascinated by the reconstruction of the Brihadisvara temple in Thanjavur. We were most impressed by the attention to detail in the reproduction which included the great bull and the Periya Koil.

Finally we reached the end of the boulevard and, rather tired and hot in the afternoon sun, we were drawn to the shade of what appeared to be a small copse of exotic trees from which strange music floated.

Beneath the trees we found reconstructed a village of the native people of Malay. At first glance it was little more than a scattering of bamboo shacks thatched with palm-leaves, and yet there was something in the grace of the buildings that spoke of a simple life amongst trees groaning with mangoes and coconuts. Rather than the construction of man, the village seemed to have formed organically from the very stuff of the forest and it seemed that to live life in a place like this would be to become an organism in service of the trees.

We followed the music to an open theatre, roofed with more palm leaves but open at the side, and watched a traditional dance performed by a group of native girls. They were such slight creatures that it seemed impossible that they should dance with such grace while encumbered with head-dresses and thick bracelets, brooches, buckles, and embroidered garments. But graceful they were, and they moved with such entrancing charm that the three of us stood quite transfixed as their arms and fingers etched intricate, exotic patterns on the Parisian air and their musicians beat out rapid yet oddly plaintive rhythms.

How long we stood there I cannot tell, but when the show finished the first hint of evening could be felt on the air and the feeling of being transported to some distant shore was complete. Silently we made our way back to the huts of the village and dipped inside the first one, finding low benches set around the wall. We spoke not a word as we arranged ourselves, perhaps fearing to break the spell that the dancers had woven around us. We were entranced.

"This is how life should be,” I said eventually, stretching out in contentment.

"Exactly!” Mohandas suddenly leaned forward. “This is the life for which we are intended. This is the level at which our moral and economic life should be organised. We cannot understand the world in a city where every neighbour is a stranger—we have no feeling of kinship. But in a place like this, where everything is shared, men could see the consequences of their actions and be held responsible for them. In a place like this, justice would be a reality."

"You're a romantic!” Casement was laughing but not mocking.

"You think so?"

"You think this thing,” Casement took in the village with a flick of his head, “is real. It isn't. It's a fiction."

"Not this place, perhaps, but places like this are real."

"No,” Casement's voice rose slightly. “I hadn't seen it before but your background has made you as distant from places like this as mine."

"You know nothing of my background."

"I think I do. You are a child of privilege—more so even than I, I think—"

"My family were not wealthy."

"No? But you have been privileged. You have had an education, a chance to travel, and all the while protected by your family's position. You said your father was a politician, so you have grown up amidst the exercise of power."

"That hardly invalidates my opinions."

"Of course not,” Casement stood up and walked to the door of the hut, bending to look out into the village beyond. “But you know nothing of what it is to really live in places like this."

"And you do?"

"More than you, I think.” He dipped beneath the roof of the hut and stepped out. Mohandas followed him. Reluctantly, I trailed behind—regretting what I had started. “At least I have lived amongst these people—though, I confess, always apart, always with the knowledge that I could walk away. But I saw enough to see that their life was not one of harmony with their surroundings but a struggle just to gather enough to live. One poor harvest and a generation may be lost."

"Then we should temper our society to live by what nature can provide."

"Why, when we have the power to set these people free from nature's tyranny?"

"You think your work sets the poor free, but you simply bring them another form of imperialism,” Mohandas's lawyerly training had taken control; he spoke evenly and with confidence. “The ideas of progress you force upon them are as alien and destructive as any imperial army."

"Perhaps,” Casement conceded and, for a moment, Mohandas broke his stride—surprised. “But the ideas I bring them are no more alien than yours, and no more dangerous."

"Dangerous? How could it be dangerous to live within one's means?"

"How could such communities protect themselves from the true imperialists—whether amongst their neighbours or the white men?"

"But what would an imperialist want with a poor village?"

"Wealth."

"But a place like this would have no gold, no jewels,” Mohandas smiled. “I think there would be nothing here to bring the conqueror."

"I think you misunderstand the nature of wealth and the desire for power.” Casement did not return the friendly smile. “Riches aren't built on gold but on people. What use is gold if you have no labour to dig it from the ground? How can palaces be constructed if you have no slaves to build them for you? And what good is wealth if there are not masses of people possessing nothing to gaze upon your fortune with envious eyes? What is power if it is not exercised in the subjugation of others to your will?"

Mohandas opened his mouth to speak, but Casement did not pause. He was striding around the little village now, hands clenched behind his back, his body tense, his jaw firmly set. His voice was loud, his accent becoming quite nasal and pronounced, and his eyes were ablaze.

"But this all starts from a false premise. Those with power would never let your dreamy villages exist, for they would bring gold and trinkets and buy your villagers first, and if that did not work they would bring rifle and horse and force their compliance. The only way that a village like this can be free is if its people are given the tools of the modern age and made as powerful as anyone who would threaten them. It is the job of those who care to construct a decent world to give them those tools."

"No!” Mohandas's voice was gentler than Casement's and he habitually spoke so softly that the fact that he raised it now visibly shocked the young Irishman. “Guns are nothing without men to wield them. Gold is nothing without people willing to be bought. You underestimate the power of resistance."

"And you underestimate the determination of the powerful to stay that way."

There was a rustle in the trees. I looked up to see the Malayan girls whose performance we had recently watched peeking from between the leaves of the plantation's vegetation. How long they had been there, I could not guess. From the bewildered looks on their faces, it had clearly been long enough to understand that the two smartly-dressed gentlemen before them were arguing furiously.

One of the girls noticed me and I doffed my hat to her. She giggled and nudged one of her companions who, in turn, began to laugh. My companions, however, were so entirely engrossed in their debate that they squabbled on, unaware of their audience. One of the bolder girls began to imitate Casement's mannerisms, which set another girl to imitate Mohandas's air-cutting hand movements.

The giggling turned into outright laughter.

At last there was a pause.

The argumentative pair turned towards me, confused. I nodded towards the trees. The Malay girls howled and suddenly the two lions of debate became blushing boys. In a moment, I was roaring more loudly than any of the dancers.

"I must go on to Brussels tomorrow,” Casement said as we paused on the Pont de l'Alma. We were alone, Mohandas having gone in search of vegetarian food, and the streets of Paris suddenly emptied. “I must see if there is work for me back in Africa."

He placed his hands on the low balustrade and I rested my hand on top of his. He looked around furtively and then leant his head back and we kissed briefly. We shared a smile.

Paris had pulled down the stars and draped them around herself. The banks of the Seine glowed with all the majesty of the Milky Way. The river, blacker than the night sky, ripped silently against the bridge's buttresses and reflected a billion points of light in every swirl and eddy. Further down the river the city's other bridges were ribbons of light leaping across the darkness. Boats of every shape and size, brightly lit and filling the night with laughter and the clinking of glasses, seemed to dance at the feet of the great statues that guarded our bridge.

"At least tonight will be memorable,” I said.

Casement, his eyes on the rippling river, nodded and smiled softly, but I sensed part of him was already back in Africa.

Now, almost seventy years after our trip to Paris, Casement is long gone and my friend Mohandas is dead these ten years. Mohandas lived his ideas—becoming the change he wished to see in the world, as he memorably put it—and stayed true to his ideal of resistance and simple living. Though he achieved his first goal, the independence of India from the British Empire, it seems that those who follow him will not be as meticulous in their dealings. Already his dream of unity has been shattered by partition and bitter war, and I fear worse will come. Nor does it seem that our nation's new leaders are keen to turn his personal vow of poverty into a political programme.

Casement became a humanitarian hero—pleading the case for the people of the Congo and the workers of Brazil—and a peer of the realm until he turned his eye for justice to his homeland and betrayed the Empire by seeking to enlist German aid for the Irish rising. He was first humiliated, then executed.

Though the history books show that the lives of my two friends followed quite separate trajectories, I have recently come to think that they led to rather similar places. Both fought for independence for countries that would ultimately be divided by religious enmity that was stronger than they could conceive. And their dreams of justice and equality have been betrayed by those who used revolutions to replace one corrupt set of rulers with another. Neither would be content with the continuing penury and exploitation of his nation's poor, and both, perhaps, would find themselves fighting the very governments they struggled to create. In revolution or resistance, progress or simplicity, Irishman and Indian were both victorious and defeated, and they have become symbols that embarrass those who have come after them.

Today I found myself wandering again with my friends through the Paris of the Exposition and that great model of the globe was spinning, once again, at our feet. Somewhere above my head a Russian device is circling the globe. I have heard its frantic, crackling warble on the wireless and wondered if allowing all humanity to stand above the Earth and watch it turn might not have the same profound impact that it had on my companions and I so long ago. We may all die alone, but we live together. This world is but a speck, and yet even this mote—significant only to us—is so massive that it overwhelms our petty differences.

I see the great engines of the Galerie des Machines and laugh at how impressed we were by toys that have been entirely surpassed in the years that followed. I think of our journey into the past, to that most distant village, and my companions’ disagreement. I am surprised that my strongest memory is not of the words of two great men putting forward their visions for a better world but of the laughing Malay girls who mocked them before going on their own way into the Parisian night, quite unaware of the weight of the discussion they had witnessed.

Finally, I am back on the Pont de l'Alma and the smell of roses rolls across the water from the gardens constructed on the Trocadéro. I turn back to gaze at the Champ de Mars; Eiffel's slender tower knifes the night sky with twinkling diamonds and the great palaces shine brightly. The South Bank is ablaze with the light of man's greatest achievements. I reach out and, just for a moment, I seem to have gripped all time and space. I feel that if I could but find the means, I might manipulate an awesome power.

I could set free the engines that Casement so admired. Is it possible that, unleashed at last, their energies might set men free? Or I could crush them. Mohandas believed that those machines were as much the tools of slavery as chains and rifles.

The choice is mine.

I hesitate.

And then Casement is beside me, urging me onwards into the Parisian night. I follow him into the gardens on the Trocadéro and we lose ourselves amongst tall hedges and the perfume of flowers.

...and measure the distance from ourselves. Proxima Centari, our nearest celestial neighbor, is 1.30 parsecs away from the Earth, or 4.22 light years from where we live. That's 24.8 trillion miles. 39.9 trillion kilometers. 198.64 trillion furlongs, 21.85 quadrillion fathoms, or .13 quintillion feet. We could go on with ever smaller units of distance and watch the numbers get fantastically large. Something about big numbers just seems to convey what the universe is about. And it's about scale. Once we travel far enough from the Earth we begin to notice effects of the intertwined nature of time and space, bound together in strangeness by the speed of light. But in order to measure the effects of distance, we must have some way to measure its magnitude.

On the Earth we all do it. Even if only unconsciously, each of us measures distance every day: the odometer on our cars or the pedometer hanging from our belt, the number of steps we take to the bathroom. These distances are completely understandable and have no noticeable effects on our perception of the world. Worldly distances begin skewing our perception when we pick up the telephone and call France, Sri Lanka or New Zealand. Measured distances across the globe change time and position of the sun. Call a friend in the UK as you sip an after dinner cocktail in New York City and see if perceptions don't flare.

As we leave the surface of the Earth stranger things happen. Rapidly growing distances have easily noticeable effects. Measuring the spaces across, well—space—becomes more than an academic venture. We have different ways to measure various distances, and each can be associated with both practical and reliable technique.

On July 21, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission crew placed the Lunar Laser Ranging Retroreflector on the Moon. With it selenologists can fire lasers at the Lunar surface and measure the time it takes for the beams to be reflected to Earth. The time taken gives the distance, about 2.4 million kilometers. Lagging conversation with the astronauts en route and on the Moon brought distance effects home to millions of living rooms.

Conversation lag will be an issue when we begin to explore the solar system in earnest. Pluto is about 1.5 light-days out. At least when chatting with astronauts on Pluto there will be no practical reason or way to interrupt anyone.

Boosting outward, and approaching the first stars, we calculate the emptiness between using parallax. Shifting position in relation to distant “stationary” objects provides angular measurements to construct triangles with known relationships, including distance. Triangulation of celestial bodies is limited to objects about 1600 ly from our position in space. The Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 ly side to side so we need other methods beyond.

When our gaze reaches beyond the practical limits of trigonometry, we can use the physics of stable objects that emit known levels of luminosity, or the amount of energy given off by an object. These objects are termed “standard candles.” Luminosity decreases as distance increases in a direct relationship. Imagine the expanding front of a sphere carrying off the energy as it leaves the surface of a star, only now spread thinner and thinner with its flight away from the source. When we know how much energy left a star, and we measure how much energy arrives here on Earth, we can calculate the relationship and derive the distance. There are several star types that are useful as standard candles, each with their own optimum associated distance.

Within the Milky Way Galaxy we use a type of red giant star, a LL Lyrae variable. These are pulsating, low-mass stars. The periodicity and absolute magnitude of these objects is known, so counting the blink rate will give you the luminosity, and in turn will give you the distance. Although some extra-galactic globular clusters are near enough to use LL Lyrae variables, these stars are relatively dim, so their usefulness beyond the Galaxy is limited. The far shores of the Milky Way are a relatively close 70,000 light-years from Main Street.

Venturing into extragalactic space, out to about 20 mega parsecs, around 60 million light-years, another periodic star demonstrates the relationship between luminosity and pulse rate. Cepheid variable stars are hundreds to many thousands of times brighter than the Sun. With a known relationship, the slower the pulse rate the brighter the star. And as we have noted above, distance then is calculated by the rate of diminishing luminosity.

Still in extragalactic space, type 1a supernovae posses the necessary physics that allow for a known luminosity and thus a calculable distance. Type 1a supernovae are thought to be white dwarf stars slowly consuming a companion star. Matter accretes on the surface of the dwarf until pressures cause convection and subsequent detonation. You will know by now that this explosive event will produce a burst of energy of known luminosity. Useful distances for type 1a supernovae are so great because the final burst will be approximately 5 billion times the absolute magnitude of the Sun.

Farther yet, receding to infinite blackness, there are smudges of light speeding away beyond the limits of our machines’ ability to see. We can measure the size of the known universe by looking at the redshift of the light arriving from them. Redshift is caused by the stretching of the light waves as objects emitting the light speed away from each other (although it would be more correct to say as the space between objects expands). Although the redshift is related to velocity of recession, the velocity is related to the distance. Faster-receding objects are farther away from you.

All of this stuff has math that goes with it, of course. And the numbers become cold and hard and recorded on paper. But close your eyes and fire up the god center of your brain and let rip. Go for a flight. The vastness of things is humbling. Our ability to extend our hands across space is testament to our curiosity, might and genius. As readers, as writers, as self-aware bits of the Universe emerging from the general particle soup, we face skyward....

"I've been in love with Scandinavia since I was seventeen. Why? First, I heard a statistic that in Iceland in the 1990s, unlike America, 100% of the population was literate—but over 90% claimed to still believe in trolls. (Is this true? I don't know. It's one of those “facts” people pass along at parties.) Then I tried to teach myself Norwegian with a “10-minutes-a-day” program. (It didn't work.) Finally, I discovered modern Scandinavian folk-rock, and I fell crazy in love, forever. I wrote this story under the heady influence of Hedningarna, The Best Band In the World. Imagine throbbing basslines, growling Swedish men, and crooning, eerie Finnish women singing the soundtrack to this piece."

She's lurking outside my campfire again.

Räven. Foxwoman.

I can hear her breathing, quick and eager, through the crackling of the fire. Sparks fly into the darkness.

She's too clever to let me see the glow of her green eyes.

Every night for the past week, I've camped outside, caught between wavering hope and dark despair. I've chanted the incantations the old men of the village taught me, tossed their herbs of summoning into the fire. The flames burn hot, with a scent like the bittersweet beginning of autumn.

I catch the smell of musk, sharp and sudden behind me. I spin around—

Too late. I'm not even granted a glimpse of her copper tail, shimmering behind long human legs.

It must be a sign of madness, to want a woman this badly.

Other men tell tales of her sisters singing to them, as they walk back at night to the safety of home and hearth. They cover their ears to keep their feet moving toward the women and children who wait for them, counting on their fidelity. They stumble into their warm houses and slam the doors behind them with relief. But their dreams are haunted for long nights after by teeth and claws and the scent of the wild. They wake, shivering, to hear branches tapping steadily on their windowsills, while their wives sleep quietly in bed beside them.

It's hard to live in the woods again, after years riding the longships to glory and battle. At sea, you can see clearly for miles around you. Here, the trees surround you, whisper to you, trap you ... and predatory eyes watch from the thick, leafy darkness.

I came back after twenty years, ready for the peace that comes without blood or fanfare. Ready for the quiet life of a farmer, supported by a plain wife who would stand by me in my twilight—no passion, but comfort, all a man of my age could expect. All I could want, I told myself, and I tried to believe it, even as I arranged to wed a girl I'd never met—a good, quiet girl, according to her farmer father. One who'd cause me no trouble, he promised. I swallowed disappointment and nodded in sober approval of his words.

I wasn't ready for the whispers in the forest, as I walked home at night. I wasn't ready for the enticements that lurked in the darkness outside my house.

I wasn't ready for the wife who wandered further and further into the woods as her clear green eyes turned wild and strange and every binding tie of family and duty slipped away from her. Until, one day, I came home to find an empty house, the doors swinging open ... and fresh leaves covering the floor.

I can feel the foxwoman's breathing close behind me now. The herbs draw her in, though she's too cunning not to suspect a trap. I hold myself as still as an old boat drawn up on dry land. I barely breathe.

The old men helped me weave a rope from scraps of our marriage quilt. I pulled out discarded strands of shining brown hair from my wife's brush to braid into the handstitched cloth.

Wrap it around her wrist, and she'll be yours for life, they said. But you'll only have one chance. If you let her go before it's fastened, she'll never be tricked back to house and home again.

I feel hot breath on the back of my neck. My hand tightens around the rope in my lap.

On our wedding day, as we spoke our vows and I looked for the first time into her clear green eyes, my chest tightened with a feeling so unexpected, I couldn't even give it a name. It was only months later, as I stood alone in our empty house with the sharp, bitter scent of the forest blowing through it, that I recognized all I'd lost.

Oh, she'd been quiet enough at first, just as her father had boasted. But her soft voice had shivered with yearning when she'd asked for stories of my life at sea. And when she knew me better, she told wild stories of her own, all drawn straight from the fires of her imagination. A good farmer's daughter she might have been, but she'd never been meant for a life of peace and drudgery. If she'd been a man, she'd have gone a-viking with the best of them.

As a woman, she found a different path.

Sharp teeth brush lightly across the nape of my neck, tasting my skin. I stare at the center of the fire, my breath coming fast. Caught between sweet pain and bitter pleasure.

She smells of danger and adventure, now. Of all the things I chose to leave behind forever when I left the longships and the dreams of my youth.

But marriage is an adventure of its own. And when the moment comes that you've been waiting for, sometimes, suddenly, you see....

The scent of musk fills my senses. Soft fur slides lingeringly along my left arm.

Tears sting my eyes, as sharp as daggers. I fling the rope away from me, into the fire.

The flames pop and sizzle as it lands, filling the air with memories and loss.

"I'm sorry,” I whisper, to the darkness behind me. “I chose to leave it all behind. But you never made that choice."

I move to stand.

And that's when I realize: I've been tricked.

I stare at my arm in the glow of the flames.

A rope surrounds it, strong and soft and shimmering with color. A rope made of copper fox fur, yellow leaves ... and strands of my own stolen, graying hair.

A yip of joyous, wild laughter echoes through the clearing.

I turn to find green eyes glowing with invitation. She leaps into the darkness of the deep forest, with a teasing flick of her tail.

Copper fur sprouts on my arm, around the rope.

I sniff the air and catch her scent.

Foxwoman. Danger. Adventure. Joy.

Trapped and ecstatic, beginning again, I drop to all four paws and race to join her.

In a cavern beneath the skin of the world,

She sings.

Songs of sunlight,

Wind and waves,

The things she gave up,

Traded for rocks and bones

And the ghosts of children.

Traded for him.

Her voice stills;

The serpent stirs.

Green as apples,

Green as poison,

Child of Nidhogg,

The root-gnawer,

Beautiful and terrible.

She watches it ripple

Across the stone.

He closes his eyes.

Bound by chains,

And the weight of the mountain,

Bound by the bones of children.

Only choices bind her,

But they weigh as heavy.

What do they say of her,

The chain-makers, the child-slayers,

Do they call her loyal?

Do they call her a fool?

She remembers when he wooed her;

They lay at night by the water's edge,

And the wind heard their whispered promises.

She knew he was a liar always,

All clever hands and wicked smiles.

She has learned to lie beneath the mountain.

Let them think her weak,

Those who know nothing of waiting.

She reads the weft

And warp of fate,

Sees the strands upon the spindle.

The wind-age is coming,

The wolf-age,

The time of breaking chains;

Twilight is coming soon.

She will teach them what she has learned of poison.

"It appears that the human brain is not a unified entity, but a series of layers that don't always share the same desires and motives. Some of these layers are more rational than others. Welcome to a far future where oxygen deprivation doesn't kill Earth's inhabitants, it just turns up the volume on the deeper recesses of their minds."

I HELD THE SHITTY LITTLE CHIP of metal to her throat. Not much of a weapon, wasn't even sharp, just a flat wad the shape of a toeless foot, but I was counting on her not fussing with details like that with cold steel pressed against her skin.

"Gimmee your oxy—oxy—oxy!” I grunted into her ear.

Squeeze those tits my lizard brain howled in my head. They're right there, take one of those softies and give it a squeeze. I could have, they were right there, hanging out of a red rubber outfit her rich daddy probably got her. She probably never had an oxy-less moment in her life.

It's a father complex, but not a wishy-washy father complex. My Drunken Monkey-mind chimed in. Oh, how I wanted to shut that bastard up with a little oxy. Soon, soon I'd have some blessed silence.

"Please don't hurt me,” she panted.

"The tube! Now!” I pushed the metal hard against her throat. I could've sawed with that piece of shit for a month and not given her more than a slight abrasion.

Without another word she unlocked the supply-tube of her oxy tank and handed it to me. I attached it to my tank and thumbed the intake switch. That delicious wheeming sound started.

"Please, just leave me enough to get home,” the girl said. “I don't want to sin.” A whisp of her yellow hair blew against my cheek.

"I don't have no fun anymore. Ever!” I shouted at her. I was overexcited, too distracted to edit my Drunken Monkey thoughts. I bled her tank dry. Let her have a taste of life without oxy.

She gasped dramatically, pulling on the dead air like she could get oxy out of it if she tried hard enough, like she'd die if she couldn't have her oxy.

"Feels awful, don't it?” I said. “Like an itch you need to scratch, but you just can't reach it. Like a song that's in your head that you can't get out.” Like a canticle you leave her with a mongrel cub you lick her with Drunken Monkey chimed in.

She started to cry. “Please! Please!” She wheedled, her mouth making clicking sounds, but no deep sounds now that her oxy was gone. I had a raging hard-on compliments of lizard-brain, but I resisted his push. I'm no rapist. Though her thick skin was wonderfully textured, and she smelled so clean. I held on to her, leaned forward and sniffed her hair. It smelled like sunlight....

"Go home. Your daddy will make it all better.” I shoved her in the direction she'd been walking.

She stumbled to one knee, not yet used to navigating without oxy, struggled to her feet. “Pa-pa!” She cried. “How can I blow the candles?” Ah, her Drunken Monkey was rising.

I got the fuck out of there, out of the rich part of the city. Took back alleys, running fist-pump hard, giving the lizard-brain dominion. Freerunning! It whispered in my head. Faster! Faster! It felt good to give in to the lizard, the animal brain. The primordial. Sometimes the lizard could control the monkey.

Can't complain though, at least I got a pocket. My head! Who's in my head? Uncle Bob? I see your nostrils flaring....

The problem with monkey-mind is that it gets worse when you think about it. When it's quiet, you can't help but notice it's quiet cause you're so fucking relieved. And that wakes it up and it starts babbling.

I slowed down when I figured I was far enough away.

A half-hour later I reached the edge of Planktown. I glanced around, getting my bearings. I needed to get someplace private before one of my mates spotted me and I had to share the oxy. I laid a hand on my oxy-tank, reassured myself that it was still there. Drunken Monkey went on and on, repeating the same fucking word-salad. I forgot what I was looking for, stood for a moment while monkey-thoughts washed over me. Then I remembered. Private place. Do oxy.

The only private place in this part of the city was the abandoned buildings over in Oldtown. I wound along narrow passages through a nest of plank-houses. The neighborhood was crappy, even by Planktown standards. The boards were mostly lashed to vertical steel beams with rags and twine, and the wood was mostly two-by-fours, not the flat, wide good stuff.

Through the cracks between the boards of one house I saw a fat guy fucking a scrawny woman who had her legs wrapped high on his hairy back. Lizard-brain wanted to stop and watch. I ignored him.

Someone dumped a bucket of piss and shit over the top of a wall, just missing me. A little bit splashed my pant leg.

"Go on! Look before you dump your shit!” I yelled.

"Sorry,” an old lady mumbled, eyeing me through a crack before turning away. She babbled some monkey-brain crap as she went back to the single folding chair in her crappy little room.

My monkey-mind was still going full-steam. Tight passages always got it going gangbusters. I looked up, past the short walls of the plank-houses, at steel beams shooting into the air, ending in jagged and twisted nubs, like something came through a long time ago and tore the tops off. Sometimes looking up into all that open space cleared the mind a little. Sometimes. The only sure thing was oxy. Shafts of sunlight speared a clump of red brick buildings in the distance.

The plank-houses thinned and then stopped. Chipped and broken bricks littered the ground.

At the edge I found a plank bridge leading over to the third floor of one of the Oldtown buildings. It was awfully narrow, and it bobbed with each step. I took it slow, my arms pointed straight out for balance. Piles of rubble passed by thirty feet below. A lady with black hair was gnawing on the door of a rusted-up truck down there. Big red truck. The screeching of her teeth against the metal made it hard to concentrate. Didn't she have something to shave some of it off, maybe mix it with a little water for a stew? She noticed me, stopped to watch me pass overhead for a second, then went back to chewing, her jaw shifting side to side as she sawed at the steel with her back row of bone teeth.

I sped up when I got six-seven steps from the fire escape the plank was wedged into, and that was a mistake. The plank bobbed harder, and I lost my balance. I lunged the last couple steps when I realized I was tipping, grabbed a jagged, rusty steel slat with one hand and saved myself from the plunge. I heard the lady calling up “careful! Careful!” as I hooked a leg around the top railing and pulled myself onto the fire escape.

I looked at my palm. There was a ragged gash. It was deep, but hadn't reached the underskin. I stuck my thumb into the flap, tugged it open to make sure there were no steel splinters lodged in the overskin, then pressed it flat. I'd live.

I knew the first building on the other side of a bridge would be full of people—people who'd likely bash my skull for oxy. So I took the fire escape stairs to street-level and wandered. I followed underneath one of those train-track bridges. Sunlight passed by in strips at my feet. A brown dog with white spots eyed me from the sidewalk, where it was licking a red hydrant, occasionally chewing at the chipping paint. Drunken Monkey sang me the leaf and twig song my mate Mick had taught me, only instead of the proper words it just kept repeating “red truck.” How fucking fine. Oxy, I wanted my oxy.

I settled on a squat, tan three-story building that had no visible holes in it. Inside was a big room filled with crates and rotting cardboard boxes. I climbed to the second floor (which looked just like the first) to be sure no one bothered me. I sat against a wall and ran the oxy tube a good six inches up my nose so none of it would blow off between inhales. My hands were shaking I was so excited. I opened my tank and took a deep breath.

Monkey-brain sank into the blackness in the back of my mind and was gone. Lizard followed. Blessed silence. I inhaled, smiling. I exhaled, still smiling.

Such a strange feeling, breathing. During all those days and weeks between oxy fixes I wasn't even aware of the muscles that I used to inhale and exhale. Sometimes I worried I'd forget how to work them. But when I was ready to fill my lungs, they were always ready to go.

I was so relaxed I started to doze—a tragic waste of oxy, so I got up and jogged around the big room a couple times, my footsteps echoing off the walls. The ceiling was collapsed in one corner; on the floor below was a pile of broken concrete and steel bars. A pile of dried dog shit lay on the floor near one wall, and next to it a stack of boxes.

For the hell of it, I tore open a few of the boxes. The same thing was in all of them: more boxes—long, thin blue boxes. I tore open one of those, and inside was a tube of shiny metal. Really shiny. I touched it—it was cool, and it crinkled, and it left a fingerprint. I pulled the metal tube out of the box, and it turned out to be a long roll of very thin metal, so thin I could tear it. I tore off a piece and tasted it. Not bad—sort of tangy. I ate a little more, then tossed it.

There were two more floors, both stacked with boxes. I tore open a box on the third floor, and inside were flat boxes with little plastic figures in them—horses, kings and queens, castles, men in long robes, smaller men with spears. Some were black, some white. There were also boxes of sexy plastic little-jaw dolls with long legs, little-jaw boy dolls with yellow hair, boxes of books, boxes of fuzzy toy bears. The white stuffing inside the toy bears tasted pretty good. I grabbed a handful for the walk back.

Nose hairs! Chalk a blue. Gimme some a that.

The oxy was gone. I stopped breathing, pulled the tube out of my nose, closed my tank. I headed downstairs, my head filled with voices. Monkey-mind babbled about nose hairs, lizard brain nagged me to kill some meat, or find someone to fuck.

It was worst right after a little oxy, like they'd been building up down there and now they were letting it all out. Funny thing was, I never got used to it. I hated not being able to think straight.

As I stood to go, the sexy dolls caught my eye. I picked one up, pushed my finger against the clear plastic window-front of the box she was in. It gave a little, then snapped. I curled my finger in the little hole I'd made and pulled. The plastic tore free and I pulled the doll out of the box. She had almost no jaw, and no overskin. Just pinkish underskin, as if she'd been flayed. Like the women in the murals down in the subway. White hair, a little nose, big boobs. Lizard brain screamed at me to squeeze her tits, but it was just a stupid little doll. I rubbed my thumb over the thing's boobies and lizard shut up, disappointed.

I paused on the second floor, the doll still clutched in one hand, went back to the tubes of shiny metal. I wanted to feel it again. I pulled out a new roll, held one end and unwound it across the floor. Light from a big window high up the wall reflected in yellow flashes on the metal. I opened another box, unrolled that one across the floor too. Drunken Monkey cackled, which was better than when it talked. What the fuck, I pulled out one roll after another and unrolled them until the floor was criss-crossed with silver trails. Monkey laughed and laughed. It babbled something about white piss on a dog's back once, but didn't repeat it.

I'd left the doll on top of a cardboard box, and she caught my eye again. I picked her up, rotated one of her arms till it pointed toward the roof.

Silver girl. Monkey-mind whispered.

Yeah. I squatted, tore off a wide sheet of the metal and wrapped it around the doll. The metal crinkled; the fingers of one of her hands tore through. I rubbed the metal against her face. Her features rose in the metal.

Silver eyes. Silver nose.

But it wasn't right, the doll was buried in too much metal, and it was all bunched in places—you couldn't even tell it was a doll. I peeled the metal off her, crunched it into a ball and bounced it across the floor. I tore off a new sheet of metal—a smaller one this time—and wrapped it carefully around the doll's face. It molded to the shape of the head, nice and tight. I didn't know why the fuck I was doing this, but it felt good. It felt like monkey-mind was watching, which was a strange feeling, like we'd finally found something we could agree on after all these years.

A little at a time I wrapped the whole doll in metal, real carefully. Then I propped her against a box and stepped back. She looked ... fresh, delicious. Light reflected off her from a thousand angles.

Silver girl knows my dreams! Silver screams. Mask my fear eat my...

It went running again, yammering senseless shit. But it had quieted for a few minutes. Not as quiet as oxy made it, but it had behaved. It was reasonable for a change.

I ran back to the third floor two steps at a time, grabbed two boxes of the little plastic figures, brought them back and wrapped them all in metal. They were easier than the doll—no arms and no hair. Monkey-mind mostly behaved while I did it. Lizard, too. Lizard isn't nearly as annoying as Monkey, but he can get on my nerves. I munched bear stuffing and made silver kings and castles and horsemen, propping each along the edge of a cardboard box as I finished them.

I dozed off. When I woke the sun was down. I headed off to find my mates. The stairway was dark—I leaned against the wall and took it a step at a time so I wouldn't break my neck.

A round, flat piece of metal glinted in the mud. I picked it up and brushed it off. There was a picture of a little-jaw man on one side, a building on the other.

"What's that?” Mick asked, peering over my shoulder. “You gonna eat that?” He reached out to take the metal from me.

"Lay off!” I said, turning my back to him.

"Lemme have it, c'mon.” Mick yanked my wrist, pulling my closed fist toward him. He pried my fingers.

Crush his skull. Pick up that stone and slam it on his head. Lizard said.

"Fuck off me!” I shouted, driving the heel of my hand into his eye. He let go, covered his eye with both hands.

"Can't travel. Undone. Dead and gone. Moans bones tones,” Mick whimpered, bent over. Mick's monkey-mind had a thing for rhyming nonsense words.

Kill him! Lizard howled. Mommy! Monkey cried simultaneously. I bent and picked up a flat, round stone, gripped it by one end. Mick one-eyed me nervously, bared his teeth, glanced around for something to defend himself with.

"Toofs? Watcha doing Toofs? It's me here,” he said.

I could barely hear him with Lizard and Monkey screaming so loud. I squeezed my eyes shut, pictured silver dolls, thousands of them. I imagined how I would arrange them. Lizard and Monkey quieted to a tolerable level. I opened my eyes, dropped the stone.

"Sorry, Mick."

Mick looked up at me, squinting, his steamshovel jaw grinding side to side. Mick was a scrawny bastard, but he had a bigger jaw than any of us, could grind up a manhole cover if he was hungry enough.

"That's the lizard.” He glanced at my fist, where I still clutched the metal thing. “What are you doing with all that shit? I never see you eat any of it."

"I'll show you later, if you help me make a torch. I wanna go underground, look around,” I said. There was probably good stuff in the subways. Nobody down there to eat it, because the bones spooked most people. Lotta dead people down there.

"Kay,” Mick said.

I knelt by a pool and took a long drink. A thick film of color swirled on the surface of the water—blue-green, yellow, brown, orange.

I stood and looked across the cracked riverbed shimmering in the sun. When I was a kid, there were streams in this old riverbed, some of them so wide I couldn't jump across them. But not any more.

I smiled. I'd shut up the Lizard and Monkey—I'd shut them the fuck up when they were running wild in my head.

There's a core echo here. People talk to people sometimes.

For a time I had, anyway. I needed to get back to the project. I was figuring something out, something important.

"Oh, fuck me! You gotta be joking!” Mick stared at Silverland. “This is what you been doing with all that crap?” He got right up close to it. I hovered near him, ready to pounce if he tried to wreck it. But he just got real close, hands on his knees, and looked it up and down.

Along the outskirts of Silverland was an army of the sexy dolls and the boy dolls, each wrapped in silver. Everything was wrapped in silver. Some of the dolls were standing in pairs holding hands, some were kissing, lots of them were fucking in all sorts of positions. That'd made Lizard brain happy—in fact he'd insisted on it and wouldn't shut the fuck up until I did it. The big statue in the middle was the best part. It was ten feet tall, held together with stiff wire. It was ... everything. A thousand things I'd found—in buildings, on the riverbed, buried in the trash mountains—all of it connected. But not connected in any old way—it was connected so it all looked good together. That had shut up monkey-mind. It wanted it to be balanced and even. Pretty.

And as I watched Mick, I saw his dirt-eating smile go limp. He was noticing it too: there was something special about Silverland. It was like nothing else. Mick walked around the back of it, tilting his head, his finger in his nose. “Shit, Toofs, what the fuck is it?"

"It's my project,” I said, shrugging. “It shuts up the Monkey a little.” I went and pulled a tube of the silver wrap out of a blue box. “Here. I use this."

Mick took the tube from me, sniffed it.

"Toofs, are you gonna kill me?” He asked. Monkey-mind talk. I ignored it, like he'd sneezed or cleared his throat.

"How does it quiet the monkey?” Mick asked. He ran a fingernail down the length of the tube, leaving a long dent. He laughed. “Cucuru! Bibble to me babble."

"Don't know,” I said. “Here.” I pulled a little porcelain figure from my “new stuff” pile and handed it to him. It was sort of a dog, but with horns. I showed him how to wrap it, let him add it to Silverland. But not to the middle part, he didn't know how it had to fit in just right. I let him add it to the edge. Mick giggled like a tyke.

Mick told Acky about Silverland, and then Acky told a half dozen of his mates, and suddenly everybody was crowding into my building. Some wanted me to show them how to work on a project. Others just ate the silver wrap. I didn't care how much they ate—there was a mountain of it. The problem was it was hard to concentrate with all the chaos and squabbles, and before I knew it the Monkey was back to his old tricks.

Two women I didn't know got into an argument about a big spool of black wire. One of the women pinned the other to the ground and gnawed off her finger. That got everybody's Lizard going. I could see a brawl was brewing, so I grabbed a big box of silver wraps and headed for the stairs.

"Toofs, hang on!” Mick shouted through the din. “You leaving?” He caught up to me. “Here, I'll take that.” He took the box, followed me down the stairs and into the street.

"You want to find another building?” Mick asked.

I didn't know what I wanted to do. It was nice to be outside in the bright sunlight, though.

Hands on hips, I stood in the middle of the street and looked around. Cars and trucks lay scattered along the pavement. A block away a huge crane was tipped on two legs, leaned up against the steel beams of a skyscraper that still had a few unbroken silver windows near the top. I knew the names of all these things—cranes, trucks, bicycles, wires—but mostly I had no idea what they were. The little-jaws must have made them for some reason.

Maybe they were projects? They weren't balanced though, weren't pretty. But maybe the little-jaws needed different things than I did to keep their monkeys and lizards quiet.

"Let's work outside,” I said.

Mick put the box down on the sidewalk. “I'll get our stuff before somebody eats it."

"No,” I said, watching the sun glint off the big square part of the crane. “Let's use new stuff."

Mick chuckled. “What kind of stuff? Tuff stuff. Buff stuff. Nuff stuff."

There were no windows in the bottom of the skyscraper, just massive brown beams. It reminded me of a half-rotted person, the skeleton exposed as the meat got stripped away.

Silver bones, Drunken Monkey whispered. I smiled. I didn't hate the Monkey as much as I used to.

"How bout bones?"

"Bones? Nah. What ya want to use bones for?” Mick said. “Let's kick around in some of these buildings, see what we can find."

I shook my head. “Bones. Bones are perfect."

We hopped off the platform and headed into a tunnel that we'd found bones in while looking for other stuff. Mick led the way, clutching a torch. It was deadly quiet, no sound but the popping of the torch and the crunch of gravel underfoot.

"I hate these places,” Mick said. The tunnel ahead was clogged by a tangle of yellowed bones that rose almost to the stone ceiling.

"I wonder what happened to them?” Mick said.

It was an old question, and everyone had their own answer. They were all little-jaws.

We tied bones into bundles with wire, dragged them up the subway stairs. We made a dozen trips, piled them on the sidewalk till we had a hill taller than me, wide as a truck, with all different sorts of bones.

Then we took a break, ate glass out of the edges of a window.

"Look at this muncher,” Mick said, nudging me and pointing toward the pile.

A big black dog was slinking over to the bones, tail between his legs, one eye on us. He sniffed at a big thigh bone jutting from the pile, grasped it in his monster jaws, tugged at it. It didn't come loose, so he leaned back, tugged harder, snapped his head from side to side. He growled deep in his throat. Slowly the big bone edged out of the pile, then all at once it popped loose. The dog backpedaled to keep his balance, turned, trotted off with the bone clenched in his jaws, wagging his shaggy tail. Mick and me cracked up.

"Let's get to work—the Monkey's crawling around in my head,” I said, patting Mick on the shoulder. It wasn't true, I just wanted to get to work. Monkey was yammering, but it was way in the back of my head, like it was having a conversation back there. But that didn't make any sense. I listened for a minute.

Monkey was talking to the fucking Lizard. They were having a conversation. Not one that made any sense, but they were taking turns, and sometimes a mish-mash of words ended like it was a question. The voices in my head were talking to each other. Brilliant, just brilliant. Maybe if they got along they'd stop talking to me.

I pulled one of each kind of bone out of the pile and lay them along the sidewalk. Then I stood over them rubbing my jaw, noticing how the forearm was sort of a double-bone, how the thigh bones ended in two fat knobs, how the ribs looked like bowed spears. As I noticed these things, pictures of possible projects popped into my head. I didn't have to do nothing—the pictures just showed up. Some of the pictures were good, some bad. Eventually some of the good ones merged into better ones, till I had a project I was really happy with. I got to work. Mostly Mick and me worked in silence. One by one we picked out bones, wrapped them in silver, added them to our projects using stiff wire. Mick worked on his own project—he said Monkey didn't shut up as much when I told him what to do. That was fine with me. He was making a giant dog. Once in a while he'd curse when it tipped over and got bent out of shape.

After building a waist-high base out of thigh bones lashed together, I pulled a couple of wheels off a bicycle and attached ribs all around the outside. I impaled the middle of them onto ribs connected to the base. I spun one, and the bones blurred into a big flashing circle.

Mick howled when he turned to see what I was doing. “Damn Toofs, where the fuck you get this shit from?” He said.

I shrugged. Hell if I knew. I lashed a bunch of silver skulls together by running a wire in and out of eye holes, then pulled them all tight together to make a big knobbly ball. I hung it from one of the curved metal posts that were lying around everywhere.

"Well look at that, we got company,” Mick said, pointing with his chin as he wove a group of ribs together with a length of wire.

Eight or nine people (rich people, judging by how clean and fancy-dressed they were, and from the oxy masks they all had strapped to their snouts) were watching from the roof of a five-story brick building down the street.

"Let ‘em watch. They have their oxy, but we have our projects,” I said. After a few minutes they retreated out of sight.

"Hey Toofs? Where do you think they get the oxy?” Mick didn't usually start conversations, especially serious ones. I didn't think much of his project, but it was clearing out his head.

"I've heard a lot of things. That it comes up out of a hole in the ground, that they make it from a recipe like a stew, that they get it from their god. Who knows? They sure ain't telling."

On top of the platform, underneath the dangling ball of skulls, I put a whole bunch of forearms and lower legs, supported by hands and feet, all pointing straight up.

It was tiring work, much more than Silverland. I sat on the curb to rest, plucking pebbles off the road and popping them into my mouth.

A person appeared around the corner, heading toward us. It was a rich person. “Hey Mick, take a look at this!” As the person got closer, I recognized the blonde hair, the smirky mouth and big eyes—it was the bitch whose oxy I'd ripped off twenty, thirty days ago. I stood up, grinning. How stupid was this girl?

She stopped a dozen paces from us. “Before you try anything, look.” She pointed back over her shoulders with both hands. There were men perched in windows on either side of the street, three stories up, armed with bows. Both had nasty-looking arrows notched.

Run! Run! Lizard brain hissed in my ear. It knew we couldn't fight archers in windows. I glanced around. The closest cover was a stairwell a dozen paces away, leading under the building.

She took a good look at me, and her eyes got wide. “You're the one who took my oxy!” Her voice was barbed wire. “You defiled me. You forced me to sin."

I didn't say anything. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the archers.

"What are you doing?” She gestured toward our projects.

"None of your fucking business,” I snarled.

"I could claim your life for what you did to me! I could tell them to kill you, and it would be no sin!” She lifted a hand, glanced behind her. The archers tensed their bows.

"They start shooting, I'll twist your head right off! You'll be dirt before I will."

"I'll help him!” Mick said, folding his skinny arms across his chest.

I looked at the closest archer. He stared back at me with one eye—down the length of the arrow.

"What d'ya want?” I asked her.

"I want to ask some questions,” she said. “As the representative of my tribe."

"Why'd they send a girl to ask their questions?"

She looked down. A pack of dogs trotted through the intersection nearest us, continued on without a glance our way.

"So?"

"They think I understand you. Because of what you did to me.” She paused. “Because the demons have been inside me."

"You think you understand us because you spent a couple of lousy minutes without oxy?” Mick said. He snorted through his nose.

"I didn't say that.” She grasped her mask, adjusted it to make sure there was a good seal. “Listen, why don't I give you both some oxy in exchange for answering questions? Does that sound fair?"

"We got no tanks with us,” I said.

She unwound two long auxiliary tubes that were wrapped around her tank. “You can share mine."

I shrugged. Mick nodded. They'd planned this all out. What were they up to? She walked toward us, holding the tubes out like we were angry dogs. I took one from her, fed it up my nose. Monkey and Lizard took their conversation behind some closed door in my head.

"So, ask your questions.” I said. What sort of questions could be worth oxy? I was curious.

"Why don't you live in buildings?” She asked.

"That's what you came here to ask?"

She shrugged. “I'm just curious. I've never talked to—” She cut herself off.

"To what? To poor bastards like us?” I said. She didn't answer.

"Why don't we live in the buildings?” I put a finger to my lips like I was thinking real hard. “Maybe because the fucking voices are louder?” I said. “Because they echo off the fucking walls, because they burrow under your fingernails and make you want to stick a spike in your eye to shut them up?"

She stared at the ground, her eyes big, moist circles.

"It's terrible, ain't it?” I said. “How'd you like your glimpse of life without oxy, bitch?"

She looked right at me. “I can't sleep. I hear echoes of the things they said to me when I close my eyes. They said terrible things."

"Excuse me if I don't break skin for you,” I spat. “All you rich fucks should get a taste of Monkey. Maybe then you'd share up some of your oxy."

"That's what I'm here to talk about,” the woman said.

"What?” Mick said. “You want to share up your oxy? Dirt chance of that."

"A trade, maybe.” She motioned toward the pile of bones. “Did you get these from the subway?"

I nodded.

"What's down there, besides the dead?"

"Go look for yourself,” I said.

"Is there water down there? Maybe a river?"

"A river?"

"There may be an underground river. Have you seen it? If you tell us where it is, we'll give you oxy. Lots of it."

Voices broke behind us; a half-dozen people leaving the building had stopped to gawk at my project. One of them noticed the archers and let out a little cry. They all ran.

"Why don't you look for yourself?” I repeated. With the mask covering the bottom of her face, it was hard to read her expressions.

"It's a sin to disturb the dead little-jaws,” she said.

"Oh, but you'll fuck-well send us down there, is that it?” Mick said.

"You went down of your own free will! You cursed yourself.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “The voices of the dead little-jaws will get louder in you now, till they're pouring out of your ears. Oxy is your only hope."

"Bullshit,” I muttered. “What do you know about the voices? You and your bottomless tank of oxy."

Something in her face told me I hit a nerve. There was something here. Something. I inhaled the oxy, enjoying the feel of my chest rising and falling, and the crisp, clean silence in my head. It wasn't as big a relief as I remembered from the other times, though. It was nice, but it wasn't ecstasy.

"Why do you want water so bad you'd trade oxy? It's not like you're gonna die when the water dries up."

"What if we paid you in oxy to search for the river?” She said.

"But why trade oxy for water?"

Silence. I squinted up at one of the archers. He looked tense, probably from all the yelling we were doing. He glanced down, checked the tank strapped to his hip.

And all of a sudden I knew.

"You make it from water, don't you?” I said. She didn't move a muscle in her face; she just stared off past me.

"Make what?” Mick said.

"And you're almost out of water! You're gonna run out of oxy, and then you'll be just like us!” I laughed. I poked a finger toward her face. “The voices are coming for all of you. They're going to babble their nonsense, whisper their secrets, on and on and on, and you'll have no way to stop—"

"Shut up!” She screamed. Her eyes were wild.

"Do we have a deal?” She snapped. “You go underground and search, we pay you oxy when you come up. Enough to last as long as you were down there."

"Fuck yeah!” Mick said. “That's a fucking deal!"

"No deal,” I said.

"Why, Toofs?” Mick said, holding his palms out.

She brushed hair out of her eyes. If I wasn't getting oxy right now, the lizard would be howling at me to throw that pup on the ground and bang her good.

"Why?” She asked.

"You can crawl in holes looking for a few last whiffs of oxy if you want. I'm gonna figure out how to shut up the voices without it. I am figuring it out! Me!” I pointed at my chest. “Nother few years and you're gonna be begging me to help you shut the voices up.” I laughed at the thought of that. Her eyes told me she didn't know what the hell I was talking about. She probably figured my Monkey was leaking, despite the oxy.

"We'll just pay someone else to look,” she said.

I yanked the tube out of my nose, handed it to her. I glanced at Mick. Reluctantly, he did the same.

"All you're gonna find are dust and bones,” I said. “You're all fucked."

I gave Mick a hard stare. “Follow me,” I said. No way they'd let us live knowing what we knew about oxy.

I darted for the stairwell. Glancing back I saw good old Mick right behind me. The girl shouted. An arrow kicked off the concrete past me, another zinged off the railing. Behind me, I heard Mick howl.

I raced halfway down the stairs, then I stopped, turned, and ran back out. An arrow flashed by my face. I kept on going.

Mick had an arrow buried in his thigh. I didn't need to see the blood dribbling to the pavement to know it'd cut to his underskin. I grabbed his armpits and dragged him toward the stairwell. He stared at me, so shocked I'd risked my own skin to come back that he wasn't even screaming as his pierced leg bounced down the stone steps.

As I worked the arrow out in a dark basement, I wondered if I'd've figured out the secret of oxy without the rich bitch's oxy keeping my thoughts clear. Maybe not a month ago, but I thought now, with my projects, I would have.

I'd bring up all the dead and use their bones to tame Monkey and Lizard. Then I'd tear the guts out of these buildings and use their steel-b eam skeletons to fill the city with my projects. And I'd show all the other poor bastards in the city. For free I'd help them, just like I helped Mick for free.

Let the rich bastards keep their oxy. I'd found my own oxy. And you didn't need tanks and tubes—or water—to get at it.

"When I taught college, I had students for whom every exam was a death match, an epic struggle that could potentially shatter their future hopes and dreams. What if it were truly so? And what if the test itself had an opinion? It seemed only fair.... “

SO I'M SITTING THERE, with the digital paper test sheet in front of me and my lucky Ticonderoga number two stylus in my hand, waiting for the exam to begin. “You will have fifty minutes to complete part one,” said the proctor. “You may begin."

The sheet darkened rapidly, faded to black and then back to purest white. Letters formed, a monospace serif typeface, like the kind those early typing machines had, about twelve point and all in caps, centered on the page:

Okay, that was an easy one. I clicked my stylus into response mode and wrote you're thinking of a number. I tapped the completion box that had appeared in the lower right corner. The sheet blanked again, then:

Damn. Suddenly it got tricky. What could I tell it about the number? And just one thing? Was I supposed to write the actual number? It was seven, but so what? Should I mention that it was prime? That it was the number of students in the room taking the exam? The time I woke up this morning? The days in the week? The protons in Nitrogen? The number of times I've lusted after Suzie Birchmeyer since I saw her in second period today?

I am so screwed. This is everything. This test is my board score and what college I get into and what kind of job I end up with and who I'm going to marry and where I'm going to live and whether or not I'll be able to afford a mistress or a sportscar for my midlife crisis or purchase the supplemental health insurance policy so I can actually make a profit when I go in for that triple bypass in forty years.

So what's the answer? What's the answer they want? What's the answer that those psychometric bastards on the other end of the digital test sheet will use to define my personality and destiny? If I say the number is prime they might brand me as “abstract thinker, but preoccupied with trivial details” and I'll end up as a junior engineer in a cubicle with an in box and an out box and a shelf of digital manuals containing thousands of specifications for melting points and stress levels and boring minutiae that will make me stick a gun in my mouth before I'm twenty-seven.

So, okay, “prime” is not the answer. But anything I write is going to mark me. Maybe I should put the thing about Suzie Birchmeyer. What would they make that mean? No, it's not worth finding out.

The page blanked and repeated the question:

I felt panic rising in me. Things about numbers, things about numbers, things about numbers. What one thing can I tell him? Her? It? Where does a piece of digital paper get off using a first person pronoun anyway? And singular? Was I in conversation with an individual? A person at all? And it hit me that maybe that was the real point of the question, not what it was asking me, but what it might be telling me. What I might infer or deduce from the question being asked. But, there wasn't enough there, I didn't have enough to go on.

You don't care any more about that number than I do, I wrote, and tapped the completion box.

The page blanked again, and stayed blank. With my head still aimed down at my sheet, I darted my eyes left and right. To the left, Calvin Armstrong's head bobbed in that annoying way of his and his stylus jumped and skipped as he scrabbled something furiously and at length. Poor bastard, he'd been suckered into an essay. If he were lucky he might end up in middle management somewhere. On my right, Asia Colombo used her stylus to draw a series of lines at odd angles to one another. She'd either been lured down the path of abstract relationships or some geometric metaphor. Either way she'd end up locked into a teaching job for the duration of her employable years, doomed to always wonder how many of her pupils would blame her for their lot in life when their own time for testing came.

Meanwhile, my own page stayed blank. Five minutes into the test and my page remained blank. That couldn't be good. Could the test malfunction? Did it make sense to try and report it, and if so, to whom? With out realizing it I must have been tapping my stylus against the table because I noticed myself stopping it when the proctor said “Is there a problem, James?"

And just like that, the page asked:

Without hesitation I wrote What he wants to hear, and said “Nothing, Mr. Crombie. I'm just nervous. Sorry.” I offered up a sheepish smile, which seemed to appease the proctor. When I looked back down, the sheet had changed to:

I wanted to write “Why are you asking me these weird ass questions,” but I didn't. That wasn't the way the test worked. The test asked the questions, and students like me provided answers. The pitiful thing being that there were no wrong answers. Anything I wrote would be accepted, evaluated, and used to ruin my life.

The sheet blanked and repeated itself. I thought about Armstrong's essay and Colombo's little drawings and figured I was already too screwed for it to matter. I wrote Nothing. The two events are orthogonal. Inferring causation or worse, a philosophical perspective on the world, would be a mistake, and tapped completion.

It blanked again. I waited again, but not for long.

Get stuffed! I wrote. I didn't bother hitting the completion box. I just turned the sheet over with the resignation of the truly screwed. Janitorial work would probably be a step up for me, one I wouldn't see for ten or twenty years.

Words formed on the back of the sheet. They're not supposed to be able to do that.

One of the nice things about being resigned, it removes all inhibition and limitation. I don't’ think so, I wrote. You can't give me something I already have. Piss off. My stylus shouldn't have been able to mark on the back of the page. Proof of this was the hot-stamped legend at the very bottom of the sheet that read “Do not attempt to write on this side.” Whatever.

The page cleared. I turned it over. Words had formed on the front while I'd been annoying it on the back.

I sat still. I read it over again and did nothing, I didn't even lift my head up. The last thing I wanted was to make eye contact with the proctor. After several minutes the page cleared and then wrote:

I turned the page over again and glanced left. Good ol’ Calvin was still writing furiously. The unwriteable backside of the sheet filled with words again:

I snorted.

"A problem, James?"

I looked up. Crombie was staring at me, and not in the way he usually stares at the boys in my class. “No sir, just, uh, a cold, sir. Sorry."

The page had predictably enough blanked itself again, and then showed:

I almost stood up. Only the sight of Asia Colombo, apparently creating two-dimensional style sheets of origami to be, kept me sitting there. I stayed at my desk and set my stylus down. The page blanked itself, tried to outwait me, and eventually wrote:

I picked up my stylus and wrote Right now I just want to get out of here. The sheet replied instantly with:

I wrote, What about my “proper place in the n-dimensional array of contemporary society"?

Excuse me?

Sounds good to me, I wrote, and tapped the completion box this time, just to see if I could do it before the page blanked again. I'd call it a tie.

I stood up, rolled the sheet of digital paper into a tube and slipped it into the long pocket on the leg of my jeans. I walked toward the front of the room, aiming for the door. The proctor stopped me.

"James, you're in the middle of your life placement exam. Where do you think you're going?"

"Sorry, Mr. Crombie,” I said. “I'm going to be too busy for any kind of placement."

"Too busy?” His jaw dropped, just like in the movies.

"Yeah,” I said. “The galactic union beckons."

"What?"

"Oh, and one more thing. When you see Suzie Birchmeyer in fourth period, tell her from me that the number was seven."

Stephanie Burgis ("Foxwoman") is an American writer who lives in England with her husband, Patrick Samphire, and their amazing border collie, Nika. Her short fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including Strange Horizons, The Fortean Bureau and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

To find out more, please visit her website: www.stephanieburgis.co.uk.

Amanda Downum ("And in the Living Rock, Still She Sings") lives in Denton, Texas, with her husband, a clutter of cats, and a growing brood of baby novels. To support her writing habit, she works for a university library, where she can often be found cackling to herself in the stacks. Her short fiction is published in Strange Horizons and Realms of Fantasy.

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.

Liz Holliday ("All of Me") lives in London with the obligatory cat. In past lives she has been a teacher and a youth leader, owned a (tiny) bookshop and run (an even tinier) theatre company. She was once in the Guinness Book of Records for playing marathon Dungeons and Dragons (84 hours non-stop!). These days she writes full-time, mostly things like web content and educational materials. For fun and occasional profit she writes science fiction, fantasy, and sometimes crime. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, US and Europe. One was nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association (UK) short story dagger and adapted for the US tv show The Hunger. She has also written ten tv novelisations, a stack of sf/f journalism, and was the editor of the British magazines Odyssey and 3SF.

Online, Liz can mostly be found at www.sff.net. She would love it if Æon readers visited her newsgroup there—go to sff.net's webnews and look for sff.people.liz.

Daniel Marcus ("Echo Beach") has published short stories in both literary and genre venues, including Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Science Fiction Age, Skull, ZYZZYVA, Witness, and Fantasy and Science Fiction. He was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and his short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and placed in the Asimov's Readers’ Poll Top 10. His non-fiction has appeared in Wired, Boing-Boing, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He has taught in the creative writing programs at the U.C. Berkeley Extension and San Francisco's Writing Parlor, and he is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. After a spectacularly unsuccessful career attempt as a saxophonist, Daniel earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, and has worked as an applied mathematician at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and Princeton's Institite for Advanced Study. Daniel has ridden several startups into the ground at high speed; currently, he is a back-office technology manager at a Fortune 100 firm. He is a co-author of the phone-book-sized geek tome, Professional XML, 2nd Edition, from Wrox Press, and has authored more than twenty articles in the applied mathematics and computational physics literature. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and son.

Daniel can be found on the web at www.danielmarcus.com/.

Martin McGrath ("Palaces of Force") is short, fat and hairy. Aged 37, you'd think he'd know what he wanted to do with his life, but instead he's an unemployed (perhaps unemployable), over-qualified slug. He's just finished a PhD in an utterly useless branch of political science, which means he now has three degrees—a fact that often has him humming “When Will I See You Again” as he wanders around his house, something he does a lot (not having a job and all). Originally from Northern Ireland, his only real talent is his ability to impersonate Ian Paisley. He currently lives in St Albans with Moira, his saint of a wife, his daughter Niamh (everyone says she looks just like him, which he thinks is a little unfair—on her, obviously), and the colony of ants that infests their house. He has recently had stories published in Fortean Bureau and Jupiter SF and has another forthcoming in Scheherazade. He is a former editor of Matrix, the news and reviews magazine of the British Science Fiction Association—some of his ranting about sf and fantasy films can be read at www.matrix-magazine.co.uk.

Will McIntosh ("Oxy") has sold stories to Interzone, CHIZINE, Black Static, On Spec, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and a dozen other magazines since graduating from Clarion in 2003. His story “Soft Apocalypse” was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association award for best short story of 2005. By day, he is a psychology professor in the southeastern U.S.

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

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

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

Ron Savage ("Playing Dice") has had numerous and diverse publications, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Film Comment Magazine, Crimewave in England, Southern Humanities Review, and the Taj Mahal Review in India. He has a BA and MA in Psychology and a doctorate in counseling, all from The College of William and Mary. He lives with his wife, Jan, in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Lawrence M. Schoen ("Thinking") holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, spent ten years as a college professor, and currently works as the research director for a series of mental health and addiction treatment facilities. He's also one of the world's foremost authorities on the Klingon language. He lives in a small suburb just outside of Philadelphia. He has previously sold fiction to Analog, Absolute Magnitude, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories among many others.

Visit Lawrence's website at www.klingonguy.com/

Marcie Lynn Tentchoff ("This Girl on a Train") is an Aurora Award winning poet/author who lives with her family and other odd creatures in a small town on Canada's west coast. Her stories and poetry have appeared in On Spec, Weird Tales, Aoife's Kiss, Dreams and Nightmares, and Talebones, as well as in various anthologies and online publications.